Chapter 6
Surviving Societal Expectations
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 6.
I’m going to circle back to the beginning, and start by talking about what not being authentic looks like:
Attaching our sense of self value to external inputs - doing well at work, doing well at relationships, keeping people happy.
Prioritising the needs of others above our own.
Unwilling to take risks because of a fear of failure or perception.
Can you identify with any of the above points? Perhaps you feel as though meeting external expectations defines your sense of success.
If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ll no doubt have come across something like Continuous Professional Development, or SMART targets, or OKRs.
We’re told that we should always have something that we’re trying to improve. Always goals and targets to meet, with a little reward carrot dangling at the end if we meet those goals.
What happens when we’ve met the first set of goals? That’s right, there are some more areas we can improve upon. More goals to be met next time round.
We meet those new objectives and, wait, here come yet more things we have to improve. Over and over and over again in the name of personal growth and development.
It’s not helping us to grow, though. It’s creating in us a sense of never being good enough. No matter what we do, there’s always more that we are told we should be doing so that we can improve and be successful.
Spending 40 years in employment doing these, in my opinion, bullshit CPD programmes isn’t going to positively contribute to our sense of self-worth. They’re doubly toxic because we’re told that meeting our objectives is intrinsically linked to the measure of our success. Better salaries and more responsibility (or sometimes just more responsibility).
Boom. We’re back at school again, where we become success or failure depending on how well we perform in some test, or a piece of homework about Edwardian toilet habits. Anyone would think that the whole system was designed to make us good little compliant worker bees.
I want to explore the link between these external expectations and the impact they can have on our sense of self worth. Some of you are going to be fine with that. There’ll be a few of you though, I’m sure, who are going "Nope, I’m good not thinking about that - I’m a carefully constructed manifestation of wellness, don’t start moving about my Jenga bricks."
Self-worth is at the core of who we are. It is intrinsically linked to our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviours — the lens through which we view ourselves as human beings.
How much value we place on ourselves is a complicated algorithm of both external and internal factors. Take a moment to think about what drives your sense of self worth. Are you focused on appearance, or wealth, or possessions, or status? Are you content with who you are, or do you feel that there’s room for improvement?
If you’ve got this far through a book like this then I imagine, like me, you think there’s some scope for change.
During my studies of psychotherapy, I had to spend quite a lot of time examining the work of the American psychologist Carl Ransom Rogers (what a name). He’s famous for founding Humanistic therapy, and was a serious influence on the client-therapist dynamic.
He put forward this idea that there are 3 “types” of self:
The organismic
The actual
The ideal
The organismic self is the person that we are born as. It’s the true self at the very heart of us, an immutable sphere of being. It contains our latent potential, our innate sense of values, and has a tendency to be obfuscated by inherited beliefs and external ideas.
Then there’s the actual self. That’s the person who we think that we are in the present moment. It’s responsible for our sense of identity and our perception of how others see us.
Our ideal self, conversely, is the person who we think that we should be. It holds our aspirations, our goals, and it’s this variant of us that can cause a psychological mess.
If our actual and ideal selves are in sync, then our sense of self-worth can generally be described as being pretty good. Who we are and who we think we should be are (roughly) in line with each other.
It’s when these two get out of whack that things can go awry. When we think that the person who we are is drastically different from who we should be, then we start to question and doubt our worth. In psychology terms, we call this “cognitive dissonance”. It’s one story grating up against another, and the
Now, the ideal self can be a dangerous thing. It’s important to realise that what makes up our ideal self doesn’t necessarily come from our own wants and needs. In fact, it rarely comes from us at all.
Mostly it is formed from the opinions or expectations of what other people think we should be. This can be our parents, our teachers, our bosses at work, our close friends. It can even come from what presents itself to us in media and advertising.
“I’m not good enough because I’m two sizes bigger than this celebrity I’m following on Instagram is”.
Again, I’m going to pose you a question — what do you think the difference between your actual and ideal self is? Are they mostly in sync, or are they disrupted by that cognitive dissonance I spoke of earlier?
Some of our sense of self worth comes from a cultural pressure. I came across the idea of internalised capitalism recently, and it made me think about how we value ourselves in terms of our productivity. If we aren’t a contributing member of society, then we’re lazy, apathetic, and mooching off the efforts of others.
I saw a lot of that sort of mindset during the Covid pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. People pushing content along the lines of "if you haven’t learned a new skill whilst in lockdown, then you didn’t lack the time, you lacked discipline."
I read this sort of crap and it infuriated me. Piss off you intellectually dead tea strainer of a human being, I thought. It was a sentiment I couldn’t disagree with more.
