America culture is a highly competitive and highly structured phenomenon. Children are overstuffed with activities and adults are carpet-bombed with expectations. We live in an extremely densely packed society and keeping it functioning requires uniformity in such a way that a standard needs to exist so there is something to produce food, contracts, laws, necessary regulations for. This is a setting for losing lack of self.
We exist a highly competitive culture where the alpha gets all the gold and the losers fade into the backdrop or are laughed and ridiculed under the feet of the newly crowned king. It happens in class, sports, writing contests, art, races, everything but because our culture is so individualistic and preaches that old American ,”Follow your dream” homage there is a created lack of individuality. We seek to be what is best not what is individual and truly ourselves. All the little kids get trophies for competing in order to push them to aim for trophies. Schools parade and award the winners so everyone can see what they’re supposed to be. This is highly impossible and illogical, only one person can be at the top so preaching this as an expectation creates an impossible need.
It feels good to fit the expectation prototype in our head. It is a homely feeling of both making parents and the child-self feel proud and an importance in the world. We have a precedented happiness pool arraigned for people who meet that just sitting as a reservoir in ourselves awaiting a swimmer. But it feels good because we have agreed that standard is good not that we enjoy or want it. Things that make us happy, don’t need to be deemed good, they inherently and truly feel.
So we have a society where most people are chasing an unreachable dream by attempting to fit into archetypes, suits, and masks that don’t actually make them happy. However they do feel happy chasing these things BECAUSE they have accepted what we as a society have agreed is the alpha, is the apple, is the goal. Everyone has their own different spin on what and how they chase but a feeling of fitting in or being at peace and in proper place is not a place of happiness. I personally try to overload myself with projects so that I feel I am doing a ton of amazing things to fit my prototype. But I don’t enjoy them anywhere as much as I did if I chased the things that made me happy.
We need a replacement of this reservoir’s chase with a wave of acceptance of ourselves then it must be ridden with each individual current. Each person should follow what makes them happy as the steps go on and as they make their steps. A society chasing something unobtainable is a blind and unexamined society waiting for a runaway father to recognize talents we don’t have and don’t care about. All the while no one is doing what makes them happy.
