#78: Fix your self-compassion with the metaphysics of personal identity (and an Aeropress)
Your problem with self-compassion: the one that leads you to be kind and supportive to other people, but nasty and vindictive to yourself. One reason you struggle with the 'self' part of 'self-compassion' is that you view yourself as separate from other people. But what if you aren't? What if the gap between you and others is simply too small and inconsequential to support your difficult-to-shake belief that it's wrong to be nasty to people, unless the person you're being nasty to is yourself? Your imperfectionist friend is lobbing a giant metaphysics truth bomb that is going to blow apart your conviction that compassion is for everyone except you.
Find Kristin Neff's website about self-compassion here.
Reference:
Parfit, D. 1984: Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Episode transcript:
The difference between being nice to yourself and being nice to other people is smaller than you think.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello friends, how are you doing? The second podcast of 2024 has come around pretty fast, hasn’t it? I’m completely fine with getting January out of the way as quickly as possible, and maybe February too, but after that I’d like things to slow down a bit, please. Anyway. As you know, if you’ve ever listened to the intro to these episodes, visited my website, or just noticed my incredibly pedantic manner, I’m a philosopher. I’ve been a philosopher my entire adult life, starting from when I first went off to university aged 18 to study philosophy as an undergraduate. All my education has been in philosophy, and so has all my employment, except for 4 ill-advised years working in IT, and perhaps also excepting the 3-ish years I spent being a full-time mum, although answering relentless toddler ‘why’ questions probably counts as philosophy too. When I first got into philosophy, and actually throughout my entire time as a student, I was interested mainly in quite esoteric, theoretical topics. Things like time, causation, and personal identity. The sorts of issues that, as I sometimes wearily describe them these days, philosophers will probably still disagree about 500 years from now. I still have a soft spot for (and several unfinished writing projects about) the metaphysics of time, but increasingly I’ve found myself drawn more to philosophical issues that have more immediate practical relevance for everyone, not just those people trained in philosophy. Things like social and ethical issues around language and communication - I wrote a book about swearing that was published last November, and I’m working on a new one about indirect communication - sulking, flirting, passive aggression, things like that. The way I see it, this podcast and coaching (at least the way I do it) are extensions of this interest in applying philosophy to our everyday lives.These days, I am much more interested in the usefulness of philosophical views for making our lives go better than I am in the question of whether those views are actually true or not. Take episode #56, for example: ‘You're not weak-willed, according to Socrates’. Do I think that Socrates is correct about what sort of thing weakness of will is? I honestly don’t know, and I’m not sure I care very much either. What I do care about, and the reason I made that podcast episode, is that I think his view is useful. It’s useful in that it offers us a way to reframe our weak-willed moments in a way that, I hope, helps discourage us from thinking badly about ourselves, and suggests practical strategies we can use to ensure we don’t keep hitting the snooze button or putting off doing our boring admin tasks.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, in large part because it’s exciting to discover that theories and frameworks and ideas from philosophers can be applied in new and often unexpected ways to help us live happier lives. Thinking about philosophy in this way has given me a new wave of enthusiasm for it. What’s especially exciting for me is that I’ve recently been thinking about the potential to apply work in the metaphysics of personal identity in a way that is helpful in addressing the problems that lots of us have being compassionate to ourselves. Why is this especially exciting? Well, because, a long time ago, I wrote my PhD on personal identity. Back then, I was focused on issues that have nothing to do with coaching or living better or anything practical like that. It’s a happy surprise to find my thoughts turning back to issues that I spent a lot of time thinking about years ago, and seeing them in a new light, as tools that can help us be nicer to ourselves. Because we do - at least, most of the people I encounter in coaching sessions do - we do need to be nicer to ourselves. So many of us have no problem talking to ourselves in ways that we’d never dream of using with others. We tell ourselves we’re lazy, disappointing, disorganised, and not good enough. And yet we’re kind and gentle and encouraging to everyone else. When our best friend or our sibling or our colleague fails at something they’ve been working towards, we console them and help them view things in a positive light, and we encourage them not to give up and not to blame themselves. At one and the same time we’re abusive psychos and supportive friends, simply depending on whether it’s ourselves or someone else we’re talking to. One of the ways I encourage coaching clients to treat themselves with the same compassion with which they treat others is to shine a light on this double standard, ‘What would you say to your best friend if it was them experiencing this disappointment, rather than you?’ It can take a bit of mental shuffling, but eventually it’s possible to come round to a kinder way of talking to ourselves.
