How is social media rewiring us, and what’s the cost? Laura has been living with this question for years. In her writing and on the show, she’s shared how social media has affected her mental health, some of the eerie parallels to her alcohol addiction, and what ultimately led to her decision to bow out of social media earlier this year. Following her exit, Laura’s been diving deep into this topic, and this week, she goes solo on the mic, exploring one specific psychological framework she’s chewing on: the false self vs. the true self. She talks about what it is, how it plays out on social media, and how it might provide one answer to why social media is linked with high rates of depression and anxiety. This episode will likely be part of an ongoing series about social media. To that end, we REALLY want to hear from you about it. Join us at the TMST community (it’s not Facebook) and share your experience, what’s working and not working for you when it comes to social media, and your reaction to Laura’s thoughts. Show notes: Quitting Social Media, Laura McKowen: https://www.lauramckowen.com/blog/social-media-drinking-alcohol-instagram-facebook Push off From Here: Quitting Social Media (Again), Laura McKowen: https://www.lauramckowen.com/blog/quitting-social-media Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke: https://amzn.to/2V48KvA The Holistic Psychologist on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CS9f5UIvQCs/ Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST, hear uncut interviews, and keep it ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/ Join our free online community (it’s not a Facebook group!): https://www.tmstpod.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Laura McKowen on Social Media & The False Self
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hello? Hello, it's me. Just Laura this week. I am going to start occasionally doing these solo episodes. I realized I've had three podcasts. This is my third, and I've never done an episode alone. I've always had a co-host or a person that I'm interviewing. It's something that I've wanted to try. I did a very informal survey in my newsletter and asked people if they were interested in that type of thing and got some topics suggestions, too.
[00:00:44] And so here we are, I'll be doing these occasionally. It'll be just me riffing on an idea that I am thinking about. And the topic for this one was very easy to choose because it's something I have been really, fair to say, I've been obsessed with it for the better part of the last year and even prior to that. So, it's around social media.
[00:01:14] I have, I have tried, you know? We all know. We've heard. We've seen the documentaries at this point. We've all, you know, read the stats. We know that social media is linked to anxiety and depression and that, we all, anyone that I talk to about it is like, “Oh yeah, you know, it has this effect on me”, but I've noticed that not in all, but in most cases it doesn't really change people's behavior. They're still on there. And I recently took myself off and I'll talk about that later in the episode, but I've been really, I am obsessed with it. Like I was obsessed with alcohol and getting sober from alcohol and the bigger picture of alcohol in our culture back in 2013-2015 as I was getting sober and this feels very much the same. I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop talking about it. I can't stop wondering about it. So I'm just going with that. And what I want and what I'm trying to understand is what is it exactly? Like we know, I know, at a high level it's comparison.
[00:02:42] It's, you know, the things that I've written about, the having a circle of concern that's far too big for us to manage cognitively and the shaming that people do, sort of depersonalization and all of that. But I want to dig deeper. I want to know more and want to really pull it apart. To pull on these threads.
[00:03:08] So this episode is about one aspect that I'm sort of working over, turning over in my mind right now that has come to light really in the past week. It sort of jelled because of a few conversations that I've had and a few different ideas coming together. It's like, ah, okay, this is a major part of it.
[00:03:33] So that's what I'm going to be sharing today. And so our tale begins with me. Well, actually my daughter. She is 12 years old right now, Alma. She's entering junior high this week, seventh grade, and it's a new school. Seventh and eighth grade is junior high just like it was for me. And Alma has not asked me to come sleep with her, in her bed, for a long time… for over a year.
[00:04:14] She and I shared a bed when her dad and I separated and got divorced back in 2012 and we just shared a bed. Even though she had her own room, we shared a bed and when I moved in with my boyfriend, when we moved in, it kind of coincided with the perfect timing of her wanting her own space and starting to be repelled by my very existence.
