Exploration - A Practical Application
An example to be used in an attempt to show I am willing to do what I am asking my kids to: don't be afraid to put yourself out there or make mistakes in the pursuit of what brings you meaning.
Exploration - Prac. App.
I need to iron out my thoughts on this one a bit, but I also need to get them down somewhere. Considering the point of this is for accountability and criticism if necessary so I can talk to my children in the best possible manner for their future selves, I may as well subject everyone who reads what I write to a jumbled mess, right? No? Ah, then I guess I will try and write as coherently as possible while I work out a problem. We shall see. I would prefer to publish things that are already ironed out and honed against articles or books already written. I would also prefer to write while sitting on a cloud and have a monitor that eliminates all glare from the sun so I could be outside. Please don’t be afraid of making mistakes. You should also not be afraid to make mistakes publicly on occasion. There are definitely some potential financial upsides to the willingness to play the fool intentionally or in some cases purposefully. Comedians and professional athletes are great examples of this. I also want to stress the importance of your own exploration into the pursuits that pique your interests and just won’t leave you alone. This one happens to be mine. I am fully interested in writing. The main driving force behind this, in my estimation, is to offer lasting wisdom to my children so they can use it. Let me be clear, however, I do not believe that everything I think is correct, holds wisdom, or will last. I can only hope to be as accurate as possible and pass along the ideas and wisdom of the great men and women who were influential and kind enough to successfully get their thoughts and perspectives published for me to read beforehand. Hopefully their ideas will be consolidated effectively enough for my purposes. But at long last, the start of the practical application of being brave enough to explore an idea openly:
Avoid Unearned Status
Navigating societal minefields is part and parcel of doing anything publicly these days. Unfortunately the types of mines you run into vary and are mixed in with one another. One such social mine, buried beneath a clump of unassuming clout is proclaiming manufactured hardships. This irritates me to even feel the need to address but I will attempt to do so as objectively as possible. This mine along with all the other ones will be planted on the way to easy, effortless, or ill-gotten social advancement. The trick with all of these is the prize will blind you to the clumped and disturbed soil right in front of you so maybe this lesson could be summed up as simply as advising to stop and think or beware easy victories. However, the deadliness of this mistake isn’t inflicted upon the victim as quickly as a soldier triggering a bouncing betty, it takes time. Let me address the faux prize and how narcissistic the drive behind it is before I address the poison inflicted by even attempting to reach it.
There is a compounding problem people have with attention. Those who get mass attention crave more of it as an addict craves their drug of choice. The problem isn’t the compounding of attention as this as always been the case. The problem is the way it is being done and that society has found this acceptable. Given this is being done in areas our children have easy and unfettered access to adds, of course, to this. It would be easy as someone who doesn’t have experience with how functional adults operate to incorrectly assume being the most oppressed or maligned individual within a certain group of people is desirable or even possible. The latter point is simply due to the number of possible variables changes depending on who you ask, so it can be difficult to pin down oppression or the value of the maligned in a meaningful way, though not always. For example, if on social media a young up and coming video blogger posts themselves speaking out on a topic, any topic, oftentimes at the very beginning they will throw out an introduction that includes name, orientation (any variation of the word), and then descriptions like: bi-polar, depressed, anxious, agoraphobic, neurotic, on the spectrum. The last example is simply the latest tag to start being added. Let’s get one thing clear, if everyone is all of those things, nobody is. Being the same thing as everyone else instantly makes that thing normal. It’s the same concept as everything being an emergency means nothing is. However, it is not going to be the case that everyone who announces these maladies actually have them. Not to mention there doesn’t seem to be a real incentive for people actually suffering from these issues to announce them to the world as a badge of honor and a request for social clout given the deleterious effect they have on people who are afflicted. There’s no sense to be made except online social status is being sought after by winning the race to be most held back by society.
If you call out those practicing this it can be reasonably assumed you will be met with a response where it will be asserted you are part of the problem and only prove their point about being maligned because of their mental problems etc. Given the narcissistic nature of doing all this in the first place in order to garner more attention and empathy it makes sense any response will also be a narcissistic one. This is an important reason to avoid starting down that path in the first place. You do not have to be a narcissist to be enticed by the attention they draw and the methods used. Some social psychologists believe much of what drives trends like this are initially narcissists and subsequently people just imitating narcissistic behavior in order to keep up with the current social draws. Meaning inevitably you will turn yourself into a faux narcissist in order to chase some fleeting clout from people you’ve never seen or met before in a digital world. It also may be a good idea to look into the estimated number of bots on the social media platforms now. It would be embarrassing to ruin your own mental health for the attention of people who don’t exist I would think.
There is real oppression in the world. Iran’s parliament voted the other day, 227 members of parliament, to execute 15,000 protester detainees in order to send a message to the other protesters around Iran that it won’t be tolerated. They were protesting the murder of women by this same regime for egregious things such as unkempt or askew hats and hair in public or daring to not be in a hijab. I am all for voluntary practicing of religious symbolism i.e. Muslim women wearing one if they so choose, but the murder of girls in pursuit of this seems excessive. Protesting a regime that condones the murder as described seems reasonable as well. Massacring 15,000 protesters also seems unreasonable. Maybe I am biased. I feel the Iranian people have an argument for feeling oppressed and this is only one example. South Africa had a long history of apartheid, to give another extreme example, but I feel it is apt. That is oppression. The history of oppression of black people after slavery with Jim Crowe and red-lining. That one at least should be known by the people attempting to win this race nowadays. Attempting to become a maligned or oppressed individual, or attempting to prove you are one by listing psychological problems and group identities does not and will not add power or clout to whatever message you may have. Historically and definitionally oppressed and maligned peoples and groups have their power stripped and their voices taken away, so there’s no logic in the dichotomy here. Additionally it’s horrifyingly patronizing and denigrating to those who are currently still oppressed and to the sacrifices those who have been oppressed had to make in order to fight through it for equality and respect. Do not become one of those people who thing it’s a badge to wear but did not earn it. There are parents and grandparents who can wear that badge and should if they want to, but I cannot readily think of any examples where they do unless necessary. There is pain in societal obstacles due to mental problems or social oppression. There is no glory there for you if you seek it as there is no actual battle currently going on for you. There is certainly more work to be done in the west in regards to oppression but if you have the privilege of spending your time checking webMD for psychiatric diagnoses you can post in your linked-in profile or list off at the beginning of your reddit threads or vimeo rants then you likely do not suffer from that oppression but instead leech status off the pain of the truly maligned.
I got a little off track there. This continuity of a poisonous trend in which people young and old compete with each other to see who is more set back by nature of their upbringing, nature itself, their psychology, their physical maladies, society and social status does nothing but bring everyone participating in it down at an ever increasing speed. This does mean that eventually the participants will hit a floor, if one exists, but the fact this is used as a means to seek attention coupled with how effective it has been in that pursuit for whom I describe as the “narcissistic few” leads the inexperienced, the naïve and the young vulnerable to the lure for attention it dangles in front of them.
Finally, rewards you get now that you have not earned will catch up to you eventually. There is a cost for everything, it isn’t always up front. In this case you will pay for it in future reputations, mental health and stability, motivation for bettering yourself, and ability to reconcile what is real and what is part of the fantasy you have created in your online persona. Don’t manufacture dragons in a digital world or they will manifest eventually in your real one.