How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#2TLDR -: Knowing self is valuable info but like everything - in moderation.
Good viewpoint but this article does the same thing as Esalen did - look inside and find your worth to extreme...of course every thing has a dark side and so the Esalen approach led to failure is because of self....
As I see, there are two ways to look at this. 1. We are all in a actors/actress in this play called life and there are always going to be good moments and bad moments. So human potential movement has its dark/bad side and there's that. 2. Secondly, I have been on a journey inwards so this is my perspective. It's valuable to look inside and find the authentic you..though the way our human society functions, we tend to follow/do what other people tell their image of us...so it's valuable to see one's authentic self. When I say authentic self, to me it means that one is able to find something worth doing that is also paying their bills...
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#3I think part of the reason is that more and more of our identity is tied to ourselves. In the past, identity was a function of your parents, your birth place, your nationality, etc. Now this is no longer the case. The advantage is much greater freedom and mobility. The disadvantage is that you have to be more involved in defining your identity.
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#4[flagged]
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#5"There was always a dark side to the Human Potential Movement. If a positive attitude and a sense of self-worth are what matters for success, then failure is always your own fault."
I always thought my alma mater, Stanford, was backwards about students suffering from depression for exactly that reason. Promoting positivity is great, unless it means ostracizing and shaming people who are already suffering. It was hard to be there because the highest ideals were positivity and productivity, and if you're depressed you're neither.
As I get older I realize more and more what a complex organism a human society is. If you change one factor, you can easily change other ones without meaning to.
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#6The BBC documentary “Century of The Self” available on YouTube also highlights the ways in which everything happening at Esalen were leveraged to manufacture more consumerism. Great watch.
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#7The review is worth reading but the conclusion's succinctness struck me: "In other words: If you want self-esteem, earn it."
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#8"There was always a dark side to the Human Potential Movement. If a positive attitude and a sense of self-worth are what matters for success, then failure is always your own fault." I always thought my alma mater, Stanford, was backwards about students suffering from depression for exactly that reason. Promoting positivity is great, unless it means ostracizing and shaming people who are already suffering. It was hard…
Also, being positive solely for the sake of being positive short-circuits our ability to process a decently large chunk of life. This isn’t to say that being a whiny grouch is good, but that sugarcoating things is not a healthy way to look at the world. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes shitty things happen. Sometimes people are assholes. Take away the ability to credibly discuss those things as negative, and you take away the ability to comprehend and solve some very real problems.
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#9I would have enjoyed this article more if all it had written was,
"Social Media."
Re: How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
#10The Human Potential Movement actually has very deep roots in early 20th century "New Thought". New Thought and Human Potential memes have been used to keep sales forces motivated for decades, and are currently extensively used by multilevel marketing organizations to keep their independent distributors from bailing once they realize the promised riches aren't coming in.