Just how nice do you think you are really?
ISN’T our capacity for selfdelusion comforting? After all, if we looked our flaws squarely in the face we would dive beneath the duvet in shame. We present ourselves to ourselves edited and re-lit selfie-style. We shine the kindest and most flattering light on our sins and peccadilloes.
We have a knack for ironing out our shameful, selfish, licentious, slothful, lazy, venial blips and believe deep down we are delectable combinations of Mother Teresa and St Francis of Assisi.
It is no surprise that a study by psychologists at Goldsmiths University shows 98 per cent of British people consider themselves to be among the nicest 50 per cent of the population.
Hilariously researchers showed those self-proclaimed charmers footage of bawling babies, yowling car alarms and a man spilling sticky liqueur on his pristine cream carpet while a camera captured the “micro-expressions” passing over their faces. Unwittingly these paragons displayed a host of less than compassionate reactions, foremost among them fear, surprise and disgust.
Should we be embarrassed by our staunch belief that we are immune from the failings and frailties of others? Ought we to be brutally honest with ourselves?
The answer of course is both yes and no. Donning a pair of blinkers is ridiculous. Concocting a raft of excuses, half-truths and exemptions which enable us to skive at work, ignore elderly relatives, fudge the recycling, park across our neighbour’s drive and take or make the odd payment in cash if we think noone’s looking achieves little except to enable us to function as the most uncongenial versions of ourselves.
On the other hand a hefty dollop of self-loathing is death to ambition, harmful to the spirit, submerges the imagination and renders us almost comatose with indecision, trepidation and an unhealthy conviction that we are doomed to make a spectacular pig’s ear of everything we dare attempt.
How the heck do we achieve a workable balance between maintaining our self-esteem and diving into a chasm of denial? If you have heard the meanest person you know holding forth about his generosity or the vainest chap in the WOMEN who undergo failed IVF are a fifth more likely to suffer heart disease. If we needed proof that the net effect of grief, longing and disappointment is a broken heart, we should look no further. SURVIVAL of the fittest is to many an appealing concept. How dispiriting therefore to find in what should be the fragrant, delicate sylvan area of wild flowers, fittest does not mean fairest. Pollution is proving deadly to our office attesting his utter ambivalence towards superficial appearance, you will know it is a tough ask. I suppose it works like this: if you do believe you are a kind person don’t just sit back and wallow in self-congratulation. Test yourself as you would test others. Do a bit of an audit.
Write down the last time you did a good deed, had a kind thought, supported a charity or said a
POLLUTION IS KILLING OFF OUR GENTLE WILDFLOWERS
delicate wild flowers. The azure blue harebell, golden bird’s-foot trefoil and even the complex dappled orchid are under threat as nitrogen belched by diesel cars and industry engulfs them. Doing very nicely thank you are the is compassionate word. If your list short do something about it.
Hating yourself is counterproductive but thinking you are an absolute humdinger of a human being is not much use to man nor beast either. super-thugs nettles, hemlock and hogweed which flourish in nitrogen-rich soil.
Remember the Flower Fairies, painted so exquisitely by Cicely M Barker? Isn’t it painful to think many wildflowers now face extinction?