4. You're Not A Beautiful And Unique Snowflake You Have To Work For Something Meaningful
Most of us felt it at some point, that we were somewhat special, that we could be just like the people in the music videos, the movies and the television shows. A simple flick through Saturday night prime time TV can show you how much everything is geared towards that flicker of fame, that taste of perceived success. When members of the public are giving hand jobs to farm yard animals (Rebecca Loos The Farm) or masturbating with wine bottles live on tv for your viewing pleasure (Kinga Karolczak UK Big Brother 6) you know something somewhere is wrong. As Tyler Durden says
we've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact.. and we're very very pissed off. This is a point that's touched on a little more in the book than the film. In the book the narrator (Edward Norton's character) meets Tyler on a nude beach, where he watches him drag and place logs so that the shadow they cast looks like a giant hand, with Tyler sitting in the middle of the palm. With the changing position of the sun for one moment the hand is perfect. Tyler says that a person has to work hard for it, but one minute of perfection was worth the effort. That a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. If we look at psychologist Abraham Maslow's model, known as Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs, right at the top of the pyramid, what Maslow argues is the pinnacle of existence is self actualisation. As he writes in his 1954 paper, '
what a man can be, he must be'. For the narrator, that is what Tyler represents, perfection. For a moment in time he is all he can be. Now admittedly this meeting is far more symbolic in the book than the film, and I wouldn't necessarily say the book's meeting is better. But what it shows is to achieve something meaningful to you, you have to work at it. Now I'm not advising you start an underground cult and try to revert our civilisation back to year zero, but you know, maybe write something?