On Listening To Ourselves

A friend sent me this Quote:

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.” - Maya Angelou

After wondering what this could mean for a while, I asked my friend what what she thought Angelou's message was, and this was the response:

"It's one of self-actualisation. And the responsibility of the self to realise this for the individual. Therefore if you choose not to liberate yourself, even through naivety or non-realisation, it's still your choice"

This made everything a lot clearer for me. It made me realise that I thought the imagery in Angelou's quote was a bit off-putting and not quite synonymous with her message. It confused the message I was trying to interpret.

Rather than a tightrope, for me, her message depicts a series of pathways that stand in front of you. You start at the point where they all meet, and they then all diverge to go their separate ways. We need to choose a path, and that choice is excruciating and there's a threat of eternal indecision. So what do we do?


Being Led Down The Garden Path

We all have external voices that tell us what's best for us. When we're younger it's our parents, and when we get older we start listening more to our peers and getting exposed more to adverts. All these people and things, whether they realise it or not, for one reason or another, are telling you what they think is good for you.

"It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."

With all these external voices, it's hard to hear the one inside ourselves that tells us what we want to do and what's right for us. So we stop listening to the one inside our head, and chose to get mindlessly led by the voice that is telling us it knows best for us. The voice knows best, and is telling us to walk the garden path. From where we start - the nucleus where all paths start to diverge and go their own way - we start to follow the external voice and walk the garden path.


Why The Voice Occurs/Why We Listen To The Voice

Sometimes we are forced to consolidate subjective, grey areas into black or white statements. Parents, managers and experts in their disciplines at work need to consolidate grey issues into black and white boundaries and instructions, so that they're (over)simplified to the point where a layperson can understand the problem and know what to do. The solutions won't be perfect, but it's better than overwhelming others with the complexity of the problem and getting nothing done instead.

Others use the voice to gain power. The ability to consolidate grey, confusing life into a series of simple instructions will always give you control. Even if the instructions are completely wrong. Some people will listen to you, because it's too difficult for them to work out what they need to do. 

When we're younger, our parents know better, and it's safer to listen to them and act by being directed by their knowledge. But as we get older, this black and white incentive starts to turn grey.

I think a lot of us struggle with the idea of objectivity vs subjectivity. I certainly feel compelled to have a truth that's objective. And we can treat external voices as the voice of truth, the objective truth. A lot of the time, people think they objectively know whats best for you. Perhaps because they too struggle with the idea of subjective truth. And it's easier to listen to a truth and treat it as gospel, rather than struggle with the subjectiveness of it all.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd" - Voltaire

We are all influenced by the external voices. And we can allow these external voices to lead us down the path that they think is right for us, regardless of what is the right path. And the right path isn't objectively better or worse than any other path: it's just a path that is right for us.


Why We Don't Go Back To The Nucleus & Start Again When We Realise We Got It Wrong

Some of us can't interpret the many conflicting voices in our head to work out where we can gain meaning from life. Even if we do manage that, some of us won't be able to come up with a plan to achieve it. Others don't like the idea of losing the position they've got to along to the path they've been already walking. Seeing as everything's subjective, walking the path that we want to walk is no better than the path that was shown to us by the external voices anyway, right? Nope.

Let's imagine that our subjective brain is a vending machine. This vending machine sells happiness, all you need to do is put a few coins in to get happiness out. There's one problem, though - it runs on a very specific currency - and this currency is made from our own subjective preferences and tastes. Everyone has their own currency, because everyone has their own preferences. Each path that we walk down gives us money in one of those currencies as long as we continue to walk down it. Now it becomes more obvious that no matter how far down the yellow brick road we've got to, it makes sense to click the heels of our red slipper together, three times, and say, "I want to go back to the nucleus".


Complications: Changes Of Currency And Bonuses

This is where things get a bit harder and we require another skill to navigate and choose our paths successfully. That skill is foresight.

Often, as we progress with our lives, the type of work we do evolves and develops over time. So if you start doing technical work, and eventually become the expert in one area and that area needs to grow so that many people need to be able to do what you do, you start to become a teacher more and a technical operator less. Your currency and bonuses change.

How do we resolve this? Well, the best way to move forward is to pick a path that instantly gives you back the currency and bonuses that you can use, and then changes currency to another that you can still use down the line.

However our lives are uncertain, we don't know where our paths will take us. Often the paths we walk down branch off like tree leaves, just because we walk down one path for a while, doesn't mean we'll only have one option in life later down that path. Walking down one path will open more paths up later down the line.

Other times, people don't walk the path that gives bad currency, even if a bit further down, the currency and bonuses change into something really good. Sometimes we need to walk the path that doesn't given us a good return so that we've got far enough to get a currency we like. In this way, we should have foresight and ability to delay gratification so that we can be on a better path in the future.

 "You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like." - Layer Cake