“Just Be Yourself” is Stupid Advice
How the world is screwing you without you knowing it
14 min read
You hear this advice everywhere nowadays.
On the internet, from ads, from people you know, or even from your dog:
Just be yourself!
Or in other forms:
Relax, you’re amazing the way you are!
Wow, look at yourself, you’re so beautiful and unique!
(but please buy our shiny stuff and you’ll look even better, we promise!)
Don’t worry about that extra weight, you’re gorgeous baby, with our special home-delivery you don’t even have to leave your house! Eat that sh*t and shake your booty!
Oh you don’t have time to read? It’s ooohkay here’s our new app which summarizes a 900-page book in 5 sentences!
5 tips on how to be smarter 10 times faster!!!
You suddenly started questioning yourself and your beliefs? Does that make you sad? STOP IT, buy our drugs, they’re real nice and they’ll calm you down!
You have self-destructive behaviors and you constantly sabotage yourself? That’s fiiiine, it’s called being unique and spontaneous. Watch our tv show and witness other people do even dumber sh*t so you could feel better about yourself.
Okay, too keep it short, all of the above is some supreme level of bullsh*t that you constantly hear from the outside world. They make you feel better about yourself so they can sell you their own bullsh*t. It’s pure manipulation.
Truth is, nobody cares about you. The only one that should care about you is you. So when somebody tells you “just be yourself”, they really don’t know what the f*ck they’re talking about.
Let me explain.
First of all, the notion of a single “self” is false. We all have different selves with different people and different circumstances.
In other words, we all adjust our behaviors and pretend to some extent.
“Well, wait a second, Andrei, that doesn’t make any sense. A self is an identity that is consistent across time.”
That’s cute, except it’s not true. There is no real self, it’s an illusion created by your brain in order to make up a coherent “story of your life”.
Yes, neurologically speaking, we form synapses and patterns in our brains that are more or less consistent and can be tracked, but at the same time, they’re very flexible and can always change with some effort.
In a way, that illusion of the self is good for us because in all the chaos surrounding us, we need something that grounds us, and the self is such a thing. We need to think that we have a self, and not just patterns of behaviors that are observable across time and that are subject to constant change. That doesn’t sound comforting, if anything, it only makes us anxious.
However, for your own well-being, you have to realize that there is no real self, and there are just actions and decisions.
For example: you can be courageous in one moment, and a coward in the next one, does that mean that you are both courageous and a coward? Well, sort of, but not really. It means that you are a being that acts and you can act cowardly or courageously. However, you can never be completely attached to that identity, because your identity is a lot less static than you think. Instead, you can be “attached” to your actions, which means that you can always think of the moral implications of your actions on your (illusory) self and on others.
Alright, you’re not convinced, and you still want to strive to build a stable, good and moral self?
Well then, it would be wise to listen to the ancient Greeks.
One of them, Aristotle, argued that a good moral is something that stands in the middle between two vices. He called it a “golden mean”. To be courageous doesn’t mean to only do outrageously courageous things, instead, it means acting somewhere in between a courageous person and a coward.
Too much courage will make you rash and reckless, he argued (I’m paraphrasing),
“With regard to fear, courage is the mean. Rashness is the excess and cowardliness the deficiency. With regard to money, the mean is liberality. Prodigality is the excess and cheapness the defect. With regard to honor and dishonor, proper pride is the mean. Undue humility is as bad as empty vanity.”
Okay, so it’s about balance, the yin-yang, celery and pizza, Dragostea din Tei and Master of Puppets, internet memes and philosophy books.
We got that, Mr.Buddha, what else?
Well, I’m going to expand on these ideas next, and I’ll show you why the “JUST BE YOURSELF!!!” advice is as dumb as thinking that Earth is flat, or that The Big Bang Theory is actually a funny show.
1. The Self is an illusion
One of the contemporary intellectual superstars, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, Sam Harris, argues in his blog (and in a video) that the self is an illusion — an idea that is evidently not that original, as Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism have been preaching similar ideas for centuries. However, Sam’s arguments are grounded in neuroscience, which is fascinating on a completely new level.
He said,
“For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well — an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion — it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That’s not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity.”
Now this guy is on to something. He goes further, explaining how our brains hallucinate some experiences in order for them to exist,
“For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the “I,” but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, “me” which most of us would recognize as our personal identity — who we think we are. However, I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.
I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours — illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were.
Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but those properties alone do not make it so.Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I cover in the book in a way that I hope is accessible for the general reader.”
