IDB

It is indeed a very complicated philosophical question. And I actually think Dan’s questioning is a very prevalent one nowadays, though he phrases it in a very sarcastic or even cynical way. At heart he is questioning what is “truth” in an era when we all start to wake up to the ideological constructions of what we used to hold onto as “truth”. In a way it is an inevitable central aporia of social constructionism: if everything is socially and culturally constructed, what is “real” anymore?

IMO I will say a simple, less-worrisome answer is always “you are what you choose”. Many scholars have used “onion” as the perfect metaphor for social constructionism: there is no pre-existing “core” when you peel off all the “constructed” layers, but this does not mean all those layers do not exist. The “onion” exist, even though it does not have a “core”.

So I actually do not think Dan’s sarcastic disillusionment about individuality and authenticity should be considered as a form of “negative energy” or anything like that. It can be interpreted as a form of liberation and interconnectedness, even altruistic and activist.

A philosophical perspective, thanks waitingfan! I really love that onion-as-self metaphor.

I've said this before, but I think what I really like about this fan space is the opportunity it provides to talk about larger topics -- maybe topics initially prompted by DnP -- that go beyond being specifically about them. I know that might not be everyone's cup of tea, but yeah, I really have enjoyed the discussion today and have learned some things.

Another thing his tweet made me think about was something I heard the other day on Esther Perel's new podcast about relationships at work (she's a psychotherapist). She was talking about the role of work in different generations: three generations ago, work was a place to produce and two generations ago, it was a place to serve. In those cases, those generations got the question of "who am I" answered by affiliations with family and community. Now, in the current generation, work is where we go to get our identity and fulfillment, and where we turn in many cases first for a sense of purpose and meaning and emotional well-being (acknowledging, certainly, that there are class dimensions to this -- if you are just living paycheck to paycheck your relationship to work is different). That might be a bad paraphrase, but it did make me wonder about how a person in flux in their career -- like Dan, but also anyone in general -- would perceive their sense of self as being somehow threatened or confused because of how much some of us might find the question of "who am I" only something that can be answered by looking first to a professional identity.

waitingfan wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:28 pm It is indeed a very complicated philosophical question. And I actually think Dan’s questioning is a very prevalent one nowadays, though he phrases it in a very sarcastic or even cynical way. At heart he is questioning what is “truth” in an era when we all start to wake up to the ideological constructions of what we used to hold onto as “truth”. In a way it is an inevitable central aporia of social constructionism: if everything is socially and culturally constructed, what is “real” anymore?

IMO I will say a simple, less-worrisome answer is always “you are what you choose”. Many scholars have used “onion” as the perfect metaphor for social constructionism: there is no pre-existing “core” when you peel off all the “constructed” layers, but this does not mean all those layers do not exist. The “onion” exist, even though it does not have a “core”.

So I actually do not think Dan’s sarcastic disillusionment about individuality and authenticity should be considered as a form of “negative energy” or anything like that. It can be interpreted as a form of liberation and interconnectedness, even altruistic and activist.

How do you know if you're choosing or not? We can agree that personality is based on a lot of things and most professionals agree that personality is created over childhood years up to teens and when traumatic things happen that can alter the way you perceive yourself and relate to different situations and social groups. So how do you choose? How are you aware enough to choose? It's easy to say that it's not negative energy but if your energy or thought of self ARE negative, if you think part of your self issues are related to things that happened to you and you have coped with them in less than ideal ways, how do you know if your personality is your personality because it organically developed over the years or is simply a byproducts of things that happens to you and around you and if you don't know how do you choose? And if you choose to be different things around different social groups what is left when you'rE alone?

Because - and I'm probably projecting - that's part of the issue. You are different around different contexts and that can make you feel like you are not real because you become a chameleon and what does that mean when you are left alone with yourself?

I definitely think people shouldn't tell Dan if his self issues are negative or self discovering and just - accept they exist. If they make him feel bad, they have negative energy, at least for him (and for many of us)

liola wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 10:34 pm

waitingfan wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:28 pm It is indeed a very complicated philosophical question. And I actually think Dan’s questioning is a very prevalent one nowadays, though he phrases it in a very sarcastic or even cynical way. At heart he is questioning what is “truth” in an era when we all start to wake up to the ideological constructions of what we used to hold onto as “truth”. In a way it is an inevitable central aporia of social constructionism: if everything is socially and culturally constructed, what is “real” anymore?

IMO I will say a simple, less-worrisome answer is always “you are what you choose”. Many scholars have used “onion” as the perfect metaphor for social constructionism: there is no pre-existing “core” when you peel off all the “constructed” layers, but this does not mean all those layers do not exist. The “onion” exist, even though it does not have a “core”.

