decoding the human algorithm

"know thyself."

I’m sociable, skewed all the way extroverted on the extraversion scale. I need constant human stimulation to stay sane. I’m one of those people you’ll catch at a different cafe everyday bordering non-productivity because god forbid I work from my polished WFH set-up ALONE.

Yet, my social battery started draining faster than normal recently. I couldn’t pinpoint the reason for this apathetic energy I brought into every interaction.

So I decided to do what I do best, go down rabbit holes. I’ve spent years studying the dance between philosophy and psychology, reason being to diagnose my own subtle neuroses and give meaning to them, so I went deep (reddit, podcasts, talking to the Hare Krishna’s at Washington square park lol).

I’ve sort of come to understand that most people are repressed, their sense of self fragmented. It’s like we are completely cut off from their subconscious. Carl Jung calls this the shadow self— so many of us unconsciously project our repressed qualities onto others, unaware of the extent to which our shadow shapes our behaviors and decisions.

I recently did a re-evaluation on my ‘shadow self’ and what came up were my motivations, or the lack there of. I realized mimetic theory was strong at play. I come from the classic immigrant family, so from a young age I decided life was supposed to feel “hard”. Crawling down to the depths of my subconscious, I realized that I normalized nearing burnout. But I physically couldn’t keep this up any longer.

Society is also at part fault here, echoing Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God," we've moved away from the notion of the transcendental, and we're forced to turn inwards for a guiding system, to create our own values and live by them. The problem here is that we're so scattered internally, we're a war of competing motivations. This internal fragmentation has left us struggling to construct a coherent internal guiding system.

I resonate with Freud when he interrogates “how we can make our own values when we're not even masters in our own house?”

The cost of such disunity of internal values is high, the human psyche needs to move towards unity.

I saw this in myself so clearly, I was dominated by compulsive will. My value system shifting constantly based on my need for validation, or my ego needing to be placated. I constantly moved from goal to goal based on external input. This made me less motivated to move forward, because so many things were competing for my attention.

Sometimes I wonder, why do we think we're wise enough to consult with ourselves as to what values to adopt in the course of a single life? It's already so difficult to organize merely one single relationship over our lifetime, let alone constructing an entire ethos that is psychologically and socially stable to survive.

But looking at the sheer resilience of humans, I realized we have a built in guidance system. Unfortunately it is drowned out by this chaotic and over stimulating world, throwing us on some life trajectory that we’re not meant to be on.

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’s presumes that the fundamental unifying idea of existence is power, the only true ethos of mankind. He insists that the life force in human beings strives not to protect itself but to exhaust itself in being and becoming, and I find this beautiful.

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on--

from The Will to Power, s.636, Walter Kaufmann transl.

I’ve recently taken this power back into my hands. I’ve since then cultivated practice in meditation and yoga to slow down my mind, so that the little intuitive voice inside me can get louder, so it can lead the way amongst the louder ones from the outside. It’s not perfect, I still crash and burn once every quarter, but I always find myself tuning back into this signal, and only then do I find success. Success in the form of work, building more fulfilling relationships, to nourishing my body the right way.

Life is but a journey, I’ve just decided to play a more active part in co-creating it with the universe.