Identity & self-awareness: I vs me
In The Principles of Psychology (1890), the philosopher and psychologist William James distinguished between two parts of the self: the me and the I. The me is the self as ‘object’: it’s the person with your name, who has a certain appearance, a certain personal identity and social network. The me is what you see when you look in the mirror, or at your Facebook profile, what you consider when you think about your past achievements and your hopes for the future. On the other hand, the I is the self as ‘subject’: it’s the person looking through your eyes right now, experiencing the world. The I feels joy and pain and other sensations; it lives in the present.
When I’m with my toddler, the me is the person worried about all the emails building up. It’s the professor with obligations to my students and collaborators, the professional who craves respect and recognition, and the person who wishes they looked fitter and better rested. The I is the person who exists only in the moment, the person reading to a child, making lunch, or getting yelled at. Importantly, there’s often an inverse relationship between the me and the I. The more you think about the self as an object, the less you inhabit the self as a subject. The more you fret about what others think of you and the tenuousness of future success, the less you truly experience the present. Worrying about grant funding makes it difficult to appreciate snuggles from my daughter.
The relentless pressure of self-awareness is one reason why isolation can make us so anxious. Without others to pull our attention away from ourselves, we ruminate on our smallest imperfections. Both scientific studies and ancient wisdom suggest that one way to make the me more resilient (and less distressing) is to connect the self to other selves. Rather than defining me by a list of accolades or possessions, I can define it by those I help – such as my family.
The harsh light of objective self-awareness is one reason why many of us are drawn to alcohol and drugs: they dampen the activity of brain regions correlated with seeing the self as a me. A healthier option to reduce activity in these brain regions is meditation. Training the mind to focus on the I in the moment reduces the focus on the me, and increases feelings of connection with humanity. Recent research shows that taking small amounts of psilocybin also reduces activity in these me-oriented brain regions, making people feel closer to others and less afraid of dying.
Excerpts from the excellent ‘In the chaos of raising a toddler there lies a path to nirvana’ by Kurt Gray in Psyche.