So I actually do not think Dan’s sarcastic disillusionment about individuality and authenticity should be considered as a form of “negative energy” or anything like that. It can be interpreted as a form of liberation and interconnectedness, even altruistic and activist.

How do you know if you're choosing or not? We can agree that personality is based on a lot of things and most professionals agree that personality is created over childhood years up to teens and when traumatic things happen that can alter the way you perceive yourself and relate to different situations and social groups. So how do you choose? How are you aware enough to choose? It's easy to say that it's not negative energy but if your energy or thought of self ARE negative, if you think part of your self issues are related to things that happened to you and you have coped with them in less than ideal ways, how do you know if your personality is your personality because it organically developed over the years or is simply a byproducts of things that happens to you and around you and if you don't know how do you choose? And if you choose to be different things around different social groups what is left when you'rE alone?

Because - and I'm probably projecting - that's part of the issue. You are different around different contexts and that can make you feel like you are not real because you become a chameleon and what does that mean when you are left alone with yourself?

I definitely think people shouldn't tell Dan if his self issues are negative or self discovering and just - accept they exist. If they make him feel bad, they have negative energy, at least for him (and for many of us)

Yes you are exactly right! The ability to choose, or discussed in modern philosophy as the idea of “agency”, is another extremely controversial issue - but it is different from the issue of “authenticity”. Whether we as human have “agency” is very debatable, and one side of this debate does boil down to what you describe as the feeling that we are passively molded by the early life experience we endured into a sort of “personality”. This is why I said “you are what you choose” is only a simple and less-worrisome answer: there sure could be much many nuances behind it.

Basically what I mean is just that a disillusionment about an “authentic” self, a “true” personality, can open oneself up to the self-awareness of one’s “choice”. It encourages us to constantly reflect upon what we do, how we do, and why we do - especially, how have the social norms, power relations, ideological institutions influence our behaviors. For me personally, this is the spirit I get from Dan’s sarcastic rambling over not having a personality. And I do think it is a quite positive thing. At least for me it is much more positive than the popular “be true to yourself” discourse, which is sometimes even toxic by itself, as it kind of gives people a fake hope that we can be somehow completely severed from the society and all its normative ideologies and be less vigilant about them.

I think Dan's tweets are genuine but I also think he's joking and it's not that deep. A lot of people with mental illness talk about their normal day to day struggles with mental health in the way he does because basically we've learned people will worry if we don't make light even if it's not that serious or dark for us in that moment. I relate to Dan's tweet, I've felt like this a lot, but at the same time it's just what it is. It's bothersome but it's also not really that dark.

Obviously I can only speak for myself and maybe it's more serious for Dan but I really don't think he'd make a joke tweet about it in that case. I think this is just how he copes and makes sense of his mental health and it's really not the worst way to do it. I also wouldn't call it self-deprecating either if it's just how he feels.

waitingfan wrote:So I actually do not think Dan’s sarcastic disillusionment about individuality and authenticity should be considered as a form of “negative energy” or anything like that. It can be interpreted as a form of liberation and interconnectedness, even altruistic and activist.

I agree, that's how I understand it too. I'm not getting negative vibes from that tweet at all, it's more like he's just sharing what he feels like at the moment. We can't know what that means to him personally of course. But since I've seen a lot of people relate to it and feeling better about themselves because someone they look up to deals with the same issues, I guess it's at least a positive outcome for those guys.

Hilarious twitter thread in honour of Dan

I wonder if there is any chance that Phil’s “try new things” video for his birthday week will have anything to do with the Glitch concept.

We were having fun with predictive text on Tumblr as well, before Dan’s tweet:
The discussion on self is very interesting, but I’ve got nothing to add to it.

Oh yes, I saw that on tumblr. Cripes, I’d forgotten, my brain is annoying sometimes. I got ‘Phil, you’re cute’ which didn’t really surprise me.

I mean, I don't see why people are... worried? About the whole "who am I" thing? Maybe I'm just weird, but it's never been a big deal to me.

Obviously there is no "true self", because what does it mean to for oneself to be "true"? We put on certain personas in certain contexts, and we are just the sum of all the personas we play throughout life (unless you want to disown a certain persona as "That Is Really Not Me And I Only Play It Out Of Necessity", but honestly, I feel like if you play an act frequently enough, then that act becomes a part of you).

Then there's the option of how other people perceive you. You could say that you're a hilarious person, but then other people may think that you are the most unfunny person on the planet. Does that mean you're hilarious (because you say so) or that you're unfunny (because others say so)? How far does the right of self-determination extend?

