OK, so people talk a lot about "finding your purpose" and "living with authenticity" and all that stuff. And I agree that's probably a noble goal, although it can sometimes be very challenging and for many it never really turns up anything.
But at least they are out there looking, not just drifting through life like zombies on cruise control.
We often admire people who live authentically and secretly wish that it could be us, perhaps regretting the fact that we don't feel more courageous so that we could just fearlessly step out into the void and pursue whatever was on our mind.
But one of the things about living authentically that the infamous "they" never tell you about — I suppose because it would hamper the sales of $99 webinars and $1,000 retreats — is the fact that we live within a structural framework for society that does not necessarily reward authenticity. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is set up to reward compliance.
And so, people end up looking at all these messages about seeking authenticity and then they look at the fact that there's a lot to be given up in order to live authentically... not least of which can be such simple things as having a decent place to live and a car that runs because the vast majority of places that actually pay you this thing called money don't care about your authenticity, they care about your compliance and your following the neat little formula that has been created for how "they" want things done.
The sad thing is that a lot of people don't really move on very far from a sort of emotionally and spiritually "adolescent" place in which the majority of our life and energy revolves around navigating where we fit into a puzzle created by other people. So we put on masks and follow the rules and do whatever it is we feel we have to do in order to be able to at least survive.
I remember first examining this dichotomy some 25 years ago when I was going through one of my phases where I regularly attended self-development workshops and spiritual retreats and I always came away with this wonderful and balanced sense of purpose but within a couple of days I would discover that I had to interface with what we might call real life around me, and real life was absolutely not open to any of the tenets I had just taken on board and considered to be "wisdom."
Instead my somewhat elevated and altered way of dealing with life was met with "don't give me your New Age mumbo jumbo because that just doesn't cut it in the real world."
One of the things I learned along the way — going back all the way to when I was in business school at University — was that you pretty much have to be a screaming asshole in order to get anywhere in life. At least if you follow the standards left out for us... unhealthy as they might be.
Recently, I've noticed other web commentators remark about how business schools churn out "professional assholes" who lack any kind of compassion or decency. And then they end up running the world.
Kinda scary, if you ask me...
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2026.09.16 01:11 PDT
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