Book Trailer Rabbit Hole

Sooner or later, someone is going to walk up to you with a bucket, and somewhat breathlessly explain how you urgently need to stick your head in it. The bucket will have any number of labels on it: Jesus, philosophy, psychotherapy, socialism, functional programming, steroids, veganism, nofap, The Red Pill, drugs, mysticism.

They’ll explain how inside the bucket is a wonderful, enlightening experience that will change your view of the universe. Having already stuck their own heads in there they certainly seem to believe it.

Before you stick your head in the bucket, you don’t know what’s inside. And afterwards, if indeed you do stick your head in there, you don’t know if you have truly gained meaningful enlightenment, or simply been conned by someone who needed you to follow in their footsteps in order to validate their life choices.

All you have to do is pay attention to what happened to the other people who stuck their heads in that particular bucket. Did they prosper afterwards? Did they thrive? Were they suddenly wittier, richer, healthier, stronger, prettier, and more insightful? Were their lives suddenly filled with joy and meaning? Or did they mostly do the same things everyone else typically does but with a new bucket and a need to proselytize?

Every bucket is going to have its own advocates who want you to stick your head in it. They’ll promise you all sorts of things. Stop listening to them, and start looking at them.

If it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, and they are walking up and down your street knocking on doors, where do you think you will be in five years if you decide to wear that bucket? If that guy has the secrets of getting rich by flipping real estate, why is he writing it up in a book and selling that instead of using the secret himself? Will that kung-Fu master selling his bulletproof martial arts program climb in the ring with a decently-ranked amateur boxer?

There’s always someone willing to test the waters for you. If something amazing happens for them, you should be able to see it. If not, you’re just being proselytized by someone with a bucket on his head. This book itself is one bucket amongst many, so what’s the difference?

In a word, unhealthy narcissism. Narcissism is the male condition. Everyone has it. Men have it more than women, and it forms a bell curve amongst the population. Some people have less, which could be described as Borderline, as in the personality disorder. Most have similar amounts within a standard deviation or two. Pathological people have unhealthy amounts. But what exactly is it?

The definition in the DSM (the official psychiatrist’s book of mental disorders) defines it poorly. If being human were in the book it would read like this: We have something that we call human. It has an eye, a foot and a liver. Unfortunately, so do dinosaurs. So we will define humans as creatures with eye, foot, and liver, and missing dinosaur. This may be accurate, but it’s not useful.

Instead, I use the definition by a very insightful author, TheLastPsychiatrist, who defines it through a lens of mental models. Narcissism, according to TheLastPsychiatrist, is the belief that you are the director and star of your own personal one-man stage production. You create an identity for yourself and require reinforcement of that identity from everyone around you.

But narcissists don’t see those around them as people. They see them as archetypes, reducing them to set pieces in service of the play. This differs from a healthier narcissism where you define yourself by what you do. You put in the work to improve your life, and the result becomes your identity.

A good way to tell if you have a healthy or an unhealthy form of narcissism is to see how easily you define it. If you can give it a brand name, you’re unhealthy. Are you a Rebel™, a Playboy™, an Intellectual™, a Gamer™, a Patriarch™, a Good Father™, a Digital Nomad™ or a Real Man™? You may as well take the Pepsi taste challenge because you’re just a curated brands manufactured marketing demographic. If other people who don’t acknowledge your identity make you rage, then it’s unhealthy.

Good narcissism doesn’t need others to acknowledge it in order to be effective. The purpose of frame is to build a useful selection of mental models into your own personal deep narrative. You do this while removing any identity from your inner life that doesn’t map to the things you do, and by rebuilding your identity into one with a strong foundation. This is the fundamental concept behind the tetrahedron of frame.

This is an excerpt from Rian Stone’s book Praxeology Vol 1.

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