The Jordan Harbinger Show - 33: Will Storr | Avoiding Self-Obsession in the Age of the Selfie

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Will Storr (@wstorr) is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us. What We Discuss with Will Storr: What is the neoliberal self? Are we born with innate self-obsession, or is it picked up along the way? What happens when our fictionalized sense of self clashes with reality? Why do we overprivilege and credit select individuals for the accomplishments of many while blaming ourselves for not living up to their impossible examples? The dangers of perfectionistic thinking. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We kind of tend naturally to credit the individual with all the success. We forget all the hundreds of people around Beyonce, for example, that work on making Beyonce Beyonce, but the dark side of that is that when we fail, we do the same thing. So we're very blameful people. When we get things wrong and when we don't succeed, when we don't become the next Steve Jobs, we don't become the next Beyonce, which, let's face it, is the story for 99.999% of us. We do the same thing. We blame ourselves and we turn in ourselves, and that's extremely dangerous.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On this episode, we're talking with Will Store, author of Selfie, how we became so self-obsessed and what it's doing to us. Don't be misled by the title. This is a deep, thick, kind of dense read. And today, we'll explore the idea that we really care what others think about us. No surprise there. We want to be like the people who are more successful or thinner than we are. We each create our own narrative. And these are, all, often highly fictionalized narratives about who we are. However, the trouble can really erupt when our heroic self-stories clash brutally with reality, and we've all experienced that in some way or another. Today we'll discuss self-esteem as a social vaccine. This idea started earlier in the 60s, it turns out to be wrong. After all, if it's true that we hold within us all the power we need to succeed, then it naturally follows that if we fail, it's our fault and our fault alone.

And this is causing a lot of distress and unhappiness, not only in America, but in Western society. in general. So do we have reason to challenge the American or Western belief that we can do anything we want just because we believe in ourselves? That's what we're talking about here today with Will Stor. Enjoy. So for an investigative journalist, this topic seemed kind of interesting because it's almost like, well, okay, well, I'm going to investigate myself now, which in some ways almost seems a little bit antithetical to the book because it's about how people are too obsessed with themselves, I guess, in some way. And here we are writing about ourselves, or at least ourselves in general.

And the book itself, entitled Selfie, it's not as sort of simple as I thought it was going to be. I thought, okay, he's going to talk about how we're all obsessed with ourselves and we're all narcissists. Dot, dot, dot, dot, the end. But it gets quite a bit deeper than that. And as it turns out, not every society is as obsessed with itself as we are. So we start with a little bit of deep philosophy, like the neoliberal self. But I got to be honest, whenever I hear complex stuff like that, I kind of zone out. think it's probably over my head. So I'd love a definition here to kick things off.

Yeah. Okay. So neoliberalism is, it's really weird neoliberalism because it's this ideology we've been living under since the 1980s and it's sort of this thing that nobody's really heard of much or don't talk. They certainly don't talk about it much. And it's like we've been living under kind of fascism or communism and nobody really knows what it is. But neoliberalism is essentially, you know, in the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher over here in the UK decided to kind of change really how society was structured. They decided that they were going to increase kind of competition everywhere as much as they could. So that meant getting rid of the welfare state as much as possible, getting rid of the unions, privatizing public industries, because they just wanted to make a

human life this massive competitive game. And that's essentially what neoliberalism is, is this new freedom. So we're all going to be kind of free individuals to sort of go forth into the world and, you know, make money and profit. And it really was kind of a victory of money over politics. It was this idea that politics should be as small as possible, and we should allow the kind of money markets to kind of rule the Western world or the world itself, actually. It was very Anne Rand or Iron Rand, never know how to pronounce that. I think it's both. It's both. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And actually, that's a really good point because, you know, iron Rand is a massively influential figure and remains so today. And her influence feeds through

into the modern world in various different ways. And one of the most powerful is that she had as a kind of one of her disciples sitting at her feet as she was writing Atlas shrugged, her kind of big kind of classic novel was this, he's got Alan Greenspan. And of course, Alan Greenspan was massively inspired by Iran's ideas about, you know, capitalism being this, not just an economic system, but a moral good, like as a moral quest. And of course, he went into, you know, run the American economy for so long. And people call him the banker of near capitalism. He was really the guy that encouraged this idea and kind of muddled through this idea right up until it all kind of started to blow up around the time of the financial crisis. So how do we get from Iron Rann to, okay, I've got to have a lot of Instagram followers and a selfie camera and a stick so that I can show people that I'm at the beach?

How do we go from that to this? Well, it's a really fantastic question. And the answer comes from psychology and psychologists. And the psychologists have long been sort of wondering about how does our environment, how does the kind of world in which we live influence us and how much kind of does it end up kind of creating our sense of who we are? And the answer is a lot. So we're born as humans with kind of half formed brains. You know, Jeans do a lot of the work. So we're born kind of half wide up. But the human brain knows that it's going to get lots of information from its environment from the world it finds itself in when it's born. So it's like it's like the brain asks itself a question when we're born. It asks itself. Who do I have to be in this environment in order to get along and get ahead? And that's what we want to do as humans. We want to get along with other people. We also want to get ahead of them too.

And for most of history, the answer has been, well, you know, what's the ecology like? What's the landscape like? Do you have to hunt? Do I have to fish? Do I have to get on with people? This kind of thing. But of course, in the modern ages, a lot of that is down to the economy. The answer is, how do I make money, really?

