You're

making a lot of sense.

I want to talk a little bit more about your idea of You're raising this idea of continuity.

And I think it's interesting.

What we keep as our core self and then choose to expand as opposed to what we discard.

And so we're organically building identity all the time in that way.

That's normal.

Maybe you can say it in writing the book if you want, but also in When we do this, when we sit in this tension, is there love? Is it there too? Is that a kind of a tension? What do you think?

there's...

I do.

I do.

Well, you've got a couple of questions in there.

So you've got this sort of before and after about what's the generational difference.

And then you've got this other set of questions, I think, which really sort of gets to the heart of How the coding has been engineered to create a sense of inner chaos, because it's useful and it can be monetized.

So those are two.

You're making

Mm-hmm

...

the platforms that people post on.

And it, it goes something like this.

Uh, it, this starts with Lacan, you know, the, the, the French psychiatrist, and, and it got picked up by Žižek, who is this, you know, philosophical rock star, um, on the internet.

This idea that the self is a construct, that there really is no self.

It is all performance.

How do we, Patricia, how do we start to think about subtracting some of this to get back to, uh, getting our systems online with ourselves?

Quickly before we get into it, though, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to the listeners?

So I am what you would call a cultural analyst.

This is someone who studies the culture as if it were an analytic patient.

So I have a, an eclectic, uh, set of disciplines that I draw from.

Psychology, I study digital culture, I study traditional culture such as history, mythology, and sociology, and the arts.

I draw this all together by way of analyzing sort of what's happening in the collective, and when I'm seeing spikes, you know, when these things converge and they begin to tell a story about where we're at as a civilization, that's when I get involved, start researching, and write about it.

And the reason I wrote this book is that I've been involved in one way or another with the internet since the very beginning.

What, life doesn't begin till you're 40? Doesn't he say something like that?

of optionality, like not having options and being stuck, being in one spot, or is it self-doubt?

Well, so what has happened, self-doubt is the symptom.

what's really happening is that now every question isn't just, well, you know, how do I pivot? Or what direction should I go in? It's really, who fundamentally am I? And our answer to that has been performance based.

And persona is in Carl Jung's map of the psyche it is the thinnest layer it is let me use a tech term it is the gooey interface between you and society so it's the social part of the self but it is also the thinnest layer of the psyche so we have made it load-bearing and it wasn't built for that so this is like this is the equivalent of moving a piano on a skateboard And so it's giving people symptoms that they feel but can't pin down.

And I spent 10 years talking to people, crisscrossing the country.

And then also I harnessed a rudimentary AI tool back in 2016 so that I could scrape the web at 500 posts, 500,000 posts at a swath across 12,000 users.

And did that for three years and started to do a comparative analysis of how people were actually talking about their sense of self.

Or is it going to be one of those things where we have AI that actually helps us build that capability and kind of augments our ability along the way? What's your forecast for that future?