Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”
Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.
In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.
When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.
And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.
Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”
Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!
It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.
Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.
So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)
The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.
And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.
In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”
A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.
But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.
Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”
Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.
Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”
We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”
In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.
Our individualistic culture inflames the ego and numbs the spirit. Failure teaches us who we are.
Via NYTimes, By David Brooks
Mr. Brooks is an Opinion columnist. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.”
April 6, 2019
Many of the people I admire lead lives that have a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career, started a family and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb — I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a doctor, a cop. They did the things society encourages us to do, like make a mark, become successful, buy a home, raise a family, pursue happiness.
People on the first mountain spend a lot of time on reputation management. They ask: What do people think of me? Where do I rank? They’re trying to win the victories the ego enjoys.
These hustling years are also powerfully shaped by our individualistic and meritocratic culture. People operate under this assumption: I can make myself happy. If I achieve excellence, lose more weight, follow this self-improvement technique, fulfillment will follow.
But in the lives of the people I’m talking about — the ones I really admire — something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.
Some of them achieved success and found it unsatisfying. They figured there must be more to life, some higher purpose. Others failed. They lost their job or endured some scandal. Suddenly they were falling, not climbing, and their whole identity was in peril. Yet another group of people got hit sideways by something that wasn’t part of the original plan. They had a cancer scare or suffered the loss of a child. These tragedies made the first-mountain victories seem, well, not so important.
Life had thrown them into the valley, as it throws most of us into the valley at one point or another. They were suffering and adrift.
Some people are broken by this kind of pain and grief. They seem to get smaller and more afraid, and never recover. They get angry, resentful and tribal.
But other people are broken open. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upends the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. The basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew. Some people look into the hidden depths of themselves and they realize that success won’t fill those spaces. Only a spiritual life and unconditional love from family and friends will do. They realize how lucky they are. They are down in the valley, but their health is O.K.; they’re not financially destroyed; they’re about to be dragged on an adventure that will leave them transformed.
They realize that while our educational system generally prepares us for climbing this or that mountain, your life is actually defined by how you make use of your moment of greatest adversity.
So how does moral renewal happen? How do you move from a life based on bad values to a life based on better ones?
First, there has to be a period of solitude, in the wilderness, where self-reflection can occur.
“What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped away of any way of proving his worth?” Belden Lane asks in “Backpacking With the Saints.” What happens where there is no audience, nothing he can achieve? He crumbles. The ego dissolves. “Only then is he able to be loved.”
That’s the key point here. The self-centered voice of the ego has to be quieted before a person is capable of freely giving and receiving love.
Then there is contact with the heart and soul — through prayer, meditation, writing, whatever it is that puts you in contact with your deepest desires.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us,” Annie Dillard writes in “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”
In the wilderness the desire for esteem is stripped away and bigger desires are made visible: the desires of the heart (to live in loving connection with others) and the desires of the soul (the yearning to serve some transcendent ideal and to be sanctified by that service).
When people are broken open in this way, they are more sensitive to the pains and joys of the world. They realize: Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain. I am ready for a larger journey.
Some people radically change their lives at this point. They quit corporate jobs and teach elementary school. They dedicate themselves to some social or political cause. I know a woman whose son committed suicide. She says that the scared, self-conscious woman she used to be died with him. She found her voice and helps families in crisis. I recently met a guy who used to be a banker. That failed to satisfy, and now he helps men coming out of prison. I once corresponded with a man from Australia who lost his wife, a tragedy that occasioned a period of reflection. He wrote, “I feel almost guilty about how significant my own growth has been as a result of my wife’s death.”
Perhaps most of the people who have emerged from a setback stay in their same jobs, with their same lives, but they are different. It’s not about self anymore; it’s about relation, it’s about the giving yourself away. Their joy is in seeing others shine.
In their book “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe tell the story of a hospital janitor named Luke. In Luke’s hospital there was a young man who’d gotten into a fight and was now in a permanent coma. The young man’s father sat with him every day in silent vigil, and every day Luke cleaned the room. But one day the father was out for a smoke when Luke cleaned it.
Later that afternoon, the father found Luke and snapped at him for not cleaning the room. The first-mountain response is to see your job as cleaning rooms. Luke could have snapped back: I did clean the room. You were out smoking. The second-mountain response is to see your job as serving patients and their families. In that case you’d go back in the room and clean it again, so that the father could have the comfort of seeing you do it. And that’s what Luke did.
If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.
On the first mountain, personal freedom is celebrated — keeping your options open, absence of restraint. But the perfectly free life is the unattached and unremembered life. Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in; it is a river you want to cross so that you can plant yourself on the other side.
So the person on the second mountain is making commitments. People who have made a commitment to a town, a person, an institution or a cause have cast their lot and burned the bridges behind them. They have made a promise without expecting a return. They are all in.
I can now usually recognize first- and second-mountain people. The former have an ultimate allegiance to self; the latter have an ultimate allegiance to some commitment. I can recognize first- and second-mountain organizations too. In some organizations, people are there to serve their individual self-interests — draw a salary. But other organizations demand that you surrender to a shared cause and so change your very identity. You become a Marine, a Morehouse Man.
I’ve been describing moral renewal in personal terms, but of course whole societies and cultures can swap bad values for better ones. I think we all realize that the hatred, fragmentation and disconnection in our society is not just a political problem. It stems from some moral and spiritual crisis.
We don’t treat one another well. And the truth is that 60 years of a hyper-individualistic first-mountain culture have weakened the bonds between people. They’ve dissolved the shared moral cultures that used to restrain capitalism and the meritocracy.
Over the past few decades the individual, the self, has been at the center. The second-mountain people are leading us toward a culture that puts relationships at the center. They ask us to measure our lives by the quality of our attachments, to see that life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one. They ask us to see others at their full depths, and not just as a stereotype, and to have the courage to lead with vulnerability. These second-mountain people are leading us into a new culture. Culture change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them. These second-mountain people have found it.