So the best way of it kind of showing this the massive effect economy has on us is to think about who we were in the West in 1965, which is sort of basically a bunch of hippies sitting around, you know, anti-materialistic, anti-corporate, anti-job, very communal in their thinking. And then fast forward just 20 years, just a heartbeat of time to the 1985. And then we're these yuppies. We're, you know, we're running around in, you know, red braces with PhiloFaxes trying to make as much money as possible and talking about greed being good. So that, you know, that's simplistic, but it's a huge transformation in who we are in only 20 years. And what happened at the exact sort of midpoint between those two periods is the economy changed.

Neo-liberism happened. And in fact, in 1981, when Margaret Thatcher just before really was rumping up all these programs, a journalist over here in London asked her, you know, what your plans, Margaret Thatcher, what's the big idea? And she said, oh, the things annoyed me about all the policies that have been passed over the last few decades. Has it always been about more collective ideals? But, you know, I think that's wrong. And she said something really quite similar.

minister. She said, the project is economics, but the object is to change the soul. You know, she said, I want to use kind of economics to kind of change who we are in the West. And that's amazing because she said that before a lot of this psychological work that's been done showing that who we are is so much a product of our environment. And that's exactly what it did happen. Very quickly, you began to see culture changing and rapidly kind of moving to accommodate the new economy. Like in 1982, you start seeing something weird happening in hospital wars. For generations, moms and dads are just called their kids normal names like Jennifer, Graham, Brian, whatever. And then suddenly in 1982, it started happening quite slowly, but it started

happening was that people started giving their kids like weirdly spelled names or names that you'd not heard before. And it was like, it's like the researcher said, you know, they wanted their kids all of a sudden to stand out and be a star, because that's how you, that's how you had to get along in this new world. Similarly, the Keep Fit Revolution happened around this time. You know, they were Jim Fixed in the United States and a similar guy they're here called, you the woman called the Green Goddess, these big kind of figures that became known for having healthy, fit, sexy bodies. And that became a thing, which again has never really left us. We still have these crazily spelled names. We still have this obsession with the physical body.

So it was really like, it was a massive, massive change. And that's the big story, I think, in how we've got from from there to selfish sticks. Because who you have to be in order to get along and get ahead in a neoliberal environment is a hustler. You've got to push yourself forward. There's no union to help you out, really. There's no job for life anymore. There's no great pension scheme for you. You've got to push, push, push. And of course, so that creates a world of kind of pushy people for want of a better word.

So we obviously care a lot what other think about us if we're inventing crazy names for our kids. And then our kids are growing up and going to the gym all the time so that we can look like cartoon characters are just super fit and sexy people. And we want to be like the people who are more successful on social media or thinner than we are, whatever. So we create this narrative of ourselves. And I've caught myself doing this. I've certainly seen other people do it because, of course, it's easier to see other people do it than to see ourselves doing it. And people turn themselves into these brands. And it's kind of funny that I'm saying this because I find that people say, oh, well, your personal brand is good.

And I'm just like, wow, this is something that I didn't think about when I started a podcast where I was just sort of talking about my own problems, really, in the beginning. And so we create these narratives. And often these are fictionalized. You know, they're run through bias. They're run through social media now. They're run through all these different sort of filters. And they're fictionalized. They're fictionalized.

These are narratives about who we are. But what happens when the story of myself as the hero clashes with reality, right? What happens then? Well, when things go wrong, I mean, well, that's a really good question. I mean, the thing about individualism in a neoliberalism, in a neoliberalism, liberalism really is a kind of accelerated, concentrated form of individualism. And the thing about individualism is, in a way, it's amazing. I mean, the West has done amazing things.

And especially for people on the left, we like to complain about the West and point out its flaws, of which, no doubt there are many. But also, they shouldn't distract us from the fact that, you know, we are the place where lots of people want to live now. Human rights starts in the West. We've achieved amazing things. We've made amazing things. We've built amazing things.

And a lot of that is down to individualism. A lot of that is down to us telling each other. you can do anything. You know, you're an incredible individual, you have huge amount of human potential, go for your dreams, and if you succeed, you will be rewarded with money and attention. I mean, that's a great system for progress and achievement and all that stuff, but it has a really dark underside because we overprivileged the idea of the individual. You know, we are the generation that thinks Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. I mean, my God, the amount of people that worked on that iPhone and in the public consciousness, it's like that was Steve Jobs made that thing,

like in a shed somewhere. I know it didn't. We kind of tend naturally to credit the individual with all the success. We forget all the hundreds of people around Beyonce, for example, that work on making Beyonce Beyonce, but the dark side of that is that when we fail, we do the same thing. So we're very blameful people. When we get things wrong and when we don't succeed, when we don't become the next Steve Jobs, we don't become the next Beyonce, which, let's face it, is the story for 99.999% of us. We do the same thing. We blame ourselves and we turn in ourselves. And that's extremely dangerous. When we start thinking like that, that's when we start getting into these difficult territories. We get depressed. We start putting suicidal. We start, we can trigger up our

behaviours like self-harm, like eating disorder. So one of the really interesting studies that's come out recently, we actually come out this year by some researchers over here in the UK. They studied 40,000 people in the UK, the US and Canada. And they found that over the last, since the 1990s, levels of perfectionistic thinking have really got up significantly. And perfectionistic thinking thinking is really interesting. So if you're thinking perfectionistically, which, you know, most of us do, you know, from now and then, what you're doing is you're setting a really high bar for your definition of success. You know, you're saying success is right up here. And of course, what happens when we do that is that we kind of fail to meet that bar. We start getting really

anxious and we start getting really upset against ourselves. One of the definitions of perfectionism is that it's somebody that's very sensitive to signals of failure. So, you know, we're constantly being triggered and defeating like a failure. And so the idea is that this neoliberalistic environment, as good as it's been for lots of things, the thing that it's bad about is it tends to make us feel like failures. It tends to sort of drive this perfectionistic thinking. It sets a really high bar for success. And now we're sort of deep into this idea.

