Researchers Were Given $2.1 Million to Help Prove Why You Should “Get Over Yourself”

Did you sign up for Tinder and have zero struggles trying to find profile photos? Has every charitable donation you’ve ever made involved a “gala?” Are you irritated by strangers striking up conversation and often find that you “can’t even?”

If you answered ‘yes’ to any or all of those questions, it’s quite possible that you need to get over yourself.

Why do such a thing? Well, I have my own thoughts on the matter but why dabble with the dilettantes when the University of Chicago is on the case. With a few million bucks and a brigade of giant brains, no less.

Strapped with a $2.1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, 28 researchers will spend 28 months investigating fundamental questions about virtue, happiness and, expanding on Monty Python’s ground-breaking research from the early 80s, the meaning of life. The academic term being used to define the focus of the research – what we would usually call “getting over yourself” – is “self-transcendence.”

The team undertaking the study has coverage across faculties of philosophy, psychology and religious studies at a number of different universities and colleges around the world. Given some of their headshots and profile write-ups, they’ll probably want to pay very close attention to their own research.

According to a summary of their project – named the Virtue, Happiness, & Meaning of Life (VHML) project – the University of Chicago is inspired to teach the world more about self-transcendence because “Research in the humanities and social sciences suggest that individuals who feel they belong to something bigger and better than they are on their own – a family with a long history and the prospect of future generations, a spiritual practice, work on behalf of social justice – often feel happier and have better life outcomes than those who do not.”

Their hypotheses seem to align with what behavioyral economists/only I refer to as The Law of Diminishing Selfie Returns, which states that, after generating a series of high-frequency, temporary emotional dividends through mechanisms of online social praise and illusions of global relevance, assuming a steady rate of production, human assets inevitably reach a point of inflection where each additional published selfie makes them more and more terrible.

By further formalizing the available data and insights surrounding the topic of self-transcendence, the team hopes to provide both academic and social communities with a compelling framework within which we can more effectively consider, discuss and pursue the building blocks of a happy, fulfilling existence.

All in all, this will probably turn out to be some pretty valuable research for millennials and the generations to come. Assuming, of course, that there’s #NoFilter when they finally publish the results.

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