Post No.: 0953
Fluffystealthkitten says:
I wish to talk about a piece of advice we often hear – ‘just be yourself’. It’s a common tip shared by many popular public figures. It’s indeed important to be yourself, your authentic self, to not try to be anyone else, so it’s not necessarily incorrect.
But we need to be cautious because we’re not going to naturally ask or listen to those who were ‘just being themselves’ but that didn’t work out for them.
We learn a lot through failures as well as successes (possibly more via the former) yet we don’t normally want to ask or listen to the advice of those who failed, or they’ll simply not have a voice to be heard in the first place e.g. no one wants to publish their autobiographies. It’s like salt and vinegar and prawn cocktail saying, “Just be yourself” but when toffee fennel and cider pea do exactly that, they don’t make it and so no one cares what they think! Maybe being crisp/chip flavours isn’t for them. This is the problem of the ‘survivorship bias’ when it comes to following advice about how to be successful only from those who have succeeded. So the fuller picture is that ‘just be yourself’ will work for some people but not others.
Let’s take the job of an online content creator for example. We’ve got to think of those who are just being themselves yet aren’t popular; those who aren’t always just being themselves (i.e. they have different onscreen versus private personalities) yet are popular; those who aren’t always just being themselves and aren’t popular; as well as those who are just being themselves and are popular – in order to assess the full fluffy picture.
And what about having a growth mindset and striving for self-improvement? I’m sure we all know of or can imagine some people who really shouldn’t just be themselves, such as bigoted or bigheaded people! (I guess pedants might also be loathed too so I ought to stop here(!))
There have been cases of popular personalities revealing their antisemitic or bullying sides, or insensitive attitudes to suicide, and these people really shouldn’t ‘just be themselves’ but should strive to be better than themselves. Many play up to the camera, which in a way is fair enough because they’re supposed to be entertainers – some would be seriously tiring to hang around IRL (as in really in real life away from any cameras) if they were always like how they are onscreen!
Just be yourself, have fun, keep pumping out quality content with a regular schedule, get on social media and network – lots of streamers do that, yet with differing results. They don’t catch a break from the platform promoting them on the front page or a big streamer raiding them. The most talented piano players, the most driven individuals, the best gamers, etc. aren’t always the most popular or rewarded. Most top influencers are women and, although there are exceptions, ‘being pretty and flirty’ if you’re a woman is more the truth if you want attention.
But some downplay the significance of how their attractive appearance plays a part in their success; although (compared to downplaying the significance of other advantages like family financial help where many people downplay these either because of ignorance or arrogance) most of these people are genuinely modest or wish others would simply focus on and appreciate their other, more earned or deeper, attributes.
So just be yourself… as long as you’re pretty, funny, emotional, opinionated and/or so forth(!)
We need to understand that it’s two sides of the same coin when society discriminately rewards more greatly those who are considered physically pretty with opportunities and followers, and criticises and bullies those who are considered physically ugly (or the times we all don’t look so great). It reduces, mainly women, down to the way they look, their weight and what they wear, and leads to pressures to look a certain way, abuse for looking unsightly, as well as the risk of being harassed or stalked for looking attractive. So if we want to eradicate abuse and harassment related to how people look, we also need to stop revering and rewarding people according to how they look too.
Some people think that everyone will know if someone is ‘being fake’ but there are a lot of carefully staged photo shoots, exaggerated reactions, fake news and undeclared adverts that slip through and garner plenty of likes or reposts. Enough people won’t or don’t care as long as the person appears relatable. This isn’t to suggest that we should be fake – it’s to say that enough people are poor at detecting what’s fake or don’t care because they simply expect people to have a public persona in certain industries. The performers usually don’t mean to put on an act but they naturally learn over time what works and what doesn’t and thus adapt – as they arguably should. Exceptions abound but you’ll then understand the phrase ‘never meet your heroes’ when their acts are down. Meow.
‘Always trust your instincts’ is another common piece of advice we hear from those whose instincts worked out well for them, while we’ll ignore those whose instincts were incorrect. Or more accurately, people are biased to remember or highlight the times their instincts were right while they’ll forget or excuse away the times their instincts were wrong, hence why people tend to believe their instincts are nearly always right!
People who believe in always trusting their own instincts will also appear to still kick themselves whenever they apparently disobey their own instincts – suggesting that they don’t seem to follow their own advice(!) Or more accurately, they’ll only determine ‘what their instincts were’ with the benefit of hindsight e.g. they faced a conflicting decision, they later found out they chose wrong, and only now do they believe that the choice they didn’t take was actually their ‘true instinct’ speaking rather than the inner voice that told them to take the choice they did ultimately take!