I'm Gen X, the children are the millennials, and then we've got Gen Z. So we're two or three generations into neoliberalism now, and I feel like it's becoming a bit toxic. We're seeing really big rises in suicidal ideation. We're seeing rises in self-harm, rises in eating disorder, but rises in body dysmorphia. I think a lot of that is down to the economy.

So we'll talk about the sort of economics of that in a second. I agree that this sort of social perfectionism and the unrealistic expectations that people get burdened with can be really dangerous. And it seems like the studies that you cite in the book, the rise of social media and the correlation of an increase in eating disorders and body dysmorphia, even in men. I mean, guys are getting. Yeah. And that I guess I shouldn't sound so surprised. But I think a lot of men are like, well, wait a minute. I've never heard of a guy with an eating disorder, but we all know one or two women with one,

but maybe guys just don't talk about it. And it's certainly on the rise. Yeah, there's an amazing statistic. So between the UK edition of this book coming out, you know, about less than a year ago and the US edition, which came out a couple of weeks ago, a new statistic came out in the UK. So in the last two years, there's been a 43% rise in hospital admissions for men with eating disorders, 43% in two years. I mean, that is unbelievable.

And I think a lot of it is down to how we measure status. So one of the fundamental things about humans, and this is biological, this is true for all humans all over the world, is that we are preoccupied with status and our own sense of status. But that's universal. We're all obsessed with status. I mean, that's something defines us as this kind of tribal primate species. Because human tribes, status is fluid, just like chimpanzees, you know, people rise and fall in status. We're obsessive relative status, kind of where we fit on that particular ladder. And I think what's interesting as you go around the world is there are different ways, and even two different times, there are different ways of measuring status.

And that's been one of the big changes in my lifetime. So when I was a, you know, when I was a teenager, we're all kind of going to, you know, venues watching bands, smoking and drinking pints. You know, the status was in a kind of grunge era, in the kind of Gen X era, was measured by almost by how little you works and how scruffy you looked, you know, and how many pints you could drink. And now, especially for men, it's changed. status is measured for young men by kind of the physical appearance of your body. And that's a real shame in a way because so now men are increasingly suffering from the same bloody nightmare that women have had to deal with for so long. You know, it almost feels like we're going backwards in a sense that rather than learning

from the kind of horrible pressures that young women very often feel to look perfect physically. You know, men are now increasingly suffering from those same problems. Yeah, I think once we used to have to keep up with our neighbours, Keeping up with the Joneses is a cliche for a reason. It meant essentially measuring ourselves against the other people in school or the people that live near us. And today with technology, we have this inexhaustible number of Joneses in every category of our lives.

So it's not just the house in the car. Yeah, and Jordan is not even the Joneses. The Kardashians were keeping up with now. One of the psychologists that I interviewed, who studied social media, you know, she said that, you know, back in the 40s, 50s, they call them stars. The idea was that they're up in the sky. They're miles away from you.

There are these exceptional godlike beings. And now in kind of neoliberal post-Reltie TV era, the idea is that we have to keep up with the Kardashians now. Everybody feels like they have to look like a celebrity, live like a celebrity, drink champagne like a celebrity. Not everyone, that's obviously an exaggeration, but lots of us do. Even just the physical thing of going through Instagram,

you know, one of the fundamental ways, because, you know, this status obsession, One of the fundamental ways that human brains judge how we're doing in the world, judge how kind of happy and satisfy we should be with our lives, is by comparing ourselves to the people around us. You know, we've evolved to live in tribes of around 150 people. Those are the brains we've got. So that would have been kind of controlled and contained unlimited back in the day.

But these days you're on Instagram, and you're flicking through Instagram, and there's, you know, there's Kim Kardashian, and there's Jennifer Lawrence. You know, and there's me. And there's a sense that we know that I could never be like these film stars and these TV stars. But I think unconsciously it still hits us. We still feel that pressure. We still feel like we're not kind of measuring up in some fundamental way. Yeah, it seems impossible, though, right?

We're always going to have that. It's just that now it's in our face all the time. And you can't just go home from school or from work and ignore it. It's on your phone. It's literally ringing in your face. Yeah, we're bombarded with it. But humans and chimpanzees, we've got this weird thing that we're groupish, and then we fight other groups.

You know, we've got this horrible inbuilt thing that when we're, when our group sees another group and the other group are behaving in a way that our group thinks is wrong, we don't just sort of watch it dispassionately. We want to attack them or we want to ostracize the members of those groups. And again, you know, we probably wouldn't have come across other groups very often back when we were evolving. This wouldn't have happened very much. And we would have relatively rarely been thrown into states of moral outrage. And moral outrage is that kind of powerful emotion where you see someone behaving in a way that kind of breaks the rules of your kind of psychological tribe. and it motivates you to want to either violently attack them or ostracized. It would have been relatively rare occurrences.

