Skip to main content

Social pressure: A major roadblock on the way to self discovery

    So, I recently read Siddhartha, and I didn't like it all that much. However, it did get me thinking about the concept of the self, and what self discovery looks like. I am certainly no expert on the topic though, since I don't really know myself all that much. What I do know, though, is that social pressures most definitely do not help the process of defining that inner self. 

Oooooooh, it's a visual metaphor

    I, as a person, tend to try to please people. I'm sure that everyone deals with this to some extent, and I think we can agree that we may act differently in front of other people. There might be people who do this that have a really good idea of themselves, but in my experience, I certainly do not know in detail who I am (at least that I care to share). Anyway, I have found that compromising parts of your personality tends to obscure the self.  
Social pressure? I guess?

    As an example, if you still remember my first blog post, where I wrote about my Church small groups and what was going on there. Now, I usually never bring this up because it is a point of contention, even though I am very passionate about things being accurate. I was recently reminded of this when there was another meeting with tons of misinfo, some of which I had discussed with the speaker before (about factually wrong statements, not just my disagreement), and I sorta let loose that night, cracking jokes to my friends I normally wouldn't even think of saying near him. So, to bring it back to the main point, I feel like more of my actual opinions (which are a part of the self) came out as a result of me not caring anymore. So, maybe care less about what other people think. Sometimes, it's not that you don't know yourself, its just that you act differently in front of other people, so your self in public is like an amorphous blob (to varying degrees). For me, I pretty much tell jokes whenever, because people like that, but I'm gonna save that for another blog post. 

Anyway, I've probably talked enough, so...uh...bye, I guess?


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kimiko Hahn's "The Ashes" and Complex Poem Structures

For my mentor poet, I chose Kimiko Hahn. I checked out her work pretty much arbitrarily, but a certain poem caught my eye, "The Ashes" . Even now, I have to say that I don't completely understand the poem. If you want to read it, just be aware that it is 80 lines across 14 stanzas. Not terribly long, but there is some pretty high diction ("reticent", "apoplectic", "intransigent,") which is not what I would consider a casual read. After my first read through, I felt that chunking would not be the best approach. There was plenty of vivid imagery, but deeper meaning started to form when I began to relate lines from separate stanzas together. For example, take a look at the eighth stanza: I tucked away our baby’s pink layette in circumspect mothballs for a christening that never took place. As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted. More than anything, I love tidal pools.  On its own, to me, this largely read as just a scene, although the third line...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is Art, Really?

What constitutes a piece of art? Like, most of us can agree that a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, and a piece of music are all obviously forms of art. However, I, along with others, also consider performance, video games, and food to be art. So what does it mean for something to be art? Should it meet certain objective requirements, or is it all about how the viewer perceives it? Some consider art in terms of effort, that the more skill or time that went into a painting, the more worthy of the title of "art"  it is. While this is a quality present in older arts, such as the Mona Lisa or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it is less obviously present in more contemporary art. Sure, There are still insanely skillful pieces of art in the modern day, such as Cao Hui's recreation of Michelangelo's David, but with its stony exterior filled with uncomfortably anatomical viscera,   but art on the more abstract side, like Mark Rothko's Black on Maroon  sometimes gets...
Post a Comment
Read more