Self-centeredness

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duszek
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Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

A self-centered person pays attention only or mainly to himself.

How do they manage to be self-centered without getting bored ?
Do they find new interesting aspects of their own personality all the time ?

Generous contributions from personal experience are welcome.
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-1-
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by -1- »

I keep my self-centredness exciting by by rerouting any subject to become a comparative expression of myself.

There is never any shortage of new and novel ways of approaching the fascinating subject matter of me for me.
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Greta
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by Greta »

It does get boring. So then you start looking outside for something more fresh.

Then that becomes troublesome so you retreat and relate the new info back to the self and then do some recontextualising, perhaps something akin to -1-'s post. Then that becomes boring and ... :D

Express. Be impressed upon. Express. Be impressed upon. Just another growth cycle amongst countless.
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

Do excentrics have more interesting things in themselves to enjoy for a longer time ?

Then they do not depend on the outside world to entertain or fascinate them.
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

Ex-centrics are particularly self-centered.

It is puzzling.
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

An excentric stays away from the center (= mainstream) and thus can focus on his own personal center or centre, undisturbed by social expectations and peer pressures.

An excentric can also become a photographer or a bird-watcher and forget about oneself, focusing mainly on exterior objects.
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by -1- »

duszek wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2018 3:38 pm An excentric stays away from the center (= mainstream) and thus can focus on his own personal center or centre, undisturbed by social expectations and peer pressures.

An excentric can also become a photographer or a bird-watcher and forget about oneself, focusing mainly on exterior objects.
Eccentrics and self-centred persons are not the same. All self-centred persons are eccentrics, but not all eccentrics are self-centred.

Eccentric means "different from the norm". Self-centred means "obsessed with the self."

Yes, obsession with the self is not normal. But there are other abnormalities, or eccentricities, that are not in the realm of self-centredness.

For instance, saints such as martyrs and self-sacrificing people for a cause or for others are not normal, but they are not self-centred. They are eccentric. Jesus of the Bible is a good example of an eccentric. Not normal. The religious believe he was supernormal, a god of sorts. Whether super-normal or other, he was not normal. He agreed with paying taxes to the Roman rulers, for instance, which was not the dominant belief people should do in Jerusalem of his day. It cost him his life.

Or take Karl Marx, for instance. He was an eccentric; he was a philosopher as well as a social scientist as well as an economical theorist. That is not normal. Most of the people in his era were not that. He was an eccentric.

Both Jesus and Marx were not self-centred.
Dubious
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by Dubious »

duszek wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:43 am A self-centered person pays attention only or mainly to himself.

How do they manage to be self-centered without getting bored ?
Being self-centered doesn't mean you're isolated or bored with yourself. In fact some who are that way may actually have a following. It all depends on the ways ego-centrism manifests itself.
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by -1- »

Dubious wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2018 11:38 pm
duszek wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:43 am A self-centered person pays attention only or mainly to himself.

How do they manage to be self-centered without getting bored ?
Being self-centered doesn't mean you're isolated or bored with yourself. In fact some who are that way may actually have a following. It all depends on the ways ego-centrism manifests itself.
Duszek, when you finally nailed down a philosophical conundrum, and you feel satisfied and clear-headed about it, others will show you you are not ever near your target.

That's what's so beautiful about philosophy. Slippery like an eel, dances like a butterfly, stings like a bee.
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

-1- wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:07 pm
duszek wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2018 3:38 pm An excentric stays away from the center (= mainstream) and thus can focus on his own personal center or centre, undisturbed by social expectations and peer pressures.

An excentric can also become a photographer or a bird-watcher and forget about oneself, focusing mainly on exterior objects.
Eccentrics and self-centred persons are not the same. All self-centred persons are eccentrics, but not all eccentrics are self-centred.

Eccentric means "different from the norm". Self-centred means "obsessed with the self."

Yes, obsession with the self is not normal. But there are other abnormalities, or eccentricities, that are not in the realm of self-centredness.

For instance, saints such as martyrs and self-sacrificing people for a cause or for others are not normal, but they are not self-centred. They are eccentric. Jesus of the Bible is a good example of an eccentric. Not normal. The religious believe he was supernormal, a god of sorts. Whether super-normal or other, he was not normal. He agreed with paying taxes to the Roman rulers, for instance, which was not the dominant belief people should do in Jerusalem of his day. It cost him his life.

Or take Karl Marx, for instance. He was an eccentric; he was a philosopher as well as a social scientist as well as an economical theorist. That is not normal. Most of the people in his era were not that. He was an eccentric.

Both Jesus and Marx were not self-centred.
A question:
can you imagine a genius or a famous scientist who is NOT an excentric ?

