Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr

Rory and his team have developed a model for suicidal thinking that is based, in part, on an influential paper by the eminent psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister, in which it’s described as an ‘escape from the self’. Baumeister theorized that the process starts when events in a person’s life ‘fall severely short of standards and expectations’. The self then blames itself for these failures, and loses faith in its ability to repair what’s gone wrong. ‘We believe it’s a feeling of being defeated and humiliated from which you cannot escape,’ said Rory. It’s not enough just to feel like a failure, a self must also lose faith in its capacity to change. ‘It can be internally and also externally, so you’re trapped by life circumstances, you can’t see a way out, or your job prospects aren’t going to change and so on.’ ‘It’s a feeling of being stuck,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. This sense of entrapment, which all comes back to control.’ ‘Control?’ ‘If you look at psychological theories across both physical health and mental health, one of the threads that runs through that is a sense of control. Whenever that control is breached it’s really problematic. When we’re distressed we’re always trying to get control back.’

Gordon co-authored a paper that argued perfectionism has been significantly underestimated as an ‘amplifier’ for suicidal ideation. Amongst other studies, he referenced a survey in which 56 per cent of friends and family members of someone who’d killed themselves referred to the deceased, unprompted, as a ‘perfectionist’. In another, interviews with mothers of male suicide victims found 71 per cent of them saying their sons had placed ‘exceedingly high’ demands on themselves. The most comprehensive study on the issue to date found a ‘strong link’ between perfectionism and suicide. Authors of the 2017 meta-analysis described perfectionists as being ‘locked in an endless loop of self-defeating over-striving in which each new task is another opportunity for hard self-rebuke, disappointment and failure.’

The discomforting truth is that we all have interpreters narrating our lives, and they’re all just guessing. We all confabulate, all the time. We’re moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things, for myriad unconscious reasons, whilst a specific part of our brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we’re up to and why. But the voice has no direct access to the real reasons we do anything. It doesn’t really know why we feel the things we feel and why we do the things we do. It’s making it up.

In the US, a study of male college students found that those from the southern states reacted more aggressively than their northern counterparts after they were shoved and called an ‘asshole’. The psychologists predicted this outcome on the basis of there being an ‘honour culture’ in the south that grew out of the way their forefathers made their living: ‘Herdsmen must be willing to use force to protect themselves and their property when law enforcement is inadequate and when one’s wealth can be rustled away,’ wrote the authors. ‘In the Old South, allowing oneself to be pushed around or affronted without retaliation amounted to admitting that one was an easy mark and could be taken advantage of.’ Evidence in support of their hypothesis was found in the southerners’ saliva, which showed greater spikes in testosterone and cortisol (a hormone implicated in anxiety, arousal and stress), and also in their behaviour in a series of tests that immediately followed the insult. Not only were they more upset than the northerners, who were relatively unaffected, they were more likely to feel their masculinity was in question and to behave in dominant and belligerent ways.

It seems brain and body respond in positive ways when we are actively making progress with our lives, pursuing the plots that give them meaning. The neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has argued that the brain’s dopamine reward system, which guides our behaviour by giving us little druggy hits of pleasure, is more active not when we seize the prize that we’re after, but when we’re in pursuit of it. Meanwhile, work by geneticist Professor Steve Cole and his colleagues is beginning to suggest that our physical health might improve – risk of heart disease and neurodegenerative disorder going down; antiviral response going up – when we’re successfully engaged in pursuits that are meaningful, a state that Aristotle called eudaemonic happiness. ‘It’s kind of striving after a noble goal,’ he told me. ‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’ I said. ‘Right. Exactly,’ he said.

What Carl Rogers and the intronauts of Esalen couldn’t know is that many of today’s experts claim there is no authentic self. Rather than there being a pure and godlike centre to us all, we actually contain a collection of bickering and competing selves, some of whom, as we’ll see, are quite disgusting. Different versions of ‘us’ become dominant in different environments. It’s now often claimed the human self cannot be reduced to some ‘innermost core’. The ‘I’ is not one, it is many.

Many of us complain that when we visit our parents for family events, such as Christmas, we seem to helplessly revert to our childhood selves. This is likely because Mum and Dad are treating us as the person we were.

There are many different kinds of social pain: embarrassment, betrayal, bereavement, insult, exclusion by a group or individual, loneliness, heartbreak. What they have in common is rejection. Ostracism is a capital assault on the self, sometimes described as ‘psychological death’. (It’s not for no reason that St Benedict considered ‘the cauterizing iron of excommunication’ the ultimate punishment for wayward monks.) The reason we’ve evolved to experience it with such agony is thought to go back to when we roamed the planet in vulnerable tribes. ‘The tribe is providing you with protection and with food and water,’ said Giorgia. ‘To hunt, you need maybe five or six people. You can’t do it by yourself.’ If you were rejected by the group, back then, it would very probably mean death.

Other studies, by researchers at China’s Shenzhen University, have indicated that we can struggle to feel empathy for those who we think of as having a higher status than us. This effect, of course, is made manifest in the fact that we often feel entitled to be extremely bullying and unfair to politicians, CEOs and celebrities who are, after all, no less human than we are. Once moral outrage is triggered, so is our thirst for revenge. Our use of ostracism as a weapon of assault is with us as much today as it’s always been, of course, and the science of social pain suggests it can sometimes feel hardly less brutal than the physical variety. ‘Anthropologists think ostracism was the foundation of civilization, because fear of it keeps you in line,’ said Kip. ‘But taken too far, it makes everybody too similar to each other. It penalizes diversity and creativity. You end up wanting to get along to such an extreme that you fear expressing anything unique.’ In today’s culture, this effect can be seen often in social media, newspapers and on university campuses. ‘You see it on both sides, from the right and left. There are strong pressures to conform and an immediate response to disrupt or to ostracise people who disagree.’

—Gordon co-authored a paper: ‘The destructiveness of perfectionism revisited: Implications for the assessment of suicide risk and the prevention of suicide’, Gordon L. Flett, Paul L. Hewitt, Marnin J. Heisel, Review of General Psychology (September 2014), 18(3), pp. 156–72. —The most comprehensive study Christian Jarrett, ‘Perfectionism as a risk factor for suicide – the most comprehensive test to date’, British Psychological Society Digest, 27 July 2017.

‘Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016’, T. Curran and A. P. Hill, Psychological Bulletin (2017).

Story, Robert McKee (Methuen, 1999),

The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark (Random House, 2005),