[00:04:43] And so she has been sleeping in her own bed happily, but this past week she asked me to come. She knocked on my door in the middle of the night and asked me to come sleep with her four different nights. So I was like, okay, what's going on here? And it didn't take me long to figure out like, oh, this is about school and anxiety going into junior high.
[00:05:05] One of the nights, the last one when she asked me to come sleep with her, I didn't just go in there and, you know, we didn’t fall asleep right away. She wanted to talk and she talked for an hour and a half and I usually would shut that down because sleep is... I need my sleep. I don't mess around with my sleep and plus I'm not awake yet.
[00:05:32] You know, I'm not really prepared for conversation at two in the morning, but I can tell she just needed to say these things and vomit them out of her mouth and process. And it was all about her friends. Social connections. What if this, what if that, this is what this person's doing, this is what that person's doing, this is who I am, you know. Really, like all the things that she's talking about a lot during the day, but it was like concentrated anxiety and excitement all coming out at once.
[00:06:16] I didn't shut it down because I could tell she needed it. And also I know exactly what it's like. For me, junior high, even high school, and even college, but especially junior high - I hated it. I hated it. I was not comfortable. I was anxious all the time and it was, God, I had so much anxiety.
[00:06:55] So, I've been thinking about that. It was really all about managing all the social connections and being so acutely aware of where I stood, where other people stood, the sort of social hierarchies. I was never someone that didn't care. I always cared about all that. And, to a degree, I think that's completely normal.
[00:07:28] It's part of that process of that part of life, right? Some people care more than others. I cared the most and it made me so extraordinarily uncomfortable every day, all the time. What my daughter was doing in the middle of the night was what I did 24/7 all through junior high, all through high school, with very little break. There was very little rest that I felt in those times. I was just so aware and I was never pretty enough or funny enough or sexual enough or confident enough. I didn't have boyfriends. I was a late bloomer in that way. I didn't really know what to do. And I was always part of the popular group and that came with its own sort of pressures. Like I was supposed to know how to do those things. I was supposed to know how to act and I didn't, so I performed all the time. I learned how to perform really, really well, and it was exhausting. So that was me and this became highlighted because of what Alma did the other night and all these other things that I've been thinking about.
[00:08:57] So, there was that, and then enters alcohol in high school and I realized that it was like a superpower. When I drank, it overrode my anxiety, that part of me that was always on and had my antenna up and trying to manage all these things. And then it also allowed these things to come forth within me.
[00:09:27] I could just be this person that was pretty enough or funny enough, or sexual enough or confident enough in those moments. And that was such a relief. So last week, coincidentally, I talked to Dr. Anna Lemke. She is the medical director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Program and Director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship. She's a real big deal at Stanford, as you can tell. And she is this wonderful, wonderful woman and wrote a book that just came out last week called Dopamine Nation and it's all about addiction, really, and the role that dopamine plays. And we had this conversation and I got her book and was able to dig into a little bit of it. One of the things that I found was where she introduces this concept of the false self versus the true self, which I hadn't heard of before. It was introduced by Winnicott in the 1960s.
[00:10:49] He was a psychoanalyst. And the idea is that we create the true self which is the most spontaneous, sort of natural expression of who we are. Babies come out only really expressing their true selves. You know, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. I want to be held. I want to sleep. They don't cognitively say, okay, if I do this, I'll get my needs met.
[00:11:21] Right? They just do. And what happens is that over time if needs aren't being met by our true self, expression of our true self, we create a false self, or many false selves. And some of this is natural and necessary to function in society. You create a certain persona that you present at work say, or in certain groups of people, but the problem is that this creation of a false self, sometimes eclipses or overshadows, the true self, and the true self gets lost. The true self is never accessed. The false self is the one running the show all the time. I can say without a doubt, that was me. I've written about this in my book so much as a central part of my story. I didn't really get that before I got sober, but I’d created a self that was more seemingly pleasing to other people that would ensure my connections were established and maintained. That I was more liked. That I was all of the things that I thought I needed to be.
