The Enemy Within

If I asked you who you are, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Would it be how you’re feeling right now, what you’re doing, thinking, and experiencing at this exact moment? Or would you think about your memories, and the things you’ve been through that brought you here?

When it comes right down to it, who you are is who you remember yourself being. A collection of memories that you use to paint a picture of the person you see as you. And these memories are notoriously wrong.

Daniel Kahneman, a brilliant psychologist and economist, introduced us to the two sides of ourselves, the experiencing self and the remembering self. Pitting these two sides against each other, he showed that the things we experience and how we remember them are wildly different, thanks to what’s known as duration neglect and the peak-end rule.^{Note 1}

To prove this, Kahneman decided to torture a few people.

The cold-hand experiment he and his team designed was simple enough. Participants put one of their hands in painfully cold water, and regularly recorded how much pain they were in.

Each person did it twice, alternating hands. One hand was kept in the water for 60 seconds in 14° Celsius, cold enough to hurt but not cold enough for anyone to want to quit before the time was up.

The other hand was left in for 90 seconds. The first minute was exactly the same temperature as before, but for the last 30 seconds a small blast of warm water was added to raise the temperature by about 1°, just enough to make it slightly less painful.

Some people started with the short one, some with the long. Some with their left hands, and some with the right.

When they’d finished both rounds, the experimenters gave them a choice. They had to repeat one of them, whichever one they wanted.

So which one would you pick? 60 seconds of pain, or the exact same 60 seconds of pain, but with an extra 30 seconds of slightly less pain?

It’s obvious which one is better sitting here reading about it. Pick the shorter experience and save yourself from 30 seconds of needless pain!

At least that’s what our experiencing self wants. Our remembering self has other ideas, and a full 80% of people chose to suffer through the long exposure all over again.

The experiment showed that the longer experience is the one participants remembered as better overall. All of them knew it was longer, the experimenters made it clear. But because it ended with slightly less pain than the shorter one, it was remembered more fondly.

And this is how we make all our choices. We pick the option we like the most, and since our memory is the one giving us that information, what we’re really doing is picking better memories over poorer ones.

No matter what we experience in life, all we get to keep from it is our memories. Who we are has very little to do with what we’ve gone through, and everything to do with how we remember it. And our remembering self is only interested in one thing.

Telling our story.

Our obsession with stories can be seen everywhere in our lives. If we’ve spent years in a good relationship with someone but it ends badly, the story is more focused on the breakup, despite it only being a fraction of the overall relationship that was mostly filled with good times. And this doesn’t just apply to ourselves.

When we hear about other people’s lives, we also judge it through the lens of their overall story, not their actual experiences. The psychologist Ed Diener did a study to prove this.^{Note 2} He wrote a fictional story about a woman named Jen, who died in a car crash. In one version of the story, Jen lived a very happy life, spending her time doing what she enjoyed and surrounded by friends. In the other version, Jen was given 5 extra years before her fatal car crash, but they were less happy years, still pleasant, but not as good as before.

I think you’ve picked up on the pattern by now, the results were clearly in favour of the shorter life with no dip in happiness at the end. Because it’s a better overall story for Jen. And in a story, the peaks and the end seem to matter, but how long it takes does not.

We all agree that pain should be quick (if at all), and that pleasure should last as long as possible. It’s hard to argue against that, but we now know that our memory doesn’t work that way. It holds onto the most intense moment, or the peak of the experience, and how we felt at the end of it. Our memory doesn’t care how long it lasted, it only cares about the highest high, or the lowest low, and how things ended.

Even in situations where it seems the length of the experience must surely matter, we are making this mistake. Childbirth is obviously better if it lasts for 6 hours instead of 24. But this has nothing to do with how long it lasts, and everything to do with how much more drained and defeated the mother feels after each passing hour. The end gets progressively worse and worse, and so does the story along with it.

The opposite is also true. A week-long holiday is better than just a weekend, but that is only because we feel more refreshed and relaxed with each passing day, making the ending progressively better. The better the ending, the better our overall memory, and the better the story.

It turns out that the saying all’s well that ends well is almost true. It just needs one extra line. All’s well that ends well and peaks well.

Our experiencing self is the part of us that focuses on how something feels right now. It’s the main character of our story, and cares about whether we are feeling pleasure or pain or something in between, in the here and now. But the remembering self is the narrator of our story, and is entirely focused on how something felt as a whole. How the story looks from start to finish.

We all want our lives to be a good story. We all want to be the hero. But the fact is we can’t trust our memory to tell us the true story. It will always ignore the real experience we went through, and only take into account the peaks and ending.

Why would we have developed a brain that cares less about what we actually went through, and more about how good of a story we can make of it afterwards? Wouldn’t it be much better for our survival to remember exactly how much pain or pleasure we experienced, regardless of how good the overall story is? How did our story become the most important thing for human beings, more important than avoiding needless suffering?

