8. R&R-Self-Awareness

What is self-awareness? What is there to be aware of? Is it for everyone? Who knows and who cares? No, seriously though, this is a subject worthy of investigation as self-awareness can and does affect personal-agency, and personal-agency changes things – perhaps not the whole world, but your relationships with family, colleagues, work, friends and enemies, and all those other agents whose behaviour affects our own. So, it is an important topic, and a very funny one too. 

Let’s start with ourselves. Evolution has shaped what we are in terms of sexualities and personalities that exist out-there, which greatly affect our behaviour and life-choices. So, I take these as my backdrop of what it is were being self-aware of. And as for participants in this analysis, well me of course, and those I know well, like Little-Bear. I guess this is what "self" means in "self-aware" - not being aware on-behalf of someone else (far too intrusive unless you’re a professional), and take-it-from-me, laughing at yourself is a lot funnier than laughing at others.

Like many others I occasionally thought about my behaviour and how it affected others. I was under the impression I was “an OK sort-of guy” (whatever that means). I was quite at ease with myself – I liked my sense of humour, I was quick-witted, and was averagely popular. However, I was not altogether happy with this as I was only too aware of one of my weaknesses – laziness. Now laziness is hard to find an upside to. Unlike getting the “giggles” and exhibiting undeserved vanity there is little to find good about laziness. And I was (and still am), lazy at heart – so much so that its not just not doing things, its not doing things that could severely affect your wellbeing, like washing-up, cleaning regularly, not doing what I had promised others – that sort of thing.

It’s difficult to understand how evolution could deliver humans with such an impairment, as you might expect it to cause individuals to die-out without passing-on this feature. Whoever heard of a lazy ant, but I suppose there is some logic to it somewhere, though it is difficult to paint this state of extreme laziness as a benefit to survival (mental gymnastics required). It wasn’t the fact that I was lazy that made me want to change, but the coping-strategies laziness can lead to. In my case it was telling fibs(lying) about why I hadn’t done something I said I would. What does an individual do who is configured this way? Not what I initially attempted, which was simply to turn myself into a non-lazy person by force of will-power.

I think it is possible to change your personality – certain religions do this, but there are issues. Firstly, if you achieve this delta in behaviour, is it still you, or an ill-judged attempt at mental cosmetic-surgery? This is rather philosophical, but an even more pressing reality is whether it really works? For me it didn’t. There I was, all of a sudden being busy and doing things, and hating every moment of it. I hadn’t really changed anything about myself except forcing behaviours I found increasingly impossible to sustain. It was a bit like that American cop-film of years ago when two detectives decide to swop roles in their good-cop, bad-cop interrogation routine for their next arrest. This went OK for the first five minutes until both detectives couldn’t keep-it-up, argued amongst themselves, and told the suspect to bugger-off while he could, which he duly did. This was me; I just couldn’t keep going with it.

At this point I, along with others I suspect, would have given-up and just reverted to my old ways – being lazy then having to lie about it. I agree, this isn’t the worst thing in the world, but something I did want to address. This is an example of the curse of self-awareness. Then a thought entered my brain – if I couldn’t defeat laziness head-on, perhaps an attack on the flanks might work. Instead of trying to change my personality, perhaps I could trick-it to give me an acceptable result. I could devise coping strategies that would get me to do things, the main one being to break-up whatever macro-task I had to perform into steps, then reward myself for completing each one, and it worked.

Workwise I could chop-up a day’s paid work activities into tasks – extract data, validate data, import data etc, and reward myself with a coffee at each completion. Household wise I could go to the shops, put the items away in the fridge etc, and again reward myself with a coffee. Although this strategy was successful, it did have the down-side of turning me into a coffee-fiend. But this could be countered with the biggest reward of all for when a work-stream was completed; a cannabis edible to counter the caffeine. 

There is one-other coping-strategy for excessive work-load I think we all need to understand – the monkey (monkey-on-your-shoulder). If you’re the kind of person like me who likes to help-out (a strength), it is all too easy in a working environment to be passed the monkey (a weakness). An innocuous sounding task that a colleague wanted help with, soon seems to be “owned” by you, not your colleague. As the nature of the task becomes more obvious, it is too late to raise a red-flag as you now officially have the monkey-on-your-shoulder. The solution to this is due diligence. You must investigate before agreeing to help, and if you feel there are things or people you need to complete the task scope-these-out and put them to your manager. Just doing this often releases the monkey where it will find its rightful original owner. In short, detect early, and shout loudly.

So, a bit of self-awareness can bring positive results, as it did for me, but is it a good idea for everyone? I think not. What is wrong with living an internal life at odds with what anyone other than yourself can see as false? If you’re happy and the people around you don’t get screwed by you too much, then there’s nothing wrong with living in your false-world. It’s a safe place, things just come naturally, and all is well. The last thing you would need in these circumstances is any reality to impinge on your view of yourself. But for some people like me, this is just not fulfilling, and for some it can be dangerous if the gulf between your reality and everyone-else’s gets too big.

Take Little-Bear, a very happy and much-loved member of our family. I remember once travelling down this path with him, but it was difficult. He didn’t really get-it, and for a few moments it could have ended disastrously when he exclaimed “is there something wrong with me you’re not telling me about?”. This was far too difficult a territory to enter, so I backed-off – pure reality can be too painful for anyone, especially a young bear. 

So that’s pretty-much-it. Be careful how you dabble in this subject, especially if it affects others. I’m glad to get this one done as it did not flow naturally – too painful for me perhaps? All that’s left to do now is post this on the site, go through it paragraph-by-paragraph, and obtain a polished result. Or I could leave this stage till later as its about an interesting task as correcting mistakes in an exam paper. Yes, I’ll leave it till later (same old lazy me! – thank goodness). Then I think I’ll start a piece featuring sex-and-drugs, something I know a thing-or-two-about, and everyone’s favourite.