April 25, 2010
-
expected goals
There are certain goals that in our society we are expected to have. I’ve always felt this deep seeded urge to reject these goals. For example, one of the major goals most people have that they want to accomplish at some point in their life is to own a house. People consider that a major life changing event. It’s considered a benchmark to show that they’ve lived “right” and succeeded and achieved what they needed to in life. Owning your own home is considered a turning point that symbolizes your achievement of true independence.
What a load of crap.
I have no interest in owning a house. I think it’s absurd. Lots of paperwork, lots of risk, enormous debt and for what? To be tied down in one place? To forever be fearful of changes in your mortgage forcing you into foreclosure or the value of your house dropping to the point that it’s no longer a good investment? To spend endless hours fretting over the quality of your lawn and enormous amounts of money keeping all your stoves and dishwashers and plumbing and electricity functioning? Constantly needing to fix it up to ensure that it retains its value as much as possible? Seems crazy. I just don’t get it. I never got it.
There are tons of expected goals out there. People are just used to them. We internalize them so much that we don’t ever question whether they are good goals to have or even make sense for the society as a whole for everyone to have these goals. Examples include: moving out from your parents home, having sex, falling in love, getting married, having children, graduating High School, graduating College, getting a license, owning a car, staying in shape, getting a job, being successful at a career, retiring, traveling and seeing the world, seeing your children achieve the same things, living to meet your grandchildren. Not necessarily in that order of course.
I believe it is wholly possible to live a happy fulfilling life without doing any of those things. Leastwise I don’t think a lot of those things are as necessary as we think. Not achieving any of them does not by itself make you a failure. It’s that over-simplistic view of life that often spurs feelings of depression and inadequacy. If you’ve been told over and over again by everything around you in the society, that you need to achieve these things in order to have lived a worthwhile life, then when well life gets in the way of achieving any one of these, or achieving them according to schedule, people get depressed. They start to think that there’s something wrong with them. They start to think that they made terrible mistakes and feel deep overriding regrets. If you don’t get that white picket fence dream fulfilled, you often feel like maybe you just didn’t deserve your white picket fence. And from there it’s only a hop skip and a jump away from wondering why you are here in the first place.
It’s stupid of course. For society as a whole some of these goals don’t make any sense at all. Giving everyone a college level education is unnecessary. Everyone moving away from home and striving to buy their own house creates enormous costly waste. And it leaves older people without children living in or near home to take care of them. Often it’s much more efficient monetarily to have as many people living in a house as the house can reasonably fit sharing resources. But our emphasis on moving out causes all these houses to have empty space. Which means energy is wasted heating and cooling empty rooms that aren’t in use. Socially it makes no sense. Everyone driving and owning their own car makes even less sense.
Though of course practically it’s totally understandable that many children and parents don’t want to be driven insane by continuing to have to reside with one another.
My point is more general. The leave home and strive to buy your own house pattern doesn’t HAVE to be the only one. Society could be organized differently. Lots of societies elsewhere in the world have been organized differently. In some societies communal living arrangements are the total norm. There is no expected goal of “moving out”.
In my stubbornness I’m the kind of person who sort of wants to just reject all of the expected goals as a kind of protest. I want to strive for none of them and achieve none of them and live my own way. Of course it’s far too late for that since I’ve already achieved a number of them without really trying that hard. Still I wish there was a way to get people to understand that a lot of the reason we think these things matter comes from social conditioning and not any inherent value in the thing in itself. We should strive to re-examine our goals from as neutral and objective a perspective we can in order to figure out what will really bring us happiness and give us a sense of fulfillment in our lives
Comments (2)
There are a lot of expected goals-the two that have been bothering me now are the house one & the marriage one. I just had a cousin who makes less then I do have her parents buy her one half of a duplex. For some reason that has made me feel like I haven’t accomplished something-even though I’ve done and experienced way more in life then she has. I know it’s stupid, but the feeling is there-and I love the apartment & neighbors I have. I’m pretty happy being single, but I hate that society thinks that I should be married by now. Why is it so hard not to care about what society thinks of us sometimes?
It is inherited in mankind, by nature, to strive to succeed in life. Now, how one accomplishes these goals makes the difference in our society. For instance, only one third of the population owes a home, one fourth of the population has an academic carrier. But, three fourths of the population owes a car. I agreed that paying a thirty year mortgage in a house is a total usury. Even worst, once the house is paid, it’s old enough to be trashed away. Added to that, after thirty years of hard working, one wound up resting, as you rightly said, and in an empty house; paying taxes, and getting a loan to repair what appears to be irreparable. And once the loan is approved the cycle repeats again. In another words, this country base its economy in usury, (consumerism) contrary to the dictates of economy that appeals for saving. That strive to succeed inherited into the human nature must be redirected, so as too, our economical system based in loans and debts.