Diacriticism

Always something new to learn, always some new lead to follow up on, inevitably something else going on behind the scenes.  It had occurred to me that perhaps there has to be a reason why we all aren’t running around living our lives as we saw fit, and the expense of all the hassle and noise that inevitably seems to accompany our lives.  Perhaps there are a few reasons, but most important now is the notion that perhaps we all still live in one way or another on paradigms and ideas that are over 100 years old.

Now I know, I know, nothing Victorian about you:  you the enlightened youth and elders of the mid Otts.  You’re savvy, prejudice free.  Well, probably not (check back when you’ve clean out your closets), but the point remains that you’ve carved out your own little niche in the world:  you know your passions and pleasures, pains and problems, and they make up the unique individual called you.  But how does one manage to express these desires, to carve freely our own path, with a damn-you-if-I-must attitude to self actualization?

I’m still dealing with that little quirk of life, but it hit me recently that perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves.  In fact, the idea of psychological individuation (being and behaving as we are) is one that has only seated itself very recently, in terms of history.  Think for a moment about the Industrial Revolution.  Before this great leap of technology, the only one’s who actually had the leisure time to figure out who they were and what they wanted to be were the wealthy:  everyone else was toiling in the fields, breaking their respective backs merely to eek out a living for themselves and their families (not much time for yourself, eh?).  

But with the Industrial Revolution things changed some.  In fact, they changed a lot, and for the more leisurely.  Good thing right?  Not necessarily.  The industries that flourished were those which allowed the lower-middle classes to behave like the social classes above them.  Thus the beginnings of being unique came in the form of buttons and hats, teapots and lace.  They had nothing to do with ideal; rather they were a salve, differentiation on a mass scale.

Now we may turn our eyes to the United States, where this production changed slightly, with it the opportunities to individuate.  Henry Ford furthered the ability of the common folks to further behave like the rich with this assembly line idea in the early 20th century.  

This is about when the idea of the unique self really began to blossom.  Now the leisure items of the rich were available to the masses.  What to choose?  Which style do I want?  In fact, what do I want? The questions seem trivial now, yet think for second the immense freedom our ancestors must have felt having the brainpower to spend on what particular luxury item they would like to complete themselves.  Thus we were handed the ability to be ourselves, as defined by the things that we want.

But we are still removed from the idea of supreme individuality of self.  The assembly line, the advances in technology, they were all focused on the notion of copying what the more affluent had/were up to  There were more choices now, and more leisure, now more celebrities to copy style from, more affluence to aspire to, more people to be like.  We were still on the cookie-cutter mentality, even though there swiftly because many, many cookie cutters to choose from.

But I digress.  One of the hardest things in my adolescence was having the ability to differentiate between the things I own and the thoughts that I think.  It’s easy to think that the items we have define who we are.  I smoke copious amounts of ganja, I must be a hippie.  I’m in khakis, must be a yuppie.  I am then out of step is I don’t behave like the stereotypes associated with the things that I own, got to align the ideals (I never consciously thought that, but it’s at play).  And so on.  In the end, coming to grips with the jock/stoner/intellectual/artist/insert-your-preferred-description-here meant understanding that none of those labels fit:  none of the cookie cutters could even touch what I had discovered to be my preferences and desires.

So if you’re having a day where you might not feel like you are being all that you can be, take heart: it is the generation of my contemporaries and I (and the era for everyone else) in which we are permitted and able to decide our lot in the world.  The saturation of personal services, from yogalates to scientology now allows our interaction with the world to be almost exactly and only what we make of it.  So just think that perhaps, the circumstances haven’t been right, but they certainly have become so.  Throw open the windows of how you actually think, rather than how you were told to.  People are ultimately defined by what they create, and there are no rules on creation except for the limits of your own imagination.  I cannot help but think that society is in a great position to redefine itself for the better:  and it is only through our free expression that this is possible.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.