Feeling Like You’re Trapped in Someone Else’s Master Plan?
It’s time to make your life your own.
Nothing is ever truly original. This is not the same as saying that things cannot be new. Something borrowed from some other time, re-examined, re-purposed perhaps and presented in a way that allows us to achieve a fresh insight is more valuable than its source.
The world grows in such fashion. We, personally, evolve because of it. But nothing comes without a price. So let’s start from the beginning. The positive psychology proponent, Shawn Achor, suggests that we end up feeling trapped in our life because we are conditioned by society to expect happiness to derive from social status and material possessions.
“Society is a construct whose coherence depends upon “…cultural practices that promote strong norms and punishment for deviance (tightness) and those that promote relational self-construal (collectivism).””
This conditioning is both persistent and pervasive. We are social creatures. When our environment was constrained by lack of technology to what we could reach in a day’s trot on a horse, what we could see with our eyes and what we could experience ourselves, who we became, what we did and how we thought we should act was determined by what we saw, heard and accepted.
In that small, simplified environment the approach worked. When we have access to different cultures, knowledge and perspectives we still use comparison standards to help us determine how we should think, feel and behave. And that’s when the trap is sprung.
Society is a construct whose coherence depends upon “…cultural practices that promote strong norms and punishment for deviance (tightness) and those that promote relational self-construal (collectivism).” This means that when we fail to navigate it in a way that also allows us to change and grow we become exactly what our environment expects us to be and develop only as far as it permits us to grow.
In I Could Be The One Aviccii and Nicky Romero sing:
“Feel like I’m trapped in somebody else’s master plan.
Go to school, get a job, get a mortgage.
All I’m really doing is dying.”
There Is No Master Plan
There is no master plan. That actually is the problem. If there were there would also be a deeper sense of purpose that would engage us, most times, and consume us at least sometimes. The society that subliminally dictates to us how to behave is a construct that has no objective existence and it works only as long as we all agree it does.
“we create social constructs to make better sense of the objective world.”
Social construct theory suggests that we create social constructs to make better sense of the objective world. Just like with money, the moment we all agree it exists and has specific value we are bound by the rules of its existence. Those rules can’t be then broken without also destroying the construct.
This is why the social expectations of our family, friends, community, society and country become fetters that bind us in an ever more controlled and circumscribed existence.
Breaking free would be unthinkable for two distinct and equally valid reasons. First, the effort. It requires a lot of struggling with our self to justify breaking norms that will discomfit and maybe hurt those around us. Caring for the feelings of others, exercising empathy, becomes one more fetter we struggle against. We rebel and we find ourselves isolated. Our social instinct under assault. The energetic cost of such internal and external struggle is monumental and the rewards are not always discernible.
The second reason is the isolation. Like any system that’s been set up to function society protects itself from every perceived attack by isolating and ejecting the hostile member. Strip the abstraction away and that ‘hostile member’ who has challenged the norms and broken the unwritten social construct of trust is now you and me. And we are alone. Isolation is a powerful weapon. It drives home to us just how vulnerable we are. It was not for nothing that Ancient Greece where democracy first took root and empowerment of the individual became a thing for the first time in history, also gave us ostracism. The banishment from the state for 10 years, of anyone who had been found abusing their power.
Could we go it alone? Or at least live in relative isolation? That depends on why we’re breaking the fetters that bind us to everyone else’s expectations. If greater meaning is to be found in freedom from them, then sure.
A Social Experiment
Such questions, of course, had few reliable answers. Artists, musicians, writers, routinely broke the social mould that made them in pursuit of a greater dream and a deeper personal truth. Those who were lucky enough to find it became megastars. Shining examples that helped keep hope alive for anyone who contemplated doing the same. Those who didn’t, became cautionary tales for anyone who contemplated doing the same.
Life is a yin and yang balance. You can go your own way but you’d better have a clear direction and some sort of plan on how to get there, otherwise you will be cast out, forgotten, lost.
The Covid-19 pandemic did what no social experimenter could ever, ethically, do. It stripped us all, globally, of the pervasive embrace of family, friends and society. It socially isolated us and forces us to rethink our values. Protected from the power of direct comparisons and protected by our digital cocoons, many of us rethought the “why” of our existence and the “what” of our actions.
In a study published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry the pandemic appears to have affected virtually every social construct we have created and, by association, also affected our inner sense of mental balance.
Anything that affects our mental balance has a direct impact on what we call “human economic behavior” that is essentially our activities filtered by our values and driven by our perceived reward system. Covid-19 affected everything. It changes how we bank, shop, work, develop and behave.
An Opportunity Driven By A Challenge
Living in a post-Covid-ish world is a challenge. A study in Italy, that suffered some of the most horrendous cases of Covid-19 shows that there are increased levels of anxiety and depression in the general population. This, in turn, affects many other interrelated elements of 21st century life. Social trust, tolerance of change, reaction to sudden challenges. A polarization of opinion driven by the different means through which people gather, assess and assimilate data about the external world.
None of this is easy to deal with. At the same time these challenges provide an opportunity. With the fetters that bind us to the prescriptive way of behaving within the social construct weakened, we can more easily make decisions based upon values, beliefs and goals that more closely reflect our own needs, wants, hopes and dreams.
The general sense of unease that persists from Covid-19 allows us to ‘rebel’ without triggering an over-reaction from the system. A World Economic Forum article highlights how ‘The Great Resignation’ is very much a post Covid-19 phenomenon brought about by this re-evaluation of personal values, priorities and goals.
The world is changing. But the world is us. It is made up of our actions. Of our willingness to accept something or reject it. The world is itself a construct that we make each and every day through the things we do and the expectations we have.
Intentionality in our values and beliefs is now reflected in our actions and behavior. We are finding the strength to more closely guide our lives because our close brush with mortality has changed the value we ascribe to the energetic cost involved.
A new world is emerging as a result of this. One where each life is a reflection of its own drives, dreams and hopes not just a product of society’s expectations.
