Could it be that the ways we are pursuing our goals of Happiness and self-fulfillment (autonomy, liberty of choice, and control over one’s life) are precisely what will prevent us from achieving that fulfillment?
Our current strategies to pursue self-fulfillment risk bringing about some unintended consequences.
- As performance trumps living, we are increasingly losing sense of what is natural (our biology, ecology, physiology, etc.), saddling ourselves a burden of effort and counter-intuitiveness that needn't be... even losing touch with our humanity... in ways that are unsustainable. Meanwhile, despite our herioc efforts to procure and maintain happiness, we are losing our liberty / control over our own lives because much of this performance is responding to abitrary societal criteria and approval rather than our personal preferences, desires, or talents with which we are increasingly losing touch.
- As we pursue a kind of still-life, taxidermic identity, we find, in turn, our growth stifled. As a consequence, we are losing a sense of who we are and losing a sense of our personal self- worth (performance is a redundant logic). Consequentially, our strategies for defining ourselves is actually diminishing our veritable, positive individuality... and reducing our access to self-realization and fulfillment
- Meanwhile, as we spin the plates to keep up the performance, we're running ourselves into the ground. Already women admit to feeling exhausted, stressed, and guilty with too little energy to be creative in finding a different beat to march to
- The bluff is then rendered mandatory as it becomes societally normalized. Not fitting with the mould becomes increasingly difficult and could lead to ostracism
- This normalization is newly internalized, influencing our priorities and social rules, and therefore undermines our diversity, our potential, and our possibilities (this is my stunted synapses theory upon which I'll expound in a blog entry)
This vicious cycle locks us in to pursuing a chronic of a failure foretold depsite the gains of choice the woman's movement has achieved.
But those are just the unintended consequences for us.
What about their repercussions on upcoming generations, on our children?!
