The You in Young American

The great irony of America's twenty-somethings is they despise being told what to do, but they'll go out of their way to be told who they are.

If they were to excavate the ancient ruins of sites like Greece or Mexico, they wouldn't listen to the counsel and direction of those who know how to excavate, but they would seek out someone who's willing to tell them what the ruins look like based on popular culture. Identity is like the ruins, though, in that you have to work and remove what's loose and unnecessary to reveal what is structure and what is sediment. And, like the erosion of nature, the erosion of life will either further bury your identity or will slowly destroy what little has been crudely exposed.

I was once told by a close friend that, "Identity is the fluid result of what you want and what you'll do to get [what you want]." If that is true, then the aforementioned youth are surrendering their actual identity by failing to want and failing to act, exchanging it for a convenient mask, mass-produced with brittle plastic, shaped by the mold of acceptance.

Why is it so repulsive to simply follow directions, for some? Why is it such a sharp concept to be told what to do, whether you want to do it or not? Is freedom truly at stake? Is it a threat to individuality? Or, is it just the fear and pride of a youth unaware of the benefits of authority?

This is where they, and countless others, are truly lost. There are those with authority who have the youth's best interest at heart, and seek to instruct and guide them using the experience of a lifetime, and the observations of multiple lifetimes. However, the youth seem to see authority as an attempt to chain and oppress them, rather than to protect and lead them. Instead of accepting a leader or a master, they surrender their wills to those who are simply using treats to bait them into whichever trap serves the hand that feeds them best. They blindly give authority to those who've earned none.


Here's an analogy to illustrate my point: A fill-in-the-blank questionnaire is being projected onto an erasable surface. Each question goes something like, "My favorite color is _______," "I like to ______," "I want to be a ________ someday," etc. A child, then, is asked to go fill in those blanks. Once, the child is finished, they sit down, proud of their answers and feeling a great sense of individuality and purpose (if you've ever worked with children, you know that's no exaggeration.) However, this child has given their entrusted answers to the person(s) who wrote the questions and the person(s) who projected the questionnaire. This presents a number of risks, such as the questions being changed, but the answers remaining the same, changing how the child now identifies with their own answers; or, the lack of meaning to the child's answers once the projector has been turned off, turning what they thought made them special into random words in a meaningless order. In either case, the child unwittingly gives themselves a hollow sense of self, while simultaneously being trained to do so.


This is what happens with online quizzes and the like. The "Which Type of Sandwich Are You" or "What Type of Person Should You Marry" clickbait hooks twenty-somethings into what seems like a harmless two minutes of enlightening entertainment, when, in reality, they're letting themselves be trained to answer personal questions, and chaining themselves to the leashes of carefully worded inquiries. Thus, they give in to what some would call the illusion of choice, and surrender their true identity to a selective few options that someone they've never met came up with.

It takes work, trials, and errors to discover your true self. Like ancient ruins, one can learn how to take the trowel and get down in the dirt, or let the trowel rust and help someone decide what the ruins look like with limited evidence.

What power, then, belongs to those who not only discover who they are, but what they're made of--because only they can actually create a new identity, becoming truly individual. It's this point most of the twenty-somethings in this era will never reach, and so becomes more intense the authority of those who do. Will those who earn this authority use it well? To most, it'll never matter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Broke Dick's Thoughts Bucket

Bard (Gemini) AI Regret Poetry

The Dick Who Was