[0:00]What if self-awareness isn't the superpower? What if it's actually the trap? I know exactly who I am. INFJ, anxious attachment,gram 4. I have a notes app full of observation about my own patterns, my own thoughts, my own feelings towards my thoughts. Journal entries from two years ago that describe the same problems I journalled about last week. But in better pros because I've had more practice describing them. I've gotten so good at narrating my own dysfunction that it's become a kind of a skill, a talent almost. I can tell you exactly why I'm stuck, in detail with references. And the scariest part isn't that self-awareness didn't work, it's that it felt like it was working. Every new insight felt like a step forward, every framework felt like a key. And I was collecting keys. I had a whole ring of them, beautiful, shiny keys. And I never once tried to actually open the door. And apparently so is everyone else. Somewhere along the way, self-awareness became the most praised trait on the internet. People announced their red flags and their meeting a resume. They say that I'm anxious, avoidant, attachment, disorganized attachment, I'm recovering people pleaser, which got me thinking... What if self-awareness isn't superpower? What if it's actually the trap?
[1:09]I think there is one culprit to this problem. Buzzfeed personality quizzes. Somewhere around 2013, Buzzfeed looked at the human race and asked, what if they could find out what type of bread they are? And by giving the masses the power to discover which Gilmore Girl character matches their communication style, they accidentally unleashed something, the belief that you can be categorized. But BuzzFeed personality quizzes were really just the gateway drug, because once you accepted the premise that your entire inner world can just be categorized by one quiz, now you're ready for the actual hard stuff. First came Briggs, 16 personalities, four little letters define who you are. And I felt like people started using almost these personality quizzes as an excuse for their behavior. Like, oh, I'm an INTJ, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they took these personality quizzes as like fact as this is just who I am. And here's the thing, I feel like I've gone back on this for so many times in the past few years on the legitimacy of personality quizzes. Like, can you truly be objective about a test about who you are, you evaluating yourself? I think there's always some sort of subjectivity to that, even if you're just taking this quiz and no one's seeing the results, you want to be someone. Do you know what I'm saying? Is I don't know if there is necessarily an objective truth of what your personality is, and even if there is, I don't know if you're the right person to evaluate that. Anyways, that's a whole other tangent. Like, I feel like I've taken the Meyer's brig so many times, and I've gotten one consistent result, I would say, like majority of the time. But there are sometimes I would just get a totally random result, and it's just maybe because my mood is like weird on a random like Friday. Anyways, after Myers's break, then came the attachment quizzes. I feel like the attachment styles got really popular because it didn't just tell you who you are, it tells you who you are in love. Anxious, avoidant, disorganized, secure. No one is secure by the way. Suddenly every failed relationship got their own Wikipedia page, every situation ship got their own diagnosis. You're not getting ghosted, you're just activating someone's attachment system. Which sounds a lot better than he's just not that into you. Don't look at it. None of these frameworks are actually completely useless. Some of them are genuinely insightful and tell you a lot about your personality and other people that are similar to you. But I think somewhere along the way we stopped using them as tools and started using them as identities. The framework became the thing, knowing your type became a stand-in for knowing yourself, and knowing yourself became a stand-in for actually doing anything with that information. We've built an entire personality around having a personality type. And the more categories we connected, INFJ, Scorpio, eldest daughter, HSP. The more legible we became to ourselves, and the more explained that we actually felt. But explained isn't the same as understood, and understood isn't the same as changed. It's like we organized the closet. Every issue, every wound, every pattern has its own neat little tidy box. It's very tidy all up in here, it's very self-aware, but we have yet to actually leave the house. So, why does it actually feel so good to be labeled? Because it really does. Like the first time I read my Myers's brick description, I was just like, I feel so seen. It's so funny because it's like this paragraph that was written for probably like 200 million people, and I was like, oh my God, this is me. The thing is, the label doesn't tell you anything new. It just gives you permission to be who you always were. I've always been quiet, but introvert makes it sound less of a problem and more like something that's just inherent in my own architecture. I may be always felt things too much, but highly sensitive person takes that from a personal deficit to just a neurological feature. It's essentially just self-acceptance through classification, which is why it's so addictive. One label and you feel seen, two labels and you feel understood. By your fifth, you basically just assembled like an IKEA version of your personality. And the best part of this is it doesn't require anyone else. It doesn't require someone else's input. We figured out how to feel known without the inconvenience of actually being known by someone, which is incredibly efficient and also pretty sad. People much smarter than me have been thinking about this for hundreds of years. There's this writer named Fernando Pessoa, he was Portuguese. He lived in Lisbon in the early 1900s. His day job was just a commercial translator. But Pessoa had a problem. He was so aware of himself. He was constantly observing his own thoughts, his own feelings, his own reaction to his feelings. So much so that he couldn't figure out which version of himself was the real one. So, he did something a little bit cooky. He started inventing people. Like full people with different writing styles, different philosophies, different biographies, over 70 of them actually. He basically ran a population inside his own head because one wasn't enough for all the observing that he was doing, which honestly sounds like a mental health problem and it probably was. But it's also a very extreme example of what self-aware people experience. Because Pessoa landed on this observation that I've been thinking about for so long, and I'm going to be paraphrasing here. But he said, the moment you start observing yourself, you split into two. There is the you that's living, and there's