If you are self-aware of what you are going through, you would be in a better position to understand others, and affect people around you.
The dominant strain of the twentieth century, whether emanating from Marx or Freud, has been self-awareness; we have lost the art of forgetting ourselves. Which means we have little chance of being happy, since so much of happiness consists of inner peace; of playing ostrich, in fact. To say nothing of the fact that all this psychological self-consciousness is rather vulgar...
