“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.”

Building a strong sense of yourself can seem like an impossible task at times. It’s a lifelong project figuring out who you are, what you value, and what is important to you. It is especially hard to know yourself when living in a culture that sends us constant messages about who we should be and what we should like. It makes it challenging for us to separate what we want from what other people want. It is hard to know ourselves and find our own voice in the midst of so many other dominant ideas and opinions.

Figuring out who you are

<ul><li>Differentiate yourself. Look within, and distinguish yourself from your surroundings, allowing you to become more self-aware. Take your time and remember that knowing yourself happens through the daily decisions you make.</li><li>Connect with yourself. When a situation occurs, take a step back and watch your process, thoughts, and feelings, without trying to react immediately. </li><li>See challenges as a way to know yourself. When you’re faced with difficult situations in life, try to see them as opportunities for you to decide who you are and see what you’re capable of.  </li></ul>

Build a strong and authentic sense of self

<ul><li>Make a real effort to have your feelings line up with your logical brain by looking at the facts of every situation</li><li>Practice sitting with the discomfort that comes from your wants not being immediately satisfied.</li><li>Think about your personal values instead of imposing them on other people.</li><li>When people in your life upset you or you don’t agree with them, try to stay connected to them rather than pulling away.</li><li>Have your own ideas, values, and thoughts even if others disagree with them.</li><li>Look beyond your initial impulsive reactions so that you can see your real intentions, and act in ways that better fit <warningtag>with who you want to be versus what your impulses dictate.</warningtag></li></ul>

Apply these actions to your life

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to Build a Strong Sense of Self

In the West, we continuously feel we should be different from others. We feel that deep inside is our self, our identity to which we must be true. We also see ourselves as unique. In everything we do, we want to reflect that individual self.  In Asia, people have a flexi-self or inter-dependent culture. It is a self that's oriented more to duty than to rights. They know they are different but don't attach much significance to being unique.

The true self vs the flexi self

In the West, making choices can make us a little anxious because it defines who we are. However, when people from Asia make choices, it doesn't have this overlay.  They feel we are less free than they are. They think we are kind of in a prison, because we must define ourselves in every moment. For example, if we take care of the elderly, we want to feel that it's an extension of our great love. Yet, somebody from a more flexi self will take care of the elderly parent because it's their duty, not an expression of themselves.

Choice is very important in the West

Chinese philosophers would say it is extremely restraining to stick to what we think we naturally are meant to be. Our responses can fall into ruts and patterns that repeat endlessly.  For example, when someone does something against you, it can make you angry because it brings back a childhood memory of being angry. What it really is, is a patterned response.

We have made things hard for ourselves

Many of the patterns you've fallen into could be potentially destructive for you and those around you.  Instead, you should be trying to break those patterns and change the way you interact with the world. You'll never get to the good life unless you work through these patterns and create different patterns.

What you think you are, is just a bunch of patterns you've fallen into

Most people misinterpret the idea in Buddhist psychology of egoless-ness or no-self. They say we don't need the ego or the self at all.  We need our egos. But we take ourselves more seriously than we need to. The self is not as fixed as we would like to think. The ego is a way of organising oneself from a young age.  For many people, it stays in an immature place where our intellect defines who we are.  Because the ego likes repetition, we're always reinforcing its own vision of itself.  And that restricts us.

The egoless-ness or no self

Consciousness is very subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. Its an experiential internal qualitative dimension to the physical system. We can't reduce that experiential side to neurotransmitters and states of the brain. So, when you're trying to study human consciousness by looking at the states of the brain, you can only correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states but you can never dismiss the first person experiential side.

Discussing consciousness scientifically

Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel they have bodies and that they're inside the body, inside their heads. But that locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion, meaning it makes no neuro-anatomical sense. The processes in the brain can be independently erupted . We are a changing system, a process.

The self is an illusion

The 3 layers of identity: The self in culture, the self in Eastern philosophy, the self in neuroscience.

