There is pressure from society to construct an identity.
Depending on what identity you construct, you accordingly get experiences. I
find this a very difficult choice. Changing identity is not easy. Investments
accumulate over whatever identity you choose. Just like, if you were a nomad,
you should let go of a lot of things before you decide to move – changing
identity would involve losing all your accumulations/investments to the extent
to which you change. People try to further their own identity by making more
and more connections having the same social mimes, which leads to the formation
of groups. If you want to change the group, then in the changed group suddenly
all the stuff you had previously would become irrelevant. Kind of like, if one
group was totally into bitching, gossiping and trivial social information and
another one discussed philosophy and abstract ideas, they are quite
incompatible. So the skills you acquired in your previous group cannot be used
here much. Another analogy would be, if I worked as a carpenter for many years
and then I suddenly want to switch to being an electrician then there would be
little transferable parts. The same issue occurs in marriage, it’s a contract
with accumulating investment over time. If you suddenly decide to break out of
it, all the relationship investment collapses. Switching a career would also
mean losing a lot of your investment like the carpenter-electrician example.
There are transferable skills but a drastic switch could leave very little commonality.
If you decide to leave your company, again all the internal knowledge,
processes and the relationships you acquired in the company would be lost.
Certain patterns could be metaphorically applied in other companies too, but
this would be an abstract learning for the most of it. Basically, you would
have to start all over again in the new company with the abstract learning from
the previous company experience.
This is the dilemma of an explorer. There is a force trying to make us move
towards investments, security and consolidation and there is another counter
force which aims at diversity of experience and seeks exploration. If I take my
personal case, I have moved in and out of so many groups, so many social mimes,
so many intellectual ideas, concepts, fantasies and experiments. But at a given
time, my mental state is in a specific configuration and I can only access a very
tiny fraction of all that’s there in my experiential memory. When I go into
totally new groups, I am suddenly returned to square one. There is no
investment, they don’t know me or trust me, and carry a very rudimentary image
of me. The passing away of all that I experience makes it easier for me to
understand of all this as an illusion and the emptiness of my essence. But the
entire societal/cultural layer we have over reality works in exactly in the
opposite direction by language and a conceptual layer where things exist
inherently in and off themselves. What do you tend to choose: investment or free
exploration?
