laughing at yourself

May 22, 2022

How to Become Your Own Best Friend

Who is the person closest to you?

You see him every day, talk to him and about him, sleep with him, clean him up, applaud his successes and analyze his defeats. This individual knows more about you than you will ever know.

Maybe it’s time to make yourself into your own best friend, given all that intimacy.

I’ve listed 30 suggestions to get you started.

  1. Be entertaining company on your own. Inspect your personality and how you view the world compared to others. Seek new ideas, and pass the unaccompanied time with enjoyment. Go places and do things beyond your usual comfort zone, including solo explorations. Perhaps concerts, movies, parks, museums, and tours.  Don’t sit alone in quiet desperation.
  2. Be kind to who you are. Your life emerged without a display case from which to choose the attributes you wanted. You began with raw and imperfect materials of external creation. Improve them as you can, but don’t diminish what you have accomplished. In the words of Epictetus, “...as the (working) material of the carpenter is wood, and that of (a sculptor is) bronze, so the subject matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.“
  3. Mistakes are inevitable. Master them. Please take steps to skip over their repetition.
  4. Putting others first must have limits. Decency doesn’t require one to be a human sacrifice. Self-compassion is not selfishness but the foremost necessity of life. You can only be helpful to others if you maintain the strength to do good. Generosity and kindness are not identical to placing yourself last in line. As a Christian colleague told more than one of her clients, “Get off the cross, we need the wood.”
  5. Become independent, assertive, and the best available defender of your ground. If another must serve as the guardian of your well-being, safety, and security, your dependency will be like an Achilles heel awaiting its fatal arrow. Be the advocate on your behalf.
  6. Pursue advice, so long as you don’t overdo it. Make sure of your advisors and how much to follow their suggestions.
  7. Look for excellent models. Those you admire might be appropriate, but celebrity should not be a necessary criterion.
  8. Read fine authors, the better to write with clarity and engage with all the great minds of civilization’s past. Recognize a book as a chance to uncover the author’s observations before you dispute them.
  9. Don’t overthink. Delay and avoidance offer no guarantee of improved decision-making. If you wait until you feel right and ready, don’t be surprised when speeding time stares down at you from a passing train, with your opportunity aboard. The next locomotive to the same destination could be canceled. Is there knowledge you must first acquire? Begin then to obtain it instead of waiting for divine intervention.
  10. Do not explain, excuse, or apologize because you believe someone else expects this. Such efforts betray insecurity. Discover when to wait and how to say no.
  11. Do not worry much about what others will say about you privately. They tend to be preoccupied with their foibles, not yours. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “I have wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others...”
  12. Hold yourself to account. Look into the mirror. Do not turn away; instead, make sure to praise strengths and admit flaws.
  13. Allow love and kindness to emanate from your being. Live with both intelligence and an open heart. Those different from you also find existence challenging.
  14. Consider friendship with people unlike you as an opportunity. Hesitate before condemning the unfamiliar ones, those outside of your understanding.
  15. Learn, always learn. You will relearn the same lessons under new conditions with different solutions many times in any life. If you stay unchanged, you will be like a man watching history race by, missing the chance to be enlarged by time, thought, and experience.
  16. Pick your battles. When you swim in a pool of anger, you will drink its pollution, distressed when you could be joyful.
  17. Hold on to old friends. They share knowledge of your youth and lived through the trials and joys of growing up in the same place, at the same time, with the same teachers, and the same challenges. They alone have a personal recall of your parents and “the old neighborhood.”
  18. Misfortune and unhappiness will be overwhelming at times. Most of us eventually return to our usual level of well-being — to our set point.
  19. Contemplate whether you received more pleasure from experiences or things. Material objects tend to lose the boost they give us soon after receiving them. The new car smell fades, and the Christmas toy gets put away. 
  20. When hardship comes, remember how you survived earlier losses and what properties within you enabled you to bounce back.
  21. “But those who forget the past, ignore the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and filled with anxiety...Their very pleasures are fearful and troubled by alarms of different kinds; at the very moment of rejoicing, the anxious thought occurs to them: ‘How long will this last?‘” (Seneca, On the Shortness of Life).
  22. You will gain more from those who are learning more. Prioritize people who do not always insist on certainty but approach the world with many questions and are unafraid of complex answers.
  23. Disappointments needn’t always be someone’s fault. Expect ups and downs. Sometimes your frustrations are due to your mistakes. Often they are a function of a world where competition, another person’s trouble, the search for love, and simultaneous demands will pull you and the rest of humanity in directions no one expected, with collisions of your interests and theirs.
  24. Not everyone will love you, nor even like you. Accept that. Living means your heart will break, and you might bruise others’ hearts like a game of dominoes.
  25. You will not accomplish everything, travel everywhere, or “have it all.” Practice gratitude for what you possess, displaying generosity to those you care about and even strangers. Make the best choices on matters of importance.
  26. Remember, you are not a “thinking machine,” but your emotions will try to persuade you that you are. As Antonio Damasio reminds us, “We are feeling machines that think.”* Make an effort to recognize this and enlarge the scope of your rationality.
  27. Laugh at the absurdity of the world and yourself.
  28. The world will test you. Then and only then will you know who you are. Fate is a hard teacher. Before your turn comes, be careful who you judge. Knowing yourself has value, not despite but because of the high price of its instruction.
  29. Empty your being of all your power, imagination, and grit. Use it up. To live a full life is to leave it with nothing undone or held back. In so doing, you can look back with satisfaction and a smile.
  30. Finally, Seth Stephens-Davidowtz offers this “data-driven answer to life,” only half-jokingly: “Be with your love, on an 80-degree sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.” You can do much worse.

