Arthur Brooks

My podcast guest might be good.

I got to prepare for that thing.

And my stomach is rumbling.

I forgot to eat lunch.

And oh, yeah, the payment didn't come in for that thing.

It's so boring.

But Mother Nature wants you to be the star of that psychodrama all day long in your head.

That's what William James called a me-self, the me-self.

It's looking at yourself and thinking about yourself all day long.

And you need that for self-reference to make your way in the world.

If you don't understand what you're doing, you're going to be a pretty bad driver.

You're going to be in a traffic accident pretty quickly.

But there's also the I-self, which is looking out at the world, which is transcending yourself by looking out at the world in which you're one player, but you're only one player in it.

And it's interesting because transcendent experiences are those where the me-self disappears and the I-self becomes dominant.

There are times, actually, when they become confused, and that's kind of what a fugue state is psychologically, where you become disassociated with yourself in this weird way.

And all of us have experienced this.

I remember one time...

I had a lot on my mind and I was putting gas in my car and I was just like really worried about something.

It was back when I was a CEO and my life was like a living, like dystopian hell hole, right?

And everything was a problem every single day.