Topic for today: Our society is too externally focused.
As a general rule, there is not enough appreciation given to spending time with oneself, getting to know yourself (god that sounds cheesy) and actually doing some introspection and figuring out who you are, what you want, what is really important to you… etc. Instead it all seems to be a big effort to drown out that kind of stuff as much as possible. Maybe that’s because people are scared of what they might find out if they actually took the time to get to know themselves. -I don’t know, I’m just theorizing here. What I do know is that lately I feel immense pressure from the outside (”society” [freshman year flashback: "I can't listen to songs that have the word 'society' in the title"]) to go out, do stuff, exert myself, “meet people”. Pressure to do things I don’t want to do — but, it seems, if I don’t do those things, I’m labeled as weird or uninteresting or somehow socially deviant.
Yes, lately I have been lonely here, that is true. A lingering, pervasive loneliness has been with me since the end of last week. I seem to finally be shaking it a little, because I feel a little better today. Anyway…sure, I may say that I want to “meet people” here, that I want to make friends here, but it’s not that I necessarily want a whole cadre of people around. Quality is much more important to me than quantity — always has been. And being in a large group of people who you can’t relate to (to whom you can’t relate) can be even more lonely than being by yourself. What (or perhaps I should say who) I really want here is/are any of my few very close friends, whom I feel very blessed to have in my life, but whom I miss terribly. (Or, if by some possibility, I end up meeting another person with whom I can have that type of connection and *real* friendship. But that’s not necessarily something I expect — I am grateful for the friends I have and I know that some people never have that kind of friendship. But that doesn’t make the loneliness hurt any less when it creeps up on me like it did last week.)
Back to where I was at the end of the first paragraph. I still feel like there are so many expectations from the outside for me to do things a certain way or act a certain way. But I am not going to do anything that feels unnatural to me, or anything that I don’t really want to do, or try to act differently than who I really am, in the name of “making friends”. Because in that case I probably wouldn’t make any real friends anyway. I mean, what I believe deep down is that if I’m supposed to meet someone, they will come into my life, somehow. I may not put my faith in the traditional Judeo-Christian God, but (at the risk of sounding like an AA handbook) I do believe that there is some kind of “higher power” at work in the universe, and that things don’t happen by accident. I also know that I will never understand how it all works or why some things happen… but I do believe that there’s some rhyme and reason to what goes on in day-to-day life, it’s not all just random chaos.
Ok, that’s enough, I need to go to bed. Yes, a large portion of this was cut-and-pasted from an email I wrote to Jenny and Niki. What can I say, I’m lazy. ;-) Good night.
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Great post Amber. The book to read here is “Escape From Freedom” by Erich Fromm.
A happy weekend to you and yours.
–ken
‘To thine own self be true.’ And stuphf. There is no point in trying to please other people at your expense. Those of us that have to stay and home and be introspective support you, but you don’t really know we’re out here because we’re hidden at home introspecting.
The only way I excuse other people for being externally focused because it is possible that if they thought about things they may experience an existential crisis and figure that there is indeed chaos and meaninglessness — then figure, why not play the game? It’s possible that we look for reason and order in the world because instinctively we’re creatures of habit. Sorry to be bleak again.
But it’s still possible to have peace and meaning within oneself, despite the order of the world.
And I was thinking you cut and paste from this to your e-mail to us. :) No one need ever have known, either.
I cannot think of any songs that have the word “society” in it. But my song title lexicon is not very vast.
Well, that remark was made by Kira when we went to a “concert” on the first floor of my dorm that was put on by Jacques’s punk band. (Jacques was a guy we vaguely knew who we sometimes talked to between classes in the park, and who happened to live in my dorm.) In the song they were playing at the moment, we could understand only two words: “society” and “brutality”, screamed in rapid succession.