Felt Cute, Might Dissolve Boundaries Later
My baby’s face emerges on the ultrasound monitor like a mask of smoke. Wisps of fluid swirl and distort its edges. I’m reminded that every person is a sequence, and we all live at the mercy of a bedeviling dance of impermanence — just as sure as this person has come into view, one day it will fade away.
What do I wish for its journey in between? A soft sense of self. Much generosity, little self-regard. The feeling of being inseparable from communities and ecosystems.
There are lines we think define us — contours of body, thought and identity. They all drive a grand illusion of separation. Of course separation exists at a practical level, but with respect to the important themes of our lives, we overemphasize it. We think we’re more independent than we are, less influenced by our environment, more in control of our destiny, and, of course, we all squirm to ignore the fact that one day we’ll disappear.
As I look at the fluid borders of that face, I dream of someone who suffers these delusions just a little bit less; someone who meets the world not as a hard-edged Lego person clip-clopping into scenes, but as a brushstroke in a great painting.
A sense of self has utility as we grow from being helpless smears of emotion and impulse to rational actors in the adult world. But in most of us, self is overdeveloped.¹ It’s exceedingly rare for anyone to acquire the precise self-awareness they need to navigate the world, then taper off to an ideal position of selflessness. When it happens, we call them saints (then decades later write a book saying, eh, not so much). But sainthood is like pre-dawn workouts — unfathomable to most of us.
I can’t name a single moment in my life when my sense of self served me, but I know its daily torment. What I find helpful is to periodically search for it in important places, to challenge its significance, and ultimately, its validity. Here are some examples.
Looking for self in space
I live in Chicago, one of the most densely populated cities in America. If I walked out on my balcony and screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs, and continued for several minutes until my body collapsed, I’d be lucky if even one one-hundredth of one percent of the city’s population heard me.² That’s how small I am. And like most people, I do my best to ignore that every single day.
We love to exclaim “It’s a small world!” when we encounter a surprising personal connection, but there’s always subtextual desperation in the response. A part of us lurches from the shadows, teeth clattering, and grabs the wrists of our new acquaintance — oh my god, you know someone I know? The notion of a small world is welcome relief from the fact that our actual world is a colossus keen to obliterate all traces of personal significance.
Embracing small parts of a big world is both essential and wonderful, in so many ways. But we must be able to toggle between perspectives, however humbling some of them may be. There’s little honor in hanging out at a pub where everyone knows your name if you can’t name a single country in northern Africa. With respect to global perspective, you’re either with us or against us.
Looking for self in time
From the center of our experience, it feels like we sit on a throne in time, with the past and future running like red carpet behind and beyond us. We scoff at egomaniacs who think they’re the center of the universe, but we do the same thing with time — we orient ourselves at the center of past and future, then abstract and compress them to make our objectively tiny lives feel substantial. Want to really feel substantial? Consider that the aggregate joy of trillions of human lives spread across hundreds of thousands of years into the future depends entirely on how well you and your present Earthbound cohort handle your business and whether or not you all wake and rise to the potential of your collective might.
It’s natural to feel central in time, perhaps even like you’re in some charmed defiance of it, at least compared to all the other peons in history. But it’s a fantasy. The length of time any of us exists is imperceivable against the backdrop of the time we don’t exist. There’s no throne, we’re only thread in the carpet.
Take a look: imagine a piece of white string pulled taut, the length of a fire truck. Now mark it with an ordinary ballpoint pen — one tick, one millimeter wide. Take several steps back from the string and imagine it represents the age of the universe, 13.8 billion years. If so, every millimeter accounts for 1.1 million years. Now look at your one-millimeter mark. If you want to find ten centuries within it — the span of all human progress from 1021 until now — you need to divide that millimeter 1,100 times. Want to find one human lifespan? Divide it 14,100 times.
Looking for self in memory
Surely the aggregate of all my experiences thus far, as much as any other thing, makes me who I am. And if I go looking for those memories, I’ll find the constructive material of self. Right? Let’s see.
Occasionally I pause, close my eyes, and try to sense the scope and character of my whole life, in memory. Sometimes I give it a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, but in either case, the goal is the same: to look across a vast landscape of experience and make contact with whatever presents itself.
What do I find? Not much. Certainly not a collection of thousands of vivid, immersive scenes ready to be played clean from beginning to end. I get a few faint glimpses, that’s about it. My mind skips over years like a stone over water, then quickly plunks to stillness. Ah, forget it, I think, it’s too much. That’s literally what I think, it’s too much. I act as though the lid is too heavy to lift on some great trove of memories, the material of self, but I’m really just protecting myself from an unbearable truth — that I remember so little over such a great expanse.
In one memory, I’m 14 years old, in my bedroom on a school night, doing push-ups and blasting an anti-parent anthem as I process my most recent day as an eighth-grader. The throbbing emotions and sense of self were at the time unprecedented. What’s left of the scene now, in memory? Almost nothing. I recall the song, I recall the push-ups. I have little connection to the emotions I felt and I can’t recall a single thought I had. But across nearly two thousand nights I spent in that bedroom as a teenager, it’s among my most vivid and enduring memories.