Their moral revolution points us toward a different goal. On the first mountain we shoot for happiness, but on the second mountain we are rewarded with joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self. It happens as we move toward our goals. You get a promotion. You have a delicious meal.
Joy involves the transcendence of self. When you’re on the second mountain, you realize we aim too low. We compete to get near a little sunlamp, but if we lived differently, we could feel the glow of real sunshine. On the second mountain you see that happiness is good, but joy is better.
David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and the forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks
I am not an avid YouTuber, which leaves me fraught with conflict about why I haven’t taken advantage of it. Because there’s money to be made out there with material as written about here, that honestly, I find dumbfounding. But, no more dumbfounding than a million other sites, and postings that are just as puzzling.
Having spent so many years in advertising, sales and marketing, I have an instinctive belief to how these things seed, grow, and take shape for popular consumption. As always, as it was then, that is entirely what the money goal is about. Its not so much about memberships, or paid views. its about advertising revenue. Eyes, Minds, Pocketbooks, Wallets, and today, selling off your privacy as well.
Considering the demographic of most hyper active Youtuber viewers (not producers), I woudl venture to guess, they have either no clue about how much they give up of their privacy, or they just don’t care, waving it off as part of their life culture, as if its some type of generational badge of their moment in time. Sort of like saying, “we can’t beat’em, so lets join’em, stop being suspicious and paranoid, and assume the best for our interests is in the hands of every advertiser, and exploitative entity that has our info. Its rosy, but naiive to the nth degree.
The story below on A.S.M.R reflects one of many more similar stories in our current technoculture. I read it in full, decided it was a fad, an opportunity to make money based on the strange traction things of little importance can pick up today. But, as often happens after reading articles and reporting of quality depth and observation, I came away with two paragraphs that stuck with me, and made the whole effort worthwhile.
They are highlighted below, they are my takeaway:
Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
(If online link is restricted to subscribers, full text is pasted below.) Also, some YouTube samples are included below.
How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation
The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.
Via NYTimes Magazine, By Jamie Lauren Keiles
April 2019
When Jennifer Allen watched videos of space, she sometimes felt this peculiar sensation: a tingling that spread through her scalp as the camera pulled back to show the marble of the earth. It came in a wave, like a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of her spine and leaving behind a sense of gratitude and wholeness. Allen loved this feeling, but she didn’t know what caused it. It was totally distinct from anything she’d experienced before. Every two years or so she’d take to Google. She tried searching things like “tingling head and spine” or “brain orgasm.” For nine years, the search didn’t turn up anything.
Then, around 2009, it did. As always, Allen typed her phrases into Google, but this time she got a result on a message board called SteadyHealth. The post was titled WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD:
i get this sensation sometimes. theres no real trigger for it. it just happens randomly. its been happening since i was a kid and i’m 21 now. some examples of what it seems has caused it to happen before are as a child while watching a puppet show and when i was being read a story to. as a teenager when a classmate did me a favor and when a friend drew on the palm of my hand with markers. sometimes it happens for no reason at all
The poster went on to demand an explanation. In the discussion, nobody had one, but many described a similar feeling — a “silvery sparkle” inside the head, a euphoric “brain-gasm” or a feeling like goose bumps in the scalp that faded “in and out in waves of heightened intensity.” Many people agreed that the sensation was euphoric. (“Aside from an actual orgasm, it’s probably the most enjoyable sensation possible,” one user wrote.) Its triggers were as varied as watching someone fill out a form, listening to whispering sounds or seeing Bob Ross paint landscapes on TV.
Allen scrolled through pages and pages of discussion.
Oh my gosh, she remembers thinking. These people are talking about exactly what I experience.
In time, that post begot a second post: WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – PART 2. As discourse on the unnamed feeling evolved, users shared accidental triggers found online — a man unlocking a damaged padlock, someone brushing her hair. These videos had a gentleness in common that many of the users found hard to describe. Some spoke of the need for a research group to better understand the sensation. Still others expressed fear over social repercussions: Were they perverts? Were they sick? Were they indigo children? Pleasure is rarely consequence-free.
“People had been told they were on drugs or that they had lice — things like that,” Allen says. “And then there was the factor of people calling it a ‘brain orgasm’ and it sounding like some sort of erotic fetish kind of thing.”
Allen had invested a lot in the discussion, even expressing interest in the fledgling research effort. She saw how the feeling had improved her sense of calm, but she worried that the subtext of a “tingling sensation” would hold the group back from legitimacy. The whole thing sounded too hokey — or too horny. If they wanted to generate scientific interest, they needed a more scientific-sounding name.
And so in February 2010, she sat down to brainstorm some ideas. Others had tried to describe the weird sensation, but spacey nicknames like “attention-induced head orgasm” had never quite caught on. Allen felt a debt to the feeling’s New Age fans, but she also saw the usefulness of more clinical language. When no existing term could meet both conditions, she made up a new one: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R. She started with “autonomous” because it was a feeling from within; “sensory” was self-explanatory. “Meridian” worked triple duty, suggesting peak but also orgasm and the energy pathways of traditional Chinese medicine. “Response” was just to say that it was not a constant state; it happened in reaction to a set of stimuli, like whispering, gum chewing and tapping.
“I wish I’d made it a little shorter,” Allen says. But at least it sounded better than “brain-gasm.”
She debuted the new name on the SteadyHealth board by announcing the “ASMR Group” she had registered on Facebook. Discussion-board users migrated en masse, and soon membership spanned six continents: a blogger in South Africa, an artist in Detroit, an ethnobotany researcher working in Australia. They started sharing links to videos again — not the accidental triggers of before but a new genre created for the express purpose of inducing A.S.M.R. These videos often featured anonymous women delivering soft-spoken voice-over narration. According to message-board lore, the first of this type was a video titled “Whisper 1 – hello!” It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title. Now, under the search-engine-friendly banner of A.S.M.R., this new genre offered an on-demand way to trigger the once-serendipitous sensation. A new crop of YouTube creators emerged to serve up the feeling to those who knew they felt it — at that point, a small but growing subset of the public.
