Chris Williamson

Why is self-awareness a problem?

Yeah, you've got this line, self-awareness is a sort of poison that we each consume upon birth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How much of that do you think is just us all coming up with some fancy philosophical explanation for our own idiosyncratic experience of the world that you have a bit of a grasp of the awe and a bit of a grasp of the dread and some people are almost all dread and some people are almost all awe and each of them kind of create their own philosophical views of the world and the universe based around just

Well, this is my typical daily affect.

This is my typical experience of things.

If consciousness is a mystery that can't understand itself, does that mean that the human condition is just fundamentally tragic?

Is there a way to become self-aware without it becoming self-destructive?

I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes, that there's a kind of

enjoyment, freedom.

There's a freedom in naivety would be a way to put it.

And, um, that there, uh,

the less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be.

There's complexity and responsibility and self-doubt and self-esteem issues come in.

And there's an awareness of what I could have done.

Standards kind of begin to rise, but in kind of squirrely ways about virtue.

If you've got a critical mind, you find an ever-increasing number of ways to derogate success, even if you manage to achieve the success.

Because

You were aware of all of the ways that you might have lied or cajoled or coerced or not been fully virtuous en route to achieving the thing.