Personal Woes and Advice 2

[pendell]

I've got a big ideological/philosophical problem I need to talk to someone about, but I can't post it here because that would violate forum policy...

*Waves* You can talk to me in PM. There's also no forum policy on the GITP facebook chat.

Unfortunately most of the issues I've seen were ones where "stop interacting" wasn't an option. It's usually not an issue of choosing to interact with the people, but trying to do normal things like attending classes and go to social events and generally just live your own life. In my case I was dealing with people who felt threatened by having a person who wore black and skulls on a college campus (they were still in the school shooting panic stuff).

The phrase that pops unbidden into my mind is "meet them halfway".

Human beings are herd animals. There's no way around that. So if you insist that everyone else in the world accommodate your particular preferences and tastes ... well, they won't. You have the right to express yourself. No one else has the obligation to listen or watch you do it. The more you try to impose your thoughts and ideas and expression on them, the more they push back.

OTOH, that doesn't mean you just have to surrender to the herd either. What kind of a life is that?

So in a way it's a lot like the testing of boundaries we did with our parents as adolescents. Push the rest of the world too far outside of its comfort zone , the rest of the world will push back. But if you let the world make all your choices for you, you're not a human being but a lemming. So the trick is to find that midpoint where there can be a healthy mutual tolerance. There never will be a lack of tension when individual expression meets group expectations. So the solutions are 1) Move the group towards greater acceptance by behaving well while retaining your quirks. 2) Drop the more outrageous things you do in public so long as it doesn't conflict with core principle. 3) Stand firm on those things which are truly core. Sometimes this means accepting a certain level of grief from society for your choices.

And somewhere in the wilderness between total conformity and total rebellion maybe you can find that place where you and society get along. Where you compliment each other.


Respectfully,

Brian P.