I’m far from being the only person to notice this double standard. The psychologist Kristin Neff, who I’ve talked about on this podcast before, is the absolute boss of self-compassion research and insights. On her website - which you should definitely visit if you struggle with this, because she has some fantastic resources, many of them free - there’s a big banner that says, ‘With self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.’ The message here is this: if you struggle with self-compassion, it’s not because you struggle with the ‘compassion’ bit. It’s the ‘self’ part of ‘self-compassion’ that you have a problem with. Somehow, all your kindness and consideration switches off when your attention turns to yourself. The question ‘Is it me who’s failed, or someone else?’ looms large for you when you’re deciding whether to engage compassion mode or psycho mode. But what is the distinction between you and other people? Maybe if you could reframe the way you view that, you’d find it easier, more natural and automatic, to be kind to yourself.
Here’s where the metaphysics of personal identity comes in. What makes you, today, the same person as you were yesterday, or last week, or last year, or when you were six years old? And what makes you a different, separate person to your next door neighbour, your sibling, and your classmates back when you were at school? Different phil osophers have different answers to these questions. For some, our identity over time, and our separation from other people, has to do with our bodies. What makes you today the same person as your six year old self is the fact that, if you were to trace your body back in space and time, you’d eventually arrive at your six year old self in your six year old body. And what makes you a separate person to your next door neighbour and everyone else is that you have different bodies. This is a common-sense view - if we’re searching for a friend in a crowd, we do it by searching for their body. What else could we do?! But there are problems with this view. One is that it’s not that helpful in explaining what makes you today the same person as your six year old self, because there’s an obvious sense in which your body is very different to the body of a six year old, unless you are a six year old, in which case, what are you doing listening to this podcast? You ought to be out falling off a bike or picking your nose or thinking about mermaids. Anyway, there’s an alternative to the body-based view of personal identity. The seventeenth century British philosopher John Locke thought that what makes you today the same person as your six year old self is certain psychological connections between you today and you when you were six - memory, in particular. You were the six year old whose experiences you can remember. And if you don’t remember back that far, then not to worry - if you can remember the experiences of an earlier stage of your life when you did remember being a six year old, that will do too. What makes you the same person over time is the existence of memory connections like this. And what makes you different from other people is that you don’t remember their experiences.
There are plenty of problems with Locke’s memory based view of personal identity, just as there are problems with body-based views of personal identity. Come to think of it there are problems with every view of personal identity that philosophers have ever dreamt up. We don’t need to get into all that. But one thing that almost all philosophical views of personal identity have in common is that they think there is such a thing as personal identity. In other words, they take for granted that you today really are the same person as your six year old self - we just need to work out a coherent way to explain how and why. And they take for granted that you really are a different person from everyone who isn’t you - fellow philosophers, forgive my sloppy language here - again, we just need to work out a coherent way to explain what makes you different and separate.
Someone who didn’t think along these lines was the British philosopher Derek Parfit, who passed away fairly recently, in 2017. Parfit thought that we shouldn’t care as much as we do about personal identity. Because generally, we do care about this, a great deal. When you buy a lottery ticket, you know someone is going to win the prize, and it matters to you whether the winner is you or someone else. You might have the thought, ‘I hope I win, and not someone else’. Personal identity is baked into our moral attitudes too. When we blame someone for doing something wrong in the past, it’s important to us that the person we blame is the very same person as the person who did the wrong thing. And when we give someone credit for their past achievements, it’s important that the person getting the credit is the same person as the one who made the achievements.
Parfit, though, dreamt up various sci fi scenarios to demonstrate that there could conceivably be some cases where there’s simply no answer to the question ‘Is this future (or past) person me, or are they someone else?’ It’s not simply that we can’t work out the answer - it’s that there’s no answer to know. There’s no ‘further fact’, as Parfit put it, about whether that person is me or not, beyond whether there are certain sorts of psychological and bodily connections between me and that person. Suppose that people could reproduce by division, like amoebae, so that one person becomes two people, each with identical bodies, and each with memories of the pre-division person’s life. Is the pre-division person one or other or the post-division people? Or both? Or neither? Different philosophers give different answers here. Parfit’s answer is this: there’s nothing interesting or important to know. It’s not helpful to talk about personal identity here. The best we can do is describe the psychological and bodily connections between the person who divides and the two people who result from the division.
There are lots of people who find Parfit’s views about personal identity disturbing. What do you mean, we shouldn’t care as much as we do about personal identity? Does that mean I shouldn’t care about things like whether the lottery winner is me, and perhaps even whether I live or die? Parfit addressed this discomfort directly, and wrote that he found ‘the truth’ about personal identity - in other words, his view - ‘liberating and consoling’. He explains why in a passage from his 1984 book, Reasons and Persons, that became widely shared following his death. Quote:
‘When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.’