Around the time when Allen found SteadyHealth, there were, by one count, 12 whispering channels on YouTube; three years later, that number had more than tripled. Soon a hard-won Wikipedia page would further extend the reach of the term — and further enshrine the new video genre. By 2015, the ASMR Group had made itself irrelevant. When Allen set out to name the weird sensation, she thought she was simply describing what she felt. She couldn’t foresee that her term would enable a whole new form of entertainment — or possibly something that transcended entertainment — born of the kismet of algorithmic fate as it brushed up against the crossed wires of the brain.
Todaythe action of A.S.M.R. plays out almost exclusively on YouTube, where legions of (mostly female) creators release, by my count, around 500 new videos each day. Over the course of reporting this article, I spent at least 200 hours on the site, watching women chewgum, swallow octopus sashimi, simulate eyeexams, turn pages ofbooks and peel dried glue off artificial ears. I watched a teenage girl role-play as a 14th-century nun, treating me for the bubonic plague. I watched a two-hour recording of hair-dryer sounds.
In the A.S.M.R. scene, new trends evolve quickly, driven by the spirit of innovation, corporate product-placement deals and a process of human-algorithm interaction that pushes the best new material to the top. Any trigger that starts to find fans is endlessly taken up and reperformed — ripped off by different channels for ad dollars — at least until the next trigger takes its spot. One month, cranial nerve exams are in. The next month, creators are all shaving bars of soap, chewing bricks of raw honeycomb or eating buckets of KFC. The feeling that fuels this growth is little understood, like the dark energy pushing our universe outward.
The internet is vast, but it brings like minds together. At its best, it serves to unite kinky freaks, dissidents of oppressive regimes and sufferers of obscure diseases. At the same time, this tendency can serve the cruel or misinformed — giving shared language to Nazis and incels and other bleak dopes who were once kept mercifully isolated from one another. This feature of the internet is, at best, value-neutral; in any case, A.S.M.R. tests its limits. The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.
Thinkers since ancient Greece, if not before, have found themselves obsessed with the true nature of the senses; even modern philosophers get tripped up discussing qualia, the irreducible stuff of consciousness. Subjectivity is hard to isolate, by definition, and examples of new metaphysical sensations are not exactly a regular occurrence. Synesthesia, often experienced as associating numbers with colors, is one of the rare examples. Though individuals since at least the 19th century have reported tasting words, seeing sound or hearing colors, it took until the 1980s for scientists to prove that the shared experience actually correlated with real, observable activity in the brain.
Thanks to the internet, A.S.M.R. seems to have leapfrogged the science entirely. Like synesthesia, it was first discovered by way of individual reports. Unlike synesthesia, it has not depended on brain imaging for cultural acceptance. Our foremost “proof” of A.S.M.R. comes from some people searching for the term and others making videos to populate those searches. All these YouTube users may be right that the feeling is real, but the scientific research still lags far behind.
Craig Richard, a professor of physiology at Shenandoah University in Virginia, first heard the term in 2013, on a podcast. “I’m listening to the beginning of this episode thinking, ‘This is a bunch of woo-woo bunk!’ ” he told me. Just as he went to turn the podcast off, the subject changed to the painter Bob Ross — by then, a well known A.S.M.R. trigger. Richard’s eyes lit up. In childhood, he spent afternoons watching Ross paint landscapes on TV. He remembered caring more about the painter than the painting. “It was his demeanor. It was the sounds he made and the way he talked — the way he looked in the camera.”
When the episode was over, Richard went to his computer to look up the research on A.S.M.R. At that point, he found nothing academic — only websites and forums that led him to the Facebook group. He reached out to Allen, and in collaboration with a graduate student and member of the community named Karissa Burnett, they conducted an informal online survey that, over time, has received more than 25,000 voluntary responses. (Where do you feel tingles? Head, neck, arm? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel aroused?) Richard also started ASMR University, an online archive that today remains a useful clearinghouse of research on the topic.
Still, scientific understanding has moved slowly. Funding for A.S.M.R. research is hard to justify, and the diverse nature of A.S.M.R. triggers can lead to “noisy” data. To date, ASMR University lists just 10 peer-reviewed papers. More than half of these were published in author-pay journals. The most rigorous studies use f.M.R.I. to map the activity of blood flow in the brain as participants report feeling the tingles. Outcomes have suggested, in very small samples, that A.S.M.R. might have something to do with socially bonding “affiliative behaviors,” known to release feel-good hormones like oxytocin.
Richard, for his part, considers these outcomes from an evolutionary-biology perspective. He believes that the tingles of A.S.M.R. are meant to assist in reproduction and survival, and points out that triggers like grooming, whispering and eye gazing all bear strong resemblance to the ways that humans soothe infants. In adulthood, a range of similar behaviors contribute to intimacy between mates. This may be the case, but our current understanding still leaves behind more questions than answers: If A.S.M.R. plays (or played) a key survival role, why does it seem that only some people can feel it? Why should it come to our attention only now?
It does not seem very likely that the pace and scope of research will ever catch up to the cycle of new content. For now, our chief authorities on A.S.M.R. are women and girls, alone at their computers, manipulating objects for a faceless, growing public.
Around the time that “Whisper 1 – hello!” was picking up speed in Allen’s Facebook group, Gibi — today one of YouTube’s top “A.S.M.R.tists” — was a sophomore in high school. (I’ve withheld her last name here for below-explained reasons.) Like many teenagers these days, she often had trouble falling asleep. Sometimes she would sneak her phone into her room and watch YouTube videos to relax her mind. This habit evolved by a haphazard process, led by the whims of an infinite sidebar. Makeup tutorials segued to massage, which soon gave way to A.S.M.R.
