What if we are not the Main Character?

By and large, our experience of growing into our full human, hopefully adult-ish, selves involves quite a trip through the uncharted territory of our own stories. As we live them, we write them and we pen with hope what is to come and rewrite with the haze of nostalgia what came before. It’s a lot of writing, and a lot of reflection, both forward and backwards, on who we are and why we are here. The question many people, if not all, face is, “What is the meaning of MY life?”.

How very normal and beautiful of us to always be searching for homecoming in our selves. After all we are valuable, our story and personal journey matter to our communities. Yet, there is a point at which it may be time to face up to some facts that maybe life is not all about us and growing up means getting out of our own heads. A human life is meant for more than just cyclical internalising and self-obsession in perpetuity, especially (and I am talking from personal experience) if you are raising children. Children have no choice to be born to this world, and they are as needy as they come. We, as consenting adults, have choice in how we move through this world and part of that often involves either making decisions with our needs at the centre or our children’s needs which usually (mostly) come with personal sacrifice. This is most prescient in the early years of parenting, as they grow in independence so too can you grow for yourself.

The inhabitants of the world have, in all my personal thirty odd years of knowing this physical earth home, come to a place of extremely narrow focus. The contradiction stands. The universality of the lived experience of being a person is as known as it ever has been. We are more globally aware, informed, educated, connected, ‘social ’, health-conscious, and wealthy than ever. Yet, the cultural zeitgeist is that of individualism above all else and we are slowly losing touch with human connectivity because of it. We are more obsessive, isolated, lonely, depressed, angry and broke than ever.

We are drowning in content. Mostly, it’s great and, a vast majority of it is the same thing regurgitated over and over with slightly different presentations. All of it, including my own writings, point to a global wrestling with mattering and feeling ‘right’. We obsess over our voice and presence on the platform of the social world. We are all just trying to figure it out, but the terms and conditions of figuring it out have changed and we no longer can ascertain what the end point is. We can’t use an external measuring tool of fulfillment because we now know that the metrics that were previously been set were done so as a means to generate exclusion. These standards of ‘the good life’ have historically been based off of one small powerful people group or another to the detriment of anyone who was been marked as being different. The definition of ‘a meaningful life’ is being set by organisations and systems that profit off of people never actually achieving it, or scrutinizing too closely why we think it’s something that needs to be purchased, but living in the endless reaching-striving-failing. It is absolutely exhausting.

It seems that where the most cruel industrialisation of the self has taken place has been in successfully re-branding itself as the antidote to the flaws of the previous generation. Our generation perceives themselves as being more mentally well, compassionate, mindful, progressive and free…etc than our parents. Language is where we can first see evidence of this false reframing of well-intentioned ideas into loaded words or empty jargon. Phrases like ‘self-care, self-love, boundaries, protect your peace, you do you’ have all been co-opted by people and corporations with an agenda to corral us towards their personal ( AND PROFITABLE) definition of these ideals. Really much of how these terms operate is by obscuring the truth, they point to self obsession as something to strive for and bypass the complexity of personal struggles by vapid, toxic positivity. What if stepping into a fuller version of ourselves actually involved an element of self-forgetting not highly scrutinized public self-flagellation and preening? Perhaps our addicted and anxious minds, that only seem to be getting worse and more widespread, might welcome a break from the constant assessment of our own performance in public. If we could start to waken to the idea that we are being sold distraction in the form of self-improvement and personal fixation then maybe we could realise that this time we have alive is about more than just….making ourselves into the best versions of who we are meant to be?

There is a faint line between the point of being self-aware and being selfish, which historically would have become more distinct as a person crossed the threshold from childhood to adulthood. Times have changed, generally for the better in some ways and worse in others which is a common trait of generational transition, and one significant change has been the delaying of ‘adulthood’ until later in a person’s life. Thus, the soul-searching years of youth have been artificially stretched. It is fantastic to know that life can begin later and that we don’t have to have our shit together as soon as we graduate college. Of course it can, you can build a big beautiful life at any age. The problem arises not from delayed action or failure when trying, but lack of direction, distraction and inertia. How hyper-consumer cultures keep us small, busy and malleable is by concentrating all our energies on our shiny and current feelings of self and how we can center our emotional experience and less on how we fit into the bigger picture as part of a social net connected by a shared contract of operation and obligation to one another.

Here is the catch about all this interior pontificating that we are pushing, it doesn’t seem to make anyone any happier. In fact it leads to a lot of circling of the drain and while people become very good at expressing their feelings and inner landscape it becomes quite tiresome to always be around people who are only capable of conversing when what you are speaking of can be related to them in some way.

Growing up leads us to community engagement with people who may not be on the same page as us, and the development of expectations and responsibilities that may not leave time for us to ‘thrive’ and that can just be how adulthood is. How then do we respond? How do we take care of ourselves, honour our needs and mental wellness without centering ourselves in the story of our lives? The concept of egocentrism was developed by Jean Piaget the psychologist in the 1920’s (who later expressed his misgivings over the viral* use of the word itself). It largely refers to a state of intellectual development within preschool children that defines their thinking processes as they shift from a wholly subjective perspective to a more global, external perspective.

One consequence of egocentrism is the assumption of the personal, interior experience as more valid and real than that of people outside of one’s self. It can look like a preoccupation with one’s own inner thoughts, an unhealthy obsession with sifting through our ways of being in order to find the right ‘identity’ to perform, it can also appear as a presumption that any negative experience is a personal assault on us without considering the multiplicity of random occurrences that might have led to said harm. In fact, it will most often reveal itself in our inability to account for other people’s fully lived stories or significance in society.

The world is ours and everyone else is just living in it.

This energy often manifests in moral superiority, intellectual browbeating, impatience and an unwillingness to be called up to a higher standard. Unable to think rationally and feeling like the protagonist, when people are only able to interpret things as happening to them, in the world we live in now, rage and it’s social presentation, ‘outrage’ is the most readily available projection growing numbers of people are falling too as an increasingly common volatile reaction to inane day to day challenges. It’ scary and sad and is breaking us apart.

The balance between tuning out noise that pulls us away from a self-aware yet others-centric value system and ongoing self-pruning that leads us to avoid everything that doesn’t make us feel comfortable, seen or special is a tricky one to master. Can we honour and fulfill ourselves if we live in service to others and put aside the things that ‘put us first’? How do you commit to lifting up others, putting their needs ahead of your own and defaulting to understanding over interpreting without crossing your own boundaries? None of us want to end up like many of our own parents who live in bitterness because they gave too much for too long and never poured into themselves. There are seasons in life when we have to accept that we cannot be the leading lady, sometimes we owe more to others in a way that initially feel like a depletion but over time reveal themselves to be deeply, profoundly fulfilling. Maybe it’s time to picture a world and a people who are joyfully focused on the well-being of each other and not as deeply bound up in making their own self-image an icon. I have relentless hope for more out of this grief stricken world.

*Of course, Piaget did not himself refer to the over usage and simplified invocation of his coined term as ‘viral’ since our interpretation of that word to mean “something spread rapidly through online sharing" only shifted in the 2000’s.