We are all narcissists

So I read a book “Concise Laws of Human Nature”

There, basically it is explained that we all love ourselves, therefore, we are all narcissistic by nature, just there are spectrums. The difference between a clinical NPD with those who don’t is how their love for themselves affects other people, or to be more accurate, how this love for themselves affects how they interact with other people.

I acknowledge that I love myself. I love the conditions that are bestowed upon myself. I love how my intellect helps me realize things people don’t. I love my curiosity about the universe and how the world really works in physics world. I actually am curious about things supernatural, but there are not many reliable documented sources about that. I also love the blessing that I have with my physique. Although I’m not at the top tier, but I would put myself somewhere about 8 relative to people around me, and maybe 6-7 relative to people in the world. See? Narcissist enough?

But sometimes I also hate myself. To be accurate, I hate the self that decides to do the stupid things I did, if that makes sense. I also hate myself for all the weakness that I have. I used to hate myself for being so introverted, but now I’m not anymore. Yeah, just like that.

But I think (one of) the worst kind of a person is a narcissist at the point they will be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Those people that don’t consider other people at all, unless those other people benefit themselves. Like she’s the center of the world where other people should revolve around her, and their problems don’t matter, only hers.

Being a Teenager is Hard

Looking back, as I was a teenager, I can only remember that I was angry at all times.

It’s not just hormones. Mostly it was a feeling of helplessness, a feeling of wanting to understand something: the world and how it works, but having no guidance. A feeling of wanting to be understood, but no one understands you. And as a teenager, your words were mostly underestimated. The adults thought you are not yet worthy to talk serious things with them.

Also in my case, there was a case of trying to fit in. For example, helping my friends cheated during exam, because of a feeling of wanting to feel accepted as part of a group. Wanting to be accepted was a normal thing as a human to feel. After all, we are a social being. But as a teenager, the friends at school were all the friends that I had. Being accepted by them is put on a pedestal of importance.

There was also another thing back when I was a teenager. First of all, disclaimer, I acted very goofily and stupidly (until now actually lmao), probably like an autistic person. And actually, even undiagnosed, I believe I am somewhat in that spectrum. Maybe between 1 and 10, I am at 2 or 3. That other thing when I was a teenager, was that I didn’t have a lot of friends to choose. My class consisted of 17 people. And I was one of the uncool ones. I didn’t know any new trend, I know nothing about brands, I know nothing about cars, all because first of all I was not rich. And then at that time I really didn’t care about those things at all. But because of that, I was not a part of the “cool” friends, but somehow they could still bear with me because of my academic excellence. Because I was uncool, I wanted to be part of that group so much, to be seen as “cool.” Then I tried to fit in. By doing the stupid things they did, although some of them were fun, I also did miserable things, for example when that time I was asked to be invited to someone’s sweet 17 party but I was not actually invited.

“WHY THE HECK DID I DO THAT?”

But through all of those mental challenges in the past, now I build my own personality. From seeing how people underestimate timid people, I know learn to be assertive. By seeing how people more often than not take for granted a nice but weak person, I choose to be strong. By seeing other things, I learned from them and choose on how I should become. I imagined myself as a robot learning things to acquire. And since I had become all those person, now I am a very “chameleony” person. Let’s say I could act. I could pretend to be someone I’m not, although I always kept my core values intact. Yeah, if you’re reading this and you know me, I think you know what my values are as a person. What I say my values are are not important, the important thing is how I am in a real life and how I interact with you.

Sometimes I wish I could divide myself, then the other me would be responsible as an uncertified psychologist or counsellor at some school, then I would teach the students about life and how it works, having experienced it. Because with my empathetic nature, I would be awesome at that, and I had been told by my private students when I made a private course when I was in high school, that I was a very good teacher. As I understood, I was able to position myself as someone who didn’t understand the courses, I was able to do this to an almost perfect degree, and I would guide them to understand them with simple logics.

Humans: Inherently good or bad?

This is a philosophical question many couldn’t answer.