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The photo is A Warm Winter Pool, 2020, by Laura Hedien, with her permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

*Thanks also go to Brewdun for pointing out the Antonio Damasio quotation in No. 26.

March 10, 2019

Are Freudian Slips Real or Just Another Female Undergarment?

If my friend “Buffalo Bob” were still alive he could tell you a tale about Freudian slips. He learned the challenging way we all learn essential lessons, an awkward episode I will recount.

My better-half and I were having dinner at Bob’s place — the home my grad school alum occupied with his second wife. This was our first chance to meet her. Before he divorced the mother of his children, of course, the future Steins spent many a double-date with Robert and his first spouse Karen.

On this occasion we shared old stories about our school days at NU’s Psychology Department. A swell time was had by all until Bob turned to Mate #2 and called her by Mate #1’s name.

Oh no!

The temperature in the room descended in the direction of numbers common at the South Pole. The hostess soon vanished and the remaining three of us finished the feast by ourselves.

An embarrassment, for sure. But a carrier of hidden meaning? Was there some unconscious animus toward the current spouse? Did the psychologist equate her to the dark lady of yesteryear? Or did Bob miss his early love?

Perhaps none of these.

Here is an alternative interpretation: Remember, Bob and I were talking about our four-year quest for a Ph.D. and the people we palled around with way back. What notable female name most claimed my chum’s attention at the time? Karen. The conversation triggered the old habit of saying her name.

To my mind nothing sinister underpinned the mistake, though I was sympathetic to the lady’s upset. Her husband never made unflattering comparisons to her predecessor, harbored no buried wish to hurt his present love; a woman who, everyone agreed, was a far better match for him than he’d made at school.

—

Let’s take a different approach, a statistical one, in defense of my amigo’s utterance. The research evidence says written Freudian slips are random missteps. When we write penis for peanuts, slap for slip, or breast for best, the misstatements lack significance unless we make much of them.

Whence comes this information? Seth Stephens-Davidowitz gives the answer in his book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

Stephens-Davidowitz studied

more than 40,000 typing errors collected by Microsoft researchers. The agglomeration included mistakes people make but then immediately correct. In these tens of thousands of errors, there were plenty of individuals committing errors of a sexual sort. (Things like,) ‘sexurity’ for ‘security’ and ‘cocks’ instead of ‘rocks.’ But there were also plenty of innocent slips. People wrote of ‘pindows’ and ‘fegetables,’ ‘aftermoons’ and ‘refriderators.’

The researcher created a computer program to mistakenly switch particular letters in the way his sample did. For instance, replacing ‘”a t with an s , a g with an h“ as often as people do.

This social scientist wanted to see how the machine would handle words vulnerable to Freudian slips: terms like rocks and peanuts, etc. Put another way, if the supposed verbal missteps made by humans are driven by the unconscious, the device should have produced fewer such slip-ups than people would have.

Rather, the software generated sexually-tinged blunders at the same rate as the rest of us, all without the subconscious reasons Homo sapiens alone possess.

The study suggests Freud was wrong. I’ll admit, however, oral communication around a sexually attractive person might be a different matter. More research will tell us, I’m sure.

—

No matter the applause I’ve received for psychological wisdom, with passing time the more I realize the limits of our comprehension of ourselves and others. We approximate. We simplify. We project our motives on to parents, children, and neighbors.

Human nature causes us to whitewash the sins of those we like, and inflate those of ones we suspect. Each day would be too fraught if it required everyone to treat all casual interactions as fact-finding espionage missions of desperate importance. Freudian slips, in a small way, make us think we are wise when we aren’t.

Imperfect understanding of acquaintances is serviceable enough to help us through most days, but sometimes we miss not the bull’s eye, but the whole target.

Humanity is prone to believe it understands the totality of another’s character based on limited experience. Our slice of his way of being — say, in a daytime working group — might not tell us what he is like by himself or when the night is late or he is intoxicated and in love. Who knows what manner of creature he will be when giving a speech, playing a game, or in an emergency?

Everyday errors in predicting how he reacts under pressure should be no shock; nor his reaction when torn between duty and desire. The secrets of another, from us and from himself, cannot be x-rayed or scooped out for study like ice cream in the freezer.

Remember this: sometimes a Freudian slip is a meaningless bungle or blunder spoken without aim, like a banana peel waiting to tip us over.

Even better, a slip of the tongue to make us laugh at ourselves.

Bob laughed at himself a lot.

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The image on the CD cover featured at the top is by Yuly Perevezentsev. It comes from his Architectural Fantasies. To me, it looks like a reimagining of “The Tower of Babel.”