How To Start Thinking For Yourself
Are you thinking for yourself? Are your ideas your own ideas? Or are your ideas a composite of everyone else’s ideas?
I live in Barcelona. On the Ramblas, I watch people walking pairs of pugs. I see girls with Chinese symbols inked on their arms. Grown men cry when Barcelona loses to Madrid in football.
The trends I observe in the city today, I observed in London before I stepped on the plane. In New York, Paris and Berlin, I would see similar pairs of pugs and girls with love and luck in pictograms on their arms and insteps.
Who walked the first pair of matching pugs down main street? What magnet drew millions more like baaing sheep to the pet shops to acquire pairs of pugs? Has Renée Zellweger got a new face? Will George Clooney become President? Will the Duchess of Cambridge (voted in Hello! the most inspirational woman in the world) give birth to a boy or a girl?
While we follow the same ‘news’ stories, carry the same smartphones and watch the same YouTube hits sent by friends from Facebook, we are as infants sucking at the silicone breast of popular culture.
The Pains of Thinking For Yourself
Our driving force when we ceased being infants was to be an individual, to stand out, be special. What made us stop thinking this way? Why, when we learned to sit up straight and use our knife and fork properly, did we abandon our drawing books, writing poetry, climbing trees, staring at the moon?
You lose your individuality and cease thinking for yourself when your head is filled with all the stuff streaming at us over the wires and waves; once you succumb to trending. Even the use of the word trending is a symptom of fitting in rather than standing out. We picture ourselves in our fantasies outside the herd, but feel more at ease hidden in the heart of the herd.
Once you turn off the trivia and start thinking for yourself, you are more inclined to ask why this politician has said that; why Renée Zellweger’s face is ‘trending;’ why girls thought they were being original when they went to the tattoo parlour, pointed at the Chinese symbols on the wall and said: ‘I’ll have that one.’
Once you start thinking for yourself, when you hear that Things Go Better With Coke, or are told: Just Do It, you will come to see that the slogans are hollow marketing ploys to make us believe that within these catchphrases there is an essential truth, which there is not. Things do not go better with Coke, they go better with friends and family; and you can’t Just Do It if you are unemployed, downtrodden, starving. Being able to Just Do It is a privilege, not a parable.
Thinking For Yourself To Find Yourself
It is not uncommon to suffer a fear that we are invisible to others. In order to feel that we are seen and accepted, we stay in touch with current fashions, tendencies and gossip. We join in. We express opinions without realising that our views and judgments are shaped for us over the hot wires and algorithms of popular culture.
Socrates said: To find yourself, think for yourself. The first step in thinking for yourself is to acknowledge that you are not thinking for yourself. In order to think more clearly, you must look at the world of mass media with fresh eyes unimpeded by fleeting trends and the accepted, collective opinion.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the pilot and author of The Little Prince, said if you want to see more clearly, you should change the direction of your gaze. If you want to rediscover your individuality and start thinking for yourself, your gaze should be turned towards your own reflection.
Take a long look in the mirror. Now think back to that time when you were an individual, when you expressed ideas and beliefs that came from you; when you wanted to be an astronaut or a ballet dancer. Ditch who you are pretending to be and climb into the skin of who you really are. Then climb a tree.
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