When I look for self in memory, most of what I find is blank space.
Looking for self in humanity
Over the course of human history, many selves have been noted for achievements both famous and infamous. The breathless stories we tell each other about these people are instrumental in perpetuating the importance of self in our culture. But to what extent does the power we ascribe to these names belong to them versus us?
Take, for example, two of our main fixations of the 20th century: Albert Einstein and Adolph Hitler. The respective brilliance and fury of these men would mean nothing in a vacuum, without complex ecosystems around them and substantial legacies before them. If left alone in the world, each man would light a fire and wait to die. Granted, this is a reductive framing, but in order to challenge our inborn drift towards emphasis of self, we have to grapple with the fact that there’s no power in a single person.
For a more timely example, consider Jeff Bezos. No doubt, Bezos is a visionary businessperson, and the effort, intellect and instinct that has streamed out of this one human being is quite a thing to behold. What’s also true is Bezos was born at the exact right time to align himself with the early emergence of the commercial internet, a phenomenon itself set in motion not just decades earlier by the US Department of Defense’s ARPANET, but centuries earlier by the work of Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday in advancing our understanding of electricity.
And it was hardly just a matter of timing for Bezos. The spark of his ingenuity needed ample tinder, which it found in a throbbing impatience and desire for comfort that define the human psyche. Scale that across billions of consumers, and yeah, you’ll get a historic business empire.
We’re drawn to mythologizing these people because it indulges fantasies of our own personal significance. Over time, this stifles our ability to imagine what’s possible. We fixate on our personal stories rather than our collective story; above all, we’re taught to believe that each of us is great because we’re born unique. What about believing we’re great because we’re a part of something great?
As I reflect on the notion of self, I’m reminded of one of America’s defining archetypes of the last few decades, encapsulated in a certain kind of car commercial. You know the one: a lone, handsome wolf goes ripping through a big natural vista in his brand new luxury automobile. Climate-controlled leather interiors and a channel-quilted merino vest frame his satisfied gaze, the sort of gaze you only get when you combine upper-class wealth with upper-class bone structure.
There he goes! The ultimate thrust of self, questioned only by the winding road, which, upon each curve, asks him to briefly divert his attention from his many tidy successes to feel the precise grip of his tires as he banks another turn and affirms his sweet freedom.
Call me unpatriotic, but is there anything less interesting than watching one guy win? These commercials are (highly effective) low common denominators in the unceasing campaign to fetishize American individualism… and as such, they are completely full of shit.
In every scene, if you look for it, you will find extraordinary texture and depth. Ultimately, it’s a matter of perspective, and it’s up to you to decide what’s more meaningful, instructive, and charged with potential: the icon of a big man on the open road, or a boundless four-dimensional play that counts systems as its characters, not people.
That machine propelling our man represents a legacy of ingenuity and sacrifice extending back thousands of years, across countless lives, incorporating everything from the emergence of crankshafts during the Han dynasty of China (circa 200 BC) to formative auto worker labor disputes of the 1930s. The landscape he carves through is made possible not just by decades of work by conservationists and public servants, but literal epochs of time over which wind shaped rock. And that channel-quilted merino vest owes its existence to a small farm in Australia, where right this moment a shepherd tells his dog to tell his sheep to move through a small opening in a fence to access a big grazing hill where they can soften their backs in the early morning sun. As the shepherd watches his flock move across the land with rounded fluidity, like oil in a pan, he reflects on the curious dynamic of an animal commanding an animal to command animals. In this, he’s swept up in awe of nature’s design. He feels proud and safe. A moment later, he decides he’ll give some money to a neighbor who’s hurting, a man he recognizes as a troubled but essential part of his own human flock.
If the happiest moments of your life are when you look in the mirror or tweak your Twitter bio, I have bad news: that’s pathological. Most people feel most alive when the self recedes, as they watch a child open a toy, dissolve in the dark of a movie theater, drink a cold beer in the sun by their garden, or film their dog wearing a hat. Don’t mourn the dissolution of self, you never wanted it to begin with.
Footnotes
(1) I want to acknowledge the privilege assumed in advocating for the dissolution of self. Put bluntly, I’m able to bitch about my self-absorption because I grew up in a culture that never questioned or diminished my personhood. For billions of people represented by missions for greater diversity, equity and inclusion, a similar, soaring sense of personhood cannot be presumed. I believe a vast majority of people will find value in examining the limiting constructs of self, but I won’t dare suggest we all start from the same place.
(2) The population of Chicago is approximately 2.7 million people. If 500 of those people paused what they were doing to note the sound of one self screaming, I consider that quite a lot. Given how quickly sounds are knocked down in a city, and the various acoustic barriers a scream would encounter, I think 200 is more likely. In either case, it’s around 0.01% of 2.7 million.
