I wrote this post in an attempt to answer the question of why I started a blog in the first place. As I wrote, it became clear that the answer was inextricably linked to the answer to this far deeper, more fundamental question. Who is the real you?
It has been said that human beings invariably live in the instant: the immeasurably small time between which the future becomes the past. You can think of a human as a collection of these instants, piling together like grains of sand. But “you” are defined by more than your life experiences. It is generally accepted that biology also plays a role in who you are. We can account for this by widening the scope of instants we use to define you. In other words, the full “you” could be thought of as a collection of instants, starting from the beginning of life itself and following along the experiences of your ancestors, culminating in the “self” you are aware of.
These grains of sand clump together and organize themselves. They start to form shapes, a rough outline of your full personality. Your biological form stores the most important of these instances, albeit imperfectly, in your memory and the DNA inherited from your predecessors. This selection process increases the gap between these shapes and the noise, giving you recognizable individual traits, distinct fragments of the whole personality.
But this real, full you is too complex to communicate to other people. So at any given time, social context acts as a filter. A certain amount of you gets expressed to others in a given situation, and the rest remains dormant. It still exists, but it doesn’t get expressed.
This is often due to our limited processing power: a given situation only calls for a small amount of your personality to inhabit your limited window of attention. The rest stays in the background.
But there are other filtering mechanisms, too. You can deliberately suppress a part of yourself, considering it inappropriate to express in a given situation. Your ability to communicate also adds to this filter. You can only express a part of you that is equally or less complex than the degree to which you are capable of conveying complex information.
For instance, your political beliefs might be the last thing on your mind at work. That fraction of your person remains unexpressed because your attention is elsewhere. But if the topic did come up, you might refrain from adding your opinion to the conversation in order to avoid conflict at the workplace. If you did add your opinion, your ability to communicate it effectively would put a limit on how nuanced you are able to appear politically.
As a byproduct of this system, you may possess traits that never get expressed to other people at all. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people have a “dark side” they would prefer for nobody to see.
But you can imagine that this phenomenon is not limited to negative traits.
This is the situation I seem to find myself in. Parts of my worldview and my personality that I respect seem kept inside while my mediocrities get expressed. As a result, when I hear myself described by others, even people I am very close to, I usually hear a rather unflattering caricature of the self I am familiar with.
Normal, rational people tend to make judgements based on the available evidence provided by the world around them. This includes judgements about themselves. You do not typically think of yourself as great at jiu jitsu if you get dominated by unskilled opponents every time you roll. Similarly, you can only hear something about yourself so many times before you have to take its relevance seriously. What’s confusing is when the things you hear about yourself contradict the internal self you know.
This leads you to a variation of the classic dilemma: “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If you have a part of yourself that is real to you on some experiential level, but you never express it to anyone else, does it really exist?
In my case, the issue seems to be one of communication skills.
The successful vocalization of a part of yourself can be conceptualized as driving down a road.
You can imagine that there are a series of roads starting at each fragment of your full self and ending at the effective creation of a message in the spirit of that fragment.
You take in a social stimulus, and then you instantly choose a road you will take to produce a response. In my case, the mediocre, awkward parts of myself are shorter, well-developed roads. They are shorter because it does not take much thought or effort to produce a suboptimal response. They are well-developed because they are the reactions I most often give.
The deeper, more thoughtful parts of myself are longer, run-down roads, filled with debris and potholes. It is possible to take these roads, but it requires a significant amount of time. In the time frame of most conversations, I can only travel part of the way there. I end up rambling around the point I am trying to make, never quite getting the message across.
Writing your thoughts is akin to developing the road. You’re forcing yourself to take the longer road, taking the time to clear out and clean up obstacles in your path. For a specific question, what you’re essentially doing is pre-thinking an answer: you’re figuring out exactly what you think, why, and how to say it before you have to convey your perspective.
But in general, you’re also practicing taking the road that stems from that missing part of your personality. Ideally, this practice means even when you are exposed to a novel stimulus, you can drive down the road at a reasonable speed, maybe even getting to your destination.
I think it is generally accepted that a falling tree does make a sound, it is just irrelevant if nobody is around to hear it.
This blog is a medium with which I can communicate my ideas in a manner that is hypothetically accessible to other people. I could have gone through this process by writing in a private journal, but then there would still be nobody around to hear the tree fall. What this blog does, at the bare minimum, is prove I think some of these things I have a hard time expressing.
The written word is special in its ability to force a focus on ideas.
Another advantage of a blog is this emphasis on the written word. It eliminates variables. With YouTube videos and podcasts, things like video editing and the ability to speak compellingly become their own filters. If you can get these things right, your idea has a lot more potential reach and accessibility. If you cannot, you distract from the information you are trying to communicate. So in my case, it makes sense to strip these external filters altogether and focus on the idea.
The blog is a chance to develop myself.
As I have drafted these first few blog posts, I have learned just how malnourished I am intellectually. These first few posts have been ridiculously hard for me to pull together. As I have written, I have noticed glaring flaws in the ways I think, even when communicated clearly. I have to be able to learn more and develop my character in this regard. This blog gives me an opportunity to commit myself to learning and developing my mind.
I did not realize how much this was weighing on me until I decided to start a blog. It was a breath of fresh air the moment I made the decision. A blog is a landscape of endless opportunity to me. I finally have the chance to learn and communicate without being interrupted, or having to worry about a grade, or any other variables that can distract from my pursuit. I hope in this freedom I can create a version of myself that is better in all aspects of my life.