What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity. Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Learn skills from the world's top minds at Big Think Edge: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0:00 Gish Jen: The self in culture 3:22 Michael Puett & Mark Epstein: The self in Eastern philosophy 8:35 Sam Harris: The self in neuroscience Who am I? It's a question that humans have grappled with since the dawn of time, and most of us are no closer to an answer. Trying to pin down what makes you YOU depends on which school of thought you prescribe to. Some argue that the self is an illusion, while others believe that finding one's "true self" is about sincerity and authenticity. In this video, author Gish Jen, Harvard professor Michael Puett, psychotherapist Mark Epstein, and neuroscientist Sam Harris discuss three layers of the self, looking through the lens of culture, philosophy, and neuroscience. Check Bruce Hood's book "The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity" at https://amzn.to/3izeFQy ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: GISH JEN: In the West, we feel that we must differentiate ourselves from others, endlessly. We have a model of self where the self is kind of like an avocado. We have a pit inside of us. The pit is our self, our essence, our identity. It is the thing to which we must above all be true. And of course, very importantly, we see that pit as unique. So that everything we do we want to show, to reflect that pit, to reflect that self. And we want it to be unique. In Asia, people frequently have a flexi-self, so it's a different kind of self. It is a self that's oriented more to duty than to rights, for instance. And very importantly, it is not, it does not have a cultural mandate to be different and to be unique. So if you ask, are they individuals? Of course they're individuals. Are they different? Of course they are different. But of course, for them, it's like, well of course I'm different, why would I make a big deal of that, right? The difference is, how much significance do we attach to that difference? In other words, do we think it's very important to differentiate ourselves from others? So one of the ways that we do that, of course, is through choice. Choice in the West is very, very important. Everyone is always making choices. And honestly, a lot of those choices make us a little anxious. If you do a study where you are just sitting in an empty room, and you're making a choice, and you come from a more individualistic culture, you actually show signs of a little anxiety. Every little choice that you make, even in private, because it's defining of who you are, is a little loaded. They feel like, they just choose. When they make those choices it doesn't have this overlay. And that's one of the reasons they feel that actually we are less free than they are. So they think that we are the ones who are kind of in this prison where, like I say, every moment we must define ourselves. Well, isn't that awful? And of course the way that we live, we feel that, we want to be freely electing to live the way that we live. And so even when we're doing things like taking care of the elderly, for example, we want to feel that it's an extension of our great love, and the nature of our being to be able to take care of the elderly. Well, the other day I was having dinner with somebody who said, I just don't feel that. And it's just very, very hard. So somebody from a more flexi-self, or interdependent culture, would say, it's just your duty. And so for them, it's like, they help their elderly parent. They just go take care of the elderly parent because that's their duty. For them, this is really liberating. You just go do it and you don't expect it to be an expression of yourself. It's just what people do. From their point of view, we have made things very, very hard for ourselves to demand that everything should be an expression of our inner nature. MICHAEL PUETT: We often like to think that the way to become a good person is to look within, find one's true self, the sort of natural self that we have. And once you've found that self, that natural thing that you are, the goal is to be sincere and authentic to that true self. So if we stick to what we naturally are meant to be, the gifts that we're naturally endowed with, that's how we can be a sincere, authentic person. Now, a lot of our Chinese philosophers would say, that sounds good, but is on the contrary extremely restraining—and constraining—to what we could do. The fact is, if we're messy creatures, as many of them would say, what we perhaps are in our daily lives are simply people whose emotions are being pulled out all the time, by people we encounter, interactions... To read the full transcript, please visit https://bigthink.com/videos/self-identity

philosophy

Philosophy

videos

Videos

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity. | Sam Harris, Mark Epstein & more | Big Think