So we get it Sam, self is an illusion; we’re a bunch of monkeys being tricked by our own brains.
WTF do we do now? Give up?
Well, not really, Sam argues that there’s obvious benefits to this illusion, however, we should always be aware that it is an illusion, and treat it with skepticism,
“…the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.”
Okay now, being aware of all of the above, why the advice of BEING YOURSEEEEFH is wrong?
Here’s the next reason:
2. It invites mediocrity
The idea of accepting yourself the way you are is actually noble in its intentions. It’s hard to argue against that. However, just like giving your kid a candy every time he does something dumb can potentially ruin his life in the future, soothing yourself and telling yourself that you’re amazing the way you are can often be detrimental to your development.
If I do stupid sh*t, I should be called out by others, but even more importantly, I should be called out by myself. I should be my own judge first. How I talk to myself is who I become, so I better talk to myself in an honest way so I don’t become a delusional little sh*t.
Ugh, yes, OBVIOUSLY you shouldn’t go to the extremes and beat yourself up for every weakness, but you should love yourself the way a (good) parent loves his own child: he’s strict when needed and makes appropriate judgments so that the kid can learn right from wrong, and he’s kind by default, unconditionally.
Personally, I started improving my mental and physical well-being once I realized that I’m not okay the way I am. That feeling sucked, I cannot lie. It felt like the thin veil that covered my world had just vanished in the air. I felt empty and anxious. It took me a few years to rebuild myself, but I only got at that stage by accepting that I sucked, and that “being myself” doesn’t really mean much when you don’t even know who you are. But I was willing to delay momentary pleasure for my own self-improvement, and I knew it was the only way through which I would suck less.
In one of his blog posts, Benjamin P. Hardy discussed the tendency of our current culture to obsess with momentary pleasures,
“Anything worth doing is going to suck at the beginning. Anything worth doing is meant to require pain and sacrifice. Herein lies the problem facing America, which originally was built on the moral of impulse control. What once used to be a country filled with people sacrificing momentary pleasure for a better future, the overpowering message of today is live for the moment.
And that’s exactly what people do. They live for this moment. Consequently, when something sucks, or becomes hard, most people quit. Most people indulge themselves in momentary satisfaction at the expense of a better future.”
It is an idea we all know and that rationally makes sense, yet we keep sabotaging ourselves, indulging into perverse nihilism and saying that “nothing matters, we’re all going to die anyway”.
Well, duh, we are going to die, so why should we live our lives in mediocrity? Why not push ourselves and find out what we’re capable of? Isn’t that what we admire in our heroes in books and movies, isn’t the struggle the thing that gives life meaning?
Or maybe meaning for you is “being yourself”, ignoring your potential, indulging into physical pleasures and being a self-entitled ignorant little sh*t? Fine, be yourself then. But I’m damn sure I wouldn’t want to hang out with you, because frankly, you’re an emotional mess, and nobody got time for that.
3. It puts feelings above facts
Is “being yourself” a fact? No, it’s a feeling. Like I said before, the self is an illusion, that’s a fact. The idea we have in our head of our “self” is — you guessed it — a feeling.
Look around, do you really think this thriving world was made on feelings? Sure, art is very much in the realm of feelings, but even so it has chemistry, physics, geometry, and math involved in it. All these feelings wouldn’t matter if they weren’t grounded and materialized in the real world. An idea is just an idea until it is executed in the real world. “Be yourself” is just a mental bumper sticker until you actually act, improve, judge, and be judged by others.
Being yourself is a continuous event, a stream of actions, and not a state of “being” — as paradoxically as it sounds.
Ma boi Socrates realizing he knows nothing.
I would like to suggest an alternative to this BE YOURSELF movement: let’s call it, in the best traditions of the ancient Greek, Socrates, the I KNOW NOTHING movement.
Let’s face it, most of the time we’d like to think we know sh*t about the world, but really, at its core, we know nothing. Or let me put it more accurately, we know nothing of real significance.
Sure, you may know the capital of Myanmar (I don’t) or the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on current world affairs or the name of your neighbor’s cousin’s dog or MBTI personality types, but whatever you know, most probably, is not going to affect the world in any significant way.
The I KNOW NOTHING movement admits:
— that we are more ignorant than we think we are.
— that knowing is not a destination but a continuous process of discovery and questioning.
— that Wikipedia is a great internet experiment that helped us all write our essays in school.
— that our self-importance is temporary in the grand scheme of things.
— that I don’t know why we glorify stupid people in the media but it’s really entertaining so please keep it up thanks.
