Be Yourself: I wish this phrase would go away

Post Reply New Topic

I wish people would just quit using this phrase and I wish it would just go away and disappear. It is utter poppycock because there are people who are true to themselves and who remain single and unemployed. What does everyone think?

i believe that theres nothing inherently wrong with 'being yourself' the problem is that the social narrative is based around that some 'selves' are getting preferential treatment over others 'selves'.

It's a compromise. If "be yourself" happens to be "be useless and boring", then yes perhaps you should stop "being yourself".

Rather than telling people to "be themselves", you should instead be telling them to be aware of how other people see them. There's a lot of smug in the former phrase, as in "all I did was being myself--and look at all I have that you don't have!".

I think part of it is that its one of those tautological speech figuratives that NT's hold so dear.

When they say "be yourself" they mean "be calm and don't be nervous at the moment of truth". They don't necessarilly mean being yourself to its logical conclusion to the point that it becomes damaging to your self interests.

If you believe "being yourself" to be a causal factor in attaining an external benefit, disappointment is inevitable.

If you see the reward of "being yourself" within itself, and disassociate it from the external, then you will forever have an intrinsic joy to come back to, regardless of what might surround you.

This is not something you can approach from a functional perspective, as it has no function or real-world application. It's only a state of mind.

I feel it is rather useless advice. There is no such thing as the self. Better advice would be to "choose A self," as there are a finite combination of socially acceptable attributes that will not interfere with your interactions more than they promote them.

The 'self' as defined by, say, interests is entirely circumstantial. It completely depends on input from others and what you are exposed to in the formative stages determines who "you" are. Take the same genetic combination and move it to the usa and you might get a football loving NT person, but in deep indigenous south America you get an expert spear-thrower, or adopt them into a family of engineers and you get a Trekkie, who then becomes the next engineer. We have some natural leanings, for example someone who is nearsighted is unlikely to excel at baseball, cricket, (spear throwing), etc. However put them with a rich family with access to an optometrist and lazer eye surgery and will be as if that little genetic variation never existed! You are an aspie or not because your parents are aspie or not, alternatively because you gestated in the presence of this or that local environmental factor that may or may not be present somewhere else. I'm not saying it's fate but more that the dice only role once and the rest of the game is played with that roll, and how it interacts with all the other rolls.

There are a finite number of possible personalities as there are only so many general attributes to be added or subtracted to the docket. You are born with natural tendencies, such as shyness, touch sensitivity, or alternatively high pain tolerance and lightning reflexes and clearheadedness. Your "self" is not truly unique, it is merely an amalgamation of the available inputs. Almost no one is truly unique except in how the collage of attributes is arranged. This does not mean that people are the same or even similar, but more that there are a finite number of archetypes that are available for you to occupy. This is necessary because it would be impossible to memorize interactions for an infinite number of possible personalities. Most people prefer to specialize in just a few archetypes and abhor or avoid all others (i.e. bullying, racism etc.) for simplicities sake.

Part of the reasons aspies have trouble socializing is they fail to fully incorperate a particular archetype and therefor there is, in fact, no knowable way to interact with them. It is impossible to know how to react to someone that you have never met before, understanding that someone really means some-archetype. EG looking at the "popular" crowd and the various subgroups beneath them you will find little or no variation between individuals. If you were to try and describe them you would find yourself in an infinite loop of repetition: X hair, Y eyes wearing a polo shirt and jeans. Plays A,B, and C sports.

My favorite analogy of this stems from a researcher analyzing the mating patterns of monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies courtship rituals require the male to complete an intricate dance with the female, however this is not instinctual so much as cultural and the dance varies from clutch to clutch and when monarchs migrate they always breed in the place of their birth. The researcher was documenting the monarch population when he noticed a male monarch drift in from the west, clearly displaced. The male began attempting to court females. His dance had loops and swirls and dives and was beautifully acrobatic, but because it was not to the expectation of the females mid way through the dance when he was not in the required place they would lose interest and wander off. The male continued attempting to attract a mate but was not able to do so before the end of his short remaining lifespan and died before the day was out. This is how researchers discovered that even insects have learned behavior, culture, and ethnocentrism. The advantage to being human is self-awareness of the existence of these patterns and the ability to observe and learn from others who are more socially adept, or alternatively ask for directions back west.

My interpretation of this information is that it is better to make oneself more generic, but a specific kind of generic. Pick and archetype and stick with it. It doesn't have to be the main archetype or even a common one. But by creating a persona that conforms to a set of social norms that is applicable to multiple aspects of that collective 'self' strangers will have an easier time adapting to those first few interactions. As Shakespeare said(ish) 'all the world is a stage and we are just actors,' so stick to the script! More importantly realize even though there is a script, and no director to call cut and try the scene again.

Without starting a complete metaphysical derailment, I would like to say we have the same ideas, but would call them different things. I would call your explanation (as in, the definitions we apply to an abstract concept) the qualities of self. The nature of self being much more elusive, perhaps infallible.

I assert that, as we apply these definitions, we have control over them...however meaningless they are. That is to say, we also have the power to remove these definitions, such is the intent of my last post.

Heh, I have to physically restrain myself from telling people to not be themselves up in L&D...

I Heart Huckabees did a beautiful job of that.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIWtKKnnV0g[/youtube]
My favorite part of the movie.

I'd like to think that you have some choice of who you want to be. I'd like to have the curiosity about the world and tenacity of solving problems like how I perceive Richard Feynman, and the humor of Steve Carrell or Steven Colbert, I'd like to write like Ray Bradbury or Neil Degrasse Tyson that same spirit. I'd like to expose frauds like James Randi does. I'd like to teach a class like Walter Lewin. Maybe I can't pull all that off, and I'm not talking about mimicking or repeating jokes or stories, I'm talking about something different than that, the spirit these people have, that I perceive them to have. I also like the sense of humor my grandma has, I'd like to do that,

Maybe its not about who you want to be, but what you want to do. I want to tell a story that leaves an impression like how Ray Bradbury's short stories stuck with me. I'd like to do advanced algebra in my head. I'd like to learn calculus, I'd like to solve a rubix cube. Maybe when you do something often enough, people see it become you.

I rank that phrase right up there with, "There's no wrong answer."

A week or so ago, I expressed a bit of bewilderment about being told throughout my life to "just be yourself". Another member posted the following, which I found quite helpful.