Video consumption is spurred by the pandemic, but screen time has risen consistently over the years.Eras of video<ol><li>Television: limited production access, extensive budget and planning</li><li>YouTube: no time constraints, anyone can be a creator</li><li>Tik Tok: one minute or less, accessible to anyone with a smartphone</li></ol><ul><li>Algorithm-driven discovery creates extremely personalized content</li></ul>

Video is evolving from an add-on to a necessity

<ul><li>Chinese platforms make digital classrooms more engaging for young students</li><li>Teachers can give “rewards” and real-time quizzes for immediate feedback</li><li>Video e-commerce offers interaction between host and customer</li><li>Virtual classes like piano lessons are accessible and cheap</li></ul>Market opportunities<ul><li>Video-first platforms: upgrade and make experiences more efficient</li><li>Video integration with APIs: add functionality with simple tools</li></ul>

Conferences and health appointments can be made virtual

Taking cues from gaming, entertainment, and abroad, video-first products are transforming the future of education, shopping, and solopreneurship.

remotework

Remote Work

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Live, Social, and Shoppable: The Future of Video | Andreessen Horowitz

Brooklyn-based software developer Josh Wardle created it last year as a gift for his partner, who was obsessed with word games like the New York Times’ “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee">Spelling Bee</a>”. Wardle put the game up for free online in October, and it quickly went all hockey-stick. There were <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/01/20/millennials-are-driving-force-behind-wordles-success-poll-suggests/?sh=70b6e76c6e72">90 people people playing it in November, 300,000 by early January, and only a few weeks later, about 2 million a week.</a> One survey estimates that 14% of American adults are playing Wordle.

The Word About Wordle

Most successful ideas do not arrive out of nowhere; they’re extensions or riffs on existing ones.This is particularly true with games, where tinkering with an existing form of play can create something that’s i) delightfully new while ii) also being familiar. That combo of “new” yet “familiar” is pure gold. Do something too derivative and people yawn; do something too novel and they’re baffled. The path to wild success is hitting that midpoint.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: No Need To Reinvent The Wheel

Living as we do in a capitalist society, it’s easy to assume the only reason people would engage in creative labour is for profit. But the world of culture doesn’t work that way. It’s always been full of creators who are<ol><li>astonishingly productive and</li><li>propelled by desires other than money.</li></ol>The sheer uncommerciality of the venture is weirdly refreshing. It stands in total contrast to the just-add-water hucksterism of today’s influencers and tech firms, who are constantly trying to shove sponsorships into their work or shake their audience upside down to see what loose change rattles out.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Making Something As a Gift is a Powerful Motivation

When we’re creating things, it’s normal to start worrying about how our audience will react. All those different people, with different aesthetics! Some of them are gonna love this part of what you’re doing, but hate this other part. Worrying about this can lead you into a rathole of self-censorship, where you try to satisfy everyone and wind up satisfying no one.Wardle was making his game for just one person. When you’re in a mental dialogue with a single person, your creative decisions are sharpened.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Make Things For An Audience of One

It’s frequently very valuable to pay attention how your audience is interacting with your work. They see things you don’t, and come up with ideas you can’t. In the early days of Twitter, it was clever users who invented the retweet and the at-reply. To their credit, Twitter’s engineers spotted the behavior and adopted them as native features, and they helped catalyze Twitter’s explosive growth.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Observe What Your Fans Are Doing

Anyone can play Wordle, in any browser. You don’t need to create an account or log in. You don’t need an app store. Wardle avoided every single digital walled garden, and instead went with the most wide-open field available: The web.﻿People are especially enthusiastic about things they can share without having to go through an App Store, or without being bogged down by having lots of their data captured during the experience.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Make Stuff On The Open Web

Wordle offers up only one new word everyday. That’s it. Once you’ve solved the day’s word, you…stop playing. You go do other stuff, like your job or hanging out with your loved ones. Sure, you might hanker to play more Wordle, but you can’t. You gotta wait until tomorrow.Unlike nearly all social media (and most video games), Wordle is not trying to get you narcotically addicted to reopening the app again and again, all day long, in an eye-glazed trance.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Don't Engineer For Addiction

Made me play the game! It's online on the web and free to play!

