halfacanuck

While walking home from the beer store this evening it suddenly and inexplicably occurred to me just how staggeringly small are the odds that within my lifetime there will be invented a technology sufficiently advanced as to enable me to taste my own corpse.

Yeah.

I've been thinking a lot about me recently (which may come as a surprise to my long-term readers who know I tend not to talk about me, me, me, or me very often, and to those who know me personally, who understand how fascinating and deep I am and thus how great is the temptation to think and talk about me constantly, pausing perhaps only to eat and go to the toilet). In particular I've been thinking about social roles, and those within which I've existed at various points in my life, and how unaware I've been of their influence over not just my behavior but also my thought processes.

It's quite alarming to someone as fiercely intelligent and modest as myself to realize that a great proportion of what I do and say is determined not by logic and reason but by social customs and expectations. It's a serious blow to the ego. I don't want to believe I'm susceptible to advertisers' tricks: only other people fall for that kind of transparent mind-play. I don't want to believe I am for the most part entirely predictable to anyone trained in psychology, or just wise. I'm above that. I'm special.

But I'm not. Most of the time I'm an automaton, doing precisely what is expected of me, without even thinking about it. It's a self-fulfilling and self-sustaining thing: because it's what's expected, no-one notices, and thus behave as I expect them to, and thus there's nothing aberrant for me to notice either, and we all just carry on being comfortable and automatic and conformist. By definition, it's only when I notice myself not falling for some marketing ploy or other is when I recognize it happening. The rest of the time I just lap it up with the best of 'em.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It's necessary, even. Sometimes conformity is good: I like my waiters to confom to the usual role they're given. To illustrate, here are some things I want in a waiter:

1. Politeness
2. Promptness
3. Unobtrusiveness

Here are some things I do not want in a waiter:

1. Repeatedly bringing everyone else's order to me first, for comic effect
2. Angrily insisting that I eat all my vegetables
3. Trying to startle me while I taste the wine

As you can see, there's nothing wrong with conformity. In fact, it's not those invisible, unnoticed roles that are the problem. The problematic ones are those I do notice, but feel unable to escape. They're the roles that are upsetting and unsettling. They're the ones that most damage my self-esteem and make me feel the most impotent. And the awareness of those kinds of roles doesn't come overnight. The recognition sneaks up on you as a sort of ever-increasing sense of wrongness, and a great deal of time can pass before the discomfort is profound enough to be explained and thus dealt with.

So maybe my problem is not, as I've always thought, that I analyze too much. Maybe I don't analyze enough, or I analyze the wrong things. Maybe it's time to stop worrying about being manipulated into buying the latest of Swiffer's innovations, because, really, it doesn't matter that much if I'm tricked into purchasing a sticky lightweight carpet-rolling device. What I need to worry about are those times I conform when I shouldn't, when my conformity is truly detrimental. I need to learn how to recognize that sense of wrongness more quickly and analyze it more effectively so I can explain it sooner. Yup.

(Although, now I think about it, perhaps a restaurant chain requiring waiters randomly to pop a balloon next to diners' heads while they sample the house red isn't such a bad idea after all. It'd be a great place to take someone with whom you're certain the conversation would otherwise be stilted and awkward. Nothing enlivens an evening like great spurts of colored alcohol flying willy-nilly. I smell a patent.)

"In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many refrigerators, even those that did not suffer from flood or wind damage, had to be discarded due to the effects of having food rotting in them (with infestations first of maggots, then of toxic mold) for 6+ weeks with no electricity in the hot southern summer.

These were hauled out to the curb for eventual pick-up; often their owners decorated them with slogans or folk art."

Check out the surprisingly affecting photographs at Wikimedia commons.