Is excentricity a conditio sine qua non for any serious achievement and for creative work ?
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by Dontaskme »

duszek wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:43 am A self-centered person pays attention only or mainly to himself.

How do they manage to be self-centered without getting bored ?
Do they find new interesting aspects of their own personality all the time ?

Generous contributions from personal experience are welcome.
There Real Self has no Self.

Boredom can only arise if there is a sense of ''other'' Self ..which does apparently arise and is unique to the human being's mind. But, that sense of ''other'' is a lie. Humans live this lie every day of their lives until they awaken to the truth of oneness, it's what makes humans totally and utterly the most selfish creatures that ever was, human beings are selfish to the core...doing just about anything they can think of in order to defend this lie, even pretending to be a caring loving person which is always a fake decoy and another ploy to get their own way.
Humans turn away from the real truth in fear because they intuitively know it in their deepest heart...but this turning away is what makes humans the absolutely stark raving bonkers species that ever roamed the planet, they are absolutely insane, always in the pursuit of pleasure at the cost of their own species and their the environment that sustains them, and basically anything that gets in their own way, humans are total idiots, born into a world view not of their own choosing, with the expectation to conform to that ''other'' world view, they have no identity of their own and so take on the ''others'' instead...it's a madness that is totally being the acceptable norm.

The difference between an enlightened person and an unenlightened person is that when an enlightened person is told by an unenlightened person that they are mad, crazy, or insane etc..they just don't care,they don't give a flying banana... whereas an unenlightened person will get all defensive and angry, ...the problem is that they too are the mad, crazy, insane ones, but they will outright flatly deny they are ..never ever quite knowing they are.

But the enlightened person never denies he is mad, he KNOWS he is mad.

This is the human condition...that most people turn a blind eye to...and is why the world of being a human will and always will be a fucked up reality. Freedom is found in the Real SELF...the Self that doesn't have a Self...this place is the only refuge, but no one wants to visit, well not at least until they are tired of all the hurting they do to them self...perhaps then they will surrender to the inevitable realisation of real truth.

.
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by -1- »

duszek wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:58 am
A question:
can you imagine a genius or a famous scientist who is NOT an excentric ?

Is excentricity a conditio sine qua non for any serious achievement and for creative work ?
Imagine, yes. Point at one, no.

Eccentricity (this is the correct spelling, I believe) per definition applies to all human beings: no two humans can form a "norm" to which all other humans correspond.

Eccentricity is a qualitative difference, it can't be measured by numbers; and such eccentricities that can be measured by numbers (such as height, or weight) must be arbitrarily decided for range of normalcy, outside of which a person is eccentric.

Of course eccentricity applies to moral, emotional and intellectual modes of operation, not to height or to weight. How do you measure the normalcy of these three? I don't believe you can.

To relate this to your question, "can you imagine a genius or a famous scientist who is NOT an eccentric?" the question can be answered with assurance ONLY if we could define the deviation from the norm which would still be within a certain definition or range of what is normal. How can you define "normal" creativity with "deviant" creativity? I suggest it is a highly subjective decision.

So your question is actually unanswerable. What can be accepted as normal behaviour by one, may be defined by others' internal classification system as "aberrant" or "deviant". Who is to judge which is right, which is wrong? After all, even if we need to go into the microscopic levels to find this true, we are all different, norms as such don't exist. (If you define norm as "a range in which people are equal in style and execution of behaviour response.")
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

Leaving the mainstream means that you annoy your family and friends.

I happen to read a book by a certain Patrick McGrath, "The Grotesque", which is about a Sir Hugo Coal, a self-appointed paleontologist, warring with the Royal Society, who has ended up as a vegetable in a wheelchair, probably due to scheming of his malevolent butler Fledge.
Sir Hugo tries to reconstruct the events leading to his becoming confined to a wheelchair.

One of the things that he liked to do when still normal:
he would ask the butler to put Herbert on the dinner table (a toad), together with maggots for Herbert to eat.
Herbert happens to be also the first name of his wife´s father.

Would we like to meet someone like Sir Hugo ?
dorothea
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by dorothea »

Is self-centredness the same, or only related to, egoism - in your question? I ask because it seems to me one cannot be egoistic or (self-centred?) without reference to other people: to focus on self is actively to treat others negatively is it not? (It would be absurd to describe Yahweh or Allah as self-centred or egoistic.) So an egoist is not unaware of other people, but dispassionately or negatively disposed towards them except in so far as they might impinge upon the egoist life. Schopenhauer argued that egoism led logically (ultimately) to concern for others - in that their contentment was necessary to our own contentment.
duszek
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Re: Self-centeredness

Post by duszek »

It seems to me that:

"self-centered" is a neutral term,

"selfisch" or "egoistic" is a perjorative term

A selfish person defends one´s own interests and takes advantage of other people.
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