Well, it’s simple really. Our story is what other people will judge us on.

Our peaks and endings. Our biggest successes, worst failures, and how it all resolved itself. When we compare ourselves to other people, these are the moments we use to do it. Which is why a good story is the most valuable thing to have, and a bad story is the root of your insecurity.

We know that we still associate the negative judgement of others with a decreased chance of survival. And the story of who we are, our sense of self, is the benchmark we use to measure exactly how negative those judgements are likely to be.

If we want to take control of who we are and how good we feel about ourselves, this is the place to do it.

Because the truth is, stories are dangerous.

Heroes and Villains

Our story is what gives us a sense of self. Memory allows us to keep track of past experiences, but the stories we make from them can be as flexible as our imagination.

We can make a good experience worthless, or a bad experience life-changing. We can make ourselves the hero in every encounter we’ve ever had, or we can be the villain, responsible for every negative moment of our lives. We can literally rewrite our history so that our sense of self comes out looking exactly the way we want it to.

We do this using defence mechanisms. Denial, repression, projection, and rationalisation are all just tools we use to rewrite our past and protect our story.

This new story we tell ourselves is a lie, but we don’t care. Our love of a good story is all that matters. It takes courage to stop the lie in its tracks, before it can take hold. Most people are happy to accept any story that makes them feel better about who they are. And the consequence of this is a world full of frightened people, who lie to themselves to make them feel stronger, smarter, and braver than they actually are.

Alfred Adler wrote about the dangers of giving meaning to our experiences, explaining that “we do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.”^{Note 3}

He rejected the idea of determinism, that the outcome of an experience is determined by the experience itself. It’s the meaning we give to our experiences, or rather, how we fit them into the story of who we are, that ultimately creates our sense of self.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if life was only filled with good experiences. But we all know that’s not how it goes. When bad things happen that can’t be twisted into something positive, we feel like our story’s been damaged forever. Our sense of self has been changed in ways we never wanted and can never fix.

We’ve all felt this way at some point, so I don’t need to describe how life-shattering it feels.

The further we are from living the story we want, the more threatened our sense of self becomes. If you’re insecure, it’s because you currently have a fragile sense of self. You don’t like the story of your life so far.

Having no idea where your story’s going, or feeling threatened by anything that impacts your life, makes you vulnerable to using destructive defence mechanisms. You will do whatever you can to protect yourself, including trying to escape from your story altogether, which is why we get addicted to things like drugs and alcohol, or anything that numbs us.

We all fear the irreversible. We fear things that will change who we are forever… things that will change our story so badly that it can’t be undone.

And the weaker our sense of self is, the more afraid of this we are.

There is only one way out of this situation, and that’s developing a stronger sense of self. One that isn’t threatened by the challenges of life and can face up to our fears. Having a strong sense of self means you can handle pretty much anything. You’re confident you can incorporate life’s varied experiences into the story of who you are, and you aren’t threatened by any changes you might have to make. You don’t need to fear the irreversible, because your story is flexible enough to take whatever life throws at you.

But this is a lot easier said than done. There are many traps along the road to confidence, and the most common one can be summed up in the popular phrase “fake it till you make it”.

Fake Confidence

I grew up in a family full of strong and smart women. My mother is a force of nature, tough, hard-working, and fierce when it comes to protecting her family. My six sisters all took after her. Good at pretty much everything they tried, all of them are super high achievers and have gone on to do some seriously impressive things. So far, the older ones have already covered; being a lawyer for the Australian Government, getting a master’s degree in psychology, working for child protection services, and becoming a doctor.

I’m more like my dad.

Optimistic and good natured, sure, but also borderline incompetent in comparison.

I’ve always considered myself an underachiever. And compared to my sisters, that’s exactly what I am.

But around midway through high school, I stumbled upon a neat little trick that I thought would finally turn the tables on my siblings once and for all.

I realised I could just fake it.

I couldn’t actually be better than my siblings, but I could sure as hell act like I was.

So that’s exactly what I did. For years, slowly getting better and better as I went. And it worked. Well, sort of. My sisters started to believe I actually was confident. And by the time I was graduating school, a big part of how people saw me was the guy that could stay cool under pressure, was always relaxed and didn’t sweat the little things. I was the most confident sibling, and despite all their incredible achievements, it seemed like I had won the best prize of all. Except for one, teeny tiny little problem.

It wasn’t real.

I left school way more insecure than when I started.

Faking confidence changed how people saw me, but it didn’t change how I saw myself. Worse than that, it made me feel like I had a dark and terrible secret, something to hide that made it even harder to let people into my life. Putting up barriers between myself and the people closest to me felt like a good way to protect against outside influences, so I could focus more on feeling confident independently. But it was a trap. I was just digging myself deeper and deeper into the pit of insecurity.