But now on social media, it's kind of weaponized these instincts in us. It's kind of enabled us to form groups bigger and more powerful than ever before like we do on Twitter and Facebook. And it's kind of weaponized that moral outrage too. We don't just get angry. There's that drive to punish them or ostracize them in some way. And I think this is a really new thing. And I think it's another really dangerous thing.

And it also adds to that level of perfectionism, too. There's a huge pressure, I think, that people must have the perfect opinions, the perfect views. They must perfectly mirror the beliefs and values of their tribe. And if they don't, they are pounced upon on social media. And especially for young people, I think, but not just for young people. This creates an enormous pressure that just wasn't really there before. So if it's true that we all hold within us the power we need to succeed, right? It's all about you. It's all about the individual. And I like that. It's empowering in some way, right? And that's why they developed they, the ubiquitous they, developed this in a way because it is empowering. But the problem is that if we hold within us all the power we need to succeed, then what does it mean if we fail? Does it mean that it's our fault alone as well?

That's the lie, really. All cultures tell stories. And they tell kind of hero stories. And the heroes of the stories of any culture tend to take the form of the kind of individual that is. best equipped to get along and get ahead in that particular environment. And the kind of neoliberal hero is this person who believes they can do anything, be anyone. They're kind of young. They're in the 20s. They're good looking. They've got a thin waist. They're friendly.

They're entrepreneurial. They've got loads of mates. You know the person. You see them everywhere in advertising on television and in movies. But that person's a lie. That person doesn't really exist. It's this kind of cultural tribal propaganda. It's our tribe telling stories in order to,

going to push us into being this perfect inadvertent, and the veritcoma self. And what people always do, whether you're on the left thing or you're right wing, when you kind of drift too far into these kind of utopian ideas, people always forget that we're biological creatures. People always think that we are infinitely malleable, that we don't have genes and wiring and biology. That's a really important part of who we are.

It's not all of who we are by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a big part of who we are. And what our genes do is they set our limits. They mean that we're a certain kind of person with a certain kind of personality. And there's not much that you can do to radically shift out of those limitations. And so this idea that we have all within us that we need to succeed is a lie. It's a really powerful lie because it pushes people to kind of shoot for the stars. But it's a long way down from the stars.

And when you don't reach the stars and you fall, that is going to break your back. And that is what I believe is happening a lot. And that is what I believe is responsible for a lot of these rises in these very unfortunate and unpleasant mental health issues. So how did you get interested in this stuff in the first place? I know you had kind of a rough childhood. Did that sort of play into your interest in this area? Yeah, it did. Yeah.

Again, I brought up in the 80s and 90s, it was the self-esteem era. So, you know, I wasn't a very, very, I wasn't particularly happy kid. I wasn't good at school. I would act out. I would, you know, I would drink and I would take drugs, I got a job with the police, all of that stuff. And at 18, I started going to therapy just trying to sort of work out what the hell was wrong with me. And at therapy, I got the same message that I would get from sort of well-meaning teachers and other people at school that were around me and trying to help me. And that was like, your problem is that you've got, you know, you've got low self-esteem.

I come from a very good old-fashioned traditional British family, not a lot of love and affection there. Well, almost none, to be honest. And so that was, so that was the kind of cause and effect. It was like, well, you had this fairly loveless childhood, and that's giving you low self-esteem. So what you need to do to fix yourself is to start loving yourself and appreciating yourself and all that stuff. So is that kind of big self-esteem story? And I believe that for most of my life. And then in my kind of work in journalism, I started writing this profile of this guy called Roy Baumeister, this American, really brilliant American professional psychology.

And Roy Baumeister was a guy who was one of the main people in the 80s that was studying self-esteem. He was a complete believer in this idea that self-esteem was his magic bullet. If everybody loved themselves, they would become the best versions of themselves. He's perfect, ideal humans. But then he got a book deal to write a book about evil. So he started sort of looking into kind of the science of evil. And he realized that there was a problem with that theory. Because one of the big parts of that theory was the thing.

There's something wrong with you. if you're evil, say, is because you've got low self-esteem. And what you need to do is get high self-esteem. But he noted a lot of these really evil people actually had really high self-esteem. And, you know, Roy Baummeister's dad was a proper Nazi, like an actual German Nazi fought in Second World War. And he said, you know, like, it sounds flipping. But Hitler didn't have much of a self-esteem problem, did he? It was a pretty good self-esteem.

I don't know. I don't know him very well, but it doesn't seem like it. It doesn't feel like it. And then he started realizing that, you know, the people that he knew from his research who had low self-esteem, they're kind of like a little mouse lighter figures that sat in the corner and didn't really want to sort of put their hands up and get any attention. And he didn't feel like the evil people he was meeting in these prisons. So he started sort of looking into the research and he started trying to track this idea that high self-esteem was this social bullet. And he found that there really wasn't much evidence for it at all.

