Know Thyself

Not sure who this book is targeted at. Not me that's for sure. OMG it was boring. You won't learn a thing about “self awareness” in this book, an almost criminally mislabelled book, or at least a teeny tiny portion of that domain. The biggest shortcoming of this book is that like almost all psychological models that attempt to explain phenomena by referring to processes in the brain it is conceptually impoverished. There is no underlying conceptual model of the self or it's relationship to itself and it's goals or experience. Any intellectual endeavour that does not have a clear and well defined conceptual model is a waste of time. Anyway I have already wasted enough time on this book so I'm off to hopefully find a more interesting one.

I've come back to edit this review (later on the evening I wrote it) because I realise what annoyed me about the book. And that was that I invested all this time in reading it in the hope that it would better equip me in life to more robustly work towards what is important to me. In other words, it would have utility in my life. And failing that that I could see it perhaps have utility for other people. But my disappointment in this book, & all those other sub-3-or-4-star rated books, is that I am left no richer or well prepared for life and I can't see how it has progressed humanity in any meaningful way.

What the f**k is the point about studying & then writing about self-awareness (or the teeny tiny portion of that he calls “meta cognition”) if a “tool” is not produced from this. A rule of thumb that helps someone in the everydayness of their life. A tool that can be shared. If knowledge doesn't help someone move closer to what is important to them then it's not knowledge; it's noise. I'm sure there are some people for whom this book is knowledge but I lay odds it's not you.