Brooklyn-based software developer Josh Wardle created it last year as a gift for his partner, who was obsessed with word games like the New York Times’ “Spelling Bee”. Wardle put the game up for free…

product

Product & Design

Six Lessons From the Success of Wordle

The pandemic accelerated our virtual world of work. For many, in-person gatherings turned into video call-only meetings overnight. Tools and platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Workplace from Facebook became mission-critical to collaborating with teammates and getting work done. 
Now, some companies like Meta (née Facebook) and Microsoft plan to create the platforms and tools for organizations to operate in a virtual workspace—for employees to go beyond two-dimensional Zoom calls and interact with colleagues in three-dimensions via an avatar in a virtual environment.

Enter The Metaverse

A virtual workspace is an online environment where employees communicate, collaborate, and/or work. Many are already familiar with two-dimensional virtual workspaces thanks to remote work. If not, think platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. 
While three-dimensional virtual workspaces are less common, some companies are aiming to make them the next wave of how we work. What’s the difference? Instead of seeing coworkers on a video-call grid, employees in a three-dimensional workspace would join them (with an avatar) in a virtual office.

Defining A Virtual Workspace

Meta/Facebook is not the only gig in town. A number of companies have already made waves (i.e., investments) in building the metaverse. Gaming platform Roblox has shared its vision for a place where “people can come together within millions of 3D experiences to learn, work, play, create and socialize.”
Meanwhile, Epic Games (the company behind Fortnite) has raised $1 billion from investors to help with its plans for building the metaverse. Companies like Microsoft and chipmaker Nvidia have also expressed intent to build the metaverse.

A Host of Companies In The Metaverse

<ul>
<li>More immersive and real-time than a video conference call</li>
<li>People feel engaged and more present in the metaverse</li>
<li>Prone to glitches and outages.</li>
</ul>

The Pros And Cons Of Metaverse

Diversifying the tools your organization uses in a virtual workspace would help mitigate a problem like this from happening again. But there are other implications for a virtual world of work—especially with Facebook at the helm. 
Facebook trying to lead the way into a virtual world could require even more personal data and offer greater potential for abuse and misinformation when it hasn’t fixed those problems in its current platforms.

Beware Of Tech Giants Wanting User Info

With Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s all-in on the metaverse, it might only be a matter of time before virtual reality technologies go mainstream and play a greater role in our work life.

career

Career

business

Business

Will Your Next Meeting Happen in the Metaverse? Here’s What You Need to Know About Virtual Workspaces

In April 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine had a deadly and costly experiment that led to the greatest nuclear accident on record, killing 32 people instantly and crippling thousands more in Russia, France and Italy.
The explosion, which resulted from an unstable nuclear reactor getting overheated, poisoned the wildlife and led to an exponential rise in cancer cases in the surrounding area.

The Worst Nuclear Accident

On 30 April 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster goes public, days after the event. What exactly happened at Reactor Number Four at Chernobyl's nuclear power plant, and why?

history

History

What was the Chernobyl Disaster?

In the 19th Century, manufacturers added all kinds of unpleasant substances to processed food.
Milk sellers in the US once added chalk or dye to make their watered-down batches look more palatable. Other food companies added copper sulphate - a garden pesticide - to their tinned vegetables to make them look greener. Formaldehyde or borax was added to extend shelf life. In England, green sugary sweets were coloured with arsenic, and lead was added to red or yellow ones.

The need for food labelling

Forcing stricter labelling regulations took decades. Today, processed foods come with abundant information about their contents, although it is not always easy to understand. Food regulations differ around the world. The UN and WHO's Codex Alimentarius provides an international set of labelling standards, but the food code is voluntary and used in different ways worldwide. Nutrition labelling is mandatory in the major economies, including the US, India, China, Japan, Australia and EU members.

