繭: Cocoon
It seems that everybody, no matter where you go, tells
you to “just be yourself!” That seems like some pretty decent advice, so you
decide to just be yourself for once, and those same people who gave you that
suggestion turn around and judge you for just being yourself. You don’t become “individual”
or “unique” like they said you would; in fact, you’re treated as “weird” or “crazy.”
Eventually, you learn to be wary of just being yourself. And you learn to be
wary of others who are trying to just be themselves. You build yourself a
cocoon, and hide in it. Ironically, society has made sure to fit you into the
mold it tried so hard to push you out of.
 |
| We hide in our cocoons of safety. |
People still try
to revive individualism. Some attempt to force people to “breathe after [their]
own fashion[s]” (Henry David Thoreau); others try to reduce what has become the
“natural, hard-wired default-setting” of judging and blaming others (David
Foster Wallace). Yet the world is still the same way, with the people who
encourage individuality being the same people who hide in their own shells and
bite at anybody else who is different.
And to be very honest, I have no idea what the cause
is. Maybe notions of class and status create such a rift between us that to be
any different, widening that gap, would be too much to handle. Maybe some alien
species has taken over the human consciousness, altering our actions to be
different from our words. Maybe we’ve just been misleading ourselves, and don’t
even actually want to be different.
Anyway, whatever the reason, it’ll be interesting to
see how things play out. Maybe there’ll be no apparent change in my lifetime,
or in my kids’, or grandkids’, or even great grandkids’. This idea of
individualism could be considered something from a fairy tale, or a quality
only superheroes possess – yes, there are a select few who are intrepid enough
to stand out. But those who truly don’t mind what others think are few and far
between. In that case, maybe our species will always be this way, striving to
be different yet forcing ourselves not to. But then again, maybe we will be
able to somehow break free of our cocoons.
Who knows, really?
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