Try Not To Let Others or Yourself Box You In

July 13th, 2020

To start off, I find it really hard to believe that it’s already July. Lockdown started in March and so much has changed since then. Things are moving ridiculously fast as well as the number of coronavirus cases!! Exciting times for all of humanity. I think it’s interesting that the one year that I decided to commit myself to writing on my blog consistently ended up being quite the chaotic span of time in decades. Ah well, I guess we can’t really do much about it.

Over the last few years of my life, I’ve noticed that people really like to put a label on what other can do and what they are. It’s interesting because it almost seems like a precautionary measure that people take to figure out who’s a threat and who’s not. It’s evolved to the point that we now judge people immediately for what they are wearing, say, or are doing in a given moment. For example, when you were a kid, you may have had friends who immediately labeled you as the “athletic kid” or the “nerd kid” or the “video game kid”. While these seem harmless at the surface, they can do a lot underneath the surface for many people. When you are told of what people think of you, you begin to question your own self worth or you double down in denial that others simply don’t understand you. It’s kind of an odd situation, isn’t it?

I think it ultimately boils down to predicability. People want to be able to predict what kind of person you are when they meet you. There’s a reason why we tend to feel uncomfortable around smooth-talking people who don’t want to reveal their true intentions. Albeit, it’s not necessarily always malicious, but there’s always this strange feeling that looms around. We subconsciously categorize the people we meet and set labels for what they can do based on a set of sparse experiences. I think if we all could read into the pasts of people and the trials and tribulations they went through to get to where they are our perspectives would be vastly different. I’m not excusing people for shitty things that they’ve done in their lives, but there certainly is a gray area in which we have the right to judge people.

We’ve all had these experiences where people come in and tell you that they didn’t “expect you to do something because blah blah” or maybe because they “thought you were smart because blah blah”. Shit like this really pisses me off. It sucks because there are times when people who barely understand where you came from slap an assumption on who you have to be because of a snippet of information. But humans are social creatures and we crave that kind of social affirmation. We want a place in society, and we want others to allocate room for what we can contribute.

Living to satisfy others and answering their questions is ultimately a losing battle. There will never be a point in which you win, and there will always be something else that you have to pivot to. There really is no point. I think true personal freedom really comes from letting go of some of those expectations that people put on you for who you have to become. You don’t have to be a 1-dimensional person; humans are inherently multi-faceted creatures that can be skilled in many different things. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing this freedom. I believe that the main drive for a lot of entrepreneurs is this pursuit of freedom. When you achieve an astronomical level of wealth, you basically become free from the obligations that society puts on most people: you can literally do whatever you want and no one can say a damn thing. This is probably why the rich are hated so much, and honestly, I wonder how many people would use their path of freedom to help others. Is that virtuous? Does that make you a good person? I believe that I can’t judge people for what they do, but helping others certainly won’t dent the bank accounts of the extraordinarily wealthy population.

That’s the end of my rant on that. Ultimately, I think that the labels and discouragements from external sources can provide some good insight to your resolve. Sometimes if we are taking a path that may not be well suited for our future, external pressures will overcome the weaker determination that one may have to achieve their goals. It’s important to be self-aware in that sense, but if there’s something that you truly believe in and want to go for, then nothing should stop you because your hard work will force open doors either way!