a you that's watching you live. And here's the problem, these two people can never be the same person at the same time. Like think about the last time that you're in a conversation and you were monitoring how you're coming across. Were you actually in the conversation, fully present, or were you just like above it, narrating, focusing, fixating on how you are sounding, how you're speaking? saying like, fuck, like I'm being too quiet right now, it's so awkward. Like does my breath smell bad? That's like the split right there. You left the moment to observe the moment, and by the time that you fully come back, the moment is over. And if you do this long enough, you spend years monitoring, observing, curating this version of yourself, you stop being able to tell which version is actually you. The one that is living and the one that is watching. The feeling, or the analysis of the feeling, the person, or the personality type. Pessoa wrote that he'd become a series of feelings that belong to no one. Which I feel like is a pretty good description of being like too self-aware. You watch yourself too closely, you almost become a performance for yourself, and the performance has become the person. So, Pessoa diagnosed the disease, but he didn't really offer a cure. He mostly just wrote about it under 70 different names and then kind of just died in relative obscurity. It's it's poetic, but not super actionable. So for the cure, I had to go to somewhere else. Carl Young. Carl Young is a Swiss psychologist, and he's a very common subtext screenshot. He basically studied a lot about self-awareness, the soul, about how people process different emotions, just a lot about psychology. He's pretty famous. But he had this concept of the shadow. Your shadow is everything about you that you decided isn't you. It's not just like the obviously bad stuff, like your pettiness, your anger issues, the fact that maybe you rank every person that you see. It's also the stuff that scares you. The ambition you won't admit to because you're scared that you're just going to fail, the anger that you convince yourself you process. It's every quality that you ever looked at and was like, that's not me. Like I don't want to be that person, but it is you, except you're just not really good at looking at it. It's basically your emotional baggage drawer. Young argues that there's a difference between recognizing your shadow and integrating it, and most people, the smartest, the most pretentious, the most well-therapy people, they often get stuck at just recognizing it. Because recognition is the fun part, right? Recognition is the personality quiz. Recognition is being able to say, I'm anxious attachment, I'm a Scorpio. It's the moment that you say, I know that I do this at dinner and everyone nods and thinks that you're so emotionally intelligent and you're so self-aware. Recognition is a performance. Integration is the part that nobody talks about because integration is not a caption. Integration is not an insight, it's not a revelation. It's actually calling that friend that you had a little awkward standoff with six months ago, instead of just writing and journaling why you're so bad at maintaining close friendships. It's deciding to actually talk to someone at a party and not let your introversion get the best of you. It's essentially just letting people see the person behind the performance. Young basically argued that you can't think your way into becoming a better person. And for all of us overthinkers out there, that's quite unfortunate news. Like he went a little bit further than this, he basically just observed that anything pushed to its extreme becomes bad. Courage becomes recklessness, confidence becomes delusion, and self-awareness pushed far enough becomes self-imprisonment. The tool becomes the cage, because at some point, you're reflecting not to learn anymore, you're reflecting to control. You're monitoring every thought that you have so nothing catches you off guard. You're analyzing every interaction, so you're never vulnerable. You're essentially just staying in the observation deck of your own life because it's safer up there. You can see everything, you'll never be not prepared, but you're not actually in anything. Now this is the part where I have to stop talking about dead psychologists and you just start talking about my own life because I am exhibit A. I am an overthinker, I love to introspect, I love to mole over topics over and over again and just find patterns and talk about why I'm feeling this way. Like I literally have friends where we meet up like once a month and we just talk about what we're feeling and why we're feeling those things, and those conversations are so interesting to me. I feel like I've gotten to a point where like, I just like talk and talk and talk. I know all of my flaws. I know like what makes me tick. I know why I'm not the person I want to be yet. But it's just so hard to like kind of break out of that because talking about it and introspecting is the easy part. But actually doing something about it, changing it, that's kind of scary. That's kind of scary, guys. Like I feel like when I've gone through periods where I felt like I'm in a rut, I usually know why I'm in a rut. But like actually having agency and putting my life in control and not just like viewing my life go to shit, but actually stepping in and doing something and veering it off from the shit. I don't know, I feel like it it takes a lot of effort to do that. It takes a lot of will power, it takes a lot of discipline. But essentially what I'm trying to say is I think a lot of people use self-awareness as a coping mechanism because I have, I have for a really long time. I thought that being able to diagnose my own dysfunction was the end goal, but it really is just the starting point. And the scariest part isn't just that self-awareness didn't work, it's that it felt like it was working. Every new insight I made about myself felt like a step forward, every framework felt like a key, every personality test felt like a new revelation, and I was just like collecting keys. Beautiful, shiny keys. I had a whole key chain of them, but I never use the keys to open any doors. So, the thing that I think I'm starting to understand is that self-awareness was never the actual destination. It was supposed to be the door. And I've been standing in this doorway for years admiring the hinges, looking at the door frame, looking at the little dust in the corner, and somehow just never walked through it. I think that's like the uncomfortable truth about all this, the personality tests, the therapy, the talking, the rumination, the overthinking, the entire self-awareness industrial complex, none of it was ever going to just be enough, because at some point you have to do the thing that no framework can do for you. You have to be the person. I know exactly who I am. And maybe that was never the point.
