Be Yourself
“I have something for you to chew on, I think it's one of the biggest paradoxes of our modern time,” my friend Kenneth announced to me yesterday.
“Now you got my curiosity, please continue,” I replied.
“You know how people usually say that you should be yourself?
I think the majority of people doesn't really mean that.
Why do you think that is?
I don't want your answer now, I want you to chew on this one.”
So I did. Actually, first I thought about why people don't want to be themselves, or in other words, don't want to live up to their highest potential.
I thought that for many people, this might simply be too intense. I think that many people have had peak experiences at certain moments or during certain phases of their life that I would interpret as moments of close cooperation with life (or god, as some would say) but were also overwhelmed by the sudden intensity. Either it was too much for them, or they simply didn't think that they deserve it. And they simply forgot about it. And went back to normal.
As for why people don't want others to be themselves, I think the most straightforward answer is that we much rather want other people to be pleasant for us, not for themselves. We usually want other people to be themselves, but within the boundary of what is acceptable for us.
Connected with the first thought, we might also not want others to be themselves when we chose to not be ourselves.
I also thought that maybe there is no way to not be oneself.
So we might flip the whole argument on its head and say:
Why is it that people don't want to see others as who they are?
The answer is still somewhat the same: because we would like other people to be pleasant for us much rather than to see them “as they are”.
However, to form a truly deep connection with anyone, I think it is necessary to both understand the way in which they see themselves, and to see them in the way they are. Which to be honest, I think is very hard, because we always tend to project our own needs, desires and hopes, as well as our own flaws and shadows onto other people.
The only way to get there might be to not need anything from another person, to be fully content with oneself, be able to be with oneself in pure bliss, as Erich Fromm explains towards the end of his book The Art of Love. (It was only yesterday that I finally started listening to the last chapter of the book, and it's becoming very clear what I have to do.)
I wonder if this answers Kenneth's question in the way he expected and I wonder why he's leading such a miserable life if he has figured this out.