Faking It

I have a problem. I keep pretending to fit in by trying to understand references that I don't fully know.

Here is an annotated list of things I've made jokes about that I haven't read, watched, played, or listened to:

- Kanye West
- LOST
- Game of Thrones
- Mario Kart
- Bollywood films

Many of my friends are avid gamers, and yet I have never played video games. Many of my friends are addicted to shows such as Game of Thrones, Community, Doctor Who, House of Cards, Mad Men, and Downton Abbey. I have watched these shows only sparingly or not at all. I want to watch them, but I don't have the time.

I have this constantly nagging sensation that I don't belong. There's a pit in my stomach, as I agonize over my lack of cultural knowledge. Because I have a photographic memory and a ridiculously good sense for small details, I can read comments that people make about their favorite shows, books, and movies, and get a pretty good sense of what people like about their entertainment and what they find memorable - I don't typically know enough to have an in-depth conversation but I'll remember enough to laugh at inside jokes that only fans usually get and to deduce what happens next in shows without getting the spoilers first.

I am alternately dismayed and amused by my talents.

I've never been a primarily self-guided person - I've always been heavily influenced by other people, whether it's been my parents, my former church, my fellow Scouts, my school mates, my coworkers, or my college theater friends. When I was in school, I always found it annoying when teachers asked me to answer questions for them before being instructed in how to solve them.

While I now realize that these teachers were often teaching me how to think, I often felt at a disadvantage because these teachers were trying to get me to think in a way that is more difficult for me. My best thinking happens when I reconfigure things I hear and learn from other people and imaginatively rearrange them. Among the first CDs I ever got as gifts were Weird Al Yankovic's Running With Scissors and Allan Sherman's Greatest Hits. I respect the work of these parody artists, who substitute their own words in popular songs to produce jaw-droppingly awkward and subversively hilarious new interpretations.

I'd much rather learn what people believe is best and why they believe that, and then try to make the connections myself. Perhaps that is why I added a philosophy major when I was a college student. I've long been fascinated by how people construct their own realities. That leads me to ask whether my own efforts to construct reality are, in fact, a parody. That's a difficult question to tackle; let's agree to defer the follow-up question, asking if my parodies are genuine or ironic?

For me, claiming to be an individual has never been a natural or a self-evident act. I can see the fault lines where I added or subtracted various habits and fandoms to become who I am today, and I recognize the role of luck and contingency in my life so far. It just doesn't matter that much to me whether I'm riding the crest of a wave of popularity or favoring obscure pursuits that most people ignore or impugn.

Nevertheless, I'm eager to see how far I can push. How inventive can I be spurning the social boundaries of my generation, sparring with the popular imagination, and spurring strange new vistas of awareness? Or am I just rationalizing my own laziness to sound pretentious? The answer, of course, is in the act - in the knowledge of the act - and in the knowledge that, despite our best efforts, we are all actors in our own way.

Emptiness

My mother once told me that she sees the world much like I do, only that she can't imagine that there isn't "something out there".

A friend of mine told me yesterday that his life lately has been reverberating between depression caused by loneliness and a feeling of emptiness. During a conversation with the same friend, we agreed that individuals are often the product of their friends and their experiences. The interactions I have with my friends form a critical part of my personality, my values, and my character.

If I am without friends, then I am without scaffolding.

A former professor once gave my class an analogy: Alexander Calder was a famous sculptor, known for his mobiles. In a mobile, one object hangs at the top. A number of other options are attached one-by-one in a succession of linkages. The analogy to philosophy is that the object at the top in a mobile is the like the first premise of an argument or the first assumption in an ideology. Each premise or assumption in a philosophical idea is connected to its original ancestor, and a student of philosophy can't properly understand an idea without understanding its structure.

Perhaps one common thread from these experiences is the idea that society is a structure of people, and each individual person is somewhat responsible for developing his or her own structure of important people in their lives. So, a tempting question to ask is, what kind of structures is our society building?

In some ways, people are detached from each other more than ever. There are more alternatives for choosing parts of an identity or community, but the options available tend to be more superficial and less meaningful in terms of in-person relationships.

What does it mean to have a structure in life anymore? What does it mean to have a community? Besides my parents, I have little extended family that I can call very close. Even some of my close friendships seem to have a tenuous footing, and I have no other relationships. I live in a large city, surrounded by strangers. I have some powerful but alien-feeling tools at my disposal, but I'm not sure how I can bridge the gap.