[00:12:56] And some of that is very real. We don't do it because we're deceptive liars. We do it just like every other adaptive behavior to keep our attachments, to get our needs met. So Anna introduced me to this false self concept. I'm going to read a little line from her book.
[00:13:19] The false self is a self-constructed persona in defense against intolerable, external demands and stressors. Winnicott postulated that the creation of the false self can lead to feelings of profound emptiness. As Gertrude Stein said, “There is no there there.” I felt that when I read it. I felt that. And she says when our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we've created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization. Okay. So that's a little foreshadowing into where I'm going.
[00:14:17] All through my twenties, my late teens, really all my life, I can say late teens, twenties and most of my thirties, my false self was running the show. False selves. And alcohol really held it up. It allowed it to happen. It kept at bay the pain of being detached, a true self. And then in 2014, when I got sober, I started reconnecting, connecting, learning who the true Laura was, who this true self was.
[00:15:05] And I remember feeling like, oh, I didn't know how much alone time I needed. I didn't know that I actually really hate big social situations or even, you know, smaller ones. I didn't realize that socializing was so extraordinarily exhausting to me. I didn't know how much alone time I needed. I didn't. Like I did know, but I had pushed that part of me so far down and so far away.
[00:15:43] And I thought in the early years of getting sober, that I just needed to recover from all that, you know, that outward energy I had expended towards socializing and drinking and all of that. It wasn't just a recovery period. It turns out that's just who I am. Seven years later, I'm continually amazed at how much alone time I need, how little tolerance I have for socializing more than say, two hours, how deep of an inner life I have and how extraordinarily important it is for me to connect with that and be in that, and so on and so forth. So 2014, right? I got sober. This has been an ongoing process of really practicing honesty. And Anna talks about in her book, how practicing radical honesty is really about sorting out the authentic self and becoming the true self and letting go of the narratives of the false self and that is a process that is so, so paramount in recovery. So crucial. And that has been my experience, too. I didn't have that language for it, I have known and have written extensively about the importance of learning to tell the truth and telling the truth and how to me that has been the central process of sobriety.
[00:17:27] And something that if I get far away from, I become very unwell, very fast. Okay. So I got sober in 2014 and at the same time started to really use social media.
[00:17:55] I created my business, Facebook page for writing and sharing, you know, my thoughts around the things that I was writing about at the time, mostly related to getting sober and addiction. In 2014, I started my Instagram account, which was different than my personal account. I don't have a personal Instagram account anymore, but I did.
[00:18:24] And I started it, it was about sobriety. It became, has become, it is what is now I would say my business, Instagram account. I had been, I've been someone who used social media really from the beginning when Facebook started in 2007, but the personal side. My personal account on Facebook has never really dragged me into a dark place.
[00:18:54] I don't pay much attention to it. I haven't paid a ton of attention to it ever really, but the business one, because I can't really say there's a business one and a personal life, you know, my personal life is so intertwined with my work, that it would be disingenuous to say that they're that different.
[00:19:24] Okay. So I started building these platforms in 2014 and it's seven years later now and I had a Facebook page that had about 30,000 followers. Deactivated that six months ago or more, deleted it. And I never really used Twitter. It to me was like, I'm so glad, but Twitter was like, oh hell no, I can't, this is too much.
[00:20:00] I can't manage it. So luckily I never fell into the Twitter toilet, but Instagram I, built close to 80,000 as a following there. And, you know, it would be a total lie to say, to disentangle my social media accounts from my ability to move into a different career to get a foothold in writing, becoming an author.
[00:20:39] I don't know how responsible my engagement there is for the fact that I was able to get a publishing deal. The fact that I was able to eventually switch careers. I don't know how important that was in those, or how much of a factor social media was, but it's in there for sure. So there's obviously a lot of good that has come from it.
[00:21:08] And over the course, I would say, as I started writing about it in 2018, that's when I first wrote it about the ills of social media on my mental health and again, in 2019, 2020, and then this year. So I started to notice that it was a problem for me. But it took me I can say now four years to really extract myself.
