Doing what you ‘should’ do doesn’t make you a good person. It certainly doesn’t make you BETTER than anyone doing what they ‘want’. Stop being afraid of doing what you WANT to do.
This life of societal serfdom starts early. Children get force fed the propaganda from church, school, and parenting. A fear is instilled. Do what they say or bad, horrible consequences will follow.
There is a ‘right way,’ how a ‘good’ person does it. Rules to live by. Break these, step out of what you ‘should’ do and you will be struck down from above, sent to the principal, or at the very least judged heavily by those ‘good’ obeyers.
For instance, this past weekend when I heard numerous variations of:
“I can’t believe you are doing {xyz}. You should be doing {xyz}”
SHOULD be? Should be. SHOULD BE?! A chant of mediocrity.
Says who? Says you? And you got that ‘should be’ from someone else, who said it because they felt they ‘should’ because someone else said they ‘should’……all the way down the line?
Fuck that. You SHOULD be doing what you WANT instead of telling me what I SHOULD be doing.
The people preaching ‘should be’s are spineless adherents merely existing till they perish. Caught up in holding pattern they aren’t happy in, they dissuade you into a life you aren’t naturally interested in. They feel a holier-than-thou self-righteousness when they sit you on their knee and tell you what you ‘should’ be doing. They know deep down they are caught up, but preaching to others is what small joy they can find in such an existence, and keeps them from jumping off a bridge.
I see it with so many of my friends these days. Whether a relationship, career path, or even everyday actions, they do what they have been brainwashed they ‘should’ do. Afraid of judgement, punishment, or not conscious enough to know they are doing so, they ignore what they really want. This ends in a 50% national divorce rate, people who hate their jobs, and predictable drones.
News Flash: Those type of people, who do what they ‘should’ and follow each rule, never will do anything substantial. Ever. They won’t change the world. They won’t be remembered. They will exist. They will die. They will be referenced as ‘they’ as they are indiscernible.
Think of anyone great. Did they fall in this category? Never. Those people did what they wanted. Which took going against what society thought they ‘should’ do. Breaking a few rules. Not afraid of being judged by the masses.
Eventually the drones will realize this too……………on their deathbed. Nobody is going to be there to pin a medal on your chest for doing what society said you ‘should’ all your life. There will only be regret.
In the moving article about the top 5 regrets of the dying, #1 was:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
and that SHOULD get you thinking.
Brent-
Tone suggests a distain towards church/religion? Did I pick up that correctly?
No distain towards religion. I am nobody to say what is right/wrong. Would it make a difference to readers if I was openly for/against?
Thank you for writing this Brent. The link at the end is wonderful.
Your writing can use work. You write with an air of know-it-all superiority. At least it comes off that way to me.
I think you can deliver the same message in a bit gentler way.
Keep at it!
HAHA. This is written to Will, isn’t it?
Could have been
Hi Brent, I came along your page via your Toms Shoes post.
Can I ask what you do for your profession?
I know this may come as a strage questions, but reading your posts I cannot put it together.
What did you “want” to be, and are you doing that?
- Rita
Currently I don’t have a defined career/profession. Although I am getting closer to what I “want” to be, and that has little to do with what profession I choose.
Brent, it is interesting browsing through your limited posts and seeing your interests change. Many of them seem to be angry reactions to something that happens. I first came here from the Toms post. I may not have a good sense, but that is the way it came off to me. What about positive experiences? Do you ever write about those?
Overall, decent start. Write more.
Like others I found your blog from your post about Toms, which I whole-heartedly agree with.
Being around your age, I too have recently found myself reflecting on this, and I believe there is some grey area here which you don’t touch on. Doing what you ‘want’ without thinking about what you ‘should’ be doing can have consequences for the people around you. Thinking about yourself as an integral part of a community, as opposed to a single person in a self-reliant population, can be hard; especially when you live in a large city such as NY (I live in Los Angeles myself). However, when you start breaking communities down into smaller segments such as personal connections, it is easier to start seeing situations where what you do has an impact on the people around you. Suppose a family member got sick and other family members decided to pool money together to get them help, and you’re not able to contribute because you sacrificed an income for your personal endeavors. Honestly, I think this individualist line of thinking is very ‘first-world’ (as related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), but if everyone did what they wanted to do instead of what they should do, society would start to break down. Think of all the people that only have the opportunity to do what they want because someone else, like their parents, did what they should and were able to support them.
I believe there are things you should do, whether you want to or not, and many of these things you should do are things adults (with more life experience) harp on you about throughout your adolescence. Following societal norms isn’t just about being a sheep, many of these norms have evolved into what they are out of the necessity to survive as a community.
Sorry if this sounds like a rant, or if it rambles along too much.