IJSP Number 6, 2024

92 drainage which, in the end, does not permit the individual to connect with their problems as they should be apprehended, namely by the humbler aspects of self- esteem concerning one’s own ego . If we look at those two aspects or exploratory directions that the self (our self ) can take, it becomes very clear that self-importance is the ominous and detrimental one. The only one that can be of real help in a psychotherapeutic approach is the level of self-esteem as a fundamentally different existential positioning. Being a monopolistic life position, self-importance encloses the individual in a prison, one that is, more or less, self-made. Once arrested in this prison there is no more liberty or possibility of escaping it – one is generally arrested for life. The gates are closed, the walls erected and, as everyone else is living in a prison too, that is what normality looks like. Self-importance, being inherently very important, does not allow any step outside its own territory. The individual is not only arrested in its own prison but has no chance of getting out, because they cannot see that there is something out there. Besides one’s own self- importance, there is nothing left to look or to search for, as for example self- development or evolution. Self-importance is ‘self-sufficient’ (as in: self- restrictive) and, consequently, frozen on its own existential floor where it continues surviving in a very conservative, stagnant, and anti-evolutionary niche. The fact that the self-important individual is permanently surrounded by ‘others’, and all ‘the others’ are like him or her, is just another aggravating factor in an already complicated socio-psychological equation. We have here another of those paradoxes of self-importance: they too, namely ‘the others’ involved in the same social fabric, are bursting with so much self-importance that they can hardly see that there is somebody else out there. What they all want first and foremost is validation, confirmation that they are important – paradoxically, they all are important, at least in their own eyes – and, being on the constant pursuit for applause and appreciation, they see others as mere objects who should just praise them. What are the self-important individuals getting instead from those ‘others’, who are at least as self-important? Only ‘plastic’ or false strokes, only formalities, niceties, and empty words, or polite formulas that are so superficial that they will never appease the deep need and the unquenchable thirst for something substantial as acknowledgment. As we know, we cannot live if feed with plastic, one wants natural food, proteins, fibres, etc., everything the body and the soul needs in order not only to survive, but to live, grow and evolve. Plastic strokes are not food for our ego , as ultra-processed food (plastic food) cannot be food for our body. Plastic food can fill the stomach but the body will not feel nourishment and will crave for more (plastic) food. And the situation is the same with plastic strokes, the soul cannot feel the nourishment and will ask for more. Plastic strokes are just another lie in our contemporary and fallacious society. A plastic stroke, say a ‘like’, or an ‘emoji’ on the internet, doesn’t satisfy anybody, it just asks for more, for the endless reiteration of the same empty and senseless stuff. Consequently,