[00:21:39] And I didn't feel like it was an option. And I know a lot of people don't feel like it's an option to back out of it or want to. I know people don't have the same experience that I do, but I think a lot of people do have the same experience, but they either feel trapped by it or, you know, they need it for their business. Or they just don't otherwise know how, if or how, they kick it off. Okay. But I digress. So back to this false self concept.
[00:22:22] I want to read you another part of what Anna wrote in her book. She says the antidote to the false self is the authentic self. Radical honesty is a way to get there. It tethers us to our existence and makes us feel real in the world. Okay. I want to say that again. It tethers us to our existence. So I don't know if you've had this feeling before, but I know for me, I have been at times so embroiled, so involved, in my social media presence, my existence.
[00:23:17] And I'll really focus on Instagram cause that's been the Achilles heel for me that I could not feel my life. I did not feel tethered to my existence, my online life, the false self, because it is a false self and I'll talk about that. My online persona felt more real, more important, more tangible than my real life. The depersonalization and the derealization realization were very, very real.
[00:24:04] And so was the profound emptiness in that I was only as up as my latest post and how it did. And I was as low as, you know, the low, the bad comment that I got or the poor performance of whatever post. The up and the down and the up and the down and it's absolutely out of control for so many reasons. It's an algorithm. Uh, yeah. It's not really directly correlated to anything real so any real sense of value or any real sense of meaning. It's a game and it's a game that by definition works because we don't know that yet. It's like a slot machine.
[00:25:08] I have been reading about how that's one of the reasons why social media is so addictive to us. Because slot machines are addictive, not because you win sometimes, it's because you don't most of the time. It's because you don't know. It's the unknown. It's when you don't know when you're going to win.
[00:25:29] So you pull and you pull and you pull in it's that not knowing. It's that maybe this time that keeps you pulling and pulling and pulling. Same with social media. It's that maybe this post is the one. Maybe this one will be huge. I might get connected with this person or that person, you know? The sort of specifics are a little bit different for everybody, especially if you use it for business reasons.
[00:26:05] It's the maybe that keeps us going back and back and back. And it feels real. It feels so real because I can look, I can point to certain things that have become real in my life. Certain relationships. Certain connections that have become real because of social media that I can say, but there's this, this that's real. Yeah. But as a whole it’s really not something that, it's definitely not something that you can stand on.
[00:26:44] It's not something you can fall back on to as what is called the true self. Right? So, another part of what was written in that paragraph that Anna wrote: The antidote to the false self is the authentic self. Radical honesty is a way to get there. It tethers us to our existence and makes us feel real in the world. It also lessens the cognitive load required to maintain all those lies, freeing up mental energy to live more spontaneously in the middle. Holy crap. There's so much in those, what, three sentences? So much. I could do three podcasts just on that, but let's bring this back. Okay. So I get to this place, it got really bad in 2020, and it's stayed pretty bad in 2021 where I would have told you that I am who I am on social media. That that is who I am, who I am in real life. But of course that's not true. It can't be true. It cannot be true. It's not true for anyone. I don't care what they say. I'm very aware when you have 80,000 people potentially following you. And by the way, we know in the back of our minds, subconsciously that it's the potential that the entire world at any moment could see what we are saying.
[00:28:34] There is no way you're not performing something. There's no way you're not editing yourself. Unless you are a sociopath or psychopath and you really don't care, you don't have that part of your consciousness that is aware of these things, you're going to care. You're going to care and we're not stupid.
[00:29:01] We shape our performances. We shape our behavior to achieve a certain end. And I'm not saying that people come out and outright lie, but you tailor a message. So you leave things out or you don't, you express things in a certain way. There is a certain skill you develop for being on social itself so that you can project.
[00:29:34] You can take any moment based on how you present the picture, how you present the quote, and how you write the caption that supports this overall image. And some people get much closer to reality than others, but it's never fully there. Right? It's never fully there. There are all kinds of things that I would never say online that I feel that I might say in a trusted relationship or a conversation between me and say, you know, one of my friends or my boyfriend, because I can't. Those are things I can't work out with 80,000 people. All my doubts, insecurities questions, contradictions. And we don't allow for that stuff to take place on social media.
