When someone above the age of young adulthood says that he is searching for himself, it is almost always because he has been behaving badly or has had reversals in life. No one goes off in search of himself whose life is satisfactory. The assumption is that, once found, the true self will be charming, successful, and, above all, good. This is because man is born good, though — paradoxically — everywhere is bad. Finding yourself is a panacea, and you will live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, the search for the true self has a tendency to go on for years or even for decades. I used to ask my patients who said that they were in search of themselves how they would know when they had found it. The true self, after all, is not like a mislaid pair of cuff links. They said that their unhappiness would fall away when they found it, presumably like the outer mold of a casting. But they had no real idea of what a better life than the one they were leading would be like. Mostly they thought of the better life as one of luxury and more consumption, bathing in ass’ milk rather than in mere water. When I suggested that they needed to lose rather than to find themselves, they asked how one lost oneself.
“By being interested in something outside of and other than oneself,” I said.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
Here the weakness of my advice became apparent to me. I have been interested in many different things in my life, usually in succession, and my library is a testimony to my tendency to serial monomania; but I have never been interested in nothing, and therefore have no idea how people develop the capacity to be interested in something (that is to say, in anything) ex nihilo, so to speak, nor do I have any recollection of how I did so myself. I suspect (though I cannot prove) that modern education, which lays emphasis on the relevance of what is taught to children’s present lives rather than, as it should be, on its irrelevance, is partly to blame for the very large numbers of people who cannot lose themselves, and therefore are left to the vagaries of entertainment provided for them under our current regime of bread and circuses. The unassuageable thirst for entertainment is both a manifestation and a symptom of a profound boredom with the world. Indeed, entertainment is also one of the greatest causes of boredom in the world, inasmuch as everyday reality can now rarely compete in raw sensation with entertainment. But since dealing with everyday reality remains a necessity for most people, it results in boredom because it is compared with entertainment. Only a deeper engagement with the world can avoid or overcome this problem.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lose Yourself”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-11-10.
November 13, 2022
QotD: Your “true self”
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