The separate bounded self is a fallacy we choose whether to recognize

Evidence

What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of “efficiency” is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined “self”: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It’s also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 477

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the book’s core claim — attention is the faculty by which you constitute a world — restated as: the self is not a choice of what you are but of whether you recognize your relational constitution. Dense and paradigm-shifting, resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s stated key idea (‘attention is the faculty by which you constitute a world’) and connects to Watts and Buddhist no-self traditions.
• QUESTION: The reader’s privilege critique is sharpened here: if recognition of relational self is the only real choice, it still leaves open whose conditions make that recognition affordable — Olson’s ‘neutral, apolitical existence’ is precisely the mythology attending gentrification.

Related

• The self is bound to others and the world, not separate or controllable (similarity 0.92)