Why are we failing ourselves over the fallible society?
We keep witnessing almost everywhere around us, how society dictates the norms for most people. Be it a career, lifestyle or age norms to name a few.
What maximum people around us think is right, serves as the basis for our life decisions, and hence the mark of sanity or insanity is bestowed upon us, by ourselves or others around us.
The definition of sanity is derived first hand from society’s labels and rules.
These societal rules are not only ever-changing but they also only fathom the benefits that are applicable to the momentary understanding of a select few and the people running it. If the interest shifts, the rules in no time follow the trail.
Why is this even important?
Because the only thing that is stopping us as individuals, and our species in all to be actually wise, is this fleeting label of being tagged as sane or insane, right or wrong, successful or a failure.
History has the proof, of how temporary our rules and the accuracy of our understanding can be:-
- You were declared insane, to have thought in the past that women can do anything that men can. On the other hand, you were sane enough if you supported all the rules and values that we today call discrimination.
- You were claimed to be insane to even think, that a person can go astray in their behavior because of some personal emotional troubles they have( In the past when mental health does not even exist as a problem). But you were sane enough when you accepted and supported the killings or, imparting excruciating pain on the ill, as a way of relieving them from the evil spirits or whatever they were called as per the wisdom of the time.
I could go on, but I assume you got the point?
What is rational today, might only be a humongous mistake on a societal scale, no better than the mistakes, we have been making in the past.
As long as you are not crossing any ethical line of code or not harming other beings, sanity only has an individual meaning, that which:-
- makes you feel able
- makes you feel stable
- imparts you with abundant energy
- fills you with enthusiasm to the core of your very being
- makes you whole
Hence, anything that makes you filled with energy. The energy you derive while you are working on your ideal self, and not trying to fit in a mold handed over to you by external stimulus. And enables you to embark on your journey to meaning.
Everything a bit left or right from this individual sense of wholeness will only make the sanest of being crazy, in the rut of trying to do right by society.
And even if you become worthy of their acceptance, as per the definition, you have been taught, in no time the definition and the rules, would make a U-turn and fly past you, making you feel bewildered and leaving you to drown in your own foolishness. It would not stop, not even to look back and care about the mess it had made of the hundreds of people who participated in this circus called THE SOCIETY.
What if you just did it your own way? No rules, no right or wrong, just what you think is beautiful?
-Sandra Magsamen
