Photo taken on a great walk :)
Society & culture are constantly working together in their influence on the human experience. Society provides a structure to existence in telling everyone what is available and how everything should be organized. Culture provides interpretation to societal structures in telling you what’s impressive, what’s acceptable, and what’s not.
When I was growing up, society handed me the same generic life script that everyone else gets. It was expected that I do well in school, go to college, and start my career. I got married along the way, and the societal expectation is now that I buy a house, have children, and save for retirement. For this essay, I’ll call this “conventional life.”
Conventional life doesn’t even have to hire a marketing team. Authority figures to subordinates, then eventually subordinates to other subordinates communicate the brand statements to the masses and begin to judge one another by how well they are performing. We institutionalize, both formally and informally, the messages of society and culture so well that these abstract concepts never have to be explained directly. They turn people into both consumers and distributors of the life script.
And beyond conventional life, the social world around us also sets standards for who is considered physically attractive, and who is not. Expectations are set for what is considered masculine or feminine. Social consequences are enforced and reinforced based on height, weight, skin, and hair because they have worked together in creating a system where all of these superficial parts of a person communicate something about that person’s worth. And beauty standards are especially powerful because people claim their social judgments are their aesthetic preference.
But when we take a closer look at aesthetic preferences, we often discover how deeply they have been shaped by societal and cultural assumptions. And of course beauty standards get internalized through repeated reinforcement, so now society and culture influence the way people experience their own bodies and the bodies of other people.
Conventional life sets the stage full of already-existing assumptions about what everything is supposed to look like. A child walks onto this stage holding the script that they never even got a chance to read and evaluate. They begin performing for an audience who also knows the script somehow, and they are judged by this audience on how well they will stick to it. Each child actor also has a supporting cast. But this supporting cast does not collaborate with you to produce a phenomenal work. No, this supporting cast serves as comparison points.
I remember being a child and already being conditioned to measure my life against other kids. Was I one of the kids who was excelling or failing? In my case, it was largely dependent on which teacher you asked and which subject they taught. But nonetheless, children recognize that there appears to be a kind of person who receives approval, and their job is to become that person. And who sets the standard for the kind of person worthy of praise and approval? Easy - society and culture.
During our childhood years, throughout our teen years, and into our adult years, we grow stronger in our belief that validation from external forces about your life is what gives you permission to feel okay with yourself.
The way a person feels about themselves carries enormous influence over the decisions that they make and the kind of person they choose to be. The conventional script has set the benchmark of “enough” that people spend their 80-something years either trying to be better than, trying to just barely meet, or simply accepting that they never will. Some of my deepest internal struggles have come from trying so badly to be enough. I wanted enough money, enough beauty, enough friends, enough accomplishments, and enough proof that my life was going somewhere.
Some individuals review inherited expectations, then actively choose to reject them for a more “original” way of living. But nonetheless, even in this rebellion, these standards are still daring these rebels to defy them. Relating to conventional life through resistance rather than obedience is still allowing conventional life to consume a large portion of your mind. You could live an extremely unconventional life while remaining deeply controlled by society because your whole identity revolves around proving how unconventional you are.
So instead of following the script because it is the script (conformity) or rejecting the script because it is the script (rebellion), what if we put the script under a microscope, examined it, and decided which parts are good and meaningful for us, and which parts we are better off without?
Nothing was more freeing for me than realizing that I could take the script that was given to me by society and annotated a million times by both my authority figures and my peers, and examine that script, and decide what parts of it actually mattered to me.
That kind of examination required a level of introspection I was originally not comfortable with and a level of vulnerability that I found terrifying. Because when we start to examine our lives, we may have to ask ourselves some heavy and challenging questions about the conventional life we’ve always revered.
Questions like: Do we actually want a thing, or do we just want what that thing will say about us? Do we actually want relationships, or do we just want proof that we’ve been chosen to be a part of something? Have we been called to our careers, or are they just proof that our lives matter? And why?
After conducting a careful examination into what we actually value, we may realize that many societal markers of conventional success contribute very little to the kind of person we want to become. In fact, if we look even more closely and dig even more deeply, we may learn that our chasing of conventional success markers was actually running away from something we’re afraid of. What is that thing? Is it something we’ve buried and repressed for so long that pulling it out would change us in a way we don’t think we can afford to be changed? Easy stuff right? :)
But I would argue that the good news is there’s no perfectly authentic self waiting to be discovered when stripping away society. You can keep the good while releasing the fear that once powered every good thing you did. The goal is for reflection to deepen our ordinary lives.
I’m not encouraging us to find ourselves by quitting our jobs, leaving our spouses, and having a destructive existential crisis just because we start to think more deeply about our lives.
All I’m encouraging is that we allow ourselves the freedom to consciously decide what a good life means to us before we begin grading ourselves on whether we have achieved one. And this is an ongoing process that can only be done well if we are actually living our lives at the same time. The two things must happen simultaneously.
And yes, this does mean that we will often do it badly. We’ll misunderstand ourselves. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll have to apologize & fix things. We’ll have to do all of the things we were scared of before we started living an examined life. And our experiences will give us new information and new information will give us a new part of ourselves to examine. It’s a process we’ll never complete, but we can get better at doing it. Sometimes self-knowledge arrives precisely through getting something wrong and reflecting.
The question is not about how impressive our lives are or how original our lives are, it’s about how examined our lives are. Regardless of how conventional or unconventional our lives are, if a life goes unlooked at, in my opinion, that is the most devastating way for it to be wasted. What I intend to do with The More You Look is offer a perspective that can hopefully spark a conversation which, God willing, encourages people to examine their lives a little more closely. And as I sit here typing this on my 23rd birthday, I pray that in another 23 years, I'll have somewhat begun to scratch the surface of what it means to master the art of self-examination. <3 ~ B. Moore
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