I was at a conference last week where I encountered the idea of self-discrepancy theory, which somehow I had never heard of before. In the version I heard about, there were three items which might fail to be in harmony: the person you are (actual), the person you would like to be (ideal), and the person you feel a responsibility to be (ought). Roughly speaking, the idea is that if you harmonize among these, it improves your well-being.
Like a lot of well-being frameworks that focus on coherence, it gave me pause. My textural experience of life has always been more a managed conflict one than a harmony one. Things that are good in the long run are often not the things I feel like doing at a given moment. Even for things I enjoy I often have to fight through some inertia to get into it.
When I was in my twenties I did a lot more of what I felt like doing in a given moment, and there was a lot of skipping class, extreme drinking, and cake for lunch. It wasn't good. And even though I actually love exercise once I am doing it, it's been years of habit forming to get past the feeling of ugh, this time I don't feel like getting started, maybe I'll just lie down.
I don't think of these as deficiencies or as mental ill-health. It just feels normal to me to engage in a lot of keeping-myself-on-track as a way of doing a) the things I want to do and b) the things I should be doing. Do I really need harmony to be well?
Also, when I started trying to slot my preferences, attitudes, and actions into the three categories, I was struck to find an almost empty second category of "the person you would like to be."
Those conflicts I just mentioned like cake for lunch versus feeling like a healthy person all seem in the "actual" category. And I have a very full third category of "the person you feel a responsibility to be," with varying interpretations of responsibility. There are commitments to honor, ethical values to uphold, political causes to support, solidarity activities to engage in. Like a lot of people, I feel disharmony between myself as an actual person and the person I feel a responsibility to be. Even in a decent and gentle world, it's not always easy to be a good person, and god knows we do not live in a decent and gentle world.
So while disharmony between "actual" and "ought" is obvious to me, I actually found myself a bit unclear on the concept of the person I would like to be when that ideal is separated from responsibility. What kind of ideal is that?
I see both an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of my empty second category. An optimistic interpretation is that I like myself the way I am. Self-acceptance for the win!
A pessimistic interpretation is that I've taken all the items normally in the second category and moved them into the third -- essentially moralizing all my ideals. Instead of just aspiring to be a certain kind of person, I have put a responsibility spin on it. For example, I don't like cooking, and I often think it would be so nice to be the kind of person who likes to cook, and who does cook. But I tend think of that in highly moralized terms -- of nurturing/caring for others, and not being wasteful, and saving resources.
Well, as we say around our household, "the one doesn't exclude the other." It can be self-acceptance and moralizing all at the same time.
In any case, while I can see the appeal of some harmony between the person you are and the person you feel a responsibility to be, I'm not sure I want to just be the person I feel a responsibility to be. And from a practical perspective, it doesn't really matter, because I don't know how to increase that harmony anyway. So I guess I'll just keep muddling along with my inner conflict management strategies, and forget about harmony altogether.
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