What about taking the time to simply “be”, rather than “do”? To spend energy reflecting on and working on ourselves. Does this not have value? Is it not productive? Or are my actions only worthy if I’ve become fluent in Spanish and qualified as an accountant by the time everything gets back to a sense of normality?
I digress. I feel the cortisol rising, but I think you get my point — take some time to become aware of where these expectations come from. It’s tough undoing years of conditioned thinking, but if you know where that thinking originates, it’s the first step in changing it. Bringing that actual and ideal self closer together.
I particularly like something that Picasso said on being an artist that wholly encapsulates this idea of conditioned thinking:
All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
How true this statement is! What happens to our sense of wonder, our free abandon to fail and learn from our mistakes? Why must we be crippled by a fear of getting things wrong?
I see it in so many people, reluctant to step outside the lines of conformity, to be themselves without caring for judgement, to risk it all and fail and try again without giving a shit about the mistake. Too busy becoming the failure instead of using it to leverage some wisdom out of our errors.
We can learn a lot from ourselves as children. I came across a great story of a girl in primary school who wasn’t paying attention to the teacher in class. Instead, she was busy drawing a picture, both oblivious and uncaring of the teacher’s expectations.
The teacher stopped and asked the girl “What are you drawing?”
The girl replied, “I’m drawing a picture of God.”
“But nobody knows what God looks like,” said the teacher.
With beautiful aplomb, the girl said, “They will in a minute.”
Such wonderful confidence. Such certainty in what she was doing, so uncaring of the ideas of success and failure. The girl was simply doing without attachment to the outcome, no concern that God might not look anything like the picture she was drawing.
This whole construct of pinning our sense of worth on externally defined criteria of success or failure, to wax theoretical for a moment, keeps us locked on the esteem rung of Maslow’s hierarchy.
We’re striving to prove that we’re good enough, to meet those needs of prestige and acknowledgement of our accomplishments. That only works, though, if we’ve got a fixed benchmark for what we think success should be.
To be honest, I wouldn’t even call it success. Success feels like a business term. I prefer to use the word fulfilment.
It’s no surprise that it’s going to take a bit of time and effort to unravel the knots in our psyche that these systems have created.
The greatest tool that we can apply to this unravelling is self-compassion. We have to avoid this idea of forcing the self to change, because all this does is create conflict between me and I. It is pure self flagellation, and even the Catholics banned that back in 1261.
Recognise and acknowledge that it’s going to take time to get away from the default script that’s running in our minds. Act gently towards ourselves when we slip back into old mindsets and behaviours.
We also have to remember that there doesn’t have to be an inherent purpose in doing something that satisfies our authenticity. Love music and want to pick up that guitar that’s been gathering dust in the corner for 10 years? If it’s going to satisfy some creative need of expression in you, then do it. The end result doesn’t mean that you have to make a livelihood from playing the guitar. We are doing it for the singular purpose of doing it.
I mentioned previously the idea of the meritocratic society, and some of the potential dangers that can arise from existing in the thick of one.
Most of us embrace it to an extent. On paper, it looks like a good idea, and I will admit to agreeing with it, in principle. In a world founded on meritocracy, we can throw away the old classist system, replacing it with one where money, power, and status are rewarded to the most qualified and deserving.
Already, I’m seeing a problem. It’s a nice story, but not something that stands up to scrutiny in the wild.
We follow influencers on Instagram and Facebook as they dutifully and diligently inform us that we, too, can be successful if we only have the requisite drive and ambition to do so. People peddling courses and workshops on self improvement and better thinking like modern age snake oil.
The landscape is filled with self proclaimed gurus and lifestyle experts, straining on their porcelain thrones to up-sell you their latest technique. These are the pantheon of the modern age. But where Hercules and Perseus inspired us with tales of heroism and bravery, of self-sacrifice and overcoming the odds, our new heroes are evoking something else entirely.
They’re not motivating us to be better people. They’re filling us with envy and self-loathing. Through them, we exist in a world of comparison. Measuring ourselves against their success, and finding ourselves forever wanting.
Standing atop their pedestals, they tell us that anyone with a good idea and enough drive can achieve whatever they want. What are you waiting for? Get out there and achieve!
It creates within us this powerful dichotomy. An internal agony, because the reality doesn’t marry up with our perception. The story doesn’t stand up to interrogation.
The problem with our brand of meritocracy is that it just doesn’t feel like it works, despite how rigorously the ideology is drummed into us. What makes it all the more demoralising is that when we expend all of this energy into a particular direction, “rising and grinding” - another phrase that I loathe with a vehement passion - and nothing comes to fruition, where are we left?
