When I'm fucked up, that's the real me.
When I'm fucked up, that's the real me.
This lyric is sung by The Weeknd in The Hills. Hearing it, I wondered what was going on in the mind of the lyricist. Why would a person identify more strongly with a substance-intoxicated form of themselves than with their sober form?
One possibility is that the intoxicated man reliably outperforms the sober man on a criterion which the sober man values. A causally interleaved trio of common biological effects of recreational intoxication seem likely to enable this: elevated self-concept (including elevated estimates of one's social appearance, skill, and the task-adequacy of one's holdings), decreased anxiety relating to expected social persecution for potential violations of respect- and etiquette-based social conventions, and a generally elevated, euphoric mood. This trio of effects together produces greater motivation, reward-seeking approach behaviors, and attentive physiological arousal. In short, the sober man may find himself inhibited from following desired courses of action, of which inhibitions his drugs relieve him.
A second possibility is that the man is dissatisfied with himself when sober and that recreational intoxication inhibits this judgment, but without producing an elevated self-concept as before. This could be achieved by a different cluster of effects of recreational intoxication; that of sedation, numbing, insensibility, blunted affect, and disorientation (including derealization and depersonalization).
A third explanation, this one pragmatic: the man maintains separate peer groups; in one group he claims credit for his sober behavior, and in the other group he claims credit for his intoxicated behavior. One benefit of this arrangement is that the man has opportunities to act according to one group's standards or the others', as suits him, without losing as much face if he did the same without the excuse of intoxication (respectively, without the excuse of sobriety).
One test of this third explanation, as a strategy of general human use (because of course I'm looking at this through the lens of CEV), is to see whether people endorse, in restricted social contexts, other personal conditions of diminished capacity which could excuse them from bearing credit for their acts. People often maintain distinct peer groups wherein they are credited for their youthful acts versus their mature acts. Fatigue, I think, does not present such a strong confirmatory case, maybe because fatigue is too (common, transitory, graded, ...?) for the one to join a group of peers for its occurrence and other peers for its remission. Duress of a limited kind does fit here I think; for example, people can claim as an excuse that they were acting under familial social pressures. The condition of physical disability doesn't fit here, but I'm sure it would if people went through regular phases of physical ability and disability. Mood disorders with phases do fit, I think. Automatism doesn't fit, which is weird from the perspective I used a second ago because it's kind of like a transitory form of disability. "When I'm habituated, that's the real me / When I'm habituated…" I'll have to think about that one more, later. Lycanthropy, though fictional, would certainly fit if it existed. I should probably do a better job unifying the cases where excuses don't fit, especially by analyzing automatism and fatigue, but for the moment this is a satisfying list.
I welcome any alternative explanations of why a person would, at least sometimes, endorse their intoxicated behavior.
Edit: Someone who is more often intoxicated than not might identify more strongly with their more familiar mental state. The lyricist could either be in such condition or wish to persuade others of that he is. This part of the edit I like. The next part is crap.
I don't know my Evo Psych, but I pattern-match this attempt at persuasion as consonant with a certain reproductive strategy; trying to piece my half-thoughts into a full sentence of a theory, it comes out something like this: impulsiveness\risk tasking, criminality, and sensation seeking are, for a man, marks of high testosterone (or high testosterone sensitivity?), which promotes seeking of mates and aggression\competitiveness in domains of male-male conflict (territoriality, mate guarding, food competition), while reducing the individual male's investments into mates and offspring.
The reasons why this testosterone-promoted strategy of high mating investment and low parental investment works...are even more tangled in my mind, and probably causally-disordered. It's clear that men who appear to have a lower mutational load or higher genetic parasite resistance, being more valued by women, can afford to offer less support to those women and to their offspring than can men of lower apparent genetic quality.
"The eugenic man can purchase sex at a lower price" is the usual case. There might be confounding factors relating to, like, seasonality of reproduction, or selection pressures that vary with the prevalence of high versus low parental investment in a breeding population, or...whatever. But with the usual case being usual, if a man's genetic status is known by his potential mates to be quality, or even if his genetic status is uncertain to potential mates, then being neglectful, unfaithful, criminal, impulsive, et cetera, are behaviors to be expected.
I'm not impressed with this as even a micro-theory of human male sociosexuality, but I also don't know the reasons why it's wrong. One problem is that it doesn't account for the unemployment of some other possible counter-signals, like maintaining poor nutritional status. Even if the sociosexual counter-signalling idea were right, the connection to the song lyric is tenuous. Grr.
I'd still appreciate hearing any alternative explanations of the lyric, or pointers for putting the micro-theory aright.
Edit 2: Will Newsome provided two more explanations on twitter. First, the mind of a frequent drug user might be more lethargic when they're sober and more creative when they're drunk or high. The second explanation I'm producing verbatim because I don't trust myself to summarize all of his nuances:
"but there's a moral dimension to the utterance as well that is important. He sees himself as tragically flawed"
"the weeknd is all about being hedonistic to cope with pragmatic-lesson-teaching tragedy, certain kind of chick crack"
"(thereby creating a powerful mate of a man who otherwise would have been expected to remain a genetic contractor so to speak)"
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