Existentialism

If you're anything like me, your world is your world. Indeed, if you want to get down to brass tacks and talk about the human condition, how we view ourselves is WAY more important than you'd think. 

            What I think I look like

         What I actually look like 

  We get so caught up in what others would think or how our family would react that we forget the truly most important person to us: ourselves.  

 A lot of people spend their lives living to make other people's lives easier: we may never complain in front of a friend because we know of a hardship they've gone through, we may not tell our parents what's really going on in our lives and possibly the worst of all, we may lie to a doctor because we are afraid of judgement. (Of course I quit all the salt, doc!)

 Humans are a fucking weird species. We've dumped most of our biologic instincts at the back door and ushered along something called a social contract. The Social Contract (SC) is best explained as the animal behavior that we willingly give up in exchange for social behavior we may not be inclined to, to ensure the best survival of the species as a whole.

  A good example of this is getting married. 

Most other animals don't mate for life and the ones that do just find the first mate they can and stick with them. There are animals like geese that pair-bond so tightly that even if one dies, the other one never mates again. Humans are not generally like this. We date before finding a mate (again, not counting cultures that do arranged marriages) and may not stay with the same mate for life, as evidenced by the amount of single parents and divorcees. We don't even pick our mates by the strength of their genes, we pick someone we like! No animals do this. We say to each other "I like you the best and I won't have sex with anyone else." because sex is our strongest instinct and we've fucked it ALL up with making it a taboo part and yet the defining factor in romantic relationships.

 This is one of the ways we ignore our own biology in favor of what we think the Social Contract demands. We do what looks good from the outside, not what is good for our insides. Mom says to marry a good-looking rich man so you do and you are miserable because you'd be happier with a slightly ugly guy or maybe even another woman.  You may not even realise that you've "settled" for what your mom wanted, not what you wanted and you might not even know what you want because you've been told something else your whole life! That's the really creepy part. How much of you is you and how much is learned? Okay, back up, gettin a little off topic, lets move on... 

  When all the lights have gone out for the day and you're laying there in bed perhaps with your significant other, who are you really there with? You. At that moment is when it's the clearest that you might not know what you want out of life because you've listened to other people who were important to you.  Then you go to sleep and forget all about your deep thoughts and you wake up in the morning just barely able to remember the dream you had about eating cereal on the handlebars of Jeff Goldblum's bicycle while he pedaled through a purple field, much less the epiphany you had. It's rough! 

                   I swear this was a middle school ten seconds ago.

  We get so sidetracked, go to college, get married, have kids and all of that, that we forget to find out what makes us happy. There's so much distraction and advertising is really the worst. I despise advertising in it's current form because all advertising does is show us what we want, not what we need out of the product. Lightbulb commercials show big, happy, clean families living in perfect houses in general situations unlike you'll ever really need a lightbulb in.  You hardly ever need the batteries for a flashlight when the kids are camping in the backyard, you need it when someone uses a hair dryer and trips the circuit breaker and the whole back half of the house goes dark! We don't need makeup to highlight our already perfect faces, we need that shit to cover up that we're actually a 35ft long creature from the Paleozoic era asking for tree fiddy!

  It's like, thanks to what's good for the entire species, we lose our individuality. I don't mean everyone's a snowflake or any of that weird bullshit, I mean that we don't get to choose a life for ourselves. 

 We need education, however, we don't educate children how to think for themselves, it's usually memory and a set of generally useful subjects that's good at being good and awful at encouraging what will develop a kids natural abilities. Every Child Must Learn X Subject. Not every child is going to excel at these subjects for any number of reasons but on the other side, are the kids who are innately talented for certain areas. But we sandwich them in to every class making sure they spend just as much time in hated science as they do in loved English. We do it for the good of the group. We have to. We haven't come up with a widely accepted way for this to change. 

  All the while we're in school the goal is to go to college for something you might not even like in favor of how much money you can make and then you're supposed to settle down with a spouse. Every single person gets told this, at least in America. This is the Tradition and The Way We Do Things. Sure, there are some exceptions but people actually stress out about doing these things because other people told them to! I've met a lot of people who put themselves through heartache and years of hating their lives, just because it made their parents happy.

  Lolwhut? Okay, I'm going to lose a lot of you here and that's okay, maybe I'm not good at explaining things. There's a LOT of good advice from parents. They had an entire life before you and there are things you can learn from that but their situation and yours are very different. What exactly worked for them may not work for you and some of us haven't got the heart to say you appreciate what they have to say but must respectfully decline.  

  Maybe you want to be a long-haul driver for a few years to get a feel for the whole country before you decide on what city to live in or what higher education to pursue. There's a certain stigma to truck drivers and you may have pressure to go to a good college and have a nice, safe office job. You might find during your journey that you prefer horticulture or rescuing and fostering animals. Something you may not even need to go to college for. 

Someone gets paid the big bucks to do this.

 I think we all have to take a step back and ask ourselves "what do I want," without feeling selfish. We're taught that to think of ourselves is the worst injustice you can do, especially when it affects someone else. That's why so many people stay married "for the kids" and stay in a miserable job because it makes their parents proud or is good for the country.

 We did this to ourselves and now we're sad sacks most of the time who can't even figure out if we love watching the colors of a sunset or just that we have a few moments to watch it. I said earlier we fucked sex ALL up. Humans are socially monogamous. We can choose a mate for life or we can dump that mate and choose another. People break up and divorce all the time and we look down on those people because we think it isn't fair to us, who are still with our significant other and upholding the promises we made to the other person. We think people who chose to never have children are weird because no one presented us with the option that we didn't have to have them. Girls like pink, boys like blue. 

Janice keeps telling me I need to do yoga, well, fuck you Janice, I like Rugby!

Generalities are GREAT for the species as it helps fill roles that need to be filled, gender nonwithstanding. It's TERRIBLE for individuals because we often feel being ourselves will not benefit anyone else. This is pretty awful because with as much emphasis as we put on equality for all humans regardless of sex, race or capabilities, it doesn't promote individual equality. Our current social contact was accepted a long time ago when we didn't have scientific explanations for why things happened or why boys are good at some things and girls are good at another and that's okay.

 I'm rambling like hell now and I'm not even sure where I wanted to go with this, maybe that we look at the whole species and don't think about what would make us happy because we're too busy thinking about the whole species, which doesn't do us as an individual any good. To make the whole species better and happier we have to work on the smallest parts of it, ourselves. 

 Maybe quit listening to what makes other people happy when they see you and concentrate more on making yourself happy when you look in the mirror. If you want curls, do it and fuck what your peers think.

 Or dress up like R-2D-2, whatever works