— that BEING YOURSELF doesn’t really mean anything since we can’t truly know ourselves.
— That Jon Snow is a cool and handsome guy.
— that I’ve no idea how my grandma cooks her plăcinte cu brânză and bakes her signature cake but I f*cking love it and I don’t wanna know and grandma I miss you please make some more plăcinte cu brânză when I come back to Moldova thanks.
All in all, I believe this world would be a better place if we didn’t glorify feelings so much, and instead treated them for what they are — temporary brain activities that may give us pleasure or suffering, which can have a thousand different meanings depending on our interpretations.
Feelings are great, they make us feel alive, not just be alive. They make us human. But they’re not the end goal, they’re not the fundamental fabric of our society — facts and reason are. Only after realizing this can we actually prioritize stuff and enjoy life more and make smarter choices. We can make the facts more meaningful by using our feelings — our capacity of employing creativity with its infinite interpretations, and our urge to make this big old rock that we live on a more bearable place to share our lives.
4. Actions > Self-esteem
Sorry to break it to you, but the whole self-esteem obsession of the current era is a bunch of bullsh*t. What really matters is your actions. Feeling good about yourself means nothing when actions don’t align with that feeling. And even when your actions are good, feeling good about it is pointless, it’s pleasant, but still, pointless.
Feelings are fleeting, you cannot rely on judgments about them. In fact, the Buddhists and meditation gurus would say that “judging a feeling is wrong, just let it be”. So the only thing that shows your true character is how you act over time. That shows your “real self” if you believe in that notion.
So all that noise from corporations and media and your grandma and your dog is just that — noise.
Look, really think about this idea: how the f*ck can someone tell you to “be yourself” if they don’t even know your true self, and more than that, often even you don’t know yourself. And what is it with this obsession of the self? Me me me look at me I feel good blablabla. Your imaginary self doesn’t matter, your actions do. Your actions make you who you are. Only by doing you can find your true character and judge yourself and be judged by others. Everything else is esoteric mumbo jumbo and just absolutely pointless.
To continue with Bejamin P. Hardy’s article, he expanded on this idea, saying,
“People are taught to love themselves regardless of their performance. Thus, they justify mediocrity. Yet, Asians and other immigrant groups who often are considered to have low self-esteem consistently outperform Americans who have high self-esteem.
Unlike in other parts of the world where hard work is seen as a virtue, the repeated phrase in America is: ‘Don’t work too hard!’ Success these days is to get as much as you can for as little work as possible.
In the book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld explain that most successful people not only control their impulses, but also have an implicit sense of inferiority.
These people may have confidence, yet, they remain unsure of themselves. They have a chip on their shoulder due to being oppressed in some way. So they continuously push themselves, regardless of how successful they become, to prove themselves. They are never satisfied with what they’ve done. They continue to feel inferior.
These very traits are awarded in today’s economy because they are so rare. Again, few people control their impulses, but instead live for the moment. And few people, especially in America, have any sense of inferiority. Rather, most people have bought into the myth that you must first love yourself before you can become successful.
Garbage.True confidence is earned. It’s earned by succeeding. Not by wishing for success. Meta-analytic research confirms this.
True confidence emerges when you consistently push-through things that suck. The longer you sit with the boredom, pain, and discomfort — and actually create something meaningful, the more confident and successful you will be.”
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So, how can we conclude this mess of an article? What are our takeaways? Here’s a few:
1) The “self” is an illusion — Buddha and neuroscience agree.
2) Your identity is not static, don’t get attached to it — be attached to your actions. (always think of the moral implications of your actions on your “self” and on others.)
3) Don’t congratulate yourself on “being yourself” — it invites mediocrity and makes you lazy.
4) Learn to sacrifice momentary pleasure for a better future. (anything worth doing is going to suck at the beginning)
5) Feelings are great, but they complete facts. Not the other way around. (facts > feelings)
6) Instead of preaching to BE YOURSELF, better admit that you KNOW NOTHING, and go from there. (Socrates ma boi)
7) I miss my grandma.
8) Feeling good about yourself means nothing when actions don’t align with that feeling. (Actions > self-esteem)
9) True confidence is earned. (it emerges when you consistently push-through things that suck. The longer you sit with the boredom, pain, and discomfort — and actually create something meaningful, the more confident and successful you will be. — Benjaming P. Hardy)
10) KNAAWLEDGE is power, and top 10’s are the best.
Thaaaanks for reading!
Bye and be well.