My New Personal Goal
I’ve clearly established that bragging of any sort annoys me to no end on LinkedIn. I will stick with the point that I made when I started my content journey on the platform: using social media, whether through seeking engagements or by posting self congratulatory messages to prop up your undervalued ego, is irritating. “Hey! Look at me! I’m amazing!” is the calling card of the majority of users on the platform, and many others are willing to play along and provide the endorphin boosting ego trip that the original poster desires.
Ok, fine, it’s annoying to me. No need to beat a dead horse on this one. But things only get interesting when I begin to look inside myself and examine why I find this behavior so annoying. After all, seeking ego validation and acceptance from others is a normal part of the human condition. We all need people to tell us that we are OK and that we should be proud of our accomplishments. Why does this bother me so much?
I realized it’s annoying to me because I’ve perfectly crafted an image of myself on the network as someone who is above all of this. I am humble, appropriately self deprecating, giving to a fault, vulnerable in discussing my personal foibles, and yet I’m also a “VP of Research” so in the eyes of many, I’ve attained something great that’s worth aspiring to.
And I’ve started to believe that this is all I am — this amazingly perfect person that, in reality, is just a crafted image. I don’t have the same ego needs as others. I don’t get jealous. I don’t need to brag. I’m so much better than that, and because I don’t do those things, I get to judge others who do do them. I get to say “look at those silly people who aren’t as evolved as me. They have a lot of work to do if they want to be as virtuous as me.”
But it’s total bullshit. The fact of the matter is that I’m just as messed up, jealous, needy, and starved for attention as everyone else. I do messed up things to hurt people just because I can. I get super irritable and act out in ways that I shouldn’t. I’ve done this numerous times in the past couple of weeks on the platform, letting my “bad side” take over and hurt others, all in the name of being sanctimonious and self righteous. This is me being human, deviating from my carefully crafted “good” persona.
I don’t want to hide this side of me anymore. So this blog post is my “coming out” post: I accept that I’m a messy human being, who does some good things and also makes a ton of mistakes.
The only thing that might slightly separate me from other people is the self awareness that I bring to the table when I’m doing shitty things to other people and to myself. Thanks to years of intense self examination, there are few stones left unturned in understanding why I behave the way I do. Others might act out and may not know why they do it. Does this matter in the end? I don’t know. But it does give me more control: when I’m doing something shitty, I’m quite aware that I’m doing it, and oftentimes I’m able to explain why I’m doing it.
So where do I go from here? I start working on accepting myself as messed up, a person who’s capable of doing stupid, vain, narcissistic immature crap just like everyone else. I start owning my “bad” stuff more. I work on integrating the bad stuff into a full view of who I am rather than disowning it and believing that my crafted persona is all of me. It’s going to take some work but I’m happy that I’ve reached this point in my personal development. It’s a big step forward so let’s see where I go from here.
