It matters not how you feel
We live in a society that rewards conformity. How you appear is more valuable than who you are or how you feel. Kagiso Msimango discusses this disturbing trend.
They never ask questions about what really matters
Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: "What does his voice sound like?", "What games does he like best?", or "Does he collect butterflies?".
They ask: "How old is he?", "How many brothers does he have?", "How much does he weigh?", or "How much money does his father make?" Only then do they think they know him. – The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
I recently had a catch-up session with a friend that I hadn’t seen in a number of years
I am generally in a great place at the moment. My greatest challenge is that I feel over-extended.
She, on the other hand, is having a rough time in her career and her marriage. After telling me how challenging marriage is proving to be, she asked, without a hint of irony, when I intended to get married.
We had just established that I am very happy with my life as it is, while she wasn’t very satisfied with hers and one of the contributing factors was her marriage. Yet she still asked, without missing a beat, when I was going to get married!
When I pointed this out to her, she justified it by saying that considering what I do – I support, inspire and empower women to create lives they love, being married would be better for business because single women in their 30s seem like losers.
Seemingly the fact that I genuinely do love my life doesn’t carry much weight
So I ran an online poll where I asked people to choose between two options:
(1) You appear positively ecstatic with your life but you are in fact mildly dissatisfied with it, or
(2) You appear extremely miserable with your life but in fact it you are the happiest you have ever been.
Most of the people would rather experience mild dissatisfaction but appear very happy, than be very happy and appear miserable
Scary, huh?
This reminded me of a parable I came across, while I was studying to qualify as an IAW (life) coach:
In the dark of the night thieves entered a store and did their work without detection. In the morning the store opened at the appointed time. It was obvious to the clerk that the store had been entered, yet nothing seemed to have been taken.
As the day progressed and customers brought merchandise to the counter, the storekeepers noticed a curious phenomenon. The merchandise of least value wore the tags of greatest value. And the items of greatest value carried the tags of least value. By the end of the day the puzzle had been solved. The thieves had reversed the price tags.
We live in a society that rewards conformity
There are evolutionary reasons why survival of the individual and the group requires conformity from members of the group and I have no issues with the concept.
It is how and what we have chosen to conform to that bothers me
Our conformity-based upbringing, more often than not, reverses the price tags. The natural, unique, self is criticized, judged and punished into submission and an artificial constructed self emerges.
We learn soon enough that how you appear is more valuable than who you are or how you feel. It doesn’t seem to matter if your actions make you happy and do no harm. Image is everything.
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