Welcome to the Egocosm
I have this strange, but perhaps not uncommon expectation that my internal life and the analysis of it will be of interest to others. I am genuinely surprised, sometimes even hurt when, occasionally, another person confronts me with the fact that I am of no interest to them whatsoever. But I am never entirely discouraged.
I see myself as a reflection of the world. I see the world through myself, the world in myself. I see myself as a microcosm, an ego-cosm, of the world outside myself. I understand other people as versions of myself, orphaned from the original source. And by revealing intimate truths about myself, I try to describe intimate truths about the rest of the world. Things the rest of the world is too proud or too smart to reveal or too arrogant or too stupid to see. I have made this argument numerous times, drunk and sober, to numerous people. Some buy it, some don’t, but in my eyes, it’s an honest and convincing argument. In my eyes, it is the only honest argument. In my eyes, of course.
I do occasionally wonder if other people understand other people this way, or if they are capable of understanding others as other selves. But this turns out to be perfectly circular. I’ll never know, because I understand other people as versions of myself. A peculiar species of anti-solipsistic adolescent solipsism: I recognise your existence on the condition that yours is simply a version, most likely an inferior one, of my own.
I concede that it’s not impossible that other people see the world in some other, less egocentric way. There are people who have assured me that they don’t view the world the way I do, but I am far from convinced. I am convinced, on the contrary, that I can only find truths by introspection, that we can only really observe the world by self-observation.
I have had this argument numerous times, drunk and sober but mostly drunk. It has been rehearsed at length but it has never been particularly well delivered. It always seems to get lost in the pettiness of reality as the desire of other egos to silence this enormous other ego, this cosmic fucking ego, turns bickering into bickering.
… Forgive me.
There are 5 Comments to "Welcome to the Egocosm"
This is an excerpt from an email from one of the most frequent participants in the real live debates I mention above. He would never actually have posted it on my site, lest he publicly support the propagation of my ego, but it’s worth posting as it’s probably more entertaining than the post itself. And I thought I was getting the final say:
[...] people who think much the same way this young egotist does. I am no different, as I acknowledged in my first blog post and in my About page. Still, even in Berlin, a city full of pretenders, pretentiousness of this [...]
“in my eyes, it’s an honest and convincing argument. In my eyes. In my eyes”- sorry. got bored
tim_AKA_MP@yokohama_wankers_society.com
Sorry to bore you, MP. Perhaps you ought to get back to some of your more interesting pursuits, then…
Sadly,
Our personal lives
Are of no interest.