Self-awareness
Self-awareness is an individuals ability to understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. To perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts.
Reasons for the lack of self-awareness
Being self aware is a beautiful gift- it means that you are humble
enough to admit you have flaws and intelligent enough to know how to
deal with them in a way that makes you a better person. Yet many people
lack self-awareness, why is that?
Perspective - No one is entirely self aware
& (barring exceptional disorders) people are not entirely devoid of self awareness.
It's probably unfair to say that they are not self aware & would be more fair
to say that they weren't as aware as you thought they should be. Or were less
self aware than you perceive others to be.
Privileges - Being self aware is a result of
some form of emotional labor. Privilege is the lack of obligation to perform
(a type) of labor. Some people exist at the intersection of quite a bit of
privilege. They have experienced life in such a way that the kind of emotional
labor that would lead to becoming self aware was not actually required of them.
Denial - This is a common defense mechanism.
Sometimes people refuse to look at themselves because it would be too painful
to do so. And it seems easier to them to stumble through life unaware of how
they shape their lives than it would be to have to confront themselves, take
responsibility & attempt to make a change
Obviously there can be any number of other reasons for a lack of self-awareness
as well.
Being unable to self-reflect, could be a direct result of a
trauma.
I also think it's a skill to self reflect. Some people don't have this skill
simply because they don't practice it. The
ability may be innate, but if the ability is never used, then it withers
away. You are born with muscles, but if you never use them, they atrophy.
The more you use your muscles, the better they get and i don't see
self-reflection as an exception to this rule.
It could also be a result of suffering from a mental condition or cognitive disorder. Individuals who
struggle with narcissistic tendencies or straight NPD don't have the
ability to feel remorse or see fault in their own actions for example.
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All these reasons and pitfalls, adds up to a large amount of people, unfortunately.
You see it driving on the roads when people cut you off.
You see it when people
continue the same sabotaging behaviors over and over again in their relationships,
but blame the other person.
Tons of examples. People just excuse it by saying,
“that's just how I am.” Instead of working on improving
themselves and looking inward for the answers to their problems.
It's not always
someone else's fault. Sometimes it's you. You gotta take ownership for your
role in your failures. Way too many people never do this, and as a result,
never live the life that they could.
"For freedom is acquired not by the full possession of the things which are desired, but by removing the desire..."
Who's Aaron Swartz?
Swartz, 26, was a Harvard University student who helped develop the RSS
standard and (kind of) co-founded Reddit. He was also a hacker, activist
and internet freedom advocate, which i will talk a bit about below.
In 2008, Aaron Swartz downloaded 2.7 million public court documents from the
PACER [Public Access to Court Electronic Records] database, aiming to make
them freely accessible. PACER charged 0.08$ per-page despite the public domain
status, resulting in a budget surplus of some $150 million, reported the New York Times.
In 1 of the 17 libraries, conducting a free trial of the PACER system,
Swartz used the credentials of a Sacramento library and a Perl script to download
2.7 million court documents and later distribute them publically.
His actions led to an FBI investigation, but no charges were filed, as it
was ultimately deemed that the documents were, in fact, public.
Between 2010 - 2011, through an unlocked wiring closet, Swartz used his Harvard
University JSTOR [Journal Storage] account, to access a database of academic
journals through MITs network and download approximately 4.8 million academic
articles from JSTOR,
"with the intent to distribute" according to prosecutors.
Although JSTOR declined to pursue charges and reached a settlement with Swartz
in June 2011; under the terms that he surrendered the downloaded data, Swartz
was arrested on the night of January 6, 2011 near the Harvard campus. Federal
prosecutors, led by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, continued an aggressive case
against him. The prosecution brought 13 felony charges under the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, including wire fraud and computer fraud.
The case became highly controversial as prosecutors sought an extraordinary
sentence: up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines if convicted. Many
legal experts criticized the prosecution as disproportionate and politically
motivated.
On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn
apartment, at the age of 26. Swartz's family and his partner created a memorial
website on which they issued the statement:
"He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to
enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better
place."
Below you can read the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, written by Aaron
Swartz.
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
American Wealth Distribution: By the Numbers
The United States has one of the most uneven distributions of wealth and
income among developed nations. According to data from the Federal
Reserve, the top 10% of Americans hold approximately 69% of the nation's
wealth and the top 1% hold 38% of the nation's wealth, nearly as much
wealth as the collective bottom 90% of the nation.
Whats worse is that this disparity has grown substantially over recent decades.
When examining wage data specifically, the contrast becomes even more pronounced.
Social Security Administration figures reveal that while the average American
worker in the bottom 90% earns around $40,845 annually, while those in the
top percentiles earn many many multiples of this amount. The wage gap between
the highest earners and the average worker has expanded by roughly 350% since
1979.
This economic stratification affects various aspects of American life,
from housing access to educational opportunities. Research from the Pew
Research Center indicates that 67% of Americans believe the wealth gap has
increased in the past 20 years — a perception supported by economic data.
The Congressional Budget Office reports that between 1979 and 2019, real
income for households in the top 1% grew by 160%, compared to a 26%
increase for the middle 60% of the income distribution.
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