It’s like watching a TV special about media affecting culture. You don’t realize you’re in a play within a play until much later, maybe never.
Could it be that life works the same way? We try to understand it from the context of living it. Is it possible to be unbiased when examining our choices within an environment that creates (and limits) those choices?
Using the word conundrum is so tempting, but we’d be back in a box again. One where communication is only as good as the vocabulary we share. It’s like a Yogi Berra quote that leaves you hanging. One of my favorites:
“Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”
A possible answer lies in quicksand, where escape is counterintuitive, demanding relaxation instead of panic, breathing deep instead of fast and thinking with a clear mind so you can be aware enough to take action:
Thoughts of Haiti or any natural disaster like Katrina or the flash floods in India make me consider how unjustified the loss of life is. Who deserves such an unexpected fate? Is it fair? Why them? Why now? What possible meaning can we derive from this?
Our petty worries of “Why me?” when we don’t make the team or get pulled over lose their value in the face of such disasters. Eventually though we all go back to our daily routines and such menial things start once again taking on more value. I remember feeling this strongly a year after 9/11. Business as usual.
How can we learn to stay with that keen focus that results from realizing how ephemeral life is – how random fate can be? We can’t control for the unexpected. We can try preparing for it with sandbags and supplies and extra food, but to preserve what? To go back to live the way we’ve been living and prepare for the next big catastrophe?
It doesn’t add up. The preservation of life as it is seems banal. The trauma of loss can be an opportunity to evolve at an accelerated rate. To maintain the foresight of seeing life almost gone and suddenly saved at the last moment. To take advantage of a second chance that we so rarely get as adults unless we put ourselves through the minor trauma of moving, changing jobs, or leaving a loved one.
Jay’s always writing sensibly, especially when it comes to healthcare. His ideas are offbeat, novel, and make you do a double-take in your head about what’s really going on in the world.
His doing more, buying less post struck a chord on a different level. The picture in the post reminds me of Will Hunting’s room in Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies of all time. Just a place to crash, recharge and start anew.
Living simply is difficult at first because you’re forced to prioritize. To each his own though; personalized living. Some earn money and do great things for stuff, which may be their personal drive. Cant knock that. Problems arise (as in the current financial crisis) when people start buying into what others are doing, just because.
What’s your own definition of living? Cut out the media, your friends, your family, your social status and what’s “required” of you. How would you choose to live?
Hierarchy is directly correlated to intimidation. The higher you go up the ladder, the more imposing the person becomes in our minds. We end up equating the position and the person. It’s a powerful effect. Even after meeting with a person and getting a consistently negative vibe, we play it down because that’s the president of so-and-so. The fear – like the title itself – is man-made. The only meaning it has is the value you give it.
When you call up Verizon or Apple, you expect great service. When you meet with the CEO of a company or a high-level politician, you expect professionalism. When you go to Bolo or Tribeca Grill, you expect amazing food. Certain brand names, like certain titles, convey a quality proposition that we grow to expect. All of which is upheld by each and every person that works for that company or embodies that role.
It really hits you when you get bad customer service from a company you expect more from or meet with an asshole corporate executive (tell him/her to check out Bob Sutton’s blog).
You realize that it’s the person, not the position that deserves your respect.
Society tends to place men into two “opposing” camps; the nice guys and the assholes. Bipartisanship is impossible. By not being a nice guy, you’re all of a sudden an asshole? It doesn’t click.
So-called nice guys are a myth. They have two things in common; their need of acceptance and their avoidance of accountability.
Nice guys are commonly seen trying to please everybody, an inherently flawed undertaking. The implication is a dire need for approval from external sources. The ability to say no or express one’s opinion in a social context requires internal validation. By being overtly pleasing, some men are sacrificing their sense of self to gain acceptance and taking on the “nice” label to cover it up.
I’ve also heard many nice guys say they’re not accepted for who they are. They then turn around and adopt a generic do-everything-right-by-everyone persona. You can spot these guys a mile away. Instead of being themselves, they buy into a societal meme of what a man should be and ironically become one of many.
Whenever I hear that nice guys don’t get this or nice guys don’t get that, it sounds like a copout from owning up to one’s actions. Rather than going through a brief process of self-evaluation, some men use the misnomer as a scapegoat. It’s more manly to be accountable for your behavior and learn from it than to shirk responsibility.
If your current strategy for achieving your goals isn’t working, adopt a new one. Just because the term “nice” is used doesn’t necessarily make you a nice guy. Men, women, whomever are only pigeonholed by these kinds of labels. Finding out who you are is much more challenging. Expressing it freely much more rewarding.
Settling is the key word. Once we have X number of things we are set, we’ve made it. The status quo: a family, a house with a backyard, a dog, cars, TVs, possessions, wealth. Do you actually need these things or have you convinced yourself that you want them?