Since that fateful discovery, Gibi has watched A.S.M.R. videos every single night. The ritual followed her off to college, where the videos became a kind of white noise while she studied. A.S.M.R. was, by that point, not just for those who experienced the tingles. The genre had begun to find broader appeal as a sleep aid, an alternative to guided meditation and a drug-free, online version of Xanax. The medium had developed its own microstars, women with handles like Gentle Whispering ASMR and ASMRrequests, who filmed themselves crinkling paper, tapping their nails on large wooden bowls, dealing cards, brushing hair and pouring cold milk into bowls of Cocoa Krispies. One of Gibi’s favorites, Heather Feather ASMR, went beyond mere sound effects, performing full-scale role-play scenes infused with attentive, deliberate sound. In one, Heather administered a colorblindness test, tapping her wand on a laminated chart. In another, she played as a tattoo artist, trying on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Watching Heather’s videos made Gibi feel as if her “brain was swimming, in a good way.” She played the same scenes over on repeat, returning to parts that gave her the tingles.
At that point, in June 2016, many A.S.M.R.tists treated YouTube like a hobby. Across channels, production value varied wildly. A creator might post the perfect tapping video, then disappear from the site forever. Gibi thought that maybe, with regular effort, she could produce a better product — a quality channel with a regular schedule that tested out new, creative triggers on a regular basis. And so, in the summer before her senior year, she started her own channel, Gibi ASMR. Six months after graduation, she was earning enough in ad revenue to treat it as her full-time job. Today she has about 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
I first met Gibi in Los Angeles at Daiso, the kind of Japanese discount store that sells lots of things that you didn’t know you needed. Our plan was to shop for some tingly props — any little odd or end that might yield good, recordable sound. Gibi was in town for a public appearance. That day, a video from her account was trending globally on YouTube, a role-play called “The ASMR Sleep Clinic | Tingle Experiment.” She scrolled through the trending tab on her phone, rifling through the other clips in the Top 10:
“… Ellen DeGeneres, bowling ball-versus-bulletproof glass, ramen, iPhone stuff. …”
If most entertainment aims to shock or delight, then A.S.M.R. is barely entertainment at all. It’s more like a massage for the mind. Gibi’s main goal is to relax her fans.
“If you fall asleep during my video, that’s a compliment,” she said. Sleeping fans tend to leave videos running — a boon on a platform that pays dividends for view length. In this way, for Gibi, the most valuable engagement is actually a near-total lack of engagement. Even when viewers stay awake, straightforward entertainment remains somewhat beside the point. On Gibi’s channel, some of the most-requested content is not a character or joke but the sound of fingers tapping on a bread-shaped piece of cork. Fans request the “toaster coaster” by name — the closest thing A.S.M.R. has to “Free Bird.” That day, she was searching for similar objects, made of soft, dull wood or thick glass. We entered the store to the whir of air-conditioning. Gibi made a beeline toward a rack of piggy banks.
“Whenever I pick something up, I’m always listening to it,” she said, tapping her nails on a piggy bank’s candy-coated glaze. The lacquer made a dainty, plinking sound, like the loose filament of a shaken, burned-out light bulb. She moved on to rustle a strand of orange tinsel, then brushed her hand against the grain of a vellum birthday card. We turned down an aisle of fake plastic swords.
“When I hit 300,000 subscribers, I did a 300 role play, of Queen Gorgo, Leonidas’s wife,” she recalled. “That one was really cool, but people were kind of like, ‘What is going on here?’ Sometimes I’m like, Why do I even try to put effort into a big role-play, or something like that, when I can pick something up and be like, ‘O.K., here’s an hour of me tapping,’ and I’ll get like, three million views?”
Gibi is the LeBron James of touching stuff. She touches things professionally. As she paused to fondle a makeup brush, I heard the grip of her finger pads reluctant to give up the cellophane wrapper. When she smoothed the fleece of a microfiber towel, I cringed at the drag of rough callus against terry cloth. Gibi moves with the demonstrative intent of a former high school theater kid. (She is one.) She is hot in the way of a friend’s older sister, projecting an air of humble self-assuredness.
“I think a lot of what has to do with why my channel has become popular is because I do put a lot of my personality — oh, my God!” She stopped to interrupt herself and crinkled a plastic package of pens. “I put a lot of my personality into my videos,” she said.
For those who watch her at home, this apparent emotional availability can foster a range of attachments. Gibi says that most of her viewers are kind and effusive. Under her videos, they leave thousands of comments, appreciating the sound of her voice and its power to alleviate their insomnia, anxiety and P.T.S.D. (“SHE CAN M AKE ADS RELAXING!” one fan delighted.) For others, the tender tone can be misleading.
Unloading her shopping basket at the till, she told me the story of one obsessive fan who believed she was talking directly to him. He sent her tens of thousands of messages, she said, and she filed a police report. Other fans have pried into her past, digging up old records from high school. Creepiness and harassment are widespread problems for the young female creators of the A.S.M.R. world. Gibi takes extreme precautions to protect her own privacy. She doesn’t share her last name, or her relationship status, or even what city she lives in. When she films in an airport, she is careful to choose an unplaceable background. If she happens to meet a fan on the street near her house, she pretends that she’s there on vacation.
“I’ve learned a lot about cybersecurity,” she said. “If you ever want to start a YouTube channel, delete everything, and then go back and delete more. Make everything private. Act like you have five million subscribers when you’re starting, because you can’t go back.”
Outside the store, Gibi laid her purchases out on the pavement. We surveyed the haul: the ceramic piggy bank, the strand of orange tinsel, a thick glass jar with a plastic lid, a stress ball shaped like a bakery bun and a random assortment of candy and snacks. Gibi unwrapped a pack of Hi-Chews and popped a fruit-flavored cube in her mouth.
