What is on everyone's minds these days?
Please god don't say the election. The media has been pumping us full like geese being prepped for fois gois with election coverage and as much as I might want to rid myself of it, I can't combat the ceaseless barrage. So I won't do further damage here.
So a different topic: living for oneself or living to impress others. This has been on my mind. Inside of everyone is a secret life. A secret being. This being is the director, the one who gives orders in an unheard voice. The being is the ghost in our machinery. It is the ego, and it's tied to the mind, taking in information, cataloguing data, observing and making decisions about survival, advancement, recognition, fear and irony. The ego is a creature of habit. It likes routine. For some the ego almost solely takes external cues (e.g. emulation of a life), rather than taking directives from the inner self. This usually happens when one believes the ego is their inner self, their only self. I know this sounds like a bunch of Oprah bullshit, but if you break it down into categories of the conscious (ego) and the unconscious (inner self) it begins to seem a little less ridiculous.
So, living for oneself or living to impress others??? This is a slippery question to resolve, but it always comes down to motives. We can examine our actions and seek out the motives for those actions. We can do the same in observing others. It's not my intention to discount the importance of the ego, the rightful human need to impress others and the inherent survival advantages in mastering appearances, etc., but rather to be critical of a life dominated by the ego. The ego is important, but it is, at its root, empty. It is a puppet. It should not be running the entire show, but only a portion of it. For example, I think the ego knows nothing of true desire. The ego knows what the ego desires, but does it really know what the inner self desires? No.
So this, I know, is just a bunch of recycled, poorly expressed, washed-up philosophy, but that aside, it still has some truth in it. Living to impress others can seem like a worthy life. It might even be a worthy life. It might just happen that while living for appearances one might coincidentally fulfill the desires of their inner self. It would be quite the coincidence. However, I think it's a perilous path, because I think it is, more often than not, unhappy trails. And that's what I want to avoid for myself personally, but it's tricky. It requires vigilance of both motives and actions. It requires thought about myself and sometimes that's scary, because self-examination can sometimes be a nebulous form of torture.
But this all to bleak, too serious. That's where forgetting the self comes into play. To laugh, to loosen up, to let go . . .
