2025.6: Independence

I mentioned in my previous post that I've spent many years of my life participating in "personal development" culture. This culture pushes the idea that you are some individual unit that must achieve resilience and performance independent of your environment/circumstance and implies that if you struggle in a particular phase in your life that the onus is on you to "pull up your bootstraps" and rise to the occasion. I am of course not absolving individual responsibility when I say this, but I believe that this mindset is essentially a reductionist mental shortcut that is built to give people a feeling of complete control over their lives. The reality is that the idea that one is separate from their environment has as much validity as the idea that one is separate from the food they eat. Our environment is quite literally imprinted in our minds as we are experiencing it. So sometimes some self-compassion is due to accept the difficulties of a particular life situation, and to focus on doing what is possible to change it rather than expecting some stable level of motivation and enthusiasm at all times. Sometimes the pressure of internalising all the issues in ones life ceases to make sense and there is a lot that can be learned from looking outwards. If you were outside in a t-shirt when it's freezing would you blame yourself for feeling cold?

I feel like the idea of independence from our environment is quite common in western culture and spans far beyond personal development ideologies. In school we are asked to think about which subjects we are inherently interested in as if these interests are not heavily influenced by our teachers, classmates, the way the content is delivered. Then we are asked to commit to a selected subject to study in a degree and ideally follow that up with a long career. I'm not against making decisions and commitments in ones life, there can be a lot of merit to this. But I think that maybe we need to change the way we think about our interests and identity. I think many people continue to seek for magical activities that they are inherently interested in some constant way and to build an identity around that. Maybe this boils down to people seeking a sense of stability and control in this ever-changing world.

I wonder if there is even such a thing as an inherent interest. I wonder what would be an example of an interest that someone has had that is truly independent of their environment or the people around them. I feel like a deeper motivation people often have for their actions is a desire to connect with others. It makes me think that is there anything one would really do if there was nobody to share it with? Maybe interests are entirely conditional on community and context? I'm not saying everyone is a blank slate and is entirely moldable. We all have biases and inclinations. But maybe in order to discover things we could be interested in over time we should be thinking more about the environments that they enable us to participate in rather than the thing itself.