The process of self-discovery requires an undoing of self-knowledge that you assume you already have.
— John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche
We suffer because we have identified with something that has no real self, no real permanence. We care more about what we are, rather than what we do.
From Ben’s video:
Genuine pretending - enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or being fully defined by them. A genuine pretender is like a child in play where they play different roles while recognizing that they hold no inherent value. Think about your childhood and how little you knew yourself. Wasn’t that actually kind of freeing?
They embrace transformation and change with ease and engage in a free and easy wandering of the heart, knowing that their identity is both genuine in what it chooses to do moment by moment and pretend in terms of how much it actually matters at the end of the day
Even though they have no greater attentional capacity than anyone else, they pay more attention to what happens around them, they notice more, and they are willing to invest more attention in things for their own sake without expecting an immediate return.
When you keep your identity small, you’re more likely to try things. You’re more free. Kids don’t go into things thinking “hmm this is way out of my element”. They drop things they’re not interested in with no baggage or self-judgement.
From Paul Graham on identity:
people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
From How to Grow Old by Bertrand Russell:
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.