6 ms·

Maybe. A friend who I spoke to for the first time in a long time made a pretty good point to me the other day. Neither of us are liberals, btw. Both of us are i

Maybe. A friend who I spoke to for the first time in a long time made a pretty good point to me the other day. Neither of us are liberals, btw. Both of us are into so many of the same things. We just have different careers, and we are approximately equally jealous of eachother’s careers. We talked about what we have been doing while feeling lonely and we each had different stories of why we were not able to spend time around people we wanted to be around. He couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore and had to move to the Midwest where now he makes a wage that will probably never allow him to move back. I, on the other hand, can never leave the city because there are no jobs for me elsewhere and I would not be able to come back. Neither of us are comfortable investing in homes because we both feel unhappy where we are. Job wise, we both have problems with our companies we work for, but like our coworkers. We feel very distant from what we are doing and recognize that the inability to change careers or better our situations gives us a lack of hope. His situation is slightly different because he is in a higher management position, but neither of us feel we can talk to anybody nearby about these things or we will be outed as not being this imaginary committed perfectly obsessed careerist type. Basically, everything we have depends on our entire stories, everything we have ever done. We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud. He relates this to our society being so obsessed with individuals instead of letting us just be ourselves, separate from our jobs and our income and wellbeing. We don’t have the option of dreaming because the risk is just too great. We have seen our friends lose everything by taking risks. Ultimately, I have to agree. We have let this obsession of making our personalities our lives get the best of both. It’s the core idea behind individualism, which we are taught is a great thing and I always believed it. I still do in most cases, but now i feel stuck inside my individual self, lonely like alll the other individuals. We are so obsessed with ourselves as individuals, we lose sight of ourselves as parts of greater wholes, like families and neighborhoods. I am not sure I can separate this from politics.

goldfeld 8y ago
> We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud. You hint at the answer, that aside from financial obligations nothing stands in the way of finding who you really are but yourself. Once a person finds confidence in expressing their true desires and aspirations, others take notice and start valuing and admiring the person, like in everything else it's a herd/popular mentality where anyone will appreciate it so long as others do but specially so long as the subject does. The road is of course winding tortuous with self-doubt, (more) loneliness as everyone else is just trying to conform and flak from society until the breakthrough years. But being a trendsetter is not much more than finding what are your particular trends for this existence, so to say. Only I can hold myself back emotionally, ultimately. Though yes, maybe attempts fail with nothing to show for it (even though wisdom may be worth more than a big salary as one ages) but I still think it's worth trying, really putting your heart into those attempts. The focus on people being specialists and not generalists (specially in more than one area of knowledge) makes the situation worse for sure.
- yellowbuilding 8y ago
  This suggests that I want more money or consumption, and that’s wrong. Nor do I want popularity. Quite the opposite. Popularity and attention are really the main problem, if anything. Who we are is defined by what we have done more than any time in history. Every day that passes is further locking ourselves into our cages of individuality. How can popularity and followers, like you mention, be our only hope for change when they are also the ties that are trapping us to our current trajectories? Specialist vs. generalist gets more at the problem I think we were talking about, but even the fact that it is such a debated concept seems off. Something seems wrong on a bigger level. Sometimes you need a specialist and sometimes a generalist, and we are highly adaptable creatures. It is strange this thing leads to so much anxiety. I think people are just worrying tremendously over which one are they to an unhealthy degree, and because they are scared to death of failure. Who can blame them? I’m sure some love popularity and never want to do anything else with their life, but that is an unrealistic bar we have created for everybody in our society. So I guess that seems like a thing to look at.
taway_1212 8y ago
Can you give examples of friends losing “everything” when following their dreams? What happened? Excellent comment BTW.
- yellowbuilding 8y ago
  I don’t think “following dreams” actually describes what I mean. I just mean doing anything except the safest thing to do, or making any sudden moves that requires a new start. Watching friends try to change careers has been cringeworthy. You have to be willing to lose everything. I think that takes all the fun out of life. It makes you feel absolutely trapped. Maybe i do love my life just how it is, but it’s hard to say when I cannot even visualize working toward anything else. I am just so much more fulfilled when working toward something. I don’t really get much out of just trying to save money so that’s I can risk it all at some point down the road. That feels like a trap. My happiest times have always been when I can be relatively confident I will not lose everything and I am in a place to contribute to something with other people. That is what I mean by “dream” and I currently have one of them, but it’s not a dream. It was once, or, it was at least a goal. I think “goal” is what’s I really mean. I want the ability to have goals in life that are not mere consumption, but that do not require overwhelming risk. The goals can be lame or common everyday things, but more real than a hobby and less deadly than risking homelessness.
  - badpun 8y ago
    I can relate to that. However, you have to realise that you literally want to have everything - both the comfort and safety AND a fullfilling life. This conflict within people has probably been going on from the beginning of time (it's greatly depicted in "The Revolutionary Road", a film by Sam Mendes (director of American Beauty)). I think that in the end, unless you're very lucky, you need to give up one or the other to some extent. Personally, I think I'd be more comfortable living my next 30 years as an at least somewhat free pauper, than spending my days in a comfortable, but depressing gilded cage - but that's a choice that everyone needs to make for themselves.
    - 8y ago

