Survival Vanity and How to Make it Work for You
Of course you think highly of yourself…but the great things you see within might be an illusion to help you cope.
There is saying, “nothing is as good or as bad as it seems”, and it’s true…there are chemicals in your body that make you feel more positive or negative than you should, and each can be appropriate. But this article is about something else, that little secret snob inside of you, that quietly believes that the rules for others don’t apply. I’m not criticizing this particularly, I understand that we all need to cope in a world where we might otherwise feel small. I just want everyone to understand this “survival vanity” and use it to good effect. At this point, let us introduce the basic rules of the human coping system:
1) When you’re in love, you pretend that you are the only ones in the world that are in love and having sex. This stems from survival vanity, that you, who are the greatest person in the world, naturally gets married to the second greatest person in the world (your mate), since you chose them.
2) Similarly, you get a dog that becomes the greatest dog in the world. This dog is the greatest because you chose them. Even though the love between you and the dog is basically contractual (you feed and pet them, they protect you and act lovingly as though you’re the only person in the world since they also have survival vanity), you pretend that they’ll only love you. As such, you let the dog do noble, Lassie-like things and reward them by letting them bark at cars and lick their genitals. If you don’t, the contract is broken and the dog walks around with a “hang-dog” expression.
3) You saw that film in Science class when you were young, about how the eyeballs invert images but the brain turns them right side up again. You begin wondering “what other senses does my brain mess around with?” (is this the front door to how survival vanity works?)
4) There is some far-off place that you know of, where people are really, really cool, like gladiators, actors, baseball players, and war heroes, but you are not a part of it…through no fault of your own, since as the greatest person in the world, it was only some cruel circumstance, fate, or unfairness, that prevented you from being really good at something or being really cool.
5) If you are lucky, you’re taught manners by your parents, and have some basic respect for all things, starting with your dog. You’re led to believe that this works since your dog pretends to like it (even though he just wants dinner). Further, you buy into a sort of chivalric code which leads you to believe that honor and sacrifice will advance you, as you read stories about Jesus, King Arthur, Robin Hood, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I say “if you’re lucky” because this has always worked for about 1/3 of the people who a) Come home from the winning side in a war alive b) are reasonably good looking, intelligent and healthy or c) don’t screw up with substance abuse.
6) The ones that can’t avail themselves of 5) are the 1/3 that use deceit and guile instead of honor (those who grew up admiring Judas, Mort D’Arthur, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Benedict Arnold, and Andrew Johnson) and the 1/3 that don’t even make it into the playing field of life. Think of these 1/3rds as the “those that make things happen, those that watch things happen, those that wonder what happened” in life.
7) No one lusts for power like those who have never had any. Call this the transition from survival vanity to survival vanity insanity. This is not only feeling that you are the best in the world, but that your kind are destined to rule the world.
8) You go to people’s funerals, and secretly believe that other people die, while you are immortal. After all, it’s never happened to you before, and you are special.
9) Other people’s farts smell, but yours don’t. More survival vanity on a very primal, animal level? This implies many more disgusting things involving your twisted brain, B.O. and burps, for starters.
10) You think your own baby is “cute”, even when he/she cries loudly on the bus or tries to eat off other people’s plates at restaurants. Other people think their own babies are cute, and yours is a brat.
11) When you have children, you develop “mini-me” survival vanity, which is to say that your children become little versions of you, and you love them the way you love yourself, and mad at them the way you get mad at yourself. At some point you need to cut them loose so that they develop their own survival vanity or else they (and/or you) will have a distorted identity.
12) When you get old your short-term memory goes haywire, while your long-term memory tends to stay intact. This is nature’s way of letting you believe the illusion that the “old days were better”, so that you can settle into a happy senescence before death.
13) Some are very, very high on the survival vanity scale, and called narcissists (like Donald Trump, who probably thinks he has the “perfect” survival vanity)
14) Time distortions: Everything that happened to you the first 20 years seemed to happen slowly, while everything that’s happened the past 20 years seems to be going by so fast. Is the little shutter-speed thing in your brain slowing down to fool you into thinking you can keep up?
15) Conspiracy Theories: These may be the ultimate expression of survival vanity mass hysteria. For instance, flat earther’s beliefs make them feel as though they are in on some special, secret knowledge that they “feel” is true, and that makes them feel unique (and the hell with what the threatening “disbelievers” think). After all, coming to terms with the truth can make you feel small and insignificant.
16) Coming of Age: And now for the biggest survival vanity of all…the sense that you more or less raised yourself through childhood while your parents were bystanders. Your parents remember changing your diapers, waking up in the middle of the night, and helping you with math/riding a bike, most of which you’ve forgotten. Thus, when you become a teen, you have an inflated sense of yourself (perhaps assisted by some hormones/genetics that are helping you become an adult and separate) and think of your parents as some kind of annoying roommates, who have obtrusively parachuted into your life and are making you do dishes/homework. Of course their hearts are broken by this, as they are only trying to help their “little thems” survive. Only when you produce your own “little yous” does your survival vanity in this area snap back to reality.
So now your secret mind has a decision to make…if you are the greatest person, with the greatest wife and the greatest dog, then why are so many people passing you up in the game of life? This is when you start finding rationalizations such as “they don’t understand what a genius I really am because they are a) biased b) jealous or c) part of a conspiracy and so you persevere in a kind of seething and bitter fashion. This works as long as you can go home to your greatest wife/kids/dog and they treat you accordingly, so that a kind of “us against the world” holds you together. But if your wife divorces you/kids run away from home/dog bites you, it becomes necessary to finally face the fact that you probably aren’t the greatest in the world, and despair sets in, meaning that your survival may be compromised. The best way around this is to isolate yourself and become a hermit, so that you can once again start building that world inside you which says you are secretly the greatest in the world, and that your B.O. actually smells pretty good.
I’m not complaining about survival vanity, I’m more of a mind to sit back and enjoy mine. I realize it must exist for a reason (survival) and so I’m not going to try and take yours away either. Be warned however, that just because my family, dog, and I think we’re the best in the world doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t the best in the world.
