Claim Your Subjectivity Before It's Too Late!
One of the most effective tools I have found for expanding consciousness and the associated self-acceptance is to drop many pretenses of objective reality. Because it is (mechanically) simpler to mentally process life events as binary, black and white, either/or, we’ve been trained and continue to train ourselves to seek out descriptions and definitions of life as knowable without equivocation. It’s leading us towards our own destruction.Inherent in deconstructing the façade of objectivity, is developing a curiosity about oneself and the world around us. I found this group discussion on the Poynter website to be a useful attempt at examining how and why we must abandon our hopeful yet neurotic and dare I say ignorant clinging to objectivity and learn how to manage what is far more ubiquitous and unstoppable: subjectivity. The discussion related to news coverage, but it can be applied just about everywhere that conflicts arise.1Inherent in deconstructing the façade of objectivity, is developing a curiosity about oneself and the world around us.
Here are a few quotes I pulled from the discussion:
Tom Rosenstiel, University of MarylandSo I don’t think that objectivity and diversity and deep understanding are at odds. I think a better term that gets closer to what most journalists believe in is open-minded inquiry. And if we could start there and lose the term objectivity altogether, we’d be in a better starting spot.
Keith Woods, NPRThe focus of this conversation around objectivity needs to be a deeper understanding of what happens when you approach the craft without believing that you have the responsibility not just to be open-minded, Tom, but to pursue, actively pursue, what you don’t know and assume the existence of your ignorance in your journalism.
It Feels Better to Claim Your Subjective Reality
Since my commitment to you here is “let’s feel better together,” I want to focus on the personal benefits for claiming your subjectivity. The first thing we’ll establish is that there is very, very little truly objective knowledge. As a person who studied science in college and continues to love the explorations of our world (and beyond!), science is often layered with impossible pressures to state absolute truths. In fact, science is the STUDY, not the determination or absolute or objective definition of our world. Scientists observe. They come up with ideas. They test these ideas, called hypotheses, and try to learn more. Most scientists have some subjective bias — after all, that’s the effective lure drawing them into a particular area of study.A recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, How Others See You, is a terrific example!2
It’s not easy to know how we come across to others, especially when we’re meeting people for the first time. Psychologist Erica Boothby says many of us underestimate how much other people actually like us. This week, we revisit one of our most popular episodes to look at how certain social illusions give us a distorted picture of ourselves.
As you learn listening to this episode (and I hope you will listen), the researcher and professor at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, uses her own life stories to illustrate her points. She is claiming her subjective reality and then mining it for insights about how we can become more effective humans, i.e. humans who feel better together. Then she goes one step further by teaching others about her research.In the case of her research, she has found we make up stories often about what others think of us — and we are often wrong. She recommends we speak up more openly and more often, to foster more and closer relationships. But also, to strengthen our own sense of self and reduce self-doubts, which helps us like ourselves more.It’s no coincidence that I’ve been feeling down about this newsletter and the lack of response I receive. My stats are going down a teeny bit. It led me to assume people don’t like it or it’s not helpful to you, but I must admit, I just don’t know! Life is amazing at what it serves up to us. I write because I like chewing on these ideas; they help reinforce my own subjective realities. If you also find you are feeling better together as we all read together, that’s a big bonus for me.This ability to claim our world view AND look the other way is another iteration of what I discussed earlier in this post:
Pop Quiz!
Here are two room photos. Are they two different rooms, do you think? They certainly look very different! Which is my office?
Surprise, it’s the same room — my office — where I was standing in the middle of the room, but looking in opposite directions. I was in the same exact place but I presented you with different perspectives. I cannot stress enough that we take one view all the damn time and assume we are seeing the whole picture. Again, this isn’t to get on anyone’s case (that is not useful) but it is to acknowledge that the brain likes shortcuts. And easy answers. And to do less work rather than more. So we can move on.But what if we are building false narratives about OURSELVES and others in our desire to move on quickly to the next thing? Consciousness demands we slow down and engage with the world, claiming our subjective views of it, then inquiring of others, “How do you see it?” It’s why I love travel so much as I get to leave my known world and explore unknown worlds. I get to experience the subjective realities of eating with fingers instead of utensils, of bathing communally before bed instead of not at all, of drinking warm beer instead of cold beer. Neither is right or wrong — all are subjective preferences.The most insidious way this yearning for objective truths undermines us is in the Department of Self-Acceptance and Self-Worth. There is that genetic and historic impulse to fit in, that once was essential for survival but no longer is. All the vast writing that has been done about the inner critic — and yet, it’s still here, alive and well, and in fact often kicking.
So How Do We Silence the Inner Critic?
By watching Ted Lasso! By getting therapy! And, by claiming our subjective realities and consciously rejecting the need for objective facts or views. More than rejecting them, I like to actively call them out as they are undermining our ability to co-habit this planet, undermining our ability to work with very different colleagues, and undermining our ability to be in loving relationships, especially in one with ourselves.I think we could lay many of our human challenges at the feet of this “Objectivity Rules” belief system, so I’m on a mission to dismantle it. It is not real — it’s a mirage we cling to in hopes of beefing up our own opinions, desires, status, authority — the list is endless. I believe we can each be far more successful in our personal life goals by claiming our subjective realities — and — making room for others’ subjective realities. I want to live in a world of conscious humans, humans who can see a bigger world by claiming the peculiarities of their own individual worlds.So I dare you to observe yourself for a few days. Question your thoughts. Ask yourself:
- Is this true for me or not?
- Where did I pick that up and do I want to keep it?
- What part of myself am I hiding because I’m pretending it’s not good?
- What objective ideas can I poke at and find the inconsistencies in?
- How can I live more and learn more?
- What pretend rules are stopping me from trying something new?
Then, report back! Let us know what pretend objective truths you dismantled and rejected.Here’s one last quote from Shankar Vedantam and the Hidden Brain podcast. I hope this teaser about social illusions will lure you over to it:But you also took this idea and built on it to suggest that it might be that this is not the only place in which we misjudge how other people think of us and how the interaction is going. Talk about how and when you decided that this was not just about the liking gap, but about a much larger set of phenomena that you eventually came to describe as social illusions.