End quote. Now, Parfit’s emphasis here is that placing too much significance on personal identity leads us to care too much about ourselves and not enough about others. His view is a way out of that. But the opposite is also true, isn’t it? When it comes to your compassion, you care far more about being kind to other people than you do about being kind to yourself. What if you thought about yourself, and your relationship to other people, in the way that Parfit did? Harsh words can be hurtful, to you just as much as to anyone else. When you open your mouth to say something mean, you tell yourself that if the person who will be smarting from your words a moment from now is you rather than someone else, then the hurt doesn’t matter. It counts less if it’s you. You deserve it. Who cares? Whatever. But what’s the difference between hurting your future self, and hurting another person? For Parfit, the difference comes down to whether the person who ends up hurt has certain sorts of psychological connections and bodily connections to you. And that’s not much of a difference, really. That thing you like to say to yourself - ‘Hurting people is wrong, unless it’s just myself that I’m hurting’. If you reframe that to reflect Parfit’s view, you get something like, ‘Hurting people is wrong, unless they can remember your experiences’. And that doesn’t make much sense, does it? I mean: what? What does memory have to do with whether it’s ok to be mean to someone? It doesn’t. Hurting people is bad. It doesn’t matter what they remember. Nor does it matter whether it’s possible trace a path through space time between your body and theirs. Your ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s just myself that I’m hurting’ is nonsense. I mean, literally nonsense. Incoherent blather.
Now, I often encourage people to take the view that if there’s something they wouldn’t say to another person because it would be too mean, then they shouldn’t be saying it to themself. And, Kristin Neff, as we’ve heard, says on her website that ‘With self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.’ But if we adopt a Parfitian view of personal identity, we can express the underlying sentiment in a much more powerful and compelling way. Because this ‘treat yourself as kindly as you treat other people’ takes for granted the idea that there really is a big difference between you and other people. We just need to try to ignore it when we’re deciding who to be kind to. On Parfit’s view, though, there really isn’t a big difference at all. We might like to think there is, but - in Parfit’s words - ‘most of us have false beliefs about our own nature’.
All this is a lot to swallow. So, let me tell you about how, practically speaking, I use Parfit’s insights in my day to day life to be kinder to myself. It started with an Aeropress. You know, those brilliant little devices that are like big syringes, used for making coffee. They make the nicest coffee, and I use mine every morning. After using it, it needs a quick clean before I can use it again. Cleaning it isn’t a big headache and probably takes less than 30 seconds, but I’d got into the habit of not doing it - leaving it on the counter with the coffee grounds still in it, in need of a clean, which I’d end up needing to do the next time I wanted to make coffee. This never struck me as remotely problematic, and it never occurred to me that it was a habit I needed to change - until I went to stay at my sister’s house and used her Aeropress, which I cleaned immediately after I’d finished using it. Leaving it for my sister or her partner to find and clean was, I noticed, out of the question - it would be inconsiderate - and my double standard puzzled me. Why was it ok to leave this thing uncleaned for my future self, but unacceptably inconsiderate to leave it for my sister and her partner? I asked myself. Anyone who wants to use it and finds it dirty is going to be inconvenienced - whether that’s me or someone else. It occurred to me that, as it happened, I found it satisfying to act considerately towards other people, but not particularly satisfying to act considerately towards my future self. But that, I realised, was wrong. I started thinking of it this way: there’s some future person who will be happy to find the Aeropress clean and ready to use when they feel like making some coffee. That future person may or may not have certain psychological and bodily connections to me now. It’s satisfying to do considerate things that make people’s lives go a little bit better - and while I used to be in the habit of adding ‘Except when it’s me!’, I found it harder to make that exception when I framed the distinction between myself and other people in terms of psychological and bodily connections than when I framed it in terms of ‘me versus someone else’. Like Parfit, I found this made me feel that other people were closer. And that, in turn, made it easier to be compassionate to myself. I stopped thinking of being kind to myself as somehow selfish or indulgent or vain. Compassion isn’t any of these things. Instead, I’ve tried to adopt the principle ‘Do things to make future people’s lives a little more pleasant’, without taking any notice of whether the future person I’m acting considerately towards is me or someone else. I find I can apply this helpfully in all sorts of ways to make improvements in my own life. If I was working with another person on a shared project, I wouldn’t be so inconsiderate as to dump a ton of work on them at the last minute, so I try not to do that to myself either - which means I’m less inclined to procrastinate. If I had a guest coming to stay, I’d want them to find their room tidy and clean and devoid of piles of junk that they need to step over in order to get into bed - so I try to keep my own bedroom tidy, out of consideration to my future self, who will be heading up to bed later on. And so on.
You might be wondering: have I completely fixed my procrastination problem? Am I constantly bombarded with the considerate, thoughtful, loving actions of my goody-goody past self? Well, lol no. Unfortunately not. Did you miss the ‘imperfectionist’ part in the name of this podcast? Like any positive change, I’ve implemented it sketchily and imperfectly. There’s always room for improvement. But what has changed is that formerly compelling belief that if it’s just me who will be inconvenienced or hurt by something I do, then it doesn’t matter. That, I can see now, is nonsense. And that makes a big difference. Self-compassion is just compassion. People deserve compassion. You’re a person. You know what to do. Until next time, my imperfect little psychologically distinct person time-slices.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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