As I study more history or learn about the traits and ideas different countries hold, it becomes ever-apparent how much of “you” has been shaped in the motions of our histories. The rarely forgotten war or trade dynamics are often cited in joking or criticizing one another. The taglines in tourism brochures hope to intrigue you about a point of pride regarding a nation’s identity or self-determination. It just leaves me feeling like, with so much at play, how does one ever really define and come to accept things about their personality?
This feels like it wants to start-off sounding very high school. This is also something I often brush against in hoping to get people to unpack their language and look harder at the source of their feelings. But I want it pressed on harder and to explore the source of my own frustrations when it feels like “my identity” is being ignored or disrespected.
I sit here writing. Pull back and I’m 1 of 3 roommates, in 1 of 4 townhouses, in 1 of dozens of townhouse clusters, in 1 of hundreds of apartment complexes. Perhaps in a Nordic country this gives a sense of calm as I likely know or am related to nearly everyone in every one of those complexes. Here, I don’t know my neighbor’s names. Immediately there’s going to be a huge cultural influence regarding trust and how it can or can’t be employed.
To trust is to be able to look forward to something. It’s rarely framed in a way like you trusting your car to start. You trust your kids are going to grow up. These are things, provided there’s not some extenuating circumstance, we sort of take for granted. If we break them down in the language of trust though, it seems to provoke, quicker than anything, the question of “why?” The most straightforward answer I can think of is “because it’s generally done so.”
If you take that answer far enough back, it tends to betray everything. Surely, you can always invent a layer of bullshit justification for the things you do, but if you’re working with an incomplete puzzle, fundamentally, you have little reason to trust anything, let alone your capacity to assess and evaluate an ingrained yet fluid personality. Ingrained in that you didn’t have to teach your eyes to see or brain to fire upon doing so. Fluid in that your tastes change, your attitude wanes, and if you’re lucky there’s always room to surprise yourself.
It’s extremely disorienting, and I’d argue probably unhealthy, to carry on like you can’t trust anything. Pragmatically, you’re not going to have a panic attack questioning the probability each time you start your car, but what if, as I fear has happened to me, a fundamental shift happens and arrests your perspective? What if you become stuck, unable to see yourself as freely obligating yourself to anything, now merely at the whims of change? It’s almost something of an argument against free will, but that’s not the direction I’m going.
I feel myself compelled. Whether it’s to write, or read, or watch, or just generally try to be learning at all times. I can speculate it came from being incentivized as a child. I can grasp at the strings of random potential conversational connections. (As it turns out, I hardly ever haven’t read at least something about what you’re into.) I can get all hippie-speak and claim some internal philosophical wisdom I’m drawing from my connection to the hive-mind. I can play faux-physicist and borrow explanations that describe me as a single neuron or experimental synapse of a higher intelligence’s simulation. But do you call your compulsions “you?”
You could as easily describe my examples in cold bio-socio-political terms. There will be a map one day of every synapse in my brain and when it fired depending on what I engaged with. Rarely do people let it sink in just how much of their approach to the world has been shaped by pop culture. I encourage you to read as much as you can about the little engine that could churning in your subconscious the next time you think you’re really making the decision. What does learning about these things really afford me? Why do “I” invite the stress of knowledge when I even know the science that says homogeneous and stupid breeds the most contentment?
The idea that I have ever arrived at a goal, for any reason beyond survival, becomes an endless speculative road. It harks, in my mind, to fundamental questions regarding existence in and of itself. Why not be some simulation meant to live out my selfish conception of the world? I’m perhaps just the latest in things the universe doesn’t know yet. Simple enough.
Why should I be frustrated that my time is being wasted when I know time isn’t really a thing? Why am I concerned about achieving some grand level of wealth or intellectual accomplishment when, the farther we pull back, the universe, let alone the world, let alone my country, let alone my town or even apartment complex is really going to blink once I’m gone? And then once all your friends die, you’ll be lucky to be properly quoted as anything that ever accurately described you or what you contributed. And you won’t care.
I don’t know that there’s some fundamental truth about the value of American elitism verses Nordic conformity that unites us all besides ignorance. It’s the ego-ridden who feel suffocated when transplanted north, and the reserved who feel embarrassed for you for sticking your neck out. People concerned with the long-term feasibility of humanity lament that content people aren’t terribly innovative or motivated. The content watch the mania of being the smartest and richest tear people apart, and often the world along with them. There’s always some opposite, diminishing, word to describe what doesn’t feel embedded in your genes or heritage.
It’s like I’m always looking for permission. I don’t know what to be really upset about. Unless I’m fabulously drunk I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do things like cry. Without a semi-constant reciprocity I have no way to describe how I value friendships. I can’t point to the precise moment I found myself capable of saying yes to initially fear and panic inducing things. Like I’m waiting for my programmer to input the coordinates of where I’m to end up next. I can claim I’m the one typing, feel each key, sound out each word, but there was no plan for this. Nor do I have a goal but to feel comfortable stopping. I could even invent a goal, like persuading you of adopting socially responsible pride. But it’d be a lie. I don’t give a shit.
I latch onto an idea of a kind of tornado. Billions of potentials swirling in the back of my head, condensed to a joke, blog, or decision to approach some topic. That “I” am the swirling, and everything I kick up and spit out the experimental results. Perhaps often if not fundamentally results I can’t read correctly or even access. I’m necessarily evolutionarily programmed to seek out cause and effect, and I operate under a grand illusion those effects are much to do with my perception or will. No matter the degree of scrutiny and doubt I interject, no matter the scientific insights I use to infer, and well independent of mystical hippie language, I’m no less compelled, and feel I have no control. I find it equally liberating and absolutely terrifying.
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