Selfie

Lesson 1. Perfection and Suicide

On June 6th,2007, Debbie Hampton, a forty-three-year-old mother of three, swallowed a handful of pills with some cheap Shiraz and tried to take her own life. She had spent all her life chasing perfection, and when she fell short, she felt like a failure. This tortured her to the extent that the only solution she could see was to die.

The human psyche is filled as much with hate as it is with love for ourselves. Sometimes, as in the case of the author, the quickest way to feel bad about oneself is to look in the mirror. We see our imperfections and hate ourselves for them. We chase perfection because we are animals of progress. But this pursuit can leave us dissatisfied. It makes our human-self malfunction.  It can lead us to self-destruction or even suicide. It makes us wish we could vanish. 

Although the overall rates of suicide have seen a general decline since the 1980s, more people today die due to suicide than in all the wars, terrorists, murders, and government incarcerations combined. Over the last few years, a surprising number of people have been a victim of the same narrative that Debbie was. A story of high expectations, dreams of perfection leading to failure and a rejection of self. This then concludes with an impulse to finish it all off, to vanish. Suicide is a catastrophic breakdown in the human self. It's the most extreme form of self-harm there is. And the more we barrel towards a perfectionist version of society, the easier it gets to make the self malfunction. 

Of course, perfectionism isn't absolute. It's a pattern of thinking. Everyone sits somewhere on the scale of perfectionism. We are all guilty of falling prey to this notion. 

We live in an age of perfectionism, but we must be careful because perfection is an idea that has the potential to harm or even kill us.  

Lesson 2. The Story of Self

We are all driven in life by the primal mechanisms within ourselves. We have within us elemental rhythms of hierarchy, territory, and bloody struggle for status and resources. We have existed for eons as groups of hunter-gatherers. The base instincts that come with that live on inside of us. Our tribal self is obsessed with status and hierarchy. Experiments surrounding these factors have found that humans, upon meeting other humans, automatically encode just three points of information about them: age, gender, and race. Despite our knowledge against thinking this way, we are always consciously or unconsciously dividing the world into groups. Due