“I” is a verb; self is an ongoing activity. Body is a noun; a man’s physical self, a genetic, done-deal. A man’s personality-self, however, is forever a-work-in-progress, which is carried out by endless story-telling about oneself.
Even amongst the ordinary, periodic note is made regarding humans’ irrepressible urge to incessantly talk about themselves, commonly followed by the mumbling of such words as: vanity, ego, self-centeredness, and so on. But as is the ever present case: life has things so arranged in the general population that no one, when they play the reoccurring role of part time detective, ever finds what they hear their self say they are looking for – for the simple, but unrealized reason that, what they are always actually looking for is their self.
From the singular minority perspective, every word a majority man speaks, not related to survival, is part of his attempt to find his self. While that may sound intriguing, it is less than maximally accurate. All of men’s non-essential, recreational chit chat, is their brain struggling to comprehend what it is doing in consciousness, and since what occurs in consciousness is based on the collateral sensation that there is a self in the brain that is having the consciousness, it is easy for life to make men take the brain’s attempted self-looking as them searching for themselves, (or as they like to say: “their true self”). It is a term that never fails to elicit a giggle from giraffes and life’s brother in law.
When not imperatively engaged in survival activity, men will be found sometimes doing, but all the time story-telling. Done to others when possible, but incessantly to themselves; and no matter what the subject appears to be, the subject is always them.
Men unremittingly tell stories about themselves in bits and pieces, and in extended essays. It is stories about them in the past; stories about them come the future; stories about them that are flattering and sometimes embarrassing. The nature of the story is unimportant, all that matters is that the story is about the story teller; that the story is about oneself. (More precisely put: what is taking place is the brain’s consciousness, talking about that very neural sensation it makes men call their, self and that it created in them to begin with. (Do any of you children recognize that award winning science project: The Closed-Loop, Self-Referential, House-Of-Self-Serving-Mirrors? What public school students call: “Me.”)
J.