Getting to know yourself in the 21st century

In a TED podcast with Yuval Noah Harari about the dangers lying ahead of us, he talks about Artificial Intelligence and says the following:

'There is now a race, a competition, to hack humanity in general and to hack you in particular. And you should make the effort to stay ahead of your competitors - of the corporations, the governments, that are trying to hack you - so you need to get to know yourself better. It's not like the old days... philosophers have been telling people to get to know themselves better for thousands of years but in the past, in the days of Socrates or Buddha, you did not have competition.... Meditation is just one way to do it. For other people psychological therapy works. For some people art is the best way to get to know themselves. For some people sport or taking a long hike. Whatever works for you, invest in that, do that. Because if they get to know you better than you know yourself, it's game over for you'.

When I heard this I was quite shocked. But the positive thing is that we can all get to know ourselves better and really have no-one to blame if we don't because no-one can do that work for us - it is our own individual journey. So how do you get to know you? As Yuval Noah Harari says 'whatever works for you, invest in that''. And if you don't know what getting to know yourself better looks like, he offers the following:

'Getting to know yourself better often means getting to know the stories in your mind which could be personal stories about your life and childhood or they could be religious, nationalist or idealogical stories... if you really take the time to get to know the stories inside yourself and what they are doing to you, I think this is the best innoculation against the worst stories around because the stories that harm humanity usually start by harming you.... they kind of amplify, turn up the volume of the fearful voices in your head.... and fear and anger and hatred... they harm you long before they harm anybody else'.

So what are your stories?

Here is the link to the full TED podcast interview which you can find on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DohVZS5Yo