And he was really instrumental in kind of blowing this idea apart. And when I found this out and found this story out, it was a real, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that this self-esteem thing that I'd bought completely was actually just not true. The whole of the culture believed it was growing up. Lots of people in the UK still do. I think you're a bit further ahead in the US, but certainly the UK and the schools, a lot of them are still buying this idea,

the self-esteem with his magic bullet. And it's just not true. It just doesn't have all these amazing effects. And actually, a lot of it is down to your genetics. So if you have a personality type, which is high in neuroticism, that goes hand in hand with having low self-esteem. The thing about personalities is it's pretty stable. I mean, it changes as you go through life.

You get less neurotic as you get older, which is lovely. you tend to. But there's not much you can do about it. It's this idea that you can just go to therapy and just change your trait neuroticism. It's just a load of rubbish. You know, you just can't do it. So discovering all this initially for me was pretty horrible because it was like, well, I've got this high neuroticism. You can do a test. You can go online. There's something called the Newcastle personality assessor, if anyone wants to do it. It's just, I think it takes like 10 minutes. It's done by guys up at the University of Newcastle over here. And it gives you a very rough thumbnail sketch of where you sit on the on the personality scale, the, the

big five traits they call them. And I did that and it came out that I was high neuroticism. And I was interviewing these guys that was saying, oh, you know, that basically goes hand in hand with misery forever. It's just like, oh, no. So initially I was pretty horrified about that. But actually, I ended up finding it really liberating because part of this idea that you are this genius, latent genius you can do whatever you want, it kind of takes away your individuality and your kind of difference. What I realized was actually, I wasn't broken in my low self-esteem. It wasn't like I was malfunctioning. It was just I'm a certain kind of human with a certain kind of brain and a certain kind of, you know, hormonal system. And that's just that.

And actually that leads to a kind of form of self-acceptance, which is sort of very different from the high self-esteem version. But it's actually, it's had a really amazing effect on my kind of sense of well-being, because I've stopped trying to fix myself now because I've realized that I'm not broken. So, you know, I really recommend that people sort of do this basic test because I think it's really useful just to find out who you are. Can you outline what that test is and we can try to find it and link to it in the show notes? Because I think a lot of people are, I hate to say, suffering from, but we're really, we always compare our blooper reel to other people's highlight reel and to get us to stop doing that. I mean, we've done entire episodes on how to stop comparing ourselves to

other people and things like that. But comparing ourselves to ourselves or our potential selves, that's a tough one. Yeah, definitely. So if you Google Newcastle Personality Assessor, you'll find this test. And it's a really simple test. It's just to ask you a bunch of questions. And it gives you, as I say, a rough thumbnail sketch of your personality on five traits. So those five traits are everybody knows introversion and extroversion. So if you think about these traits, they're not switches. You're not either one or another. You're on a, it's like a volume knob. You know, you get more or less. Spectrum. More or less. It's a spectrum. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah. Yeah. There's introversion. There's openness to experience.

So this is a generality. But generally, the more open you are, the more kind of left wing you are. So it's about openness to culture, openness to experience. There's agreeableness, which is kind of how, roughly speaking, it's how much you value getting along with other people. Conscientiousness, kind of how neat, tidy, punctual you are. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness. And neuroticism, of course, the one we've been talking about. That's kind of how anxious and how sensitive you are to signals of kind of panicking chaos in your environment.

So it's really useful to kind of find out who you are because you can save you a lot of time. A, in therapy bills, but also there's a really interesting guy called Professor Brian Little. He's a US psychologist, a teacher's personality, teaches these ideas at Harvard and over here at Cambridge University. And he talks about this self-esteem lie. The way he talks about it is this myth of ultimate control, this myth that we have complete control over who we are. And he, you know, he talks about this idea of personal projects, the idea that everybody has

various personal projects that they are undergoing at any one time. I mean, and his work suggests we all have about 15 going at any one time. And they can be anything. They can be completely mundane like teaching a dog to sit. Or they can be just, you know, hugely meaningful and massive, like trying to rid the world of racism. So you have this kind of spectrum of personal projects. It's really important to understand the science and psychology of these projects because it tends to be the ones that you're going to be good at, the ones you're going to excel at. A lot of that comes down to your kind of personality and also your abilities.

what they found in their work is that there are two qualities, elements that mean the personal project is going to make you happy and more satisfied with your life. And one is meaning. It's got to mean, something to you. I mean, that's kind of obvious. But the other one is efficacy. You've got to have some kind of, you've got to feel like you're getting better at whatever that personal project is. So it's great. So it's great if you want to decide you want to be the fastest runner in the world, right? So go and do that. But if you're, you know, 68 and living under a bridge by river and you know, you've only got kind of one leg. It's not going to be a good personal project.

You need to choose a personal project that is suitable to who you are. It's suitable to your personality. That's suitable to your kind of skill set. And it's by doing that that I think we can really find happiness. I think the big lie of the neoliberal age is, and even going before that, back from the kind of 60s, 70s into what's known as the human potential movement, this idea that humans were just full of this amazing latent potential. and we only use kind of 10% of our brains.

I think, again, the big lie of that is they kept telling us that we are like gods and that we can do anything and be anyone, and we all had to try and be the next president of the United States. But actually, I think happiness lies in us finding our own tiny, weird corner of the world in which we could be quite good at something. That should be the goal. It's funny when you describe the human potential movement of the 60s, but you don't say it's the human potential movement of the 60s,

you think, is this guy talking about like Scientology right now or what? So it's funny, the context, because now if you brought that up now, people would be like, you're smoking some weird stuff, you know, where's the DMT? But when you say, oh, it's this thing that happened as Salin or whatever in Silicon Valley in the 60s, everyone's like, oh, yeah, that hippie stuff. But it's sort of equally damaging, except for that's been around for so long that it's become a part of the culture. Yeah, it has.