What don’t you need that you think you want?
There are people who do want the societal status quo (or portions of it). There are those who rebel against it because, well, they’re rebels and they need something to be against. There are those who want to provide others the opportunity to achieve the status quo. Those that want to build something new. Those that want to sleepwalk through it all. Those that want to be engaged fully in everything. Those that want to communicate. Love. Cherish. Hate. Heal. Discover. Run. Escape. Observe. Just be.
Manliness is doing what’s necessary in the moment. As an overall disclaimer, using the word “manliness” depends very much on the culture. In America, a generally paternalistic culture, manliness is simply the word of choice to describe taking charge, responsibility, doing what’s necessary. In a maternalistic or female-driven culture, the word may be something else, but the essence still remains the same.
Manliness may be what’s necessary, but isn’t necessarily what’s right. When your buddies (or girlfriends) egg you on to chug a beer, it doesn’t make it right but it certainly is considered manly. When you take on a dare to ask a girl (or guy) out, again it may not be what’s right, but it fits the definition. Another example would be saving someone from danger while putting yourself in harm’s way. Same thing; not smart, but gutsy in most books.
That’s how I believe manliness is defined today, but it’s slowly taking on a different mold and starting to encompass more “right” scenarios. Men who stay home for example because their wife brings in a higher salary, a couple sharing housework, drinking responsibly (even joining AA), saying no to life-threatening activities like jumping off a 45-ft cliff into the water just for kicks. Does this make life a little boorish and manliness less, well, manly? Yes. But it balances the scales for men who aren’t guy’s guys. There are other ways to be manly now.
Doing what’s necessary changes with time anyway. As a culture adapts to take on a new image with advanced technology, workforce equality and acceptance of a diversity of lifestyles, so do the epithets used to “separate the men from the boys,” for lack of a better phrase. Stepping up to the plate depends completely on current context and where you are in the world.
Knowing what your culture requires can either empower you to become “manly”, motivate you to reshape the definition, or ignore it altogether and just be yourself.
Most brand names, celebrities, hot-shot companies work from an old model of selling content – here is who or what I am and I’m going to market myself to the point you either love or hate me. Paris Hilton comes to mind, maybe Geico, and how about Dove.
The new model is one of experience – I’m going to simulate a version of my reality for you to live and offer tons of testimonials so you either join the club or feel left out. Apple is first and foremost with iPod mania underway. I’d put Google in this category and one of my favorite actors, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Experience will certainly win out in the short-term and our sense of individual reality will be skewed proportionally to how much TV we imbibe. What’s next? How will the consumers’ hearts and wallets be won over? My guess is through connection. Generating a tie-in with the consumer’s life and the company’s agenda. The green community is definitely keying in on this.
The point? The core of day-to-day living remains relatively the same. We get more tools and neat stuff to tackle it. The process of convincing people to buy stuff continues to evolve. Decade to decade since the 50’s, we’ve been on a sine curve with “stability” on one end and “change” on the other. 50’s: stability, 60’s: change, 70’s: stability, 80’s: change, 90’s: stability, 00’s: change.
Money is still made trading and bartering. People still gossip. We try to understand ourselves and our place in the world. We look to the sky and dream. We build amazing things. We fight over those things, natural or otherwise. We try to get along. We seek laughter over pain, comfort over loss, safety over disconnect. And the cycle goes on and on and on.
My new favorite saying is “relative to what?” Works great for opinions disguised as facts or judgments disguised as questions.
Man, the food here sucks. – Relative to what?
They could do a better job at ______. – Relative to what?
What do you think of so and so? – Relative to what?
Do you think I look fat? – Relative to what?
We’re all absolutists. Our local environment becomes the world and it’s easy to forget the value of relativity. If we hang out with our family or local peer group most of the time, groupthink cocoons us even more. As Yogi Berra might say, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
Another way I look at it is how we view tribes and villages in third-world countries. Their ideologies seem so backwards to us, even though that’s the only world they’ve ever known. Then, just a little bit of education has an overnight effect on women’s rights, child labor, and mortality in general. They go from an absolute context to one relative to the global spectrum.
Same goes for developed countries. The moment they start thinking they’ve made it (relative to what?) is the moment they stop evolving. Information exposure alone is so powerful.
Our desire for change is rooted in wanting something we don’t think we have. Change is assumed to be an event, not a process.
A better body for example is a prevalent theme in American culture. We can all be thinner or stronger. Regardless of health benefits, aesthetics takes precedence. If change is an event, a pill for weight loss or muscle gain does the trick. From one day to the next, you’re a new you. Marketing campaigns barely run on more.
If change is a process, the body you see in the mirror and the body you want are one and the same. It’s just a matter of time. We are but versions of another self waiting to happen.