Sitting in a coffee spot in D.C’s winter drinking a hot cappuccino v.s. drinking it in the warmth of the Hawaii sun makes me think. The stark difference, albeit not bad, is worth considering as a metaphor. I might be drinking the same hot drink, but it is not the same at all. The drink itself contains multitudes: its origins, its processing methods, and even the cultivar. However, I’m interested in its imbued meanings and contextual implications. How much of this drink is changed by me, the drinker? After all, the same experience and drink could evoke nothing at all in others.
This imbuing of values and meaning is where I am finding that “we” exist. Not in the physical boundaries of what makes the body, rather in the social relationships we have with others. In essence, the people around you have an equal (if not greater) hand at making the social construct that is “you”.
It’s kind of like Hume’s Bundle theory of the self, but with a dash of Girard’s theory of mimesis: in that, the self is a fast updating collection of experience, connections, and objects of imitative desires. The theory of mimesis is fascinating on its own, because we don’t even need the objects of imitative desires to be real or even reminiscent of humans. It can come from anything.
But going back to the aspect of others’ hands in creating you or me. Take your right hand’s pointer finger and touch your nose. Now, it does not matter who, where, or when- you are reading this. That statement influenced you to make a choice, either you went through with the action, or you made a choice not to do so. It isn’t major, but that’s all it took to influence you. It is a data point that indicates whether you are the kind of person who a) physically goes along with whatever you are reading, or b) you reserve your choice and opt not to act until you know more. Yes, it is just a small, nigh insignificant, data point. However, if you were to come across thousands more of these instructions in books, these authors now have had a hand in shaping your person, across time and space. This only occurred to me recently, and I’ve been endlessly fascinated by it.
I met with a friend recently and she spoke to me about the 2025 bingo. What a clever way to give ourselves a choice in goal-setting/ theme-setting for the year. It forces you to explore quite broadly and allows for the flexibility of not doing all of them. I suppose the idea is that doing even -some- of these is better than not doing anything. It is too easy to fall into a routine as an adult. Adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Not in the physical sense, but more in the variance of activities, emotional, and social sense. We crave routines but they also deaden us. Like the data points above, once we have millions of data points for a certain action, there’s no need to make choices. We just let the monolithic historical data lead the way. And while this is good in some cases, the passivity that comes with it is like an island drifting away. Slowly the data points towards the routines become overwhelmingly intimidating and you find yourself an island isolated from everything else. The relative size of doing new things seems impossible. We are far too removed. What’s worse, the seemingly decision-free routines change our perception of time. Life goes faster.
The natural remedy to that, is of course, to pro-actively fill our lives with new “routine breakers”. Matt Cutt’s decade old TED talk[*1] first introduced me to the way novel changes slow down the perception of time. However, now I am noticing that there are further, significant, effects in defining us.
The difficulty of this challenge for me is actually coming up with the 24 things required. Much of my life has gone with me people pleasing. Choosing to do things based on how I imagined others would perceive it. It’s no surprise that our parents have a major hand in defining who we are. Especially so when there is a lack of clear emotional boundaries in the household. It’s come to the point that I’m wary of the things I come up with. The paranoia that these are the “acceptable” answers creeps up. Of course, paradoxically, I am wont to do anything if it -isn’t- the right answer (which, of course there aren’t any). I know by now that when my brain says “acceptable/right answer”, it means what I believe others would want me to do.
Perhaps, in the end, none of these concerns matter. It would be clear why I am doing it upon starting the activity. That is what really matters, right?
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNP03fDSj1U