A couple of days ago I was out with a friend of mine having coffee. I noticed that in the span of our conversation, which lasted around 1,5 hours, she made more than 10 self-deprecating jokes(stopped counting really after a while). This struck me as odd. I wanted to tell her what I thought about it but I didn't.
This person is noticeably intelligent and well educated but this is also paired with high anxiety and blaming her bad luck on factors other than herself.
Making one self-deprecating joke in the span of one conversation might be ok. And it even has the potential to sound funny if it's kinda true. For example, I am objectively clumsy. I can make a joke about it and make it funny because it's true. If I make 10 of them though, then something else is going on.
All the self-deprecating jokes she made had something to do with her intelligence. And not only that, but I watched her trying to defend herself from it in real-time, by stating a strong absolute opinion about the subject at hand. Most of her opinions are pretty absolute in general which I suspect works as a protection layer so she doesn’t get hurt.
So it seems that the stories she tells herself have a higher persisting quality to them than the norm, which is a prerequisite if you strive to be unhappy. Having strong conviction applied to these stories — because now is the time to be confident — is only pushing you faster and harder into an infinite loop of despair that only shock and pain can pull you out from.
Admitting that you might be programming yourself to go off track is a hard pill to swallow. Close to impossible. No matter how intelligent you are, this can't help you make the realization that your unhappiness and unexplained anxiety can have a pretty simple explanation. That it is your fault. No amount of brains can help you make this possibility more bearable.
You might say, how dare you, some people suffer from inner guilt. I hear you but listen to this. I’ve noticed that the people crippled with inner guilt and who are extremely harsh on themselves — whom I know many — usually fail to take real responsibility, the one that leads to action. They see themselves as victims and are trapped in this mindset without a way to say “help!”. Just like a frog gets paralyzed when a snake looks straight into its eyes ready to attack.
It is not the least coincidental that the people who struggle with such issues are always intelligent but they always seem to miss something. That your thoughts shape your mindset and that your mindset shapes how you interpret what happens to you and that this interpretation leads you to take certain actions and bear the consequences of them is too abstract to please the educated mind that it's all for concrete explanations and clearly defined paths. It sounds like woo-woo to them.
So you look for other explanations that are more . . . logical. Every other explanation will seem more plausible as long as it doesn’t point to yourself. You will start rationalizing narratives and ideologies that make you a victim until they start making sense. Now you feel safe, but you have given a part of your mind away and generally don’t go ahead in life. You are now fixated with . . . others.
People with an internal locus of control, believe they control their fate and usually have a more go-get-it mentality because of it. They are more confident and tend to be happier. On the other hand, people with an external locus of control feel they have no control over what happens and accuse outside factors as blocking points and the reason that they are behind in life. These people unfortunately have higher rates of depression and anxiety and not coincidentally they are the ones that are more likely to find solace in social movements, political ideologies, and activism.
These people fall for sophisticated narratives such as “the patriarchy” or “Western colonialism” whose defining characteristic is that they offer complete worldviews that tell you clearly who to love and who to hate. While these narratives might explain a particular slice of history, big or small, they become destructive for the person who adopts them as a whole — tools to explain past, present, and future realities. Most of history can not be explained with such one-sided narratives which don’t foster nuance and healthy doubt in an individual.
If you give power to these narratives, by supporting them, you are giving power to a more powerful and hidden narrative to spread. If a narrative offers you a convenient culprit and fosters an oppressed/oppressor framework, the logical conclusion of this will be a social need to create the ultimate evil. The people obsessed with moralizing everything to feel good about themselves and those avoiding personal responsibility for psychological survival will demand this, especially in times when their ideology is unable to provide answers.
You can see that we reached this state today by having the ultimate evil clearly defined. In our day and age, it so happened to be the “white straight man”, but it could have been anything. This is just the amalgamation of current hot topics like race, sexuality, and gender. In the past, we had the “fat rich factory owner” as a clearly defined evil. The ultimate evil offers us the ability to become heroes. If you fight the absolute evil, by definition you are the absolute good.
So.
Do you see where a self-deprecating act can lead?
I think this is what is happening to my friend. She adopted a narrative that seemed to explain the root cause of her unfulfillment. This made her perceive herself as a victim and now repeats the talking points of that narrative in various forms blaming others or “the system”. The self-deprecating jokes are just one instance where she is being caught self-programming out loud.
It might be a controversial thing to say in the age of the coddling mind but for most of your problems, you are the one to blame. It is the self-programming you do with the stories you tell yourself or the self-deprecating jokes you make that shape your outlook on life. This self-programming outperforms by a huge margin all the unjustness and mistreatment you feel you are subjected to from people around you and society.
And of course, there are exceptions and of course, there is unimaginable suffering in the world. But I bet in those cases too, the only way out is to stop viewing yourself as a victim, even if you have all the reasons to go with it.
Even if it's true that someone out there is indeed to blame for your misfortunes you should act like you are in control. This state is the only state that can weaken your bitterness, unlock your responsibility, and turbocharge your agency. To pull your locus of control inwards. To help yourself in a meaningful way while being a person that is fun to be around.
The degeneration of society happens one person at a time. It is up to you to break the cycle and not succumb to all the seemingly innocent daily habits that program you little by little, to become a lower version of yourself. This can surely happen in the span of an everyday conversation with a friend while having coffee. So be aware.
Next time I see her, I might tell her all about this.