Food regulations around the world

The ingredients are listed from the main ingredient to the least ingredient by weight. For hazelnut spread, the first (and biggest) ingredient is sugar, then oil. <ul><li>Lower down, you'll come across "E numbers". The EU uses these shortcodes to describe additives. For example, E300 is vitamin C, E160c is paprika.</li><li>In the US, there is no such coding. Instead, additives are described by their chemical names, such as sodium caseinate rather than E469. But it really refers to a protein derived from milk.</li></ul>

Understanding ingredients

Some nations like the UK use red, amber, and green colour codes to express how healthy a processed food is in terms of fat, saturates, sugars and salt.  For example, a processed meal might have 7.7g of saturated fat and be labelled red. It may also show a percentage like 39%. The amount is calculated using the "Reference intake", which is the maximum recommended intake amount for an adult woman who does an average amount of physical activity.

Nutrition facts

Serving size was another definition that may seem obvious at first but is complex to define. Until the Nutrition Facts label appeared, each manufacturer decided for themselves how big a portion was. <ul><li>The 1990 US legislation mandated that the serving size should be the amount "customarily consumed and which is expressed in a common household measure that is appropriate to the food"—but knowing what a serving size is required national surveys. </li><li>In the end, the FDA calculated the US serving sizes by using 139 categories, which includes four types of cereal and four types of cheese.</li></ul>

Serving sizes

Health claims are regulated to avoid manufacturers over-promising.  The US uses three relevant types of claims:<ul><li>Authorised claim: The approved claim must have "significant scientific agreement."</li><li>Qualified claim: The science is not settled. "Scientific evidence suggests..."</li><li>Structure-function claim: These claims are vague, such as "calcium builds strong bones". They should be viewed as marketing language.</li></ul>

Health and nutrition claims

The information on a processed food label may seem obvious, but there's often more to decipher than first appears.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

food

Food

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

health

Health

How to decode a food label

Sleep paralysis is a neurological phenomenon in which a person awakens from sleep but is temporarily paralyzed.
The episode may last a few seconds to minutes and is accompanied by the strangest hallucinations. It can feel terrifying.

Sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis often occurs when we take a nap, when jet-lagged or sleep-deprived. We wake up while still in the stage where vivid dreams occur, called the rapid eye movement sleep (REM).
During REM, the front brain - central to our ability to plan and think logically - turns off and makes our bodies temporarily paralyzed. It prevents us from acting out "real" dreams. Sometimes we wake up in this stage. The vivid and sometimes threatening dreaming of REM can "spill over" into conscious awakening. It can feel like a nightmare coming alive.

Neurological origins of sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis can sometimes make us feel like we're floating outside our body. The out-of-body experience can reliably be reproduced in the laboratory by disrupting the temporo-parietal junction in the brain. This region helps build a body image based on inputs it receives from the senses. The area is usually turned off during REM sleep.
In sleep paralysis, there is no feedback from the body telling the brain how to build the body image, resulting in out-of-body hallucinations such as seeing your body float in the air or sink deep into the bed.

Out-of-body experiences

The most distressing during sleep paralysis is seeing an intruder that sometimes attacks the sleeper. Anything the imagination can invent can happen. Commonly, the intruder chokes the person by crushing his chest. The creature can include details like a demonic face with sharp teeth and cat eyes.
One explanation is that in the same way that people who are born with a missing arm may experience phantom limbs - they feel the missing limb - a person can 'feel' another phantom person during sleep paralysis.

Seeing a ghost

Research suggests that your beliefs about sleep paralysis can shape your experience.
In Denmark, people see sleep paralysis as something trivial caused by the brain. Egyptians fear dying from sleep paralysis and consequently have longer episodes. The fear will activate fear areas in the brain, making them more likely to wake up during REM. The escalating anxiety would worsen sleep paralysis, causing more intense bodily hallucinations.

