Anattā

What superpower best represents you? What’s your Greek God name? Which character from Game of Thrones are you? What can your star sign predict about your relationships? What are your core personality traits? Who is your ideal lover? Who are you? Who are you?

There is a concept called anattā in Buddhist philosophy, which literally means “non-self”. It is a core doctrine of Buddhism, and argues that there are no unchanging, permanent characteristics in people; no fixed personality traits, no ‘core of self’, no soul.

Non-self has always been a radical concept in Western countries because so much of what we value stems from being an individual. In a capitalist society – where we work for what we have, buy what we choose, and forge our own paths through life – it becomes easy to identify with what we do, what we have, and what we seek to achieve.

Not only does ‘non-self’ challenge these pillars of Western culture, it goes against our very nature. Humans have evolved, effectively for the most part, as pattern-recognition machines. Two things that appear similar match; add a third and it becomes a pattern.

Thanks to, Gestalt psychology, we know that humans seek patterns wherever we can.

These behaviours served us well through our rise to the top of the food chain. Recognising patterns in the environment ensured our survival, and as we began to develop consciousness and theory of mind, we noticed patterns within ourselves too. What made us tick, the things we responded to in the environment, and the people we were drawn towards became core components of how we saw ourselves as individuals. They do to this day.

In recent years, our pursuit of individualism has been studied through the lens of the quantified self. Just look at horoscopes. The desire to quantify our behaviours and personalities as something tangible has led some of us to believe that the fixed patterns of star systems billions of light years away hold some significance to our personal lives. Before you know it, a vague prediction that could apply to just about anyone feels suddenly relevant.

Most personality tests use this same logic.

Modern culture exacerbates this desire. Advertisers invoke analysis paralysis, giving us the ability to hold preferences in categories we didn’t even know we could hold preferences for.

How else could something as fundamentally simple as Coke and Nutella’s personalisation campaigns be so effective? Why else would cereal companies position themselves as artisanal, feel good products that can ‘complete you’? Why else would fast food outlets make charity donations in your name with every purchase?

Social media and digital apps have capitalised on this beautifully. With one click of a button we can proudly tell the whole world that we have voted. Snapchat and Instagram filters allow us to express ourselves in a way we believe align with our sense of self. The sheer number of emojis, gifs, and stickers available to us is staggering.

Perhaps unwittingly, through the pursuit of individualism, through the process of quantifying ourselves, we have created a culture of identity politics, in which self-expression and attachment to pop culture are the biggest indicators of social status. The more individualistic you are, the more interesting you are.

And just look at monetised mobile games, most popular with the generation that complains about millennial work ethic and phones at the dinner table. A single app can sap hundreds of dollars out of someone with enough money to not care. Is this because they’re all addictive, or because incremental payments reward us with more options, more choice, more ways to express ourselves and signal it to others.

They're not even subtle about ripping people off anymore.

Virtue signalling. Self-expression. Quantified self. These are the hallmarks of becoming a successful individualist. ‘Non-self’ challenges these ideas, and yet the benefits of easing up on the ego pedal have been demonstrated again and again and again.

So can too much individualism actually stifle us?

Take the case of gender, originally derived from the duality of biological sex. These days – as written by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper – gender has become a spectrum, but not the one originally envisioned.

The ‘old’ spectrum mirrors biological sex – with ‘masculinity’ at one end and ‘femininity' at the other – and a mishmash of both in between. This makes sense. Biologically, you have testosterone or oestrogen or a mix of both. You have ovaries or testes or a bit of both.

Nowadays, gender has become a staple of identity politics; another fixed category appropriated by those obsessed with honing their identity down to the increasingly specific. People who adopt gender in this way typically feel as though ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are arbitrary; reflecting oppressive, old world, patriarchal structures.

But it doesn’t add up. You can call yourself agender (not identifying as male or female), but the reality is you will always have more of one hormone or the other. Your chromosomal structure will always lean more towards the biologically male or the biologically female. There is no magic ‘third thing’.

Or fourth, or fifth, or sixth...

Gender as a concept was a developed as a way for one to socially identify with the biological sexual characteristics that make up a person. A person’s gender cannot be ‘space’ or ‘fruit’ or their own fucking name in the same way that their race cannot be ‘Mercurian’.

Regardless, we have developed a societal need to internalise everything we identify with, or are attached to, as deeply as possible. And we have been led to believe that this is a happy and healthy pursuit; a path to self-actualisation.

Individualism relies on a culture of ‘self’, in that we all have innate or ‘hardwired’ personality traits that can be built upon, or uncovered, by our cultural upbringing. This is an appealing notion, but the research just doesn’t support it. In fact, the more we discover about personality and cognition, the more it appears that very few traits and behaviours, excluding conditional reflexes, are inherent within us from birth.

We are fast discovering that there may be no ‘core self’; something that personality psychologists have struggled to predict for decades. It’s a daunting thought for many of us because it takes away from all we’ve built. What do our personal tastes say about ourselves if there is no fixed ‘self’ to anchor them to?

"Without my personal tastes, I am nothing. Nothing!"

But daunting as it may be, the evidence is in. What we may have once thought of as a core sense-of-self is an ever-evolving societal mechanism. Studies have shown that the emotional residue from decisions made months in passing can continue to impact future decisions, even when the source of the emotion has been forgotten.

The unconscious is a powerful tool and influences so much of our behaviour. We buy Pepsi over a home brand because of memory structures built up through years of advertising exposure, but will buy a home brand on a whim when it looks almost identical to a name brand and is cheaper too.

People buy commodities based on habit, so why not make everything look like everything else? 

We hold onto faulty beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence due to confirmation bias, or cognitive dissonance, or regular and normative environmental exposure, or the fact that it was taught to us as a child by mum and dad and therefore acts as a baseline for how we critically evaluate the world as we grow old.

So much of what we believe makes us ‘who we are’ is out of our control. So much of our personality is influenced by the environment, personal idols, advertising, religion, pre-conceived beliefs, cultural upbringing, family tradition, and general System 1 style thinking that it’s a wonder we still believe that complete and total self-knowledge is within our grasp.

And, as written by Mark Manson, the only thing the Buddhists did to discover this was remove themselves from the external bullshit for a few years. But to a lot of us, ‘non-self’ is as radical as an idea can get.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that shifting from aesthetic to ascetic pursuits will make us happier. It’s about being in tune with what really matters and filtering out anything that doesn’t, because really, nobody cares about the brand of iced coffee you drink and ‘what it says about you’.

The only people saying we do care are those who stand to make a buck.

a.ce