What on earth did she mean by this?

[Sashamasha]

Last Saturday night me and my husband had some friends over for dinner just a few other couples. One couple was a friend of my husband and his wife. She is about my age (36) and although I have seen met her several times and seen her about I've never really spoken to her before and always got the impression she was a bit shy.

Anyway after dinner some of us got talking in the kitchen just about how at our age you finally start to grow up, that you get a much stronger, more solid idea of who you are and your values and that you just really know yourself and have a handle on the world. She wasn't really saying much although she was listening.

Trying to bring her out her shell I asked her very directly what her what her opinion on the topic was and although I can't remember it word for word she basically said something like the concept of being a grown up and having some sort of control was a comfort but that as humans we are all just needs, urges and want and that any understanding we had of ourselves or the world was fleeting and incomplete. She also said she felt that thinking of yourself as some how solid, defined and in control was to be in denial of what we are and a kind of self deception although she then said that self deception was probably a necessary evil.

Well there wasn't very much left to be said after that! She sounds a bit gloomy but she isn't she is very sweet but just never says much and seems to be a bit of a loner (she's an artist). Anyway I can't get what she said out of my mind, I feel a bit disturbed by it and if I am honest I don't really understand it.

So anyone have any idea of what she was on about?

Quencher - I'm not sure if your analysis of OP's intentions is accurate. Attempts to bring a shy person out of their shell are often made because of a well-intentioned desire to include the shy person in the conversation. And not taking a conversation any further can be an attempt to make everyone in the group comfortable. These are skilful intentions.

Im not surprised she is from an art background.
A scientific background works on looking for predictions. When you can predict you can have more control. Of course like could not exist as it does with total predictability. But if nothing was predictable life as we know it would be chaos.
I think as you get older you can predict better, thus giving more control.

rogueantimatter Generally I'd agree with that. But you've missed a few clues in OP's comments. OP doenst think her DH's friends wife is shy.

We're going to move this over to philosophy/religion so that it doesn't disappear. OP - do drop us a line if you have any problems.

Rogueantimatter the op was not being nice by taking the moral high-ground among her group of friends to include this woman. They waited until everyone had spoken before asking her opinion. We don't know if they were competing among themselves trying be the cleverest and most self assured person in the kitchen.

The end of their conversation was not because they wanted everyone to be comfortable. It was shock that stopped the op from asking more questioned. Secondly, she was not intelligent enough to process what the woman had just said to fast enough to have a quick comeback. Nor did any of her other friends. It's not surprising because we tend to keep people with similar likes in our circle of friends.
Her ideas of what this woman was had been all wrong. That is why she is here asking to be assured and to be told that the woman is wrong and she is right. When the op discovered that the woman might be on to something right. Her, subsequent post question what sort of woman this person was by referring to her as not normal. If she was normal, she would agree with her point of view. Probably, like all the other friends she has gathered in the room with her.

What is interesting about the op's post is that the conversation takes place in the kitchen. Usually in this scenario, women go to the kitchen to leave men to have proper chat about things business and finance while they potter about clearing up and catching up on handbags, kids and next holiday. The difference here is that an intelligent conversation took place that threw the op sideways.

When I was younger and a party animal, I would have been just like the OP, except for the thinking I was the cleverest person!
Full of dancing, and dressing up, and having lots of friends and fun. I don't regret a moment and I thought about feminism, politics etc and was quite active but very full of 'fun'.

Then I changed my life totally, went to university as a mature student, realised all of the fun had been a way of distracting myself and so also changed my philosophy of life, if it can be called philosophy! My spirituality feeds my politics and my daily life.

It's not an easy route, I suffer from anxiety and have had a dreadful time in 2016.
However, my core belief , that the world is totally interconnected, that we, as humans, are just a tiny, but powerful part of the immensity of Life does sustain me.

On a lighter note, our house is full of books, why wouldn't it be? Please don't let there ever be a move to put everything online; how will we manage if sources of power fail?
Conversations with my friends will always be political, not always party politics, but what can we do to make a fairer society on a personal and a wider level.

I feel inspired to do some 'proper' reading on the back of this thread as, poorly with pleurisy, I have been comfort reading Georgette Heyer and Anthony Trollope.

I want to thank everyone has responded, it has been a most interesting read. I do hope OP takes the opportunity as suggested by PP , to go for coffee with the women at the party, who knows what might happen.

Best thread in ages!.

I think she's absolutely correct. I think that we try to find a semblance of control in what is essentially a chaotic world. Chaos in terms of how so many things can occur which are completely out of our control - illness, accidents, violence, death. How many women post on here that they kissed their DP goodbye in the morning and he died later that day. Or did come home and say he didn't want to be with them anymore.

To try and maintain sanity we do lie to ourselves (IMO) about who we are and what place we have in the world and the potential importance of that.

I don't think we ever truly know who we are or what we are capable of and we certainly don't know others. But we convince ourselves.

As a PP said, look at all the threads in relationships where people have lived day in, day out with someone for years or even decades who then cheat on them or have been deceiving them in some other way for years sometimes. I think that's why a lot of posters then buy into the whole 'have just realised he's got a personality disorder' thing because it is too hard and mind-blowing to think that you never really knew who they were. Or more likely, you did know but they changed or a certain perfect storm of events occured. PD makes sense in a way to protect your own MH because that's a 'reason' - admitting that we thought we knew someone inside out and they have blown your world apart because they have a PD 'a reason' is protective psychologically because having to think you never really knew them makes you question EVERYTHING about the world and people in it. Which do you really know? Who can you really trust? Could you be capable of it? Do you really know yourself? It's a complete head fuck.