[00:30:30] So just by the nature of what it is, especially for someone whose person is the brand like me, it's this ever-evolving sort of monster as I see it, that feels very real. And by the way, there is a huge high to getting the quick, immediate affirmation that you can when something is received well. Of course there is, we're all drawn to that. And knowing that you might be able to do that, that you could do that at any moment. I have so many times unconsciously or consciously gone over to Instagram to post something when I wasn't getting enough feedback or attention in the present moment or whatever I was feeling that I didn't want to feel, or I wanted to, you know, manufacture a certain amount of whatever it is that I needed in the moment. Feedback, attention, acknowledgment, audience. I've done that probably millions of times at this point. Certainly, I've done it over 3000 times because I have 3000 plus posts on my account.
[00:32:01] Okay. So there's this continual construction of a false self and upholding of a false self and feedback that you get from a false self. And again, by the way, this isn't all done for malicious reasons. And I wasn't consciously doing this. There’s a lot of honest, true, and real that has gone behind my posts and gone into my posts. And there's a lot of things that I worked out online and with that community on social media, but there is a very, very, very fine line between what is real and honest, and I would say is, quote unquote good and what is feeding this false self, feeding this performance. And this is where I close the loop on the beginning part of this. That part of me, that junior high part of me, was totally activated. Who am I connected to? Who am I not connected to? How can I get this person to see me?
[00:33:14] How can I get this person to like me? How can I be seen as this way? Right? How can I comment so that it's clear where I stand on this issue so that I can be seen in this certain way by certain people to uphold this image even if that's not how I really feel? Or stay silent on something where I do have a certain opinion because I am not willing to expose that part of my process, to expose that view, because it's in conflict with what feels safe for me to show.
[00:34:19] I mean, this is the level of cognitive load required to manage this? I don't, I can't even imagine. I have some ideas based on how I feel, you know, from being off of it for a few months. Chiefly, that I used to need to nap every single day. I would wake up and basically fantasize about when I could get back into bed and I rarely went a day without taking them. And now I'm not napping as much, and I'm not fantasizing about sleeping. I might be tired. I might take a nap here and there, but I'm not just completely shut down, which is, you know, a classic symptom of depression. Okay. This constant sort of monitoring of one's self is the exact opposite of how the true self is characterized. Being able to be spontaneous in the moment, having your feet tethered to where you are, sharing how you actually feel and not editing, not performing. So I have this vision, right? Of all these false selves, interacting with false selves on social.
[00:35:48] And it's actually like some kind of horror movie or, well, I don't know if we've all seen, but a lot of us have probably seen Black Mirror. If you haven't, you might want to go back and watch the episode about social media. And that came out several years ago and I remember seeing it and thinking, oh, that is really eerie and feels way too true now.
[00:36:14] So this is a concept I'm playing with, right? This concept of true self versus false self. And for me being disconnected to my false self, to such a degree that there was no there there, is what ultimately led me to, I believe, getting into severe alcohol addiction. And it was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced having to crawl out of that.
[00:36:54] And yeah, again, faced with it in a different way with social media, but the feelings are exactly the same. The behaviors are very much the same, the rationalizations and the bargaining. And, you know, trying to apply arbitrary rules in order to stop my use and negotiating and justifying and all those things are exactly the same as my process of getting sober.
[00:37:22] And I can see underneath all of it now is this really kind of tender, beautiful, true self. Trying to fight its way back through.
[00:37:43] And as a person who had to go through the process of, I guess we could say reclaiming the true self or building up the true self or being comfortable with my true self. And I am, I am, I really am. I had that to fall back on. I know what that felt like, so I could. It wasn't that I had to do all of the same digging again.
[00:38:12] It's just, being away, being off of social for even a couple of weeks, it was like, Oh right. Here I am. Here I am. This is what's real. And the anxiety turned down significantly. The depression turned down significantly and I didn't have to go through that whole process again.
