Nov 8, 2022
Fuck The Crowd; Be the Self
Decide the flow and direction for yourself.
This evening, I watched a video cut from a standup by George Carlin via a recommendation from a fellow IT Security friend. The subject line of this piece is related to the falsehood of security that we gather, assume, and protect against all odds (ironic to protect security) because we are insecure. As always with Carlin, I enjoyed listening to his wisdom of old, which still resonates well in the present. Additionally, there was one piece of his skit that made me question my own insecurities. This was in relation to the piece about being secure in yourself and not trying to find ways to bubble wrap your life, “…what are you going to do otherwise, play with your pecker the next thirty years?”
“The Illusions of Security” — George Carlin skit:
This part of the skit resonated with me powerfully. Mostly, it made me feel defensive — and I love to find what makes me feel defensive and insecure so that I may dissect and analyze the root cause of this failure within me. Unwrapping and going deeper into this immediate sense of self-defense, I located what it was trying to protect. That is my perfectionist insecurity. More pointedly, the perfectionism of my art and its future growth by sharing said works directly with live audiences.
You see, I have some deep-seated insecurities related to social environments. This tends to create behaviors where I turtle behind more static options such as writing in a controlled environment, sharing through static methods like Medium, and then waiting patiently for validation from random people on the internet. Pretty much the modus operandi of many on the internet.
As you may glean, I am aware of my own insecure habits, but mostly because I seek them out as they turn up. As always, I am a work in progress, but this can only be done through truth awareness. Having had the opportunity to listen to Carlin and sense an immediate dread of insecurity within myself, I could connect this to my social anxiety.
Although the most common technique is to, of course — as we see with many rage-response postings throughout the internet — get defensive and seek validation for our insecurities, I have instead taken a different approach to my recent observation. Being a pacifist, I realized that responding to my insecurity through attack defense would only insulate this insecurity with unproductive distractions and a hardening of position.
So, instead, I decided to accept this self-doubt and then respond to it with a question: What shall we do differently?
The answer was pretty simple. Dump all response techniques taught in my past (to respond to fear with anger and defense) and instead become an empty bucket. An empty bucket can be filled, while a filled bucket cannot be without overflowing and wasting all efforts being made.
To best fit this requirement, I decided to ask myself the same question but in a different way: What do you plan to become one day?
Unable to defend a future I do not know and can not fully comprehend, I decided the best answer is the non-conformist way of least resistance: I will be who I am today, tomorrow, and later on; either way, I will be me.
In a nutshell, I have decided that if I do or do not do public sharing does not matter. Too, it does not matter if I play with my pecker for the next thirty years since I have then decided to masturbate that long and the success of which, equally, does not need to be validated by what others feel is true for me. Only I am my own truth; only I can be my own validator. My success is my own, no matter what the crowd decides that is.
Moreover, I hope to convey to you all that you are who you are; remove the falsehoods you were taught directly or indirectly through cultural acceptances, and become your own person. Fuck the crowd; be the self.
Or, as Charles Bukowski puts it more simply:
Be well, my friends.
— MT
— Extra—
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