Happy Wednesday, friend!

You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

Donating is Advocating

This newsletter is a free mental health resource, but it requires significant time and financial investment to produce each week. If you've gained wisdom or insight from these newsletters, please consider donating or upgrading to a $6/month subscription. Your patronage has an enormous impact and makes a real difference in keeping this resource alive 🙏🏼❤️

What is a Self?

Were we to be taken apart surgically, there isn’t a doctor in the world who would be able to locate this thing we call “I.”

We can’t capture it under a microscope or prod it during surgery.

The “I” of us, the “self” of me, isn’t concrete or tangible, yet we are all, to varying degrees of consciousness, trying to grow, tame, avoid, hurt, help, and even nurture it.

But what and who are we caring for?

Who is this “I” we always speak of?

Where does the “I” of me live?

When we refer to ourselves, we use the names our parents chose for us, which represent this supposed “I,” but our bodies are not who we are.

They are physical vehicles that allow us to contain and transport our organs from one place to another without spillage.

We constantly mistake the bodies of us for the “I” of us. We humans are known for this—misapprehending as real all that is phantom.

Take God, for instance.

Or, a better, less polarizing example, my favorite topic: Emotion.

When anxious, we mistake the sensations of dread and fear inside our bodies to mean that something is dangerous.

We confuse our somatic waves of worry that someone hates us, or that we’re getting fired, or any number of things, with fact.

But feelings are not facts, no matter how real the feeling.

Many people find themselves trapped in silent competitions against their peers using arbitrary measures, plotting their achievements and failures onto an invisible chart they believe is who they are.

But we are not our measurements, and if we are not our test results or the measure of our outsized emotions, and if we are not our bodies or even our brains, what, then, are we? And where are we?

Some people—take me, for instance—spend decades tracing the roots of their present-day behavior back to specific origin points, precise moments that might help them finally understand why they are the way they are; and people like me do this so that we can break the cycle and reclaim the original self we feel we were meant to become, an original self that existed before the world had its way with us.

So much work is devoted to untangling the Gordian knot of self, with nary a thought given to the actual self.

What is a "self," and how exactly did our capacity for awareness arise from matter seemingly incapable of awareness?

Join How to Live