• LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
    283·
    10 months ago

    Do some people not feel this way at all times? Personally i always feel like my body isn’t “me”, it’s just the functional shell that I’m living in. Like when i get in a car and go driving i don’t feel like the car is me, it’s just the functional shell I’m inside of. “Me” is my subjective sense of consciousness.

    When i look in the mirror i mostly see it in the 3rd person. I see my face and i think “hey look at that guy”, and “that face could use a shave”, etc.

    • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
      162·
      10 months ago

      I’m not claiming you’re anything, but I’ve heard similar thoughts from trans people while they were still figuring stuff out.

      • LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
        13·
        10 months ago

        Thanks for the potential help, but I’m not trans. It’s not that my reflection looks incongruent with how i feel inside, it’s that i see my body as a physical object. Which it is. “I” am not what my body is.

    • Hazrod@lemmy.world
      6·
      10 months ago

      Yeah kind of. When I look at myself on the mirror there always the feeling of “oh yeah that’s what I look like”, because that’s not how I perceived myself. My “me” isn’t a body.

    • UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      10 months ago

      I don’t typically feel this way, no. It’s kind of like playing a video game where you forgot you’re holding a controller and so you just like, go around enacting your will on stuff, without really thinking about it.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      Interesting. I don’t recall ever feeling this way. What I see in the mirror I feel as being me. I find it fascinating how different people think and experience existence. People should talk about that stuff more.

      • LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
        2·
        10 months ago

        I didn’t always think this way when i looked in the mirror, i used to think of what i see in the mirror as me. It’s something that happened as I grew older and started seeing reality in broader and broader ways.

    • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
      4·
      10 months ago

      It’s common for schizoids, for example. Personally, I’ve noticed that it’s more likely to happen the more social contact I’ve had. Generally I feel a disconnect with my reflection and if I need to look in the mirror when getting dressed or doing my hair I just avoid eye contact. .

      At work, if I catch my reflection in a shiny bolt or something while I’m working on a bike, I flinch and have to look away, it makes me feel so uncomfortable.

      I also get that floating feeling when having to talk to customers, like it’s not me and I’m observing someone else from a distance.

    • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      10 months ago

      Out of curiosity, have you always felt like this, ever since you were a child? I remember I only started feeling this third person sensation in my early teens. Like, I’d look in the mirror, and think, “who the hell is this guy and what did he do to the real me?” (well, not literally of course). I don’t think this is something uncommon, I remember seeing a meme that went like

      Me: Looks in the mirror
      [thanos image macro]
      Inner Child: I don’t even know who you are

      And that’s pretty much how I feel

      I also have a theory that this is more common among men than women, since women spend more time in front of the mirror (because makeup) and because women look nice, whereas men are generally ugly and therefore don’t enjoy being “inside” their bodies (I mean unless you’re FtM)

        • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          I mean, that’s what the dating site data seems to show. Here is an example. This could also be explained by women being more “selective” than men (as the title of the article implies)… but since attractiveness is a subjective quality, I think “Women are more selective about men than men are about women” is the equivalent of “Men are less attractive than women” in a heterosexual context.

          Another statistic is that women tend to spend more time on improving their appearance than men (source, I only skimmed through that paper, but the two graphs at the end seem to support my point). So it would make sense that the demographic who puts more effort into looking pretty will look more pretty?

          I’m not really sure why you would disagree with this? You can prove it for yourself by going outside and just looking at people on the street? The only way that you can ignore the divide in attractiveness between men and women is if you only consider celebrities, models, public figures, and so on, who spend a lot of money and effort on looking good regardless of gender.

          I’m not saying male beauty doesn’t exist or doesn’t deserve to be appreciated. Or even that you as an individual have to care about whether someone is attractive or not (again, attractiveness is subjective). I’m just saying that the reality is that women tend to be prettier. It’s100% a societal thing, maybe if history turned out differently, men would have been the ones who spend more time on their appearance.

          EDIT: I just realized I’m looking at this from a very cishet point of view, so IDK maybe attractiveness works different for LGBT+ people

  • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
    18·
    10 months ago

    Can’t look in mirrors on acid because this happens instantaneously. That clown is not fucking me and his smile is creepy

      • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
        71·
        10 months ago

        I don’t ever remember my dreams for longer than an hour but I do know that they are often incredibly surreal. Afaik I haven’t looked in a mirror but it doesn’t sound pleasant. They’ve always made me uncomfortable even sober. Passing by mirrors at night as a kid was always a very stressful experience

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
      3·
      10 months ago

      I love that feeling, it’s strange but fascinating to see my face melt and age like that, if you look for long enough you might even feel like your reflection is falling at you

  • x4740N@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    10 months ago

    Likely because your entering some level of meditative state because your focus is on the mirror and not on your thoughts

    I once accidentally went so deep in meditation that all my self awareness dissappeared but I remember it

    I also had my eyes open, it was kind of like sleep paralysis but yourself just isn’t there at all

    People who stare in the mirror and experience what is described in this meme probably experience something similar

  • threeduck@aussie.zone
    2·
    10 months ago

    I did this to help get over weed-induced anxiety. Smoked a bit at uni, started getting bad anxiety most times, so I stopped smoking. Whenever I felt weird while sober (dizzy, spaced out, over-caffeinated), it Pavlov’d me into getting anxiety. Staring into the mirror and getting that weird dissociation gave me a controllable environment to get used to strange perceptual shifts.