And, of course, there's the scientific approach. You can define personality as "a set of biases which a person uses to make decisions in life" (my own definition), and then obtain some kind of dataset of decision-making and analyse it statistically. I'm not a statistician, but I suppose I have a hobbyist interest in statistics. You could perform factor analysis on the dataset and you might (key word might: there are lots of ways in which you could throw off your results, chaos theory and all that) get a set of personality traits. That doesn't mean that the traits are innate, simply that there are factors which lead to someone making a decision, and these factors could be assumed to be personality traits.

In psychology, I know they have the idea of "the big 5": openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. If you wanted to quantify "personality", I suppose "the big 5" would be one way that many psychologists can agree upon. But I don't think most people view personality as a set of numbers or one's position in some five-dimensional space. I think people have a much more complex view of personality, and that's what defines a word, isn't it?—people's understanding of what that word means. There's no point in arguing that "personality" means XYZ when nobody else thinks it means XYZ.

Whatever people's understanding of "personality" is though, psychologists seem to mostly agree that it is largely hereditary. (Also important to note that "hereditary" in science does not mean what it means in everyday speech: if scientists say something is "hereditary", then it is observed to be largely caused by genetics rather than environment. It does not refer to the ability for something to be inherited or the ability for something to be affected by environment.)

Anyway, this was a massive ramble. I have no qualifications to discuss this, so someone who studies psychology/philosophy/statistics/etc could probably correct me on some stuff.

I haven’t ever read about stuff like this that deeply to know many theories, though I’ve dealt with my own mind (mostly with hypnotherapy and NLP/re-wiring talk rather than the reasons for everything) and read a few self-help books, maybe some a bit deeper, as well as having therapy so have spoken to more knowledgeable people. So I’d understand why people are worried about how Dan’s doing or how it sparks off their own thoughts and feelings, cos they might not know much of the theories out there, or understand it much and feel confused or however it makes them feel. As for worrying about Dan, we just hear a snapshot of how he feels which might be meant jokingly, might have a lot or just a little truth in it, and we don’t know the whole picture to feel really sure that he’s okay.

If you could give Phil one birthday present - that he'd open in front of you and react accordingly - what would you give him?

alittledizzy wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:28 am

If you could give Phil one birthday present - that he'd open in front of you and react accordingly - what would you give him?

A dog of course!

alittledizzy wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:28 am

If you could give Phil one birthday present - that he'd open in front of you and react accordingly - what would you give him?

A man in a kilt

alittledizzy wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:28 am

If you could give Phil one birthday present - that he'd open in front of you and react accordingly - what would you give him?

A shiny new (read: more £££ bc capital£ester ofc) weekly liveshow contract from literally *any* platform that isn't younow.

Sweet header! Happy Phil's birthday everyone!

...does the gift have to be wrapped? Can I make him breakfast instead?

All I want for Phil's bday is gay cake. Dan had his gay cake and I swear I will RIOT if Phil didn't get one. GAY CAKE FOR PHIL 2020

Sweets probably cos it’s almost certain to meet his tastes and his eyes would really light up. Probably would for most things, actually, cos he’s enthusiastic like that. I considered a tshirt or jumper, but we seem to see them all just once these days. I wouldn’t mind, that’s not the reason for giving, but I wonder what happened to them.

Happy birthday Philly

liola wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 11:20 am All I want for Phil's bday is gay cake. Dan had his gay cake and I swear I will RIOT if Phil didn't get one. GAY CAKE FOR PHIL 2020

IDB got a gay cake in the birthday header (clear your cache to see it y'all) so now I need an actual gay cake for him too.

Lots of gay cake and doggos in Phil's likes right now and my heart cries out for it become a reality. All of it. Even the one with alien Dan giving him the cake, please and thankiu.

Haven't logged in in a hot minute, but happy birthday Philly!

He's been liking some super cute art on Twitter. Have a little scroll thru them if you need something to brighten up your day a bit (:

I hope Dan found a haloscope cube for Phil (currently doing an AmazingPhil marathon with my ill child and Phil was googling it but couldn’t find one for sale). Happy Phil Day!

Agreed with socksparadox, Phil's likes are pure serotonin! Lots of dogs, lots of rainbows, lots of Norman. Sometimes I think about how lucky I am to be in the same fandom as so many people who draw so well

I’m glad Phil’s getting so much love today- it’s really nice to see.

I’m sad about the dan tweet. He usually tweets every year before Phil does so it seems another tradition dies. There’s still time but it’s not looking good