An interesting piece in aeon by Cody Delistraty examines the fluid nature of
personalities, particularly in relation to coming of age myths and fashionable
ideas about finding ourselves. However it is not so much the article itself,
but one of the comments which makes the whole thing so applicable to our times. First a few
quotes from the article to set the scene.
Finding one’s true
place in the world is a massive trope, not just in film and theatre, but also
in literature, education and motivational seminars – any place where young
people are involved. In all these cases, the search for the ‘self’ is dubious
because it assumes that there is an enduring ‘self’ that lurks within and that
can somehow be found. Whereas, in fact, the only ‘self’ we can be sure of is
one that changes every second, our decisions and circumstances taking us in an
infinite number of directions, moment by moment. And even if we think we have
‘found ourselves’, this is no panacea for the rest of our lives. In the last
line of F Scott Fitzgerald’s debut, This Side of Paradise (1920), young Amory
Blaine cries out: ‘I know myself, but that is all.’ Young as he is,
Fitzgerald’s confused Princetonian still sees how insubstantial the knowledge
of his ‘self’ is within the larger context of his life.
The idea of there
being a single ‘self’, hidden in a place that only maturity and adulthood can
illuminate and which, like archaeologists, we might dig and dust away the
detritus to find, is to believe that there is some inner essence locked within
us – and that unearthing it could be a key to working out how to live the rest
of our lives. This comforting notion of coming of age, of unlocking a true
‘self’ endures, even though it is out of step with current thinking in
psychology, which denies a singular identity, and instead posits the idea of
staged development, or an eternally malleable sense of self that shifts as we
grow older, and with the uniqueness of our personal experience.
Fair enough. The whole thing is worth reading, but to my mind a revealing comment puts it into a wider and more pointed perspective.
Jan Sand
As someone who has
lived longer than normal my own life agrees with the final conclusion that
circumstance has demanded central changes in my efforts to construct myself
into something acceptable to the various societies I have immersed myself into.
This can be seen as a series of multiple failures or as a most peculiar success
in that I have survived as long as I can. Some people do exceptionally well in
all the various social contexts they face. At best, I have gotten by and not
found any real satisfaction in all of my attempts. I have had to fall back on
the generality that no society offers me anything that fits well with my rather
unextraordinary unfittedness in what I have encountered. Survival alone has to
be sufficient in my sense of satisfaction.
We all find ourselves adopting personality niches, but some
of us have problems slotting ourselves into them, as the writer of the comment
seems to have found and accepted. The trouble is, those niches also seem to negate
the very idea of personality because a social niche is not a personality; it merely
attracts, nurtures and demands a certain type of personality.
Social niches force all of us into types and almost all of us succumb to some extent - usually to a large extent.
This is why those who conform seem to lack the quirks and unpredictability of an authentically
original personality.
To give a commonplace example - instead of exhibiting a
powerful and distinctive personality, the celebrity who rants about equality,
social justice or saving the planet seems to have a more limited personality than
someone who is not so easily convinced. The celebrity seems to have adopted a
set of conforming behaviours rather than a distinctive personality. Those
conforming behaviours may be stridently promoted with much waving of the arms,
but they still lack the authentic flavour of an individual personality.
With global pressures and global social media, the idea of a
distinctive personality could even fade away. What use will it be?
3 comments:
Worth noting that the "distinctive personality" is a fairly modern invention. People in earlier ages seemed to make their way based on concepts such as social role, which prescribes what we have to do. There seem to be very few accounts of how these roles chafed, or were disliked.
Sounds like a good article - I'll get myself over there for a closer look.
In my great grandparents time the leading sportsmen of their age were chaps who on horse chased after foxes or stags and other chaps with guns who shot a lot more birds than they could eat. Among the lower orders chaps who fought each other bare knuckled for a few hours were much admired. They regarded themselves as far more civilised than earlier generations with all their bear pits etc.
Sam - although people in earlier ages seemed willing enough to up sticks and move on to what they thought might be a better life.
Demetrius - I read somewhere that bare knuckled fighting wasn't as dangerous as we might suppose because hands are easily damaged.
Post a Comment