We're plastic

Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to rewire itself over time as response to lived experience, trauma or injury. It continues to function for as long as we're alive and permits us to restructure our thinking in ways that benefit us. 

In other words, we aren't stuck if we don't want to be but repair can take a long time depending on our situation. 

I remember someone who entered a religious sect at 17 only to finally leave it near age 60. He abandoned religion altogether after the long journey of realization and self discovery. His initial fervor had been whittled away to nothing. 

All of us begin life with some level of indoctrination which must then be assessed and weighed. We must determine how much of it served us and how much turned out to be detrimental and antithetical to our essential natures.

What is my motivation?

I've written many times about motivation but perhaps wasn't very explicit. Motivation is important because without some understanding of what drives us we cannot decide on whether an outcome is beneficial. 

A simple example would be that I have a pain in my foot which then motivates me to go to the doctor. My motivation is to eliminate the pain. Another one would be that I am motivated to exercise because it makes me feel good plus it keeps me healthy. I am depressed and I need to see a therapist is yet another example of motivation. 

In all cases we are moving towards improving life quality. 

Motivation involving more complex psychological drivers can be harder to understand. One can be motivated to gamble without intrinsically understanding what lies beneath the compulsion. Is it the thrill of risk, the potential promise of a payoff? 

We humans behave in ways that aren't always steeped in self comprehension which is why sometimes our behaviour can be self destructive. The woman who is beaten by her husband and keeps going back may think she somehow deserves it because she is not worthy of love. 

She has internalized low sense of self worth. 

Motivation for any complex life decision or action requires analysis which considers risk and benefit. Otherwise we aren't taking into account potential negative outcomes we may not be willing to live with. 

We ask ourselves "is my motivation to do something going to lead to a more positive and healthy version of me or am I helping someone else to improve their life?"

Toolkit

My son gets it. He is intelligent, inquisitive and thoughtful and things I have to explain to other people with more effort flows like water with him. 

He just turned 26 and has that same uncertainty we all do at that age. This era only adding more angst than when I was the same age. 

What I love about GenZ is that they don't care what you do or who you are. They want to know if you are reliable and a nice person. They have much less tendency to come pre-wired with the judgement criteria that we were filled with growing up. 

They weren't subjected to the life is hard and mean warnings which our silent generation parents felt compelled to cram into our brains. They prepared us to deal with the cruel and stupid people which are always plentiful in the world. 

But as society slowly immersed itself into more malleable terrain, the generation of my children saw that there was no danger in diversity of ideas or identities. They learned to fear less which is why less thoughtful boomers sometimes see them as lazy or disinterested. 

They aren't. 

Additionally they have a much harder economic ladder to climb with much less opportunity than we had. 

People don't fundamentally change but circumstances do which is why the best toolkit we can possess is critical thinking bolstered by kindness, discipline and self-respect.

He has them all.

Their problem

How others perceive us is of little importance compared to how we perceive ourselves. If self esteem and self respect depended on public opinion we would be in trouble. 

Most of us wear some sort of mask to get by in the world except that with age it should become thinner as we are increasingly rooted in authenticity. We begin to care much more about respecting our autonomy and preserving our well being than following societal whims. 

How others view this detachment is entirely their problem and not ours. 

Finding this sense of liberation comes at the expense of opinions that are irrelevant; from people who don't know us very well and certainly don't live in our skin. We disregard them while remaining polite and cordial. 

We simply have stopped dancing to the same music that they do.

People like her

He was looking for people to talk to on the metro platform and you knew he wasn't all connected. He stopped in front of me as I sat there and began spouting gibberish and some sexual innuendo. 

I don't know if he knew I was transgender which isn't really relevant anyway. This could have happened to anyone.

I didn't pay him much mind and then the metro came. Suddenly the young black woman who had been sitting closeby ushered me into the car with her. She was beautiful and bold and lamented "no one says anything" 

She told me she was 47 and worked in social work where she could help others. Meanwhile our friend sat at the far end of the car spouting drivel at both of us. 

"Do you feel safe?" She asked and I said yes adding I have enough rage left over in me to do some damage if need be. I am still working on decanting it. 

We both got off at the same stop and told her it was people like her who give me hope. 

I have been riding the metro everyday for years without incident but acknowledge that there is an increasing number of people who are not mentally well and they are lost. 

People like this young woman make me realize how much goodness is out there.

By design

Anyone who tells you that life is easy hasn't been paying attention. Even when things are going relatively well, something will sprout up out of the blue which will test our ability to cope and adjust. 

Most of the time we exist within a bandwidth of acceptable satisfaction while periodically peppered by anxiety, fear and even infectious joy. 

We are enigmas who only appreciate how good we have it after we are tested by calamity and ultimately survive it. 

When we no longer have mandatory tasks constantly filling our day we have more time for reflection. We can ponder how meandering, random and meaningless it all feels at times only to then change gears when a ray of insight pierces our negativity. We realize there is indeed a purpose and harmony to everything as the sun touches our face. 