Whenever we rely on our intuitions when trying to answer a question, we’re basically saying we don’t know the right answer yet we’re still going to give an answer regardless. In some cases we must give an answer there and then – in which case we must rely on our intuitions because what else do we have? But if we can take our time e.g. it’s not life-or-death to need to make an instant decision about something, we’d be better off reserving our opinions until after we’ve gathered more research and can offer a well-supported and well-reasoned answer.
Yet we can still over-rely on our instincts or intuitions and use them as a substitute for effortful critical thinking, education and scientific analysis because we’re lazy, even when we have the time to study and do research. We can think we can just ‘know’ things and that justifies our prejudices of people and things. We can be clueless about some things (even the reason for our own success) yet still feel compelled to impart advice onto others. The wisest answer is often, “I don’t know.”
For some, their faith in intuitions is akin to religious faiths in their fervour – where intuitive answers ‘must be correct’ because it’s believed they emerge from some divine inner source. And if one is evidently wrong, it’s not because one’s inner source was wrong but because one either didn’t listen to it ‘properly’ or one misinterpreted it – which is just like how people defend their religious tenets. Those who are superstitious and believe in supernatural or paranormal phenomena are more likely to trust their intuitions.
Anxious or neurotic people are more likely to believe themselves to be perceptive because they’re on higher alert to spot threats, but they generate too many false alarms because their threat-detection instincts over-fire. That’s why they’re anxious. (Well for all of us these threat-detection instincts tend to over-fire because it’s less risky to miss a true opportunity than a true threat.)
Unskilled intuitions are confused with skilled intuitions because they both come from our gut. The difference is that the latter can be explained if needed while the former might come out as ‘I don’t know why but I’ve just got a feeling’. A multitude of things influence us on a subconscious or unconscious level (thus we’re not aware of them) that can make our gut feelings biased, prejudiced or irrational. We need to feed our minds with masses of knowledge before a more reliable skilled intuition forms. Skilled or expert intuition is built upon years and years of being consistently correct about something and then essentially recognising the same situations again. However, we can believe that we’ve satisfactorily fed our minds when we’ve been exposed to a lot of poor quality information, like hearsays and conjectures, too.
It’s better than random guessing (sometimes) but if we’ve run out of knowledge or mental capacity to reason, all we’re left with is our intuition. The less we know about something, the more we will (or must) rely on our intuitions.
One intuitive heuristic (rule of thumb) some people use when they’re unsure of an answer is to ‘go down the middle’. Now this might make some sense when we’re given options that fall onto an ordered scale e.g. the correct answer is somewhere between 1 and 3, but some people even illogically use this heuristic to choose the middle option when presented with multiple choice options that don’t fall onto an ordered scale e.g. the correct answer is between an axolotl, hyrax or gharial. But blindly following our intuitions is what we frequently do, and we obviously don’t know we’re doing it unless it’s pointed out to us because we’re blindly doing it. Sometimes this means falling for scams and ‘get rich’ schemes, like blindly trusting a trusted person’s face and apparent endorsement, when their identity was actually misappropriated for the scam.
Science is the antidote to ‘feelings’ regarding what’s factual or the best solutions to problems. Our intuitions may confidently make us believe that we can come to firm conclusions based on just one or two data points, but science needs a larger sample size to come to the same level of confidence.
I know it’s difficult to ignore one’s instincts. We’re driven to follow them by evolution, even when we feel compelled to sit idle again to conserve our energy when we need to physically exercise more for our health, or we acknowledge that a particular creepy crawly cannot harm us thus shouldn’t scare us. If people’s instincts were perfect and always knew what’s best for themselves, so many people wouldn’t become ill from self-inflicted, preventable diseases.
…Umm anyway, it’s not to say that hard work has nothing to do with success but there’s more to it than that. Seldom do people recognise or point out the lucky moments that led to their successes. We’re too good at cherry-picking the evidence that fits our narrative e.g. of making it on our own.
It’s also a problem concerning self-reporting or basing one’s wisdom only upon one’s own individual experiences rather than aggregating from many, diverse, views. We must listen to both the unsuccessful and the successful – just like we need to account for the failed experiments as well as the successful ones in science, and why good science is better for gaining wisdom than just listening to people’s individual (one-sided) personal anecdotes. We need to listen to rich and poor, abled and disabled, pretty and not so pretty, etc..
We might still find statistically significant patterns after this fuller, more objective, kind of analysis – but we don’t intuitively think in this scientific way. We prefer to listen to a good individual story rather than statistics.
And probably the overall point is that if ‘yourself’ isn’t a good person then don’t be yourself – better yourself. Just be yourself… unless you’re a ****.
Meow!
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
