Seeing Yourself the Way Someone Else Does Is Not a Personality, It's a Virtue

This article, and an accompanying X thread, have been widely shared among my circle. The gist is plain enough: Younger Americans are losing the interest and possibly the capacity to see themselves the way other people see them.

That’s at least how I define “conscientiousness,” and it seems to accord with some of the behaviors that are used to exemplify its decline. What’s confusing though is the way the author of the piece seems to go back and forth between calling this is a “personality” and calling it a “skill.” I agree that conscientiousness and neuroticism are relevant to personalities, and maybe that’s the best category to put them in. But to be honest, I think stuff like calling conscientiousness a personality trait is part of what got us all into this mess.

Here’s a line from the article that’s worth highlighting:

The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting.”

But here’s the thing: Real-life commitments don’t feel messy and effortful. They are messy and effortful. I emphatically agree with the author that our digital habits make the friction of offline life less tolerable; in fact, there’s a halfway decent book about this. But something else that makes this friction less tolerable is hiding humane or inhumane traits behind the language of personality.

What I genuinely believe has happened is that the language of personality and identity has made conscientiousness almost impossible. To really see myself the way someone else would see me implies a loss (even if temporary) of selfhood that is unthinkable. No; for Millennials, their entire world—education, politics, pop culture, you name it—has been predicated on the same essential premise: “I am what I am and you must accommodate me.” The purpose of all these zealous personality tests and the cultish communities that form around them is to reinforce the ironclad law that my relationship to you begins and ends with recognition of who I am. I am an INFJ. I am an Enneagram 5. I am an introvert. I am a verbal processor. I am a visual thinker. I am what I am, and you must accommodate me.

There are two implications within this mentality. The first is that I, my nature, is settled, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. There’s a humane appeal going on here, like “Born this way.” But of course in many, perhaps most, aspects of life, this isn’t true. Personality profiling cultivates a religious attachment to a particular psychological category, but the reality is that we all change, frequently and sometimes without even realizing it. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how a la mode it is for people to stiff-arm the suggestion that they might have changed, and instead point the finger at everyone else around them?

Admitting that you’ve changed requires some humility, because it admits fault (either you’ve changed for the better, in which case you were wrong before, or you’ve changed for the worse, in which case you’re wrong now), and punctures the image of ourselves as immutable. I actually think most of the time it’s very refreshing to hear someone acknowledge how they’ve changed; there’s something respectable about that kind of, well, conscientiousness. But it’s rare to get this.

The second implication of “I am what I am, and you must accommodate me” is this: “I” am never “you.” You must accommodate me, because my personality, which demands patience and unselfishness from you, is good and essential. But this can never be flipped. Your personality cannot demand the same from me. If you try, I will talk a lot about “boundaries” and how self-care demands I don’t wear myself out for others.

This is, in essence, the purest lack of conscientiousness. The inability to see yourself as someone else might reaches its climax in demands you lay on the world that cannot be asked of you in return. If non-conscientiousness were a religion, the tweet below would be its best evangelistic tract:

Note well where this came from: A therapist. For all the (legitimate) concern about AI’s tendency to be syncophantic with its users, someone should point out that both the therapeutic and higher education industries mastered this some time ago. Maybe I’m projecting my own lack of virtue here, but “Your peace is the biggest sign of what belongs in your life” is exactly what I’d say to a customer I really wanted to keep cutting those checks. I wouldn’t worry too much about this person abandoning their children, or betraying a spouse, or cutting and running from a beloved friend, or simply stop helping people past 8PM. I just need them to come back.

It’s obviously false on its face. Nobody would stand over a 17 year old girl exhausted from trying to finish an important college entrance essay and scream, “IF IT DRAINS YOU, IT’S NOT FOR YOU.” This therapist wasn’t saying that unquestionably beneficial things like college degrees, high powered jobs, and expensive therapy sessions aren’t for you if they drain you. The therapist was saying that questionable things like other people should be tossed if they wear you out.

But, again, the big thing here is that this mentality can never be pointed at oneself. There’s no hint in this mantra that I might be the one that drains someone else. Who was catching my vomit at 2AM when I was a toddler? Who was driving 60 minutes round trip to pick me up when I couldn’t drive? Who was slicing up their day, their week, their life, to give me a piece of it? Whoever that was, maybe they should go into a wormhole like Interstellar, find the moment right before they met/conceived me, and start yelling, “ANYTHING MEANT FOR YOU WILL NOT EXHAUST YOU.”

At the end of the day, here’s what I think is happening:

1. Our modern lives are increasingly automated, which means we rely on other human beings less and less.

2. This technological disfiguring of reality gives the illusion of being able to move smoothly through life on one’s own.

3. Therapeutic models of spirituality work well with digital liturgies of self-preoccupation. It’s easy to feel like the “main character” in curated technological existence. So the “main character” ethos of self-help feels more plausible.

4. Declines of conscientiousness harm the young most of all, because it’s the young who are defined by relationships and commitments they haven’t made yet.

5. The line between the inability to see yourself from another’s perspective and the unwillingness to see is very thin.

So how do you cultivate conscientiousness? Well, the best way I know to not think of yourself as the main character is to actually be in situations where it’s impossible to think that. One of the hardest stretches of my professional life was the first two or three years into my current role in publishing. The company I work for is outstanding, the managers I’ve had are all kind, generous, patient people, and the work itself is rewarding. So what was hard? Being in a room with brilliant, talented people, making high level decisions about other brilliant, talented writers. When I started this job I thought I was a good writer. And I probably was. But I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, and the work itself exposed me to this reality again and again. I got a new view of myself because I had to.

Main character syndrome feasts on people who retreat from these kinds of relationships. The villifcation of insecurity—the idea that not feeling 100% amazing about yourself all the time is a problem that must be fixed—is main character syndrome. The baptism of antisocial tendencies under the rubic of “personality” is main character syndrome.

Here’s the secret: In life, you will feel bad. Period, end of story. There’s no way to avoid. But the question is: Why will you feel bad? You can feel bad either because your honest relationships keep you humble, and your love for others brings you out of yourself enough to exhaust you; or, you can feel bad because you spend your life avoiding these things, and realize only when it’s too late that you self-helped yourself out of the things that give life meaning. You’ll feel bad when it dawns on you that you were never the main character, but you did become the only character, and you’ll wish so much that someone had explained the difference.