Life’s Quandary

Another really well written piece of prose from the inestimable YuenHoe, though I find the idea of life’s hanging carrots a little disturbing

Lol so basically, I’m much more balanced nowadays and have gone back to debating full-time. In part, that’s the reason why my comments sound so weird… constant debating and international relations theory have sculpted my writing into something significantly different from what I usually write.

But that being said, let me briefly address some of the questions Jason brings up. I guess on this point, Jason and I have always differed.

Here’s the point of crystallization: Jason believes that fundamentally, our desires and needs are socially imposed constructs. Society forces us to believe that these things are essential and necessary to life, such that when we don’t achieve them, it directly attacks the only thing that, in principle, is truly inherent to us: Our sense of identity and worth. Therefore, Jason advocates disconnecting identity and worth from social constructs (i.e. academic success and Cambridge) and instead connecting them to inherent constructs, namely concepts that gain meaning solely by our own imputation. These would involve “successes” that simply can’t be defined by other people, for example personal pleasure in breathing fresh air on a beautiful NUS morning. Who can tell you that you’re supposed to be breathing fresher air, or you’re supposed to be breathing it more deeply in order to gain more pleasure? Inherent constructs are by definition, non-comparative – no one can tell you that you should be doing more or less of it.

From my point of view, I wish this was so. I wish I could attach my identity and worth to inherent constructs. Here’s the thing though: While I do agree with Jason that all these things are social constructs, I also believe that it’s impossible to escape from these constructs under normal conditions. Society plays a dual role in this – It creates the constructs and FURTHER creates an imperative to abide by these constructs. To put it simply: Not only are we told that our self-worth is based on how successful we are by society’s standards, we are ALSO conditioned to believe that this is the only measure of self-worth, and no other measure works.

This conditioning isn’t explicit, but implicit. By constantly reinforcing the idea that education leads to jobs and jobs lead to security, society plays off another fundamental need of most humans – security, and link that to the social constructs it creates. So at the point where we actually want to be secure in the future, conditioning kicks in to tell us that no matter what we think about the whole situation, the only sure way to satisfy this security necessity is to abide by all of society’s rules and expectations. Because security is something that can only be conferred by society. If we could create our own land and house, make our own food and spontaneously generate a life-partner, security would perhaps be less society-dependent. But since we can’t, we have to work within the boundaries imposed by it.

Then the question now becomes: Why do we have the presence of actual people like Jason, who by and large, do seem to have broken out of the cycle?

1) Minimum level of assurance.
While recognizing that we have security as our priority, different people have different standards of what it means to assure that security. Society never tells us exactly how much is required for that assurance of security. They don’t delineate and tell us that a 3.85 GPA, 5 activities and 4 prof recommendations will guarantee an 80% chance of a job totalling more than $80,000 each year til 2015. Success is not a science. So we each create our own individual yardsticks of what we need to achieve and judge each of our actions based on that yardstick we create. Even if we do realize that the yardstick we create is unrealistic, it’s difficult to dramatically change it because the uncertainty that you NEVER KNOW whether anything else would be more successful, given that security only comes after its too late to change anything. So the inherent gauge we have within us that measures our own minimum level of assurance is a determinant.

2) Socio-inherent constructs

Some inherent constructs are socially dependent. For example, I require many people whom I feel very comfortable with, to hang around with me exclusively, before I feel satisfied. This desire to fulfil emotional need has no bearing on my security. But it IS something which is socially dependent, and therefore cannot be achieved through the actions of a single actor. Dependency on society seems to be proportional to level of disappointment, because society is definitionally quixotic. It will never always provide for everything you want or desire. Similarly, a desire for example, to play an instrument professionally, is in turn an SI construct which requires society to acknowledge talent and confer the opportunities to realize that goal. The more of these goals a person possesses, the less easy it is for contentment.

If you made it all the way to the end of this long and verbose script, congratulations. A shoutout to Jason: Thanks for the well-wishes, I won’t get addicted. But beyond that, I wanted to tell you that I’ve realized my own passion for debating and I have to admit, that it feels really good to dedicate your entire being to something just for the love of doing it. But sadly, again its an SI construct: Good debating is defined by other people, in relation to how good they are. Lol nothing is easy in life.