Centre of the Universe Syndrome

We spend significant portion of our time seeking the approval of others. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and what not. We are everywhere – trying to develop a phony sense of belonging, redefining our way of being, and, to a huge extent, seeking extrinsic recognition. Bought a pricey phone, cooked something fancy to eat, feeling exultant with your partner? Happy? Yes, but not happy enough, until you post online the photographs of the phone you got, of the fancy food you cooked, and of your seemingly perfect relationship and get likes and retweets.         

Nicolaus Copernicus, a Renaissance-era astronomer and mathematician, formulated a model of universe, according to which the Earth went around the Sun instead of the other way around. He had had the idea long before, but it was only after several years of working to develop the mathematical proofs that he got assured it was true. His idea, published in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), was so earth-shattering that he didn’t publish it until the year he died (in 1543). The book was immediately withdrawn from circulation because its ideas differed from the Bible, which made it clear that the Earth, not the Sun, was the centre of the universe.

The Copernican Revolution revolutionised the way people, in those days, conceived about the universe, the world, and themselves. It brought a paradigm shift and made people acknowledge that they were no longer at the centre of the universe.     

Our behaviours and attitudes are shaped by multitude of factors, including social, biological, psychological, and spiritual. Often, these components form one or more types of personality disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (popularly known as DSM-5) has a number of criteria to identify people with narcissistic personality disorder, i.e. the people suffering from ‘Centre of the Universe Syndrome’. These include:

• Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerating your achievements and talents
• Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the
• Requiring constant admiration
• Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
• Taking advantage of others to get what you want
• Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
• Being envious of others and believing others envy you
• Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

Such people tend to believe they are of primary importance in others’ lives or to anyone they meet. The disproportionate exposure to social media may have also further contributed to more people being influenced by this ‘me first/me only’ attitude.      

It’s harsh, but it’s spot-on: people are too self-obsessed to think about you, and you are not the centre of the universe. Sorry to burst the bubble. You are not the centre of the universe: it’s a powerful insight, but only if you accept it.

Another Year of Moral Outrage

Our feelings about right and wrong are so immediate, self-activating, and compelling that they influence us as being as (one-sidedly) correct as our perceptions of objects around us. As another year passes off, there linger incessant expressions of outrage that typifies every year. 

Digital culture has shaped our mind to an extent that we think being outrage has become our duty, and in the process of fulfilling that duty we often neglect how this outrage has become replaceable and forgettable year after year.      

An angry society is not an unhealthy society. Moral outrage, mostly sounded off on Twitter and Facebook, recently proved to be a major force for holding wrongdoers accountable during the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements by democratising and loudening the voices of disempowered sections of people.

 

Nonetheless, there are fears that social media may be moulding our moral emotions in manners that could ultimately make it tougher for us to reshape society for the better.

In 2014, a study by researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that we were more likely to come to know about immoral acts online than in communication with others in person or through traditional media forms such as newspaper, radio, or TV. The study also underlined that the online content provoked a stronger sense of outrage than immoral acts encountered via traditional media sources or in person. 

Social media and online forms of communications often artificially exaggerate our experiences of outrage. Molly J Crockett, an American neuroscientist, in a 2018 opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail, says that 'if moral outrage is a fire, social media is like gasoline.'  

As we welcome another year, it's worth reflecting on whether we want to give up the control of our moral emotions and hand it over to social media algorithms that are unconcerned about our own welfare.

Scarcity Trap

When we need something urgently, our mind starts focussing on that thing instead of seeing its long-term outlook. Consumed by what we don’t have, we often ignore other important things in life and make bad choices.    

Brandy, a thirty-something lady from Detroit, Michigan, was fired from her job after she once mistakenly used her company credit card to buy diapers for her child. Being the breadwinner of the household, losing the job wreaked havoc on her financial conditions.

In America, statistics suggest poverty is decreasing, but hunger is actually rising, and when your child is hungry, you don't care where the food is coming from. With no solution in sight about how she was going to meet her daily needs, credit card bills kept piling up and pushed Brandy into heavy debt crisis. Poverty compounds itself in several ways than just incurring debts.     

An NPR’s podcast on Hidden Brain channel that I recently listened, in which Brandy is one of the persons interviewed, also discusses about Katie, a young girl who is too busy achieving professional successes. Instead of spending free time on relaxing and doing other important things in her life, she began to focus only on things related to her success at work. In Katie’s case, scarcity was brought on by a lack of time.  

One of characteristics of scarcity is that it draws significant amount of attention to itself. Focus on oneself brings benefits, but it has huge costs, too, and that adds up to the scarcity trap. When you are lonely, you tend to adopt certain behaviour that in the short term aids you manage that scarcity, but in the long term only makes things worse.  

There are psychological connections between scarcity and how we react to that crisis. Experiencing scarcity leads to biases in the mind that only exacerbates a difficult situation. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013), sociologist Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University and Eldar Shafir, behavioural scientist and psychology professor at Princeton University, explain that ‘just as food possesses the minds of those starving, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.’     

Mullainathan further suggests that ‘our solutions always struggle because the underlying problem is so complicated’. While social scientists focus deeply on the economist of poverty, they tend to pay much less attention to the psychology that creates the problem. ‘The mistake we make in managing scarcity is that we focus on one side of the calculus’, the book concludes.           

Scarcity is a trap. Building cognitive capacity to identify scarcity and realise that we are afflicted by tunnel vision - a condition in which we are consumed by intrusive thoughts and focus on what we don’t have while ignoring other important things in our life - may help us find a way out.