Mm.

and,

...

Hm. Hone down and through the middle of the parties in the day.

Yeah, we're cool, we up my head, they were quiet. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 127. Oh, oh, oh, Are Not So Smart Podcast. In this episode we sit down with my friend and one of my favorite journalists, will store whose new book just hit the

shelves here in the United States it's called Selfy how he became so self

obsessed and what it is doing to us. The book explores what he calls the age of perfectionism,

our modern struggle with our many modern pressures to meet newly emerging ideals and standards that tell us if we're falling short of the person we ought to be.

And, as he says in the book, perfectionism is the idea that kills. And you'll hear what he means by that in the interview.

In the book, Will embarks on two investigative journeys. The first is an

examination of the self as a psychological mechanism.

And he digs deep into what science has to say about where our concept of the self

originated and how it operates so that he can understand how perfectionism causes that mechanism to malfunction.

The second is how the cultural concept of self originated and then evolved over a millennium.

The very concept of a self has changed many times, as have the pressures that concept has endured, and depending on where you live today, that lineage of your culture's ideas of the self strongly

differs from that of people who live elsewhere, surrounded by different cultural norms and expectations

that change what it means to be a fully realized

and unique individual.

As he writes, it is the self that wants to become perfect, and it's our culture that tells us what perfect actually is.

It's a great book, I hope you check it out, and for this episode Will and I just have a conversation

about it.

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