The Evolving Self, by Robert Kegan

The different stages of personal/psychological growth, framed as a kind of spiral of dis-embeddings and re-embeddings, differentiating oneself from the collective and re-integrating with others, at each step learning to take as "object" the thing that in the last stage you took as part of yourself.

This book is really good, and (I think) really important, but damn was it hard for me to read – I found myself re-reading many paragraphs twice, after realising that I hadn't actually internalised anything the first time. For idiosyncratic reasons I read the first 2/3 of this book in one sitting on a day when I had cut myself off from the internet, and I really don't know if I would even have got through one chapter if I'd tried to read it in my current normal-life. So while I do recommend the book for most people, you might need to be smarter and more attentive than I am to actually read it, and I would more-recommend a shorter or snappier summary of the book – if anyone knows of such thing please let me know.

From here on, this is one of those book thoughts where I don't really discuss the book, but rather discuss unrelated thoughts that were triggered for me by reading the book. Namely: every time I go offline for a day, I understand briefly how completely my brain has been fried by being online all the time, and realise with horror that tomorrow I will (nevertheless) go back to being online all the time.

Because we are all (mostly, to varying degrees) immersed in this world of constant internet, I think it's hard not to sound like you're kidding when you talk about the level of horror this internet-addiction involves. I truly feel like I'm living in a world where I wake up every morning and have 2 beers in bed, drink consistently (though moderately) throughout the day, and rarely have even an hour each day where I'm really, truly sober. But since all my friends are also low-level drunk all day this doesn't seem unusual, nobody is worried for me, nobody tries to stop me.

And I think low-level drunkness, specifically, might in fact be the right analogy here: it's a) an enjoyable activity that b) does not prevent you from everyday functioning but c) does stop you from applying sustained, intelligent attention. If it becomes too much of your everyday life then you don't really realise how much it's wrecked your baseline, until/unless you stop for a bit and suddenly re-awaken to the possibilities your brain has when it's not being parasited in this way.

I feel like we all joke about how bad it is that we're low-level drunk all day, but we're making the joke while sitting at the pub, drinking, and we're absolutely not taking seriously the possibility that this is really, truly ruining our selves, that we might wake up one day and realise that all the things we could have done and been as people were decimated by the impact this activity is daily having on our brains.