[00:38:38] It's still as big and as scary of a false self, the allure is there. Right? Because being that false self has a big payoff, as a big payoff outwardly and, you know, we feel like it's connected to our success in the world, to our success with other people, to our connections with others, and all of that.
[00:39:05] So it's a very real draw, but there is no there there. There is no there there for me. So, I will end this episode just with that. I want to provide a few caveats, I suppose. I recognize that other people's experience is not mine. This is really about my experience and if it's something that you resonate with, that feels true to you then great. But I'm really working out what's going on with me. The pieces that I've written on social media, when I share them through my newsletter, I get more responses than any other topic. So, I know that I'm not totally alone here, but this isn't me saying everyone should get off social media.
[00:39:59] I know that's not realistic nor do I think that that's true for everyone. Just like, I don't think it's true that everyone needs to stop drinking. This is how it affects me and yeah, it's just my experience. The other thing is I totally recognize that I'm in a position now where I have built a healthy newsletter list.
[00:40:23] I have a company with The Luckiest Club. I have a community there. I have a book out in the world already and a contract to write a second and third book. That I'm in a position where I can step back from social media. There are people out there like Cal Newport and many others actually, who will say the idea that you need social media in order to be a successful author, a successful business person is, is absolutely not true. And in fact, it is totally counterproductive. I don't know. I think it really depends on the type of business that you're trying to create. I think it absolutely just depends, but I want to acknowledge that I'm in a position where I can step away now and I don't know the effect that it will have on my professional life.
[00:41:13] I really don't, but we'll see. I will have a report on that as time goes on. I've been off since April. I had a little relapse that I wrote about, when I went on a vacation in July where I was on for two days. I basically felt like I had gone out and drank two bottles of vodka and slept with a stranger and all of those things that would have been akin to an alcohol relapse. I felt that level of hangover and anxiety afterward. And since then I've been out. I actually deactivated my Instagram account. I don't have that Facebook page, that has been gone for a long time. So aside from being on LinkedIn, which I rarely ever use and I feel like I only need to have it up there because of my company, I'm off. So we'll see how it plays out. We'll see how it affects my work. We'll see. And I'll report on that as time goes on. One thought I forgot to add in and I wanted to talk about... I noticed there's this part of what I I've been talking about through this whole thing. And part of the anxiety I felt in junior high and high school, and that I have always really felt, is this very acute awareness of social connections, being in or out, in-group stuff versus out-group stuff. And this is human nature. It's very real. Some people care more than others.
[00:42:54] I am wired to care. I'm wired to notice. I am wired to care, but I care a lot less. Getting sober required me to not care nearly as much as I used to. And I have gotten a lot healthier around that, but it's still in there. And like I said, being on social media really brought out the most insecure, it brought out all the junior high stuff and it brought it out on full blast.
[00:43:22] And a really good example of it came up actually last week. Someone sent me a post from the holistic psychologist. You might follow her on Instagram. I haven't. I used to follow her a long time ago and then I didn't, I don't know why I stopped following. I just did. And this isn't a comment on her.
[00:43:49] It's more a comment on this dynamic and it underscores sort of everything that I'm saying in this episode. She's a psychologist. She has a massive following, 4 million+. She has put out a ton of information that I think has really elevated general awareness. She's brought psychological concepts to the mainstream and presented what I think is at its base very helpful information for people to start talking about things like trauma and other psychological concepts that really, unless you are in therapy or you've studied them, you wouldn't know about. So I think in that sense, there's some positive stuff there. Okay.
[00:44:44] What was fascinating to me, and it's just a perfect example of this stuff, is she posted about a new relationship that she's in. Well, her wife and another woman. A thruple. New word for me. I didn't know that was a word and great. That's a whole other thing. This sort of, where's the line between what we need to know about people and what we don't and how much is too much and why does it matter? And all of that.