Adler knew that you can’t define yourself outside of the context of everyone else around you. And you certainly can’t feel good about yourself without considering your place in your relationships and wider society. According to Adler, all of our problems in life come from our failure to develop “social interest”.^{Note 4} Without this crucial feeling that you belong with the people around you, you’ll lose confidence that your problems can be solved using cooperation, and instead resort to selfish tactics that only benefit you, like manipulation, cruelty, violence, and yes, even pretending to be something you’re not.

I never believed the lie I was trying to convince the world, but there’s an even greater threat that comes with “faking it till you make it”. You might actually start to believe your own bullshit. And there is nothing more dangerous than developing your own private definition of success.

Murderers can feel powerful and important while taking another’s life,^{Note 5} but to the rest of us they are the worst sort of people imaginable. This feeling of “confidence” is only real to themselves.

Okay, murderers are an extreme example, but this sort of private confidence can be found everywhere. A person who’s cruel to people who they think they’re better than feels good about themselves while they’re doing it, but to everyone else they’re a horrible person that we want nothing to do with.

Even young kids, with all their sweetness and innocence, are terrible human beings when it comes right down to it. Without abstract thinking, they lack empathy and only feel confident because as far as they are aware the world literally revolves around them. And unfortunately, some people never really grow out of this.

Studies have shown that narcissism is just another way people compensate for insecurity. Narcissistic people act like they’re the best thing that’s ever existed because deep down they feel the exact opposite.^{Note 6} This is very different to someone who’s a genuine psychopath mind you. Those narcissistic beliefs are actually real, but they are the rare exception. Most of the time, when you come across someone acting like a narcissist it’s safe to assume they’re deeply insecure.

This would explain the apparent rise in narcissistic behaviours, as our modern world makes it harder and harder to feel confident, especially with the rise of social media and all of the added comparisons it forces on us. More and more people are using narcissism to compensate.^{Note 7}

But no matter how confident you act, or how much you try to hide behind narcissism, you will never get rid of your insecurity. Faking it till you make it does not work.

In the end, if all you care about is yourself, you’ll lose touch with what real confidence is. You’ll invent your own version of it instead that, at best, only benefits you, and at worst actually harms others around you.

This is a dead end, and a trap that too many people fall into.

As Adler so perfectly explains, “a word which meant something to one person only would really be meaningless. It is the same with our aims and actions; their only meaning is their meaning for others.”^{Note 8}

To become someone truly confident, you can’t only consider yourself. You have to think about your impact on everyone else too.

Every influential person in history, every genius we idolise and leader we admire all had one very important thing in common. The things they did had an extreme impact on others. The more positive we believe that impact was, the more we revere them today. This stays true even if the majority of people disagree with you, which is why there are groups out there that idolise some truly horrible people.

Yet, for every “Einstein” throughout history there are countless others who probably thought they were just as brilliant, and it’s entirely possible they were. But without an accomplishment that contributes to a large enough group, they’ll never get the same level of recognition for it.

This isn’t supposed to be discouraging. I’m not suggesting that you’ll only ever feel good about yourself if you can make an enormous contribution to mankind and go down in history. That’s not the point that Adler was trying to make.

He was giving us a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that any of the founding fathers of psychology ever gave us. It will guide us along the most difficult path there is, the one that leads to the place we’re all trying to get to.

Adler gave us the map to finding confidence.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ve only just begun.

Different Paths, Same Purpose

There are as many ways to try and boost your confidence as there are people on this planet. Like literally. We all have different strategies for it, and we’ve already discussed a few of the worst ones. But now it’s time to pull back the veil and see just how much all of these strategies have in common.

The good, the bad, and the ugly paths all share the same purpose. We’re all just trying to feel good about who we are.

Some people choose to follow the self-improvement paths to build confidence. The logic is straightforward: the better you are, the more you’ll like who you are. It’s true to a point, but most people have no idea what the real benefit of self-improvement is. It’s an important step on the road to confidence, but not for the reason everyone thinks. There’s a lot we need to talk about here, so we’ll save it for later, but it’s important to realise this is just one of many ways that people try to build confidence, and far from the most common.

Other people go for the altruistic path, that of kindness, caring, giving, and supporting others. This is by far the one with the most positive side effects for the world as a whole. Helping others and being good to the people around you doesn’t just make us feel better about ourselves, it helps others feel better about themselves as well. And if you make people feel good about themselves, people reveal their best selves. But even this approach seems to fail far too often. Giving too much can lead to people-pleasing, and kindness can be taken advantage of. Over time, our focus on others can make us neglect ourselves, and slowly but surely we’ll feel less secure with our own lives. There’s much more to say about the right and wrong ways to contribute to others, so again, we’ll come back to this later.

So how do these strategies compare to the more destructive paths? Being narcissistic, judgemental or cruel may seem like a counter-intuitive way to make yourself more confident, but it’s actually a pretty effective short term strategy.