“People are naturally curious,” she said, deforming it against the hollow of her cheek. The suction made a spitty sound. When she livestreams, she went on, she even gets nervous about the weather giving away her location. “They can look up if it’s raining where I am.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
“It’s scary,” she agreed, but all I could hear was the sound of her tongue, working the last bit of taffy from her teeth.
Intimacyis a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
It’s hard to talk about A.S.M.R. without nuanced language for the things that come near sex. In the absence of such terms, the genre seems doomed to appear sexual — a suspect jumble of tingles and pleasure and subservient women you watch alone at your computer. Who, in our time, can look at a video of a young woman doing anything and not wonder who else is watching — and why? Are those who feel the tingles just a bunch of repressed weirdos? Questions like these have plagued A.S.M.R. ever since Jennifer Allen first cringed at the word “brain-gasm.”
“A lot of the visuals you might see” in A.S.M.R. videos “relate to how you might visualize what happens during healthy foreplay,” Craig Richard says. “People talking gently to each other, people touching each other lightly, gazing into each other’s eyes, expressing physical or vocal care for each other — making the other person feel safe.” If A.S.M.R. is not sexual itself, then Richard believes it might still belong to a general complex of safety, caring, connectedness and trust. “It could heighten a sexual moment, in a way the same way that massage oil can heighten a sexual moment, but oil by itself is not sexual,” he says. “We get most of our nutrition from our food, but we may supplement with vitamin pills. That’s how I view A.S.M.R. videos. There are very few people that are probably going to substitute real-world relationships.”
Every activity has a threshold of acceptable intimacy. For most people in the United States, it is normal to express that you like having your hair shampooed in a salon. It is less normal to say that you derive pleasure from taking an eye test or by making eye contact with an inquisitive waitress. These affective norms can be counterintuitive, especially considering how many of our jobs require employees to feign loving attention. Still, they exist for a reason. It is one thing to ask someone to fit your shoes; it’s another to enlist them in your search for human comfort.
Part of the joy of A.S.M.R. is the way it allows us to invert the equation. In A.S.M.R. videos, people engage in regular tasks while drawing those second-order pleasures to the fore. The usual priorities of the eye test are distorted; now it’s less about nearsightedness and more about whispered instruction and warm light. A.S.M.R. combines the one-way sociality of podcasts with the outcome-driven imperative of porn. In an age defined by loneliness and dislocation, it’s a lot to ask someone to turn that away.
Nevertheless, the gender imbalance of performers seems suspect. The viewing pattern even looks similar to porn, but this perhaps goes beyond mere horniness. For much of human history, women have been cast into care-taking roles. With centuries of imbalance, it makes plenty of sense that our brains would find peace in these strange and gendered invocations of comfort. Is that healthy? Is that normal? Really, who can say? Sitting alone in front of a screen, nothing seems that weird anymore.
Here, I suppose is the place to come clean and admit that I’ve never felt A.S.M.R. In watching those hours of YouTube, I often felt calm (and I sometimes felt horny), but not even once did my brain let loose a tingle. By the end, I found myself feeling isolated — confusingly excluded from a mass phenomenon beloved for its success at assuaging loneliness. In a last-ditch attempt to feel it for myself, I flew up to Oakland to meet Melinda Lauw, co-creator of the service Whispers on Demand and a provider of one-on-one A.S.M.R. experiences.
Lauw grew up in Singapore and studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths in London. She first got involved with A.S.M.R. through Whisperlodge, an immersive theater piece she produced with the playwright Andrew Hoepfner. Whispers on Demand grew out of that project — less theatrical, more therapeutic. Lauw’s clients were mostly women, many in the tech industry. The sessions cost $150 per hour.
Our meeting was held on a morning in September in a rent-by-the-hour conference room. I was invited to take off my shoes. In advance of the session, I’d filled out a form, confessing my tingle virginity. Lauw had arranged a pile of maybe-triggers in the style of a surgical instrument tray. The session began with us sitting side by side, and soon she was using each object on my body — rubbing the lavender oil on my wrist, crinkling the tissue paper near my head and pulsating my knee with the metal tuning fork.
I lay down on the couch, and she styled my hair with a wide cotton band, then let my hair down, then styled it again. She polished my ear with a ridged cotton swab. It felt nice to be touched, if just by way of a Q-tip, but only one time did I maybe feel a tingle. As the tip of a small, clean makeup brush outlined the greasy crease of my nose, I felt something creep on the side of my head, like a cold millipede crawling underneath my scalp — were these the famed tingles of A.S.M.R.?
Maybe so, but I pushed them away. I am not so libertine or well adjusted to make use of pleasures beyond a social script. Though Lauw was a calming and trustworthy guide, a few times I thought I might scream for no reason.
Soon enough, our session was over. We both stood up and walked to use the bathroom. Lauw waited for me outside the stall. When I was done, I leaned on the sink and offered a few words of thanks for the session. Lauw didn’t ask if I’d felt anything, and for this omission, I was grateful. Usually paid intimacy concludes with some kind of definitive transaction. I’d paid online, so I offered her a hug. We stood for a moment, embracing in the bathroom. Then I pulled away, thanked her again and returned to the noisy city streets, alone.
I’m sorry but this is not a convincing essay on plastering yourself to a smartphone excessively. Samantha Irby writes “…maybe it’s worth it.” Ok, fine. She’s a comedian, so this is supposed to be…funny? Not sure here. I think she’s into her phone big time, and this is more genuine than sarcastic. But then she doesn’t make any real case for that statement. It’s all glibness. So is this just a joke essay/opinion. Hmm. Its not funny.
She’s “…staring down the barrel of 40 yrs old!” So this is all about an existential conflict now? Wow. That better be a joke. But, its not funny. So…
As I wrote in an earlier post here, the problem with children and teens getting addicted into this vacuum of screen after screen after screen lies first with the adults around them that are addicted in front of them. Meet one right here…
Sure, electronic eyes are spying. But look at everything this pocket computer can do!