So it's really easy to look. look at the culture that we're in now or the economics of what we're in now and just be like, you know what, this is narcissistic and just sort of write it off as that. But it's not really that simple because a lot of us, we do have these illusory beliefs. And a lot of our actions are designed to reinforce a concept of ourselves that we've constructed. I mean, I think you said in one of your earlier talks that this is why Trump watches Fox News. One of the big reasons is because it makes him sound good and he wants to feel that way. And you can't really blame the guy for that, right?

I mean, we all want to read the press that makes us sound or feel good. And if we don't have any press, well, we all do because we're all on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and things like that. So we kind of create our own in that way. And it becomes this problem that is outside of just narcissism. It's not that we're all clinically narcissistic people now and we've all ruined ourselves, right? we've actually created this in a way, and it's like a double-edged sword, right? It's created all this drive and momentum and motivation among us, so it's not like we want to

get rid of it entirely, but it can just so easily get out of control. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But people today are the same as people have always been in the sense that, you know, we are helpless products, almost, I mean, puppies is going a bit too far, but, you know, culture inserts itself into the physical structure of our brains. You can't remove yourself and separate yourself from the culture. So it's not that anyone's made a decision to become a narcissist. This is the way our kind of culture drives us.

And interestingly, you know, personality becomes part of that story too because actually not everybody becomes narcissistic and all that stuff under these circumstances. Mostly people who are high and extroversion and low in agreeableness are particularly vulnerable to all this. But the other thing about the social media, you know, you're right. It's another way that we're all celebrities. I love the way you put it. You said, you know, we all create our own press now. We all have our own press now.

And I'd never thought of it like that, but it's absolutely true. That's another way that we're all sort of celebrities. We can all check our social media feeds and see how many likes we've got. We can all sort of put out some comment and see what the reaction is amongst people. So we all have become these kind of mini celebrities. I think one of the things is that the Silicon Valley Age is still relatively new. And they are fighting viciously against the idea of ever being regulated. But I think that's going to happen at some point.

And I think it kind of has to happen at some point because, you know, my background is in print journalism. And there is just, and in TV too, there's just a huge amount of rules that you have to abide by if you're a print journalist. And rightly so, you know, you're not allowed to lie about people. You're not allowed to slander people. If you damage people's lives, there are ramifications. And social media companies aren't held to these levels of responsibility. I imagine that that will start being talked about more and more now, especially after all these kind of Facebook revelations. I think people are, the honeymoon period is wearing off.

it with the social media companies. For so long, we just thought they were these cool kids that were on our side. And now I realized that they're just, they're just iron rands in hoodies, really. That's how it feels sometimes. It's a bit flippant, but that's certainly how it feels. You're right. It started with kind of like, oh, the kids these days. And it's really easy to get all, get off my lawn about this whole thing, right? Well, it's all about parental overpraise, you know, you're telling your damn kids they can do anything they want. But it's not really like that. It's not just narcissism levels rising and rising because your mom said that you're smart and you believed There's some of that, but you're right.

That only affects people with certain personality types, and I'm not going to try to guess what those are, but you're right. You said something like high extroversion, something, something. High extroversion. So high extrovers, they value those kind of dopamine hits of novelty and attention and risk-taking and all that stuff. They like attention.

And low in agreeableness, they're very competitive, and they'll do anything to kind of push their way to the top. So that's the kind of toxic mix. So these narcissism rates going up, you might ask if culture is so, besides you're so important. Why isn't everybody more narcissistic? Well, there's a lot of that's because down to personality, if you're high neuroticism, you're just not going to be that narcissistic because you hate yourself. So, yeah, it's not going to be everyone.

So it's not exactly the epidemic people are talking about because it's only epidemic in that certain people are getting it more, but it's like it's not exactly smallpox kind of thing in the new world because a huge number of people, maybe immunity is not the right. word, but they're not as affected by it because they don't have the right personality types. And that's thankful because otherwise we might actually be in quite a bit of trouble. But in the same way, and we talked with James Fallon, who studies psychopathy about this, psychopathy is rampant in a lot of war-torn places, not because there are more psychopaths, but because those triggers are present in society that bring out those personality traits.

So maybe it's not epidemic in that way. The latent stuff, the hard wiring is still there, but it's being triggered more than was before, but it's not just because your mom told you too many times that you were great in everything. It's because certain people's moms did that. But it's much more to do with the economy. The economy is much more kind of fundamental. I mean, I think the self-esteem movement in the 80s is a part of it. It's a big part of the story. But the self-esteem movement of the 80s wouldn't have happened. I don't think without the change in the economy because self-esteem was this very kind of neoliberal idea

that in order to become better workers in the economy, more competitive, more successful, or less of a burden on the state. That was the argument for the self-esteem movement, really, that we had to raise everybody's self-esteem. So it was a very neoliberal product. And it changed the way that we raised our children. It changed the way that we taught our children. And again, it goes back to this very sort of basic idea from psychology about how we work out

