substance

“You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.” 
― Chris McCandless

Today, almost everything around me is hollow. So many people go through their lives making hollow promises to people they “love” in order to maintain hollow relationships. People settle for hollow jobs so they can make enough money to support their hollow lifestyles. But where is the substance? Where are the genuine connections? I believe that those who adhere wholeheartedly to the norms of society consistently fall victim to this “hollowness”. The foundation of their lives rests on the house they live in, the cars they drive, the people they know. It is all transparent. There is no meaningful substance to most of their daily actions.

Societal pressures to marry followed by quick decisions to settle with a convenient option. Divorce is increasingly common due to “irreconcilable differences” because marriages are being built on a hollow foundation. Where is the meaning? Where is the emotion? Why has marriage become nothing more than a hollow norm? The problem is that we use “value” as a universal term. We value things, but we neglect to give different things different, specific values. Take marriage and jobs, for instance. Both require a certain degree of value, but separate value. Once these values become meshed together, they become interchangeable…. one begins to value their spouse the same way that they value their desk job, one begins to value their health and wellbeing in the same respect that they value their new car. We as a society are lacking the ability to distinguish different values and designate each with different emotions, and it is deteriorating the substance of our lives. We cannot expect to foster meaningful relationships with people if we value them in the same manner that we value something inanimate. Our mortal relationships require fine tuning. They require devotion and patience and emotion. The only thing in life that is resolute is human connection. Everything else is fleeting, can disappear at any moment. The impacts that matter are the imprints you leave on other minds.

I look back at my childhood, about growing up in an affluent neighborhood. Today, I realize that my entire social life until college was based almost completely on hollow friendships. Friends that would build relationships with you for the wrong reasons… for the convenience, for the benefit of an invite, for a little extra boost in popularity. It was all fake. The substance wasn’t there. There are few people from high school that I feel I have made lasting relationships with. There are very few people that I trust, even though I spent around 12 years in school with thousands of kids. I am sure there are more people from my high school that I could have potentially built substantial relationships with, but at the time I was so caught up in my hollow relationships that I didn’t realize that only the real connections would last once I left.

I crave relationships where meaning and substance drive our connection. We talk to each other because we are genuinely interested in the inner workings of each other’s minds, we want to know more about each other. We want to know why we are scared of some things and intrigued by others. We want to debate arguments on which we disagree, we want to intellectually challenge each other. I am tired of relationships that are built on foundations of gossip, alliances against others, convenience. I despise that people gravitate to others based on their physical appearances, who they were in high school, how much money they have, how much they can drink at a pregame. I wish people more often gravitated towards one another based on how well their minds and thoughts connected.

The problem with norms is that they deplete our excitement over something new. First world society makes you feel less special for getting a new car, for getting married, for having a kid… because EVERYONE else is doing it! Because of this, new cars and houses become things that we take for granted. Our connections to these items become hollow. They become less of an accomplishment and more just “things”. Our relationships to the inanimate must be authentic, it must be personal. We must attach personal meaning to everything we possess, just like we would an item saved from our childhood.

“Deliberate living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns — A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you”

-Chris McCandless

Social media has contributed tremendously to the lack of substance in our relationships. Our every move documented by snapchat so that we maintain relevance in others’ lives, our self esteem is validated by who/how many likes you get on an instagram photo. People judge everyone’s every virtual move. Traveling the world and studying abroad in beautiful countries while documenting it on social media has now been deemed “cliche” by society (and mostly the jealous). Trying to make a difference in the world, no matter how small, now has to be validated on social media to avoid being called out for “voluntourism”. There is no winning. We have brought ourselves to a point where we criticize substance, or the attempt to fulfill a sense of meaning in the world… and promote mundane norms that restrain us from connecting with the world authentically.

We are comforted by the sense of security we feel in our small neighborhoods. Days that include strip malls, rush hour traffic, meaningless sex and quick and easy take-out dinner have proved to fulfill our needs. But we are unable to push that line. We are unable to even step a toe over the boundaries of society and dare to venture into the unknown. We are society. We have collectively structured these norms that so many of us despise. We live our lives just satisfied ENOUGH, but never as satisfied as we can truly be. We are lazy. Our minds tell us that we should be making connections with people and learning more about each other and celebrating differences, but instead of acting on this impulse, we stay put.

And that is why our country is in the crisis that it is today. We cut ourselves off from diversity and equality and speaking our minds without political correctness because we are so conditioned by society to shy away from the unknown and the uncomfortable. People who act differently than us or look differently than us are dissected under our microscopes instead of mutually gaining different insights from one another and learning a thing or two about other cultures. I can bet you a million dollars that the man in front of me in line at Stop & Shop the other day talking to his friend about “fucking muslims” couldn’t tell you a single valid aspect of mainstream muslim culture. It’s because we don’t care. We are aroused by conflict because we feed off of gossip and anger, which somehow makes us feel superior. These arguments make us hollow. They close us off to the world and to other ideas. Your fear is apparent in your words. Your actions. While they certainly don’t lack emotion, they lack substance.

We will never progress if we do not explore aspects of life that make us uncomfortable. We will eventually need to stop riding on past successes of this country and will need to create new ones. We must stop saying how great we are as a nation and then collectively herd like a flock of sheep towards hollow norms. We must together cross the line into an unknown realm of society, one in which norms have not yet been set in place. We must progress into an era where strange, new ideas are debated and considered. We must rely less on hollow, biased words and instead challenge ourselves to broaden our horizons. We need to be less afraid to be emotional, to be full of life. To stop half-assing everything we do. We must judge our own lives by asking ourselves how much substance we personally project into society. Are you just spewing bullshit into the world and contributing to the continuance of the norm? Or are you challenging ideas, defending and discussing your opinions, learning about others’ ideas and opinions?

“Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

-William Shakespeare

“A culture is like an immune system. It operates through the laws of systems, just like a body. If a body has an infection, the immune system deals with it. Similarly, a group enforces its norms, either actively or passively.”

-Henry Cloud

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”

-Mark Twain