Modern Mythology

The prevailing belief systems of our time are invented.

I hope this doesn't make anyone too sad or angry, but a small look at history makes it quite obvious. It's also obvious when you travel to different countries and see entirely different belief systems, many contradictory, yet all applicable to life on the same planet. Christianity, for instance, is interpreted dramatically differently depending on the period of time you look at, though all of it is based on the same man's life.

Unfortunately, most of us are run by whatever mantras were recited to us through our childhoods and as adolescents. The tapes keep playing, long after they are coming from the outside. We internalize them and recite them forever.

As I read more and more from books on healing how important it is to have positive and supportive belief systems, I have mostly noticed that I'm not too messed up. :) Apart from that, I have still learned that a lot of the beliefs I would fight to convince other people of are not even my own. I mostly have cherished them because they are more modern, new, or progressive than older ones, so they seem great, since this is by comparison. Yet they still came from somewhere else. I'm sure the next generation will have even more modern, new, or progressive ones. The point is: why not make up your own?

When my parents were kids, the mantra was "go to college, work hard, you'll get a good job." Most of us have noticed life, success, and happiness are not quite that simple. Especially my parents.

When I was a kid, it was, "have fun. You're young, and if you don't have fun now, you'll find yourself with a family and less freedom. You could miss your chance."

Of course, it was never stated in such a way, but that was the implicit idea. Maybe I just absorbed it from the environment too, as I psychically tuned into all the less than happy parents who did as they were told and who found themselves with unrealized dreams. The new mantra is probably "better" than the old in that it at least allows you more freedom and also implies confidence in the person that "you'll turn out fine, don't worry about the future, do what you love or choose to do." But I found myself actually feeling pressure during and after college, "I've got to have fun!! How do I have fun!? I only have a few years before I'll be too old to have fun!" How absurd is that? Does my life end on the day of my 30th birthday or something? I think not.

What if we looked beyond both of these Life Rules?

For instance, it became so ingrained in me, whether through family or friends, that marriage and family meant selling my soul, giving up my freedom, and being boring, that I practically went into shock when I realized I wanted to get married. One of the supposedly happiest things to happen to someone--finding The One had me chasing my own tail, trying to reconcile the supposedly irreconcilable facts of "I'm not selling my soul, nor giving up any freedom" yet "I'm getting married." Getting married isn't cool anymore, hadn't I gotten the memo?

At this point, it became obvious that my mental constructions weren't really making sense. I wondered where they came from and why I still had them. I wondered what construct I would make if I was to chant the perfect mantra to the next generation.

I guess it would be: do whatever you feel is right, and ignore what you have learned it supposedly means

Only You have the power to give anything meaning.

Sometimes I think people my age are now under so much pressure to be "different" so they won't be accused of caving in to the status quo, that they're more limited than they even would have been in the first place! I'm really so exhausted by trying to make sure I have fun (which, by the way, comes pretty naturally to me on its own), am different enough, and seem "cool" that I have finally just given up. By the way, everyone on the face of the earth says they don't care what other people think, and that's a big load of crap.

My entire generation has, in a way, collapsed under the general baby boomers' collective disappointment, which partly has turned into a high divorce rate, lots of therapy, and new mantras begging their kids to have fun. It has given us the sense that work and family were in some way the source of this unhappiness. Many young people naively now believe marriage = unhappiness or corporate job = unhappiness which is so pathetically simplistic, it's downright silly.

Please: Stop Making Rules. Stop Trying To Figure It Out.

You're not going to learn how to conduct your own life by