91–100 of 114 posts
The reason the advice "be yourself" exists, and also why older people tend to be the ones expressing it, is that the danger in not being yourself is that you may wake up one day in a career or surrounded by people that do not accept you for who you are. And you end up trapped in a life where you have to pretend to be something you're not. The idea is that the younger you start being honest about yourself to others, t…
without being a loud annoying FUCKWIT to the entire population
Often Be yourself means
Speak your mind
Never self censor
Speak truth
Never lie
Not an open door to be a total wanker to everyone
To the extent that you've been 'socialized into' adopting the behaviors of those around you (often unwittingly), your authentic self may be buried ... even (for some) forgotten.
Most of us, I suspect, are reminded now and then of times in our teens/early 20s when we acted in ways that we now regret. In ways that might have sickened our pre-teen selves. Where were our 'selves' then? Well, as Blake put it, 'You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. '
First know, then be.
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Also, "be" is not necessarily a state of passivity. It can be an active process of determining what your goals and life-quality factors, and of carving out space in the world for them. That your self can be an ideal, rather than a default. Of course life is fundamentally about eating other life, except for bacteria that eat rocks. So there could be an adversarial element to it
Totally off topic, but plants and fungi don't eat other life. Plants make their own food using waste products from animals. Fungi use dead and decaying matter for food. Even more off topic, the only reason I feel the need to comment is my kid is prepping for a Singapore Science test and they seem to have a lot of questions about this stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To tone down those tendencies in yourself that are likely to cause you to get into bad situations. For instance perhaps you love to argue, often that leads people to dislike you. Find a way to be yourself and do the things that you enjoy doing without getting contempt from other individuals and society... However, there are professions where this is impossible such as porn star for instance. If you choose such a path…
> perhaps you love to argue Or go on HN, where everybody loves to argue. More generally, the world is broad enough that there's usually a tribe for everyone. You may not find them in your local area. That's an impetus to go beyond your local area and seek them out.
Be yourself is a non-statement. I don't know what it means. Does it mean follow my primal urges? Follow my idealistic goals? It doesn't say anything.
the latter is less uncompromising on how you go about living and presenting yourself but contains the same principle of unity between knowing when your acting in the world is aligned with your ethic and when it isn't, so that either your acting or your ethic can move to the point the other is, to reduce entropy in your life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally off topic, but plants and fungi don't eat other life. Plants make their own food using waste products from animals. Fungi use dead and decaying matter for food. Even more off topic, the only reason I feel the need to comment is my kid is prepping for a Singapore Science test and they seem to have a lot of questions about this stuff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Added: That means some of the answers on the sample Singapore Science tests are not really correct.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
That's interesting. I think I saw that on the YouTube channel called Ants Canada. So some fungi do kill living things. Added: That means some of the answers on the sample Singapore Science tests are not really correct.
in general blanket statement about the nature are going to always find corner cases
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The variation I like is, "Become who you are."
That's Nietzsche's "werde, der du bist".
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
That's not permitted though. This is the framework that is permitted, and within which we can discuss the difference between "be yourself" and "just do what you want" in articles of appropriate word count as suggested by the editor:
> [Hobbes] foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
We have this "open world sandbox", moot and harmless, utterly devoid of deep meaning, because it's all printed on stickers without any lasting adhesive, that can and will be removed without any trace or consequence. We may not have noticed this, but our brain did.
Most "thought" expressed in the 21st century stems from rationalizing around that elephant on the couch, that's what I think. When I come across a turtle on its back in a desert, I don't know quite know what to do, I never seem to be able to help and it's really stressing me out, but I know what I will NEVER do, I will never say "oh, I guess that's just what the turtle does, that's just how it walks, it's not dying, that's how it lives".