[00:45:18] Okay. But we'll put that aside for another day. She put up this post about this, being in this thruple and that it's this great experience. And the interesting thing was what came out a few days later. And that's what was sent to me. It was a post that was commenting on the reactions to her announcement of this relationship.
[00:45:45] And she says, you know, I lost 20,000 followers that day. I was emotionally prepared for these reactions, people not understanding people, shaming me, whatever. What is really troublesome to me is at the end of her caption, she writes that this space, her page, her Instagram account is for the courageous warriors, willing to go inward.
[00:46:21] This space is for the courageous warriors.
[00:46:28] Meaning if you aren't courageous if you are not willing to go inward, if you had a reaction to my post about my relationships that was negative say, or not fully supportive. It kind of reminded me. I saw this post a long time ago, where this woman posted a picture of her boobs online, on Instagram and then chastised people for commenting on the picture of her boobs.
[00:47:10] Like how dare you look and how dare you have an opinion about the picture that I posted of my boobs. What kind of sick psycho are you? She was talking to men in that case. I was like, okay, interesting. Interesting. This kind of reminded me of that. It's like, oh, you had a reaction to my post about my relationship.
[00:47:38] Well, and it was coded in all this psychological language because she's very smart and she's leading an entire, you could say she's leading an entire movement of, as she calls it self-healers. She has 4 million people. And at the end of this post that's cloaked in all this psychological language, she says this space is the one for the courageous warriors, willing to go in.
[00:48:11] And then, you know, who doesn't want to be in on the courageous warrior camp, who doesn't want to be someone who's willing to go inward and quote, unquote, do the work?
[00:48:28] I'm not a psychologist, but that seems extraordinarily manipulative and like gaslighting that is made of in-group out-group stuff and shame. There's lots of shaming language in there and what we do when we see a post like that, as we see, we don't just see the post itself. Of course, we see who commented and what they said, and we absorb all of that information.
[00:48:58] That informs not just how it's so persuasive to get us to be at a place to perform, being at a place where we may not be yet, to present a false self. I have done it hundreds of times, hundreds of times, because I want her to see that I’m supportive of whatever that I have this view that I think will be very popular and endearing to her and people who might follow her.
[00:49:38] When in fact, I might not really even know how I feel about this thing yet, because that's the normal human response. Okay. And I'm not even talking about her topic, just anything.
[00:49:55] One of her commenters said, “That's okay. Hey, there's 20,000 people who are unwilling to do the work.” Like, man. And this is what we see all the fuck over social media all the time. We can't possibly manage this mass of connections. I also became acquainted with a concept called Dunbar's number, which is, I won't go too far into it, but supposedly the number is 150 and it's the number of connections we can actually handle. The number of social connections we can actually manage and handle cognitively and you know, we're not meant to handle. If 150 is the max, you go onto an account like and it's 4 million, it's just mind melty. And yet we feel like we should be able to handle it. How can that not change who we are? How can that not change who she is?
[00:50:59] How can that not change us? How can that not lead to a presentation of false selves, many false selves? And no wonder so many of us feel empty. There's no there there. We feel depressed. We feel anxious, but we can't really name why. I think this is a major reason why. It certainly is for me. All right.
[00:51:30] I will leave it at that. This has been fun. I would love to know what you think. I would love to know what you think, not just about the topic, which I definitely want to know, but about these solo episodes and what works, what doesn't. We have regular conversations about the episodes in our community. You can go to tmstpod.com.
[00:51:59] You can click on community and it's a free community. And it's really fun. We do this thing called NGP Fridays, non-guilty pleasure Fridays, where we talk about shows and music and other media that we're into. And we share the playlist for every episode, which we create. A playlist for every episode, I guess I will be creating one for this.
[00:52:25] It's a good place on the internet. It's away from Facebook. It's away from Instagram. It's just a community for this podcast. So I would love to know what you think. I would love to know. All of it, what works, what doesn't, do you share this experience, that anything I said today makes sense to you.
[00:52:53] All right. Thank you for being here until next time.