Many people live at a surface level where they don't question too deeply which perhaps spares them pain although I am not sure. After all, digging too much for answers might not yield fruitful results for them. 

What I know is that we are at once simple and deeply complex creatures which was probably intended by design.

Dumber

I left Facebook back in 2011 already realizing that things were going to get much worse. 

There was something disquieting about the barrage of pablum and the obvious grandstanding by some people who wanted to advertise how well their lives were going. 

The concept of keeping up with friends was slowly turning into over sharing and insipid content which wasn't in any way enlightening. Not long after were at the start of the conspiracy theories and toxic attacks which reversed what was supposed to originally have been fruitful and constructive dialogue. 

Now even LinkedIn is a cesspool of self-aggrandizing and back slapping. 

Social media has helped strengthen the divide between people and emboldened the anonymous to poison the well of discourse. We attack what we don't like without hesitation because there are few consequences. It's a cheap and temporary elevation of self esteem at the expense of someone we consider weaker. 

I don't suspect that Mark Zuckerberg and company thought through the full spectrum of human behaviour when they unleashed this phenomenon on the world; one which is making all of us decidedly dumber.

Too much information isn't always a good thing.

Zero sum game

MAGA is a zero sum cult. It's about needing to win at something when everything else isn't working anymore. It's about owning the libs, stopping "wokeism" or whatever else the right wing echo sphere tells them. 

It's about grievance. 

For just a few minutes these people need to feel superior to someone else because they have an axe to grind with how their life quality has declined over the years. 

Trump gave them their walking papers and permission to be cruel and dismissive along with the promise they nothing bad would happen to them. They want to see others suffer for a change while they are spared. 

It's easy to call these people stupid and some of them are. But mostly they are ignorant and incurious enough to fall for a snake oil salesman who tells them he will fix their misery. 

They aren't policy wonks but instead just want to be able to pay their bills and stop feeling like they are always falling behind. 

The American dream is gone for most of them and now the best hope is to hold down a steady income and staying healthy so they don't need to declare bankruptcy after being unable to pay their medical bills.

Just wait till they find out it was all a scam.

Stiff upper lip

There's an old joke about the patient going to the doctor and lamenting "Doc it hurts when I do that" only to hear the doctor reply "then don't do that" 

It reminds me of the simplistic messaging that some people are prone to give thinking it will help us. They don't understand someone else and use pop psychology to reduce the problem to "just get over it" 

Most people don't comprehend what others go through and so they rely on a stiff upper lip suggestion that may have worked for them on some other issue. They don't intrinsically comprehend and so offer simplistic advice instead of a friendly ear and some empathy. 

People mean well I suppose. 

Perhaps because I am a very complicated person I don't appreciate reductive advice based on a presumption of understanding the problem. I prefer that if you can't relate, you just offer to earnestly listen. 

The world doesn't operate on nuance but prefers to offer buzzwords and slogans so people can move on. You get an email from HR with suggestions on reducing stress while at the same time the company culture encourages it with its frantic chaos.

"There, there" they tell you "we understand. Just breathe deeply".

Nothing wrong with that

When I was in my twenties in the 1980's, life was on more of a preset pattern. The post war social order was very much in place and we didn't ask as many questions about what to do. 

The presumption was that you would follow the tried and true model of your parents. You would finish school, get married and have kids. Society was set up to follow a template that most people could adopt even if the results ultimately varied. 

These rules weren't just about what to do but also about who you could be. 

Fast forward to today and my children at the same age I was then, have no such template. They ask themselves questions regarding their future and see no definitive path to follow because each option has so much more uncertainty. 

There is both good and bad here because while not having a mold adds confusion, it also liberates you from the societal pressure to conform. People are less prone to ask you why you aren't following the rules. 

Today, we are reimagining what the new social order will be and I think it will favor people with more tolerance for uncertainty and able to be more uniquely themselves. They are more apt to find their authenticity outside the sheep's pen. 

Nothing wrong with that.

Need versus want

How do we separate need from want? It may not be as obvious as we might think. We can also frame the question as choice versus no choice. 

We need to sleep, eat and drink water to survive but after that it becomes a descending order of priority to figure out. 

"I need to be rich" sounds more like a type of pathology than a need and we can imagine a whole host of other assertions that should make us reflect. The reason this is important is that need often gets us to a place of balance and harmony whereas want doesn't always improve our situation. 

Need versus want blurs itself in our lives often impacted by what society considers imperatives. In the past we might fret about why we aren't yet married only to discover years later that we weren't suited for it. 

A determined need became a want which ended up ultimately rejected. 

It's important to make a distinction between the essential and the elective because life comes with inherent risks. Every decision we make has consequences which is why are better off judiciously considering what outcomes we truly cannot live without versus what we think we cannot live without. 

Over time, life will teach us the distinction when we aren't sure and not always kindly.