Fear feeds terrifying sleep paralysis

<ul>
<li>Understanding what is happening during sleep paralysis helps to prevent fear cycles. People are relieved to hear they are not "crazy".</li>
<li>Literally turn your back on the terrifying monster by dreaming a coherent dream in which you are aware you are dreaming.</li>
<li>Meditation relaxation (MR) therapy was designed to treat sleep paralysis. The treatment includes techniques of cognitive reappraisals, emotional distancing, meditation, and muscle relaxation.</li>
</ul>

Controlling sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis, which 20 percent of people experience at least once, can be terrifying. Though it is a neurological phenomenon, our culture and beliefs can make the experience worse. One potential treatment is to learn to control the content of our dreams.

Sleep paralysis: a terrifying encounter with our own mind

Your immune system defends your body from infection. If you can support it, there will be benefits.
Your immune system creates, stores, and distributes white blood cells that fight bacteria and viruses you are exposed to.

Your immune system is your friend

<ul>
<li>Eating fruits and vegetables helps your immune system fight viruses and bacteria.</li>
<li>A positive attitude can help your body fight illnesses.</li>
<li>Covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze can keep germs at bay.</li>
<li>Sucking your baby's pacifier can make them less likely to develop allergies, a recent study found.</li>
</ul>

Facts about the immune system

<ul>
<li>A lack of sleep does not affect your immune system. There is a strong link between restorative sleep and a healthy immune system.</li>
<li>Supplements can help you get better faster. Taking megadoses of one vitamin has not been proven to support the immune system.</li>
<li>Kids need supplements. They really should get vitamins and minerals from eating nutritious foods.</li>
<li>Exercise does not affect the immune system. Exercise lowers blood pressure, keeps body weight under control and can protect you from some diseases.</li>
</ul>

Immune system myths

What do you really know when it comes to boosting your immune system and fighting off a cold?

Myths vs. Facts About Boosting Your Immune Sytem

A simple look at our brain, we would see a blob of jiggly meat, however, this blob of jiggly meat is extremely powerful. Through years of evolution, our brains are responsible for conjuring our pasts and predicting our futures, control our bodies, and create our experiences in the past and the present.
Our brains can also modify our physical reality through a social reality where we can make up something out of nothing and convince other people to treat it as real.

The Superhuman Power Of The Brain

Our brains rely on memories when faced with ambiguous data whereas it guesses the causes of the data received as it plans what to do next in order to keep us alive and well.
An esteemed neuroscientist described our daily experience as "the remembered present" where our brains will constantly and invisibly guess future actions based on memories that are similar to the present moment. Our brain's guesses, may they be right or wrong, manifests as our actions and senses.

Reverse Inference Problem

Our brains can actually consider physical objects and impose new or different functions on it even if it is not a part of its physical nature, using only our collective minds. This phenomenon is called social reality.
It has an amazing level of influence on our lives, not only on an individual level but the effects can be felt globally. Where we believe a certain stereotype, soon it creates a self-fulling prophecy which perpetuates the stereotype in a vicious cycle.

Social Reality

The brain makes categories based on context. Say an elephant, a fountain, and a water gun are all three different objects, however, the brain can categorize them as "objects that can shoot water."
The categories made by the brain are extremely flexible and are what drives many of our actions and experiences. this is also the engine behind social reality because when we share such categorizations and make them real it is able to influence people as well as our genetic evolution as a species.

Abstract Categories

"We have more control over reality than we might think, and more responsibility for reality than we might realize or want".

Do we see the world as it really is, or are we creating our own reality? We delve into the neuroscience behind the world that we experience.

How to Build a Strong Sense of Self

What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity. | Sam Harris, Mark Epstein & more | Big Think

Live, Social, and Shoppable: The Future of Video | Andreessen Horowitz

Six Lessons From the Success of Wordle

Will Your Next Meeting Happen in the Metaverse? Here’s What You Need to Know About Virtual Workspaces

Noelle H.