But through this writing, I will write what I think about this question and what my answer be.

When I try to answer this question, first of all, there must be a definite definition about good and bad.
What dictates a thing to be good and bad?
This is a question that is hard to answer, because it will lead to longer discussion about what is universally good and universally bad.
Killing is bad, self defense is good.
There are many things that I imagine, if we discuss what is good and bad, it will lead to endless debate.

That’s why I will ignore those definitions altogether, and I will challenge the question itself.
The humans are neither good nor bad, there must be a definition, a new word, that best describes the characteristics of humans. For me personally, I think humans are “human” has a good ring to it.

To be honest, I think it is easy to answer this question if we learn why and how humans get their behavior. It is easy to be understood, if we know how evolution shaped our behavior. How evolution leads humans to us.

First of all, as I mentioned, the question whether we are inherently good or bad is not important, leads to a very subjective answer, and actually unanswerable, because humans are neither inherently good nor bad. By giving an answer to either humans are inherently good or humans are inherently bad, we have done wrong by giving simplification to factually complex reality of humans. We are neither, we are simply a product of evolution that is still evolving.

If we are hungry, we will try to find food and eat it to stay alive.
Maternal instinct to protect their babies comes from evolution. Without it, our babies wouldn’t survive. The mothers that don’t have strong maternal instinct get removed from gene pool. That’s why most mothers have maternal instinct (not all, because deviation will always happen).

There are some animals whose mother eat their children, for example hamster. Let’s say the cute little hamster doesn’t have maternal instinct, or to be more accurate, less developed. But they can still survive to this day. Because the instinct to eat their children is the way for their survival. Maybe the children are too many and where hamster evolves in the past, there are limited resources. Just maybe. I’m sure there are more accurate explanation than that.

If we are hungry and resources are limited, evolution guides us to be egoistic to survive, and of course there are deviations, there are still selfless people out there.

If we are full, have many resources, evolution guides us to be kind, helpful, because we humans can become the superior (dominating) species through cooperation. Without cooperation, maybe our kind is still prey to lions and tigers.

That’s why I think humans possess both of these qualities. All for survival. In each person, there is a battle between those qualities, the qualities that people call “good”, and the qualities people call “bad.” Good people can do bad things, vice versa, bad people can do good things. That’s as I mentioned two times already, definition of good and bad isn’t important at all. Humans do “human” things. Or in other words, if inherently means deep inside, then humans are inherently yin and yang. Let’s say yin represents bad and yang represents good (although it’s not true lmao.) Eliminating yin altogether is unwise, because humans do need yin to survive this far. If we are too altruistic or too yang, we would definitely be gone from gene pool, just like those animals in Australia that were too peaceful they become extinct, one of them is Dodo.

I am Blessed

I am blessed.
Just this afternoon, when riding my motorcycle, I dropped the phone in a crowded road.
The vehicles were not speeding, but nevertheless there are lots of them.
I was lucky to have this one truck driver, stopping right in front of my phone, letting the panic me who stopped in the middle of the road to take the phone.
I thanked him multiple times, bowing as a sign of respect, something I learned from the Japanese.

The fact that I dropped my phone, I didn’t realize it happened at all.
What I acknowledge to happen is the fact that my phone is okay when it could have been crushed by wheels.

That’s why I’m blessed.

Not because I’m lucky.

Not because trouble seems to be away from me.

But from the fact that I remove all misfortunes from my memory, and only remember the good things.

This way, my life is happier, and I can share my happiness to other people.

Candide

Candide or if translated, means optimism, is a book by Voltaire, a philosopher/thinker/whatever that means. Basically when Voltaire wrote this book, there was an ongoing philosophy by Leibniz, a church goer, which dictated that since God is benevolent, everything that has happened to us is the possible best thing.

When Voltaire wrote this book, he basically challenged the church, a dangerous move that could get his head on spikes, but he wrote it in such a way that it seemed harmless since it’s a fiction.

