I consider myself to be rather philosophical. I do a lot of thinking even while I'm doing something else, like watching TV or playing an online game. But anyway, I was thinking earlier and I just spontaneously started typing my thoughts out on my Facebook page:
The most difficult thing in the world (for me, anyway) is learning to be your own person, independent of other people's opinions and flows, yet at the same time, blending in well, finding your place even, so as not to be useless in the world.
This balance is something that may take an entire lifetime to learn, but even that much time may not be enough for most.
Society always asks you to conform. Even people who think they're telling you how to be unique are still caught up in the same fray. Some of them even mask it, subconsciously or not, as if they just want to see you improve. But the truth is, society doesn't really want you to be yourself. They want you to be something they've already pre-envisioned you to be.
Even worse is that even though you do a lot of thinking about things like this, people are too caught up in their own problems, hang-ups, insecurities, and so on, to really think about you in any significant way, though many of them, such as friends and family, sincerely intend to help you, but simply don't know how, and therefore, fail to do so.
I'm also guilty of restricting myself, even though all this time I thought I was being different. I've always hated society, always looking at it from what I might describe as a third-person view. I don't hate the people; what I hate is the mind. Cultures, traditions, popularity, everything, they're nothing but cliques and trends built up so people can "belong" somewhere.
"Are you 'hip-hop'?"
"Are you a 'Filipino'?"
I want to learn to be able to answer those questions and others like them properly, frankly, straightly like this: "I am neither. I am me."
I think the world is stuck. Everybody thinks there's only one way to do things, because certain people at some point in the past had already decided it. As an example, to be a teacher, you must go through X number of processes, take X number of tests, etc. And yet, even with all of this processing and testing, we still have teachers that don't know what they're doing, simply reading from books and making students' lives miserable instead of helping them study and enjoy studying, ultimately making them better students, not just academically, but in a social setting as well. But that's just one example.
In the end, though, you can't put the blame fully on these institutions and their processes. It's because most people are unable to think for themselves and learn things by themselves that people have to set up these countless rules and technicalities, running on a point system for something so abstract such as human thought. In the end, my conclusion is still that the world is stuck.
ラベル: philosophy, Real Life, sociology