By putting others down, you push yourself up. If you can’t feel good about yourself honestly, then at least you can feel good about yourself in comparison to someone else. Better to be you than that useless person right? And the horrible thing is that the worse you can make that person feel about themselves, the more true this becomes.

It’s an attempt to cover up how insecure you are, nothing more. And it leads to fake beliefs about how you actually feel about yourself.^{Note 9} Thinking that you’re better than others doesn’t make it true, but believing it can help ease the pain of how much you don’t like who you are. At least for the moment.

All the worst people you know have fallen into this vicious cycle. They’re trying to escape themselves, to end the suffering they’re putting themselves through by hating who they are.

It’s a terrible strategy, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to fail in the long run. But that’s all some people know.

The rest of us wonder how these sorts of people sleep at night. How do they go home and rest peacefully after spending all day treating others so horribly? The truth is, to be like this, a person has to truly feel like they have no other options. The combination of being taught bad tactics from a young age, as well as not being taught healthy alternatives, basically screws these people up for life. Like a small child, who has no idea how to get what it wants, so it just screams loudly instead.

They’re trying to protect their self-identity, to improve the story of their life, and achieve the things they want to achieve, just like the rest of us. They just have really terrible ways of going about it, and little hope of learning better ones.

Adler spoke empathetically about these sorts of people. We all know what it’s like to feel insecure with ourselves and want to change. But what happens to people who genuinely believe that there’s nothing they can do about it? That no amount of effort could change the things they don’t like about themselves or the situations they find themselves in?

We can’t live with these sorts of feelings for long. Sooner or later we’ll have to do something to make ourselves feel better. Even if that something ends up doing more harm than good. As Adler puts it, “his feelings of inferiority will accumulate, because the situation which produces them remains unaltered. The provocation is still there. Every step he takes will lead him farther into self-deception, and all his problems will press in upon him with greater and greater urgency.”^{Note 10}

From the outside it will seem like they’re acting horribly for no reason other than they are just a horrible person. But, if we understand that they’re trying to feel good about themselves just like the rest of us, it starts to make sense.

A person that feels weak in most of their daily life will look for places they can feel strong. They don’t know how to actually become stronger, so they settle for appearing stronger in their own eyes. A common example of this is the person who feels powerless in their work environment, so acts dominating towards their family at home.

This delusional attempt at confidence can take many different shapes. The thing they all have in common is that it won’t actually fix the issue, because it does nothing to resolve the source of the person’s insecurity. They will keep feeling bad about themselves, and keep looking for more and more extreme ways to cover it up.

What everyone who uses these strategies has in common is that they need them. They don’t have the skills or confidence to behave any other way.

Does that make them a bad person? Or does it simply mean they’re incomplete, and that there are vital steps along the path to maturity they never took.

Is the answer to mimic them, and push back using the same poor behaviour? Or is it to be the example that they likely never had.

It’s easy to say that bad people have a choice, that they choose to be cruel, hostile, and selfish. But we only say this because we have a choice, we know better, and we assume they do too.

We’ve tried blaming bad people. We’ve tried labelling them as evil and demanding they change. We’ve tried holding them accountable for their behaviour. But, it has never, ever worked.

Maybe it’s time we saw them as the incomplete people that they are. Maybe we should focus on giving them what they’re missing, and offering them real alternatives, instead of demanding they stop using the only tools they have.

Maybe it’s time we start sympathising with people who don’t know how to speak kindly, and care about others.

It’s hard to imagine a worse way to live. Or a lonelier one.

Adler believed that being a kind and compassionate person is something everyone is capable of, that “everybody has the capacity to be interested in others; but this capacity must be trained and exercised or its development will be frustrated.”^{Note 11} When we come across cruel people, we know that they don’t understand the value of cooperation, and never learned how to act in harmony with the world around them.

The irony of course is that if the modern world didn’t force us all to cooperate together, these sorts of people wouldn’t have even survived. We’re all forced to interact with people we don’t like. We work with them, sell to them, ride next to them on the bus, even let our children play with theirs at school. Cooperation is almost impossible to avoid in the modern world. But in the not too distant past, making enemies with the people around you meant you’d lose the protection of the tribe, along with your chances of survival. Which means it’s likely these sorts of people are a modern problem, a consequence of a world where being liked by others is no longer a matter of life and death.

Regardless of the path you’re on, your reason for walking it is exactly the same as everyone else’s.

You aren’t looking for wealth, or status, or safety. You aren’t trying to find love, or meaning, or even happiness. You’re playing the only game in town, and pursuing the only goal there is. You’re trying to find confidence.

This is the challenge we face in the modern world. It’s the uphill battle we’re all struggling to climb.

Before we can talk about the way through this mess, we first need to take a brief look at what happens when we lose this battle entirely.