The Internet is a great blessing to me. I can research different interests and try to find individuals or groups of people who enjoy some of the things that make me happy. Yet, many things I enjoy tend to be individual pursuits which are not readily experienced as a community. (Here, I note that the types of things that bring me pleasure are also expressions of the structures of my society.)

There is "something" out there, even if that something doesn't exist in the way my mother intended. There's a whole horde of people similar to my temperament and interests who could enjoy my company, but I will never meet most of them. I have given up belief in fate, but probability is a stranger master. It is humbling but perhaps self-indulgent to think this way.

When I was talking to my friend the other day who was complaining of loneliness and depression, he sought advice on how to develop a deeper friendship once he meets people. For that, I cannot help much. All I could tell him was that his chance of meeting people increased if he did things he loved. So that is what I will do. I will continue doing the things I love, and at least find a way to be happy through that.

So often, I think about my limitations and the limitations of my life, what I don't have, what I want to do yet haven't done. I need to staunch this overly negative apprehension before it dissolves my patience. I have some amazing blessings in my life (if someone like me can use a word like blessings, and I don't see why not), and I have a lot to give and create.

I am not yet empty, though I am emptying and filling again. Whether I seek nature, writing, or laughter -- the cycle of isolation followed by joy is my constant guide. Life, like the telling of a joke, doesn't contain its satisfaction in the punchline, but spreads its infectious ironies through every set up and every staggering contradiction. Emptiness can be its own scaffolding.

Religious Traditions and Individualism

One of my friends posted a New York Times Op-Ed called "Congregations Gone Wild", complaining that members of the American clergy are suffering burnout as members of their congregations demand more entertainment and less moral guidance that could disturb the feelings of the flock. My friend wanted my thoughts, even though I'm an atheist, and I don't have a dog (don't have a sheep?) in this fight.

The idea that any particular religion's primarily about entertainment and good feelings is possible because there's no agreement about the primary purposes of most religious traditions. Most people appear to go to services, then those people feel better about themselves and superior to others for an hour or two a week -- and then continue their normal lives.

Religious ideas have been in flux throughout history - have always been part social, part religious, part political. When the same people run all three areas of a society, maybe you get a distorted idea -- but at least everyone believes a distorted idea in the same way. When different people control different parts of society... then you have all of these wonderful tensions, and eventually, nobody knows what to do anymore.

There's a trade-off between having no hierarchy and little guidance with lots of room to question authority and think independently...and having lots of hierarchy and guidance but little room to question authority or think independently. Of course, lots of people don't question authority or think for themselves at all, but continue to selectively follow traditions that have been handed to them, and over time, those traditions get weaker and weaker as you get farther from the original reasons people believed their traditions.

Can members of religions find ways to instill the principles of their faith in a rigorous, disciplined way -- in the middle of a diverse, pluralistic society that encourages different answers and different points of view? It's an interesting problem. Personally, I hope people will support traditions that encourage critical thinking and grappling with tradition on the individual level. There are religious people who stand by their faith tradition and its teachings while incorporating other opinions and other teachings.

I'm not religious myself, and I'm not sure that religion carries more benefits than harm to the world -- but if you're going to be religious, that's what I recommend. I do feel sorry for the people in those congregations that are demanding more amusement and less substance: those people by and large haven't been taught to think for themselves, but they don't have a tradition to provide them ready-made answers. That's a paradox of our society: is it better to have uninformed people with freedom, or informed people who don't have freedom? Hopefully, we can have people who are informed and have freedom. That's my goal, and I think many well-meaning religious people can help achieve that combination.

In a world with fewer shared values, all is not sour for practitioners of religion: there's an opportunity to reconcile doubt and tradition, critical thinking and moral principles, individual learning and strong communities. Even people who don't accept religious ideas have limited opportunities to find such balance.

Our world continues to change. How will religious beliefs adapt? If you're religious and you sincerely believe in the truth of your faith, then I hope you'll help the rest of us inform ourselves and gain the power to choose the beliefs that most powerfully affirm each of our values. If you're right, you'll gain followers. If you're wrong, you're only postponing the inevitable exposure as a more democratic, pluralistic, informed world continues to awaken and to demand answers.