In this book, the main character, Candide, is not smart but very optimistic. He believed the Leibniz teaching since it was taught by his philosophy teacher, Dr. Pangloss, even though shit-tons of misfortunes have happened. Having finished this book will have you thinking a few things.

For me myself, the insight I got is:

Don’t judge someone based on intelligence.
See through the naivety.
Yes, there is evil in this world.
But some people are born pure.
Spare some space, give them a break.
Always see through the character.
Beneath that flesh, bone, and organs.
There is one invisible heart.
That connects us all beings.
After all, we are one.

Writing this is easy. But after imagining my annoying aunt who kept asking me when I got married, and another aunt who despised me because I rejected her proposal to match me with a distant relative, I find it very difficult to do so.

Long Story Short

I have my own rhythm, my own habit, and other personal things that I like.
Once I contemplated that if someone else comes into my life and start dictating what I should do and shouldn’t do.
How dare she?

Then recently I just watched a short film “Long Story Short” episode 2.
Inside, basically there is a conflict between a brother and a sister.
At one scene, the sister points out his brother’s bad habits, like not checking in with his family, or he’s too egoistic.
Sometimes we have bad habits.
And by connecting with someone close,
those bad habits can be pointed out, therefore it can help us grow
to become a better version of ourselves.

Things No One Taught Us About Love: Part II Final

I have read the whole book.

Yes as I have mentioned in part 1, basically it doesn’t answer my curiosity of how love between two people works. Instead it tells me the nature of love, which in itself is not romantic love at all. It is a state of being, of metta, of universal love. The feeling of wanting someone to feel happiness. He emphasizes us to have this kind of love be built upon ourselves.

His take on relationship between two people is very wise and it feels like it comes from true love: loving yourself first then you love another person. But the be honest it’s nothing I don’t already know, like respecting boundaries, lowering expectations, go easy on people, etc. But maybe for some people who do a little thinking or if you listen to relationship gurus who tells you the bare minimums for men, you should definitely read this book and rewire your brain before it’s too late.

The only thing I hoped were answered in this book was how people fall (or as he preferred, rise) in love in the first place. This one was not found in his book. Maybe if you know someone is the one, you will know, thus its absence.

Respect and cowardice

Just last night I had a lot of uncontrollable laughs. I laughed because I watched a lot of Pinkan Mambo compilation videos and Lina Mukherje. For Lina “Queen of Garmek,” because that was my first time being exposed to her contents. I was very much surprised by how insightful she was. After all, she was famous for being a little cray-cray. And apparently she learned from her experiences and contemplated from it. While listening to what she had learned from her experiences, I was reminded that there’s no one true recipe in life.

How I came to that conclusion was because I also realized everyone’s experiences are different. If Lina did something and faced injustice, doesn’t mean by following the same recipe, others will suffer the same fate. But one thing I appreciated about Lina was that she was wise enough to declare that her theory came from her experiences, not a rule that everyone should abide by.

Only after you respect yourself then others could respect you, too. Respecting yourself means you know exactly what you want and you go with it. That’s why I respected my angry neighbor who knew her boundaries and dared to face annoying neighbors, rather than my cowardly ex who was afraid of confrontations, with excuse such as avoiding conflicts. Avoiding unnecessary conflict sure is a must, but there are some problems we should dare face forward.

A few days ago, when driving a car, my car hit another car. My fault. My mother was in the car.
After the hit, both cars were moved to side of the road. For things like this, you have to be brave and face responsibility. My mom, scared, told me not to go down from the car. Like, what the f was that supposed to mean? I hit another car. My fault. And you expect them to come to our car while we sat like a coward? Needless to say I didn’t listen to the stupid suggestion. I came down and everything went well. I treated them with respect and thankfully they were both good people who knew mistakes happen. I asked for forgiveness, spent a little money, and we were both on our way.

In the end what I wanted to say was: I hate cowardice. Like, I really really hate cowardice. That cowardice is fine if you are by yourself, just don’t drag me into your cowardice lifestyle.