Recently I've been curious about what drives an individual to become so-called " self-aware", and about the relationship between this self‑awareness and the inclination toward existential concepts. Hegel was once described as a man “who saw in the course of world events a universal spirit striving toward self‑realization.” Even if we are all part of some universal human condition, what is it, on the individual level, that creates the conditions for such realization to occur? What are its requirements, its limitations, its influencing factors? More interestingly, why do some people—seemingly independent of specific life events, personal histories, or even "personality"—appear to lack a capacity for self‑awareness altogether? And what do we actually mean when we say that someone is or is not self‑aware? Is an inclination toward the existential a permanent mode of being, or merely a heightened frequency of exploring questions about meaning, identity, and purpose...
Western post-modern society has seen the continuation of an age-old infatuation with the concept of personal growth. While this enamorment is nothing new, there has been an exponential rise in ideologies that encourage the performance of change and self-improvement. These ideologies represent growth of the individual as something aesthetic and generally positive, which exist in direct conflict with those historical depictions of difficult trials that one must commit to in pursuit of eudaemonic satisfaction. Despite this accelerating infatuation with performative experience, or possibly as some ironic juxtaposition, this same society has resurrected the popularity of historical philosophers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche (not to mention the post-modern stoics). Yet it is difficult to believe that these individuals would have supported the societal commodification of their ideologies. To them, meaning and growth were not passive artifacts to be discovered in the approval ...