Dan Munro rejoins Dr. G to discuss the concepts of familiarity and identity as twin threats to self-development. In an expansive dialogue, they explore:

– The greater threat to development posed by someone’s “familiarity zone” compared to their “comfort zone”.

– The distinction between familiarity and routine, and the constructive dimensions which positively set the latter apart.

– The tipping points at which too much novelty and unfamiliarity can lead to chaos and instability.

– How, for certain people, constant novelty, unfamiliarity, and chaos actually serve as familiarity strategies in their own right.

– How the realistic prospect of mastery can promote apathy, discourage follow-through, and prompt a fear of failure to handle success.

– Rebuilding one’s subconscious self-concept by seizing upon epiphanic occurrences of unfamiliarity.

– The pathologies of identity, and the advantages of fluidity over concreteness in self-expression and conception.

– How maintenance of the familiar helps to reify unhelpful aspects of our identity, and condemns us to realizing ruinous self-fulfilling prophecies.

– The nonsensical notion that we are a singular “self”, and how this propagates delusions about what people claim to be. l