By Samantha Irby, Via NYTimes
My phone is my favorite possession. I wish I could pretend it has been some torrid courtship, that after much cat-and-mousing the two of us succumbed to our mutual attraction and decided to settle down and make an honest go of it, but I can’t: I am in breathless pursuit, hustling to keep her updated and paid for, wooing her with expensive protective cases and as many off-brand charging cords as there are outlets in my home. She acknowledges this attention with occasional notifications, blinking on the screen, reminders to update, so many needs. That makes me want her even more.
I know that having her carelessly bouncing around the bottom of my bag all day and on the nightstand inches from my sleeping face, readily available for when I need to look up “recipes for morons” or “the best way to wash a cat,” is putting my precious information at risk. My phone is always listening, and through a series of bloops and bleeps I do not understand, the data I have spewed into the universe gets sold and fed back to me in a targeted Instagram ad for whatever it is I now urgently need.
I don’t know how thrilled I am to be giving up my secrets, but it’s foolish to think I have any control over them, and ultimately I don’t care. I love convenience and entertainment too much to worry about how much information I cannot control is being leaked to marketers, retailers, the government and whatever Chinese intelligence agency controls the barrage of ads for $13 dresses that saturate my feed.
Maybe it’s because I got in the smartphone game late and have a real memory of how inconvenient life used to be.
I’m staring down the barrel of my 40th year, and the first computer I bought for myself was six or seven years ago. I didn’t get my first iPhone until they’d been around for years, partly because I was like: “Who needs that? I prefer to live in the real world!” but mostly because the idea of walking around with a $500 computer in my pocket seemed dangerous. And the idea that I could somehow scrape together the money to purchase said pocket computer while also maintaining a roof over my head (read: partying all the time and paying for cable) was hilarious and unrealistic. I was the last dinosaur at the club sending multi-tap texts on a Nokia E51 with no camera.
When I finally upgraded, I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. O.K., sure, this glowing rectangle in my bag can tell me the weather anywhere in the world at this exact moment, but who cares? Wait, it can also figure out exactly what wrong street I’m turning down and steer me back in the right direction? And it counted how many steps I took? While also storing all the passwords I can never remember? Please excuse me while I build this shrine to the new most important thing in my life.
That is how it gets you. I was a skeptic and then I was a convert almost immediately. I have long understood that I am a tiny, powerless cog in the wheel of modern America, plus I’m not a hacker, so what do I even know about keeping things hidden? Is it even possible for me, a regular person who cannot figure out how to program the television remote, to circumvent the eyes of all of the faceless technology corporations analyzing my information? What am I going to do, cheat Amazon? Outsmart Google? No, I’m going to do what everyone else does: enter my credit card information when prompted and get that thing I need two days from when I decided I needed it.
A few months ago I went to dinner with the kind of people whose idea of fun is to correct your pronunciation of “niçoise,” and they boldly suggested that we all put our phones face down in the center of the table for the entirety of the meal and what felt like a needlessly lingering discussion afterward.
Now, I didn’t die. But I also didn’t know what time it was. Or if anyone had texted me. And I’m not really a “post a picture of my fancy meal” kind of person, but I could tell that other people wanted to. The air was heavy with missed opportunity. And you know what we talked about while cringing internally as the carafe of still water we actually had to pay for came perilously close to splashing on our helpless devices every time it was passed?
TV shows, which you can watch on a phone. Books, which, if your eyes haven’t already burned through the back of your skull from being on your phone all the time, you can read on your phone. Murder podcasts, which are specifically made to be listened to on a phone.
Yes, your phone is potentially hazardous to whatever semblance of security you might have. Yes, there are many medical professionals who would attest to the deleterious effect modern technology has on the brains and interpersonal skills of adults. But hear me out: Maybe it’s worth it?
My phone knows so much about me. It knows where I am, how many steps I took to get there, the whisper of a thought I don’t remember even fully forming in my brain that somehow made its way to a search engine. It also knows I am addicted, which is why it doesn’t ever really have to worry about whether I’m creeped out by the digital eyes I can feel looking over my shoulder.
Not long ago, Apple put a screen-time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug it won’t stop selling me. I use the statistics it collects as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone. Only one hour and 37 minutes of social networking yesterday, you say? Let me put this informative book I was reading down and try to top that. But my phone already knows that’s what I’d want to do.
Samantha Irby (@wordscience) is the author of the essay collections “Meaty” and “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.”
Very useful. An in-depth look at how truly living with humility is not just checking off a few boxes now and then, but recognizing that it is a full spectrum way of life that involves many decisions on how we feel about, and conduct, ourselves around others almost every day. This primer is important to read right through to the last frame.
”’Mother Theresa once said, “Humility is the mother of all virtues; purity, charity, and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent.” These words ring true, but you don’t have to be Mother Theresa, or even religious at all, to make an effort to practice humility in your everyday life. Being humble means accepting your limitations and making an effort to make the world a better place without wanting to take all the credit.
Part 1
Developing a More Humble Mindset
1.
Don’t think you’re too good for everything you do. People who have big egos tend to think that they deserve to be working at a better place, to be dating someone better, or even to be hanging out with people who are interesting and cooler. But your life is your life, and if you want better things, then you have to work to reach for them, instead of assuming the attitude that you’re not getting treated fairly. To practice humility, work to accept the life you have while striving for more without complaining.
If you adopt the attitude that you’re too cool for school, people will become allergic to you. Instead, work to be grateful for what you have and work to earn more, if that’s what you want.
2.
Be an optimist. People who practice humility are naturally optimistic because they don’t waste their time complaining about all of the bad things that have happened to them or dreading the future. Instead, they’re grateful what they have and they expect good things to happen in the future. Humble people don’t expect to be given good things on a silver platter, but they do believe that good things will happen to them if they work hard enough.
Work on being excited about all of the things the future holds instead of expecting catastrophe to strike at any moment.
