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> 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

> 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.

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.