goldfeld 8y ago

> We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud. You hint at the answer, that aside from financial obligations nothing stands in the way of finding who you really are but yourself. Once a person finds confidence in expressing their true desires and aspirations, others take notice and start valuing and admiring the person, like in everything else it's a herd/popular mentality where anyone will appreciate it so long as others do but specially so long as the subject does. The road is of course winding tortuous with self-doubt, (more) loneliness as everyone else is just trying to conform and flak from society until the breakthrough years. But being a trendsetter is not much more than finding what are your particular trends for this existence, so to say. Only I can hold myself back emotionally, ultimately. Though yes, maybe attempts fail with nothing to show for it (even though wisdom may be worth more than a big salary as one ages) but I still think it's worth trying, really putting your heart into those attempts. The focus on people being specialists and not generalists (specially in more than one area of knowledge) makes the situation worse for sure.

yellowbuilding 8y ago
This suggests that I want more money or consumption, and that’s wrong. Nor do I want popularity. Quite the opposite. Popularity and attention are really the main problem, if anything. Who we are is defined by what we have done more than any time in history. Every day that passes is further locking ourselves into our cages of individuality. How can popularity and followers, like you mention, be our only hope for change when they are also the ties that are trapping us to our current trajectories? Specialist vs. generalist gets more at the problem I think we were talking about, but even the fact that it is such a debated concept seems off. Something seems wrong on a bigger level. Sometimes you need a specialist and sometimes a generalist, and we are highly adaptable creatures. It is strange this thing leads to so much anxiety. I think people are just worrying tremendously over which one are they to an unhealthy degree, and because they are scared to death of failure. Who can blame them? I’m sure some love popularity and never want to do anything else with their life, but that is an unrealistic bar we have created for everybody in our society. So I guess that seems like a thing to look at.

taway_1212 8y ago

Can you give examples of friends losing “everything” when following their dreams? What happened? Excellent comment BTW.

yellowbuilding 8y ago
I don’t think “following dreams” actually describes what I mean. I just mean doing anything except the safest thing to do, or making any sudden moves that requires a new start. Watching friends try to change careers has been cringeworthy. You have to be willing to lose everything. I think that takes all the fun out of life. It makes you feel absolutely trapped. Maybe i do love my life just how it is, but it’s hard to say when I cannot even visualize working toward anything else. I am just so much more fulfilled when working toward something. I don’t really get much out of just trying to save money so that’s I can risk it all at some point down the road. That feels like a trap. My happiest times have always been when I can be relatively confident I will not lose everything and I am in a place to contribute to something with other people. That is what I mean by “dream” and I currently have one of them, but it’s not a dream. It was once, or, it was at least a goal. I think “goal” is what’s I really mean. I want the ability to have goals in life that are not mere consumption, but that do not require overwhelming risk. The goals can be lame or common everyday things, but more real than a hobby and less deadly than risking homelessness.
- badpun 8y ago
  I can relate to that. However, you have to realise that you literally want to have everything - both the comfort and safety AND a fullfilling life. This conflict within people has probably been going on from the beginning of time (it's greatly depicted in "The Revolutionary Road", a film by Sam Mendes (director of American Beauty)). I think that in the end, unless you're very lucky, you need to give up one or the other to some extent. Personally, I think I'd be more comfortable living my next 30 years as an at least somewhat free pauper, than spending my days in a comfortable, but depressing gilded cage - but that's a choice that everyone needs to make for themselves.
  - 8y ago