what we like. And how they describe it is that they say that we are what we think other people think we are. So we look at our skulls and we look at people's responses to us all the time in monitoring them. and we use some of those responses and we work at who we are but how they're responding to us it's a basic way that we do that

and of course if you're your child and you're brought into an environment where your parents and your teachers are just constantly telling you that you're amazing and you're special then that's going to have an effect that's going to have an effect on that generation of children

and I think it did have an effect I think you're right there I think epidemic is pushing it for me I think epidemic is in exaggeration and also I think that what we're finding is that things tailed off started to tail off, the rise in narcissism began to tail off around the time of the global financial crisis. And so the researchers aren't quite sure whether it's going to start

rapidly falling or whether actually there's an idea that it's a movement into a different form of narcissism, which is this kind of quite a vulnerable, sort of more neurotic form of narcissism. All that stuff's yet to shake out as far as I'm aware. Tell us about the fish tank test, because this kind of really does contrast the American belief that we can do anything we want because we believe in ourselves, this lie that you you think is very toxic. Maybe it's not an American belief, Western belief. It's Western, yeah. And that most of our potential is genetic, but this sort of fish tank test says, hey, not everybody's like this. Yeah, because that's the thing. So, you know, when you start coming across this idea,

individualism is all about the individual and people want glory and success and money and those of attention. As a Westerner raised in that environment, you just think, well, that's not culture. That's just, everyone is new. Surely, that's just what people are like. And it turns out that it's not like that at all. And it all goes back to ancient Greece. So two and a half thousand years ago, the birth of the Western self really was in ancient Greece. And that was a really particular weird kind of place, because it's not like a country, like a big landmass. It's like it's a thousand individual little communities on little islands, on rocky coasts. And to get along and get ahead in ancient Greece, you had to be a bit of a hustler because you

could do farming. There was no land for big farming projects. So it was all these individual little islands of profit and motive. And then from that landscape evolves this individual self. people pushing themselves forward, hustling, debating, starting the Olympics. And then over in East Asia, in China, you've got completely the opposite landscape. Low plains, low hills, lots of massive farming projects, wheat, rights, huge irrigation projects. They were all team intensive. So just get along and get ahead in ancient China. You had to privilege the group.

It was the group first. The group comes before the individual and everything turns towards the group. People that were stood out and tried to get all the attention were seen as terrible people. people, not good people. It was the opposite of ancient Greece. If you're like me, you're thinking, oh, two thousand and a half thousand years ago, who cares? But the amazing thing is that when you put people today in a laboratory, as you say, and test their responses to the environment, they still mirror these changes that happened to and a half thousand years ago. That were really interesting ones to do with these fish tanks. So if you put the average

sort of western air in front of a video of a fish tank, and in the fish tank, there's a big show-off, flashy fish at the front of the fish tank. And around that fish, there's loads of other fish and sort of other bits and pieces. The Westerners eye will generally stay mostly on that front fish. It will only sort of relatively rarely go out to the context. And then if you put somebody from East Asia from China, Vietnam, Japan, in front of that same fish tank, their eye will be constantly moving between the fish and everything else. And then you say to them, you say to the Western, what did you see? And the Western guy saw a fish. And you say to the East Asian person, what did you say they say a fish tank and then you say to the westerner what did you think about

the fish you saw and the fish went the investor well that's obviously the leader and the east asian person will go oh well i felt sorry for that fish because it had obviously been thrown out of the group and it must have been very lonely so you see how these these differences in the physical environment for two and a half thousand years ago they affect and change and influence the very way that we scan and process and experience the world they reflect our value judgments on people. In China, shyness is seen as a leadership quality. I mean, that's completely antithysical to how it is in the West, you know, in the Britain, in America, in Canada, where big, loud, charismatic presences are seen as natural leaders. So it's really quite extraordinary.

You think culture is, you think of culture as being like things, it's the operas and books and stuff, you know, it's the surface level. But culture really goes deep, down to the level of how we are unconsciously moving our eyes as we go into any environment. And there's a guy called Professor Richard Nisbert, who's the big kind of genius at the center of a lot of this work. I interviewed him for the book and he said, you just got to think about the average street scene in East Asia. You know, you go into a city, a big city in China or Japan. And it's just this dizzying array of information. There's just stuff everywhere. And it's just overwhelming, if you've not experienced before. You get this massive endorphin rush. It's like, oh, my God. And again, that just shows

that the kind of East Asian brain is used to a different thing. It's much used to experiencing reality as lots of things in context rather than a kind of a world made up of big individual pieces and parts. This is even represented in the selfies that people take, sort of calling back the title, obligatory title callback, right, of the book. In East Asian selfies, you've said, and I don't know if this is just anecdotal, or if you actually did a study, or if there was a study,

But you said that there's more group photos with East Asians when they take selfies versus Western. I mean, now the definition in American English of selfie is a picture that only you are in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did an event last summer with a German academic whose name escapes me. And she said this. I couldn't find a reference for it, which is why it's not in the book. But, you know, she studied selfies, so I trust her.

She said that that's one of the differences they find. they find that a Chinese selfie in inverted commas is much more likely to be of a group compared to a Western selfie, which is much more likely just to be a big face in the middle of it. I mean, it just seems so interesting that our entire culture has been programmed by this, and we kind of nobody really noticed at the time. Yeah, I know. That's the thing. I'd heard this word neoliberalism banded around a bit, and you used to sort of switch off and you go, well, what's that?

