Society Says

Our society discourages individualism. At an early age, we are in awe to learn that no human is like another, but as time goes on, we mock our neighbors for their differences.

You are encouraged to live within certain set guidelines and standards. Thinking outside the box is something you discover on your own, since mediocrity is the norm. The educational process, the media, and parental expectations attempt to stamp out your unique self-identity. You are trained to not listen to your inner intuition. Don’t trust your inner sense of knowing. Don’t believe yourself. From birth, you are programmed to put away your foolish dreams and replace them with a sensible life. Society demands that you perform according to its standards, and it is hard not to follow suit.

As a child, I was a sensitive, shy, and emotional. My father would yell at me, “Feelings? Who gave you the right to have feelings? I’ll tell you how to feel.”

Don’t you love my dad’s classic philosophy!? “There are two ways to do things: the right way and the wrong way. And there is only one right way which is my way. It’s a rather close-minded look at life and people.

We are trained not to be different. In Art and Fear, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland tell us that “Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way—they get eaten.” Too many of you live a life that others have planned for you. Society wants you to choose the temporarily easy route. If you don’t buck the system and you follow orders; if you play by the rules, everything will be okay. In essence, you submerge your unique identity and don’t listen to inner self—that part of you which knows the real truth.

My father gave me two options when I graduated high school. I could get a job, or I could go to college and become a teacher. Why a teacher? So that I could have babies, and then take the same vacations as my kids. Choosing my own future wasn’t an option. Remember I told you I was timid, right? Well, I flunked student teaching, because I was too shy to stand in front of a group of seventh graders and give a lesson plan. I had to beg my advisor to give me a D for my student teaching program in order to graduate with my class. I was not cut out to be a teacher of middle or high school students. What’s interesting is that if my father would have just let me be, he’d learn, years down the line, that there was a teacher in me after all. But some people cannot be pleased, and it’s not your job or my job to make efforts to appease them.

The result of society’s training is to become remote, mechanical beings, content to go to work for someone else and raise 2.3 children. It becomes near-impossible to hear or access your inner voice and your dreams slowly die.