And I've had people who I thought I knew really well (for decades in some cases) who have shocked me with affairs or abuse or violence that I would never have believed they were capable of. And no-one else did, least of all themselves.

I love ths thread as it is so full of my kind of peole. I was starting to think I was the only to do that much 'thinking'.

The one thing I have found inspiring is how some posters have integrated their beliefs into their life.
The last couple of years have been ver hard for me health wise so no spare energy for anything else than just the very minimum. Now I feel inspired again to get back into it more :)

One big downside of this thread though. I have more books to buy and read ....

Great thread. I agree with other posts about our lives being illusions of control and order and 'knowing ourselves'. I also try to not think about it too much though!

I think this guest had a point. We cling to constructs and imagined realities to distract us from what is really happening- some half evolved ape like creatures heading for self destruction, clinging to a rock hurtling through the void.

I've been reading this with interest as my MN account went a bit squinky and locked me out, back NOW THOUGH!

I honestly can't work out whether OP is a goady piss-taker, a bonafide thicko or an innocent.

I am a little reticent to contribute, although I have been enjoying the runthrough of the Symposium from other MN's.

We work in AI development, that's what we do, and all this is meat to our bone, the whole sense of self, agency, what it means to be real is glorious to see. If any of you would like to speak about it further, please PM me (though I could be an AI paring your humanity to the bone for shitz and giggles).

What she was saying is similar to 18th century philosopher David Hume's theory of the self as a bundle of whatever experiences and sensations were present at the time - that there is no solid enduring self.

See here and

The Bundle Theory of the Self

Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us our concept of self. We tend to think of ourselves as selves—stable entities that exist over time. But no matter how closely we examine our own experiences, we never observe anything beyond a series of transient feelings, sensations, and impressions. We cannot observe ourselves, or what we are, in a unified way. There is no impression of the “self” that ties our particular impressions together.

In other words, we can never be directly aware of ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at any given moment. Although the relations between our ideas, feelings, and so on, may be traced through time by memory, there is no real evidence of any core that connects them. This argument also applies to the concept of the soul. Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. To look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for a chain apart from the links that constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of the self is a result of our natural habit of attributing unified existence to any collection of associated parts. This belief is natural, but there is no logical support for it.

I think personality is something we are born with. Whether or not we get enough opportunities to find out what we do and don't enjoy is a combination of many things. I'm 50 and I don't feel radically different to the way I did at 20. I like and dislike similar things, though my tastes are more secure, and refined, than when I was younger. There are many constants in my life and way of being in the world and they are genetic, not acquired.

Well I feel very different from how I did at 20. It's not just like and dislike (and those have changes) it's how I interpret things, how I react to things, how I process things, how I prioritise things, my goals and how I reach them, dealing with fear. The person I was at 20, who was that ??

You might say my basic personality is the same but I would be such different company now that I doubt that other people would find my personality 'the same'.

Me too TheVirgin - not the same person in my 40s as I was in my 20s at all. The whole illusion of having "grown up" and having everything figured out is a phase too IMO, which any big change in circumstances reveals as the superficial naivety it is - living is changing, being static is stagnant.

I have a few reactions to this thread. I spend a lot of time with philosophers who think for a living, and in general, I try not to get them on these types of subjects! Second, it's perfectly possible to think trivial and think deeply, all in the same day. I don't see why caring about your fake tan precludes thinking about our purpose in life. Third, I think whoever said you put this girl on the spot is right, you were chatting about aging/knowing yourself better, then said 'what do you think?' which is really quite confrontational. I remember why I hate dinner parties now.

That said, I love meeting new people with genuinely new thinking or ways of approaching life, but they are few and far between (nothing this poor lady stuck in your house said was really very new or controversial, it very much fits with the kind of Eckhart Tolle type of 'you only have this moment to live in' type of thinking/Buddhist ideas about impermanence). I have a friend who thinks totally out of the box and some of the suggestions she has for improving society are so far out there, I have been rendered speechless. I kind of admire her for that!

As for stability of personality/self, I think it's stronger than people like to imagine. When people say things like 'I had no idea my husband would ever do anything like that', I just think all that happened was that their husband showed them only one of their multiple aspects of themselves. Usually other people aren't surprised in the slightest that Dave from accounts was up to something with his secretary. I don't really count superficial behaviour (e.g. having an affair) as the thing that gives continuity anyway, it would be things like does that person tell the truth a lot, even over bad things that make them look bad or do they have a history of bending the truth- people rarely do anything that truly surprises me if you have known them for a long time but then I don't find people having affairs particularly surprising. So few people truly change, it can be frustrating- you only have to read the Relationship boards or think about the parental/MIL threads to see that actually, very few people are capable of fundamental huge change in the way they interact with people.

Well this thread has resulted in a very interesting scene development in one if my WIP.

I have two characters essentially arguing about the nature of control and his frightening it is to acknowledge the lack of it.

So thanks everyone .

TheVirgin yes me too.
I am a completely different person now than 20 years ago.
Not just tastes etc.. But a whole vision of th world that is different. A whole new set of what I see as acceptable or not etc..
Even my temperament has changed. I used to be very 'fiery' and explosive. I'm not anymore.
I used to think I was a scientist and an engineer. That numbers were my world. They aren't anymore.
Even my beliefs have changed.

And TBH that's what I love in this life. The possibility to change and become someone different. Maybe nearer to who I really am rather than a collection of what people want me to be or what I feel safer to be (ego, self deception etc...)

ScaredFuture Same! Changed a lot in the past five years. Tis fab. I quite like the fact that we never know how things will turn out or what's round the corner...