Lots of people don't really know what is. There isn't a general kind of popular awareness of this idea. And yet this has been the controlling idea that we have been living under for all of our lives, if you're under 50. It's been the idea that has shaped who we are, our society, our values, our beliefs since the early 1980s. And there's a very little conversation about it. It's unbelievable. It really is an extraordinary thing. This word, this idea of neoliberalism isn't more well-known.

I mean, I remember growing up, and there's much more conversation about this now amongst millennials, certainly in the UK, looking back on the baby boomers and thinking, well, the baby boomers, how did that work? And it was certainly true in the States that 50s, 60s, you could be a working class family. Dad's, you know, working in a factory, moms at home. You could have a car in the front, a nice backyard, but living in a perfectly comfortable lifestyle. And I remember growing up thinking, what changed? Because that was my parents' life. And now we're living in a world where both people have got to work. Man and woman have both got a work to have anything like a decent lifestyle. Nobody can afford to live anywhere. Life seems to have got much harder. What happened? I don't know what happened. And this is the answer.

Neo-liberalism happened. We created an insanely intense competition of the world. And again, I'm not reigning against neoliberalism. There's lots of reasons why neoliberalism is really good. In the 1970s, we were in a state of economic chaos. things were going terribly wrong in the UK and the US. We were very much in this together, and the politicians were madly looking for a new idea to kind of save us.

And of course, you could argue about it forever. But neoliberalism did it, stabilised things, and it wasn't a linear story of success by any means. But we were doing pretty well in the 1980s, largely speaking. And also, and this is the real problem for people on the left like me who were kind of feel instinctively they want to attack the economic policy of Reagan and Thatcher. neoliberalism has lifted millions of people out of poverty in the developing world, like millions. It's been an unbelievable force for good outside of the West because part of the neoliberal project is like the big neoliberal wet dream is that we want the whole world to be one glorious,

perfect God-like market with no barriers to people, to goods, it just flows perfectly. So that's globalization. So we're talking about globalization. That's what we're talking about, this neoliberal kind of wet dream. And that's meant getting our iPhones put together in China, for example. and call centers and all that stuff that we complain about. But that's been a massive force for good, if you want to take a global perspective,

as I say, lifting millions of people out of poverty. Of course, there's been a kickback in the West in which it's kind of gutted the middle classes, and then we end up with a conversation that ends up very in short order with Donald Trump. Okay, last but not least, what can we do about this? Because doesn't it harm us to stop believing this type of Western lie that we can do anything we want

because we believe in ourselves? Doesn't it harm us in some way? I feel like a lot of us won't really go for it if we think we're just likely to fail because, you know, not everyone's special, so just settle for where you are in your life. Yeah, settle for mediocrity. Now, I completely agree.

It's a problem. I would like to see in schools, young people being told and taught a much more realistic model of what a human being actually is, that you're not a god, that you can't do anything, but you can, in your own way, be amazing. So teach them about personality, you know, much more focus on the individual in the sense of who is this particular individual.

And where is that weird little corner of the world in which they're going to find that they're going to be quite, really quite good at something? Because I think that's the magic for me. It's that little corner of the world doing something really, even if it's something weird, like, you know, making shoes out of knitting or whatever it might be that you're just really passionate about and you're actually quite good in something that you can, A, think about making something of a living for. from it and B, get some sort of sense of status from it. There's so much talk about diversity these days, but you never hear people talking about diversity in terms of personality type, that we are all very, very different forms, color, gender, whatever. Personality is, to me, it's a really big thing.

People are very, very different in terms of their personality. And the other thing I think that we should focus on, that we can be kind of think practically about is part of the idea that we are blank slates and we are gods and we're amazing is that we always, focus on the self. If I'm not happy, if I'm feeling stressed and anxious and miserable and lacking in status, I go to myself, I need to be better. I need to become a better person. And I think that's wrong. I think actually, we need to start thinking about changing our environment. We need to start thinking about changing the things around us. The way thing about it

is this, is if you take a lizard and put the lizard on the iceberg, that is a really unhappy lizard. But if you take that same lizard and put it in the Sahara Desert, suddenly the lizard is delighted. It's like all its Christmases have come at once. So nothing about that lizard has change whatsoever. You haven't touched an iota of its personality if it has one or character or behavior. What you've done is change this environment and I think that really should be our model. If you're an introvert and you're working in a in a store with people, try and get a job at the back of the office when you have to talk to people. There's this very obvious example. If there are people in your life that are making you unhappy, stop trying to stop telling

yourself that it's your fault that you need to change. Get rid of them. We need to have much more focus on finding happiness and comfort and a cure to our miseries by changing the life around us rather than trying to fit ourselves into that life. Well, thank you very much. Really interesting insight into a mindset that many of us have that we don't even notice. And that's, I think, what makes the book and your time today that much more educational because I think this kind of sneaks up on us or snuck up on us as a country and as a culture. And I think the more aware of it that we are, the better off we're going to be. Fantastic. It was really, really good fun talking to you. Thank you so much, Jordan.

Great big thank you to Will Store. The book title is Selfie, how we became so self-obsessed and what it's doing to us. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Will on Twitter. That'll be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which can, as always, be found at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Will Store. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to apply everything you've learned today from Will, just make sure that you go grab the worksheets in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo.

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