Though it’s a good idea to be prepared for the worst, you should work on finding the silver lining in almost every situation.
3.
Accept that you’re not the best at everything. To get in a more humble mindset, you have to accept the fact that you’re not the best at everything—or even anything. No matter how great you are at surfing, singing, or writing fiction, there will always be someone who is more knowledgeable than you are, and that’s okay. Instead of acting like you have the final say on something, be open to the fact that you’re constantly evolving and improving, and know that other people can help you get there.
If you act like you’re the best at something, you’ll come off as arrogant. Instead, show people that, while you’re proud of what you know or what you can achieve, you’re always wanting to do more.
4.
Know that humility is not false modesty. It’s one thing to be humble and another thing to be falsely modest. If you spent all weekend working on a project for work and your boss tells you you did a great job on Monday, don’t say, “It was nothing.” Tell him that you’re glad he liked it and that you’re happy to have put a lot of work into it. You may think that shrugging off your achievements will make you look more modest, but in reality, it will actually make you come off as more arrogant.[1]
Sure, it can be kind of awkward when people are praising you. However, you should accept credit where credit is due instead of acting like it was no big deal.
5
Recognize your flaws. If you want to practice humility, then you have to be aware of the fact that you’re not perfect. If you think that you’re a flawless human being, then you’re not going to learn anything new in this world or grow as a person. Instead, it’s important to be self-aware and to know what you need to work on, so you can be humbled before others. A truly humble person knows that he has things to work on and makes an effort to get there.
Sure, it can be humbling to admit that you need to work on your social skills or that you’re not the world’s neatest person. But this can also lead you to work toward self-improvement.
Along with recognizing your flaws, it’s important to be able to accept the things you cannot change about yourself.
6
Avoid bragging. To truly practice humility, you should avoid bragging or showing off as much as you can. While you may want to talk about your accomplishments, you should avoid sounding like you’re showing off as much as possible. If you worked hard to do something, then you can talk about it, but avoid talking about how rich, attractive, or successful you are, or people are likely to get the wrong impression about you. Instead, you should trust the fact that if you’re a really impressive person, other people will get a sense of it without you having to tell them.
People who truly practice humility focus much more on praising other people than on focusing on their own accomplishments.
The next time you catch yourself talking about something you’ve achieved, ask yourself whether you’re bragging or showing off, or just sharing something you’re truly proud of.
7
Be grateful for what you have—and what you don’t. If you really want to practice humility, then you have to work on being grateful for everything the world has given you, from your health to your pet kitty. Don’t take anything for granted and know that it’s a privilege to even be reading an article online. You should also be grateful for the hardships and challenges you’ve faced, because they’ve made you into the person you are today.[
Of course, some people are a lot better off than others when it comes to the luck game. Just know that it’s what you do with your luck that matters, and that you should be grateful for what you have been given instead of complaining about what you don’t have.
Gratitude is essential for true humility. Work on making a list of everything you’re grateful for and add to it whenever you think of something else.
Part 2
Taking Action
Stop talking. One way to practice humility is to spend more time listening than you do talking. If you spend all of your time talking about yourself or sharing your ideas, then you’ll be less likely to learn from others or to appreciate what they have to offer. Listening to other people will also make them feel important and cared for, and it can be very humbling to give others a listening ear and a bit of your time.
It can be very humbling to realize that other people have a perspective that is just as valid as yours, and that everyone around is also filled with worries, doubts, and hopes.
Become an expert at listening to people without interrupting them or giving them advice unless they ask for it.
2
Give other people credit. If you want to practice humility, then the best thing you can do is to is to learn to give credit where it is due. If you’re praised for doing a report at work, make sure you mention that you couldn’t have done it without two of your coworkers. If you’re praised for scoring a goal at the soccer game, mention that you couldn’t have done it without your teammates. You are rarely responsible for 100% of your success, and it’s important to take the time to acknowledge all of the other people who made your success possible.
It will actually make you feel better to acknowledge that other people have worked hard, too. If you take all the credit without deserving it, then you’ll be practicing selfishness instead of gratitude.
3
Admit when you’re wrong. One characteristic of a truly humble person is the ability to admit you’re wrong. If you’ve made a mistake, it can be very humbling to let people know that you’re aware of your missteps and that you’re apologetic about them. Don’t just be in denial or brush it under the rug. If you want to practice humility, then you have to accept that you’re not perfect and come to terms with admitting your mistakes and apologizing for them.[3
When you apologize to people, look them in the eyes, make your words genuine, and show them that the behavior won’t happen again. Let them see that you’re taking the time to truly apologize, and that you’re not just doing it out of obligation.
Of course, actions speak louder than words. To truly be forgiven, you have to work to not make the same mistake again.
4
Go last. Whether you’re ordering at a family dinner, in line at the movies, or waiting to catch the bus, make an effort to let other people go before you once in a while. People who practice humility are aware that they’re not the most important people in the world, and they let other people go before them because they know that their time isn’t more important than anyone else’s. While you shouldn’t be a pushover, you should look for opportunities to let people go ahead of you if you want to practice humility.[4
There’s a real humility in saying, “After you.” Work on seeing that your time isn’t worth more than anyone else’s and letting other people have a chance before you do.
It goes without saying that cutting a line is the opposite of being humble.
5
Ask for advice. It can be very humbling to admit that you don’t have all the answers and to defer to someone else. When something is troubling or puzzling to you, take the time to turn to a friend for advice or to ask a coworker to share his expertise. Be comfortable with admitting that other people have something that is useful to you and that you’re always open to learning more and improving as a person. Truly humble people know that knowledge is infinite, and they’re always asking others to share what they know.
Don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know something. In fact, most people love sharing their knowledge with others and will be eager to help you.
You can even offer a bit of praise when you ask for advice. Just saying something like, “Hey, I know you’re a whiz at math, and I just can’t understand this problem,” will make a person feel great, as long as it doesn’t sound like you’re sucking up.
