Listening to Daring Greatly these days on my walks. I have to say the book did not get off to a promising start when the author expresses great astonishment that what she wrote six years ago is still true of the human condition. At that point, I was not sure if I wanted to invest the next several hours on this - one would hope a life time of research on a topic would last much longer than six years. But I did continue listening out of curiosity and learned a lot in the process.
That shame or fear of being ordinary and presumably invisible is rooted in the culture of scarcity which she describes thusly:
When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.
A few days ago, I was talking to high-school junior about Instagram and his views of what the about its deleterious effects on the mental health of young girls that has been the subject of hews yet again. This kid was of the opinion that the problem is high-school culture and it always has been, social media is only an amplifier of what is bad and wrong with it. This somewhat echoes the sentiments of a former Facebook algorithm developer who was being interviewed by NPR.
Brene Brown's book seem to connect the dots a bit better for me. If we go with her theory that there is a culture of shame being fed by one of scarcity, it creates the perfect conditions for the likes of Facebook to gain power and control over our lives. It makes everybody who shares and overshares on social media appear narcissistic and as Brown says the desire to name and shame them for it is exactly the worst thing to do, it would turn into a vicious cycle.
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