Imposter Syndrome: How It Reveals Both The Paradox and The Predicament
Western culture used to project Perfection and Transcendence onto the afterlife. You had to live a good life - and then die - in order to get to heaven.
But in the 21st century, heaven is just beyond your grasp - on instagram.
An ideal world where everyone is beautiful and happy, is right there within touching distance.
Perfection and Transcendence are not found in ancient scrolls - but rather in scrolling through social media.
This radical, and often unnoticed shift in where meaning, purpose, and transcendence are to be found is at the heart of a very common, and very modern, problem - that of ‘Imposter syndrome’, the crippling suspicion that everyone else has it figured out apart from you.
It’s the deep seated feeling of being a failure and a fraud, and a gnawing fear of being exposed and revealed for you really are.
What’s going on in this complex modern phenomenon? And what can it teach us about where real happiness and security can actually be found?
‘Imposing’ on reality
First let's look at the language.
‘Imposter’ and ‘impose’ share the same Latin root - imponere, meaning “to lay on”.
To impose is to arbitrarily add something. And in an important sense this is something we are doing all the time.
Ancient spiritual traditions and the latest cutting edge neuroscience both attest to our human capacity to project all manner of things onto the perceptual field.
In reality, it turns out that all of us are imposing arbitrary narratives and meanings upon ‘the world’ - all the time.
And it’s this tendency to be ‘imposers’ that also inclines us to feel like ‘imposters’ as well.
How does this work?
(Anti) Social Media
If Buddha was alive today, his very first teaching on The Four Noble Truths could be explained through instagram alone.
It looks like everyone is having fun. It looks like everyone else has it all figured out. It looks like those people have never failed, or suffered loss, or experienced sadness and depression.
But remove the filters and the music and the editing - and every single person is a suffering being just like you.
In fact, if social media was implanted into our brains so that it published selfies in real time without our consent and captioned them with exactly what we were thinking and feeling - facebook instagram wouldn't have a single user in the world.
The Paradox & The Predicament
One aspect of Buddha’s teaching on The First Noble Truth reveals what I have dubbed ‘The Circadian Paradox’.
Put simply, this paradox captures how, every day, there is a massive inverse correlation between output and outcome.
According to neuroscience, the average person has around 90,000 thoughts per day, each one motivated by the desire to get happiness up and stress down.
Yet at the end of each day we’ve experienced no marked increase in our capacity for happiness and, generally speaking, stress has increased.
Extrapolate that out to 32,850,000 thoughts per year and almost half a billion thoughts over a lifetime and that daily paradox really does add up to a genuine existential predicament.
Despite a gargantuan, never-ending quest to increase happiness and reduce stress, no one is getting happier and or no one is free from suffering.
There’s a massive discrepancy between our projected narrative and reality - and it's this that provides the basis for the pain of the imposter syndrome.
The Real Imposter Revealed
In the imposter syndrome we completely miss both the paradox and the predicament.
We feel like imposters because we ‘impose’ a nonexistent story that everything should work out fine and progress in a linear manner towards perfection.
It’s this notion that everything should be going right, and that nothing should ever go wrong, that is the actual ‘imposter’.
So consider the following reality based alternatives.
In his bestselling book Failing Forward, John C. Maxwell argued that anyone with a successful business has failed at least 2.5 times in the process. And further, that anyone who wishes to be successful should aim to ‘increase their rate of failure’ in order to do so.
In literature there isn’t a single Hero's tale, in print or on that screen, without spectacular failures in the first and second acts. And since the dawn of human history, every meaningful story requires failure at important steps along the way.
Making genuine spiritual progress, or even just growing as a person, is very often about dealing with setbacks and adversity. And many of the most valuable lessons in life can only be learned through our supposedly stable rugs being well and truly pulled out from under us.
In a very real sense then, imposter syndrome is something that we all feel because arbitrary imposing is just something we all do.
So all we need to do to stop that feeling of being an imposter - once and for all - is to stop imposing distorted narratives in the first place.
Finding The Answers Within
When we stop seeking Perfection and Transcendence outside we’re finally able to find it within.
The three P’s of peace, presence and possibility act as an initial entry point in that experience - which is what Buddha referred to as Refuge.
From within this deeper, reality based perspective, failure and disappointment can actually be seen as incredibly valuable.
Not only because of what they show us about the problem - both the paradox and the predicament - but because they guide us to the beginning of the solution - the peace, presence, and possibility that are always accessible within.