6
Praise others. Another way to practice humility is to recognize other people for their achievements. Praise other people as much as you can, for being in awe of how hard your co-worker worked on a presentation to praising your sister for keeping her head up in a difficult situation. Praising others publicly, as long as you don’t embarrass them, can also be a great way to show your appreciation of others and to humble yourself before the strengths of other people.
Get in the habit of telling other people when they’re doing great at something. This can make both you and the person feel great.
Of course, make sure the praise is deserved. You don’t want the person to think that you just want something from him.
7
Give compliments. If you want to practice humility, then you should always be open to complimenting other people, from telling them how great they look to complimenting aspects of their personality. As long as your compliments are genuine, you’ll be making other people feel better about themselves while practicing humility in the process. Truly humble people recognize that other people have endless qualities that are worth praising.
Even something simple like, “I love your earrings. They make your eyes stand out,” can really brighten a person’s day, and it takes very little effort.
Part 3
Living a Life Filled with Humility
1
Volunteer. If you make volunteering a part of your routine, then you will be able to have a more humility-filled life. Whether you’re helping children and adults learn to read at your local library or working a soup kitchen in your community, volunteering can help you get in touch with your sense of gratitude and help people who really need you. It can be incredibly humbling to spend time with people who are grateful for your help, and it can make you be more gracious and less likely to feel entitled.[5]
Volunteer for the sake of it, not for the bragging rights. You don’t need to tell your fifty closest friends that you’re volunteering just to show off. Of course, if you’re genuinely proud and want to talk about it, that’s another thing.
Giving your time to help others can make you realize that you don’t always need to put yourself first. This can make you live a life filled with humility.
2.
Don’t compare yourself to others. To practice gratitude on a regular basis, you should avoid comparing yourself to others, whether you’re jealous of your neighbors, your best friend, or even Taylor Swift. Focus on being grateful for what you have and enjoying your life on its own terms instead of thinking you need to have what your best friend or co-worker has to truly be happy. If you spend your life comparing yourself to others, then you will never feel like what you have is enough, and you won’t be humbled before all that you have been given.
You can admire other people and feel inspired to be better because of them. But if you covet what they have, you are likely to fall into feelings of bitterness that will keep you from enjoying your life.
Don’t gossip about people or put them down because you’re secretly jealous of them, either. Humble people only say nice things about people behind their backs.
3.
Be teachable. People who practice humility are the first to admit that they don’t know everything. Whether you’re getting tips from a co-worker or a friend, it’s important to be open to new possibilities and new knowledge. Let people see that you think they have a lot to offer you, and avoid acting stubborn or like you know everything. Even if you may feel like an expert on a topic, remember that you can always learn more; it’s humbling to admit that you’re a student of life.[6]
Don’t get defensive when someone is trying to teach you something. If that person has pure intentions, then you should make an effort to hear him out.
You don’t want people to feel like you think you have all the answers, or they won’t be eager to share their experiences with you.
4.
Practice anonymous kindness. If you want to practice humility, then not all of your kind deeds have to go noticed. Donate money to charity without telling a soul about it, or donate your old clothes without saying a thing. If you notice that a person’s parking meter is expired, throw in a few quarters. Help crowdfund a worthy project. Anonymously post a kind comment on a person’s blog. Take the time to do something nice without wanting anything in return, and you will be on your way to practicing humility every day.
If you’re the only person who is aware of the good you’ve done in the world, there is something especially humbling about the experience.
You can even write about the experience in a journal if you feel like telling someone.
5.
Don’t complain so much. People who practice humility aren’t often seen complaining because they realize that life is precious and that they have so much to be grateful for. Sure, we’ve all had bad days, and it’s okay to vent once in a while, but you shouldn’t make a habit of it if you want to practice humility. Remember that so many people have it so much worse than you, and that complaining about every little thing that happened to you instead of focusing on the positive will keep you from practicing humility.
People are drawn to appreciative, positive people. If you complain all the time or form relationships based on complaining all the time, then you’ll be less likely to live a humility-filled life.
Whenever you catch yourself complaining about something, try to counter that comment with two positive comments.
6.
Spend more time in nature. There’s something very humbling about being in nature, whether you take a long hike through the woods or you spend a day just lying on the beach. Nature can remind you that there are things bigger than ourselves and our problems out there, and that we should be in awe of the world instead of obsessing over all of our little problems or thwarted ambitions. Making a habit of being in nature more often can lead you to practice humility more.
Your problems won’t seem as severe when you’re standing at the base of a mountain. As corny as it sounds, being around nature will make you see that you’re just a grain of sand on the beach that is the universe, and that you should be thankful for what you have instead of bemoaning what you wish you had.
7.
Spend more time around children. Children have a natural sense of wonder and almost never cease to be in awe of the universe. If you want to practice humility more often, then you should make a habit of spending more time with children. They’ll help you see the world through new, youthful eyes, and you’ll be able to rediscover some of the magic you may feel that you lost because of the daily grind. Making a habit of spending more time with kids, whether you spend more time with your own, volunteer with children, or help a friend out by babysitting, can help you practice humility regularly.
You may think that you have a lot to teach children and will feel humbled when you see that they have a lot to teach you, too. Listen to their perspective about the world and see how it can help you become a more humble, grateful person.
Being around children will help you rejuvenate your sense of wonder. This can help you be more appreciative of the world around you and it will keep you from taking anything for granted.
8.
Practice yoga. Yoga is a practice devoted to being grateful for the body you have been given and your time on this earth. Though some yoga practices can be a great workout, too, the most important thing with yoga is being in touch with your mind and body and not taking a single one of your breaths for granted. If you want to work on practicing humility more, then you should make yoga a regular part of your life.[7]
Taking just 2-3 classes a week can transform the way you look at the world. If you feel like you just can’t make the time to go to a yoga class, you can practice at home.