Well, if our sense of self worth isn’t up to par, more often than not we’re a tattered windsock in a doldrum. Limp and listless. (There was an impotence joke there, but I redacted it on editing).
I’ve put all of this effort in. I’ve struggled and striven and done all that I can, but I’ve failed. I must not be worthy of success.
Does that sound familiar? This is part of the complexity of living in our modern society. We’re constantly told about how many opportunities there are for success, but the reality just doesn’t match up to this. We’re told that wherever we are, whoever we are, and whomever our parents were, we will get to where we deserve to be if we have the skill and the drive to do so.
Now, here comes the killer wave. Applying some reason to the argument, if we really believe that people who are at the top of their game are the ones that deserve to be there, then we must also believe that the people who are on the lowest rungs of society deserve to be down there too.
Sit with that for a moment, because that feels like a pretty fucking dangerous mode of thinking to me.
In this meritocratic system, failure and success become deserved and earned. This is a very new idea for most of human history. We used to believe that where people ended up was at least 50% down to divine intervention, the gods, luck, fate. Whatever you want to call it.
I’m certainly a believer that any form of success takes a bit of talent, a lot of effort, and a huge chunk of good fortune. I drew this picture to illustrate:
Back in ancient Rome, if things were going really well for you, then you’d sacrifice a chicken to the goddess Fortuna as a thanks for directing your destiny down a fortuitous path. If things were going badly, you’d consult an Augur or do some Apotropaic magic because, again, fate abides. It’s the reason people used to wear protective charms.
In England in the middle ages, they’d refer to someone who was on the bottom rungs of society as an Unfortunate. I like that term. It acknowledges the importance of luck on the outcome of our lives.
If I were to fast forward to now and look at what we’d call someone like that, words such as “slacker”, “loser”, and “bum” spring to mind. See the difference here? There’s a weight to those labels, a certain narrative that they imply in the story about that person’s life, their efforts, and their choices.
This is what happens when this particular brand of meritocracy dominates our sense of ideology. If life is a fair race and you’re at the back, you’re not unfortunate. You’re last. You’ve lost. And it has a huge impact on our sense of self-worth.
It fell on the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to properly study this back in the nineteenth century. He was interested in what held society together, particularly in the wake of the rapid social change that came with modernisation and industrialism.
He broke society up into two distinct groups - traditional, and modern. Traditional societies would be something like a small village community. People shared a strong sense of communal identity, worked for the benefit of the whole, and had what he termed mechanical solidarity. Religion and tradition had a significant impact on people’s behaviour and beliefs, aligning them to a similar set of moral values.
Modern societies, however, are a very different animal. Even back then, when Durkheim conducted his study at the tail end of the 1800s, there was a stark contrast. So you can imagine what the variance must be like now.
In modern societies, we work as individuals and live, densely packed, in huge towns and cities. Romantic love has replaced village life as the central anchor of our being, and the gods are as good as dead.
It’s not all bad, though. We have more diverse values and greater individual choice. I’m not necessarily destined to spend my life working the fields, and I’m almost paralysed by choice when it comes to the different varieties of soft drink I can consume. I can also video call my mum in the next village on a magical hand-held brick, instead of having to walk 8 miles to see how she’s doing.
Durkheim noted one particularly terrifying difference between traditional and modern societies, and this formed a key part of his study. The suicide rate in Modern societies is 25% higher than in Traditional ones. Anywhere you care to look, people are unsubscribing from life at a far higher rate than they ever used to.
But what’s causing this? Why are we fundamentally less happy?
Well, if you completely discount fate, deciding instead that you are the sole author of your own destiny, and that everything that happens to you is you, then there becomes no difference between what happens to you and who you are.
That is a psychologically punishing system. It’s ironic that we spend so much of our time and efforts trying to win the approval and acceptance of others by pushing this façade of achievement and perfection. The path to true acceptance from others doesn’t arise from a show of excellence, and if it does, then you’re around the wrong people.
If we want real, authentic connections with others, then we have to get comfortable admitting our vulnerability.
Vulnerability is not something that we like to talk about in a meritocratic system. How can we get to the top if we’re vulnerable? How can we possibly deserve to win if we have weakness?
Acknowledging our vulnerability makes us authentic, and it’s here that meritocracy deeply lets us down. It makes us so focused on perfection and so enamoured with the idea that we are deserving of success, that when we fail—and fail we all shall at some point—it hits us hard.
Perhaps we should be focusing our energies more on being ourselves, rather than the avatar that modern society demands us to be so that we can get on and do well.
Perhaps we should acknowledge our failings as part of who we are, and learn to make peace with them.
Maybe it’s OK just to be good enough.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.