>>41745153it's not that strange if you look at human beings as the animals they fundamentally are. scarcity in our tiny lizard brains is always going to seem valuable because animals (organisms generally) tend to expand into the limits of their habitat and then to continue that expansion have to pursue scarce resources. humans are a deeply, deeply complex species, but we haven't broken out of that underlying mold - scarcity seeking can partially explain behaviors as varied as artistic elitism and conspicuous consumption. it happens to also apply to human interaction
>>41745200great question and I doubt people who say work on yourself are regularly conscious of this phenomenon but the two are probably related. if you guys are curious about the sort of formal academic research on this stuff by the way read about dark triad personality traits and narcissism in particular (working on yourself isn't narcissistic personality disorder, by the way - but you could see npd as an extreme manifestation of the stuff I'm talking about
