Self Reflection

It’s important to remember thought that our identity and our ideal self are both just models. And as the saying goes — all models are wrong, some models are useful.

In other words, our identity and our ideal self may closely align with reality or have very little relationship to reality at all. The ability to align our sense of self with reality is, in itself, a critical skill — self reflection.

Two brief examples:

Identity: I may believe myself to be a great cook. For Valentine’s Day, I decide to cook my date a delicious homecooked meal. I work tirelessly all day preparing and when we finally sit down to dinner, she takes a bite — yuck! This steak is bland and hard as a rock! Turns out I’m a terrible cook. If I refuse to accept that and maintain “good cook” as part of my identity, I’m likely to have a series of unfortunate dates.

Ideal Self: I may believe that I need straight As in math to meet my needs. I skip my sports practices, social events, eat dinner at my desk, don’t sleep — I forego all my other needs because I feel that an A in math is a critical need I must meet to be OK. Your average bystander might seem a bit puzzled — do I actually need an A more than I need sleep, food, movement and community? Or is my perception of my needs divorced from reality?

These challenges in self reflection — in matching our models to reality — are incredibly common (I’m guilty of both examples above in the last week, if we’re being honest). Getting models right is impossible, and making them good enough to be useful is incredibly hard.

As we talked about previously, the brain spends a lot of its energy trying to model reality closely and still we never get it right because a) reality isn’t something we have direct access to, and b) reality changes constantly. But nevertheless our brains keep trying because the worse our models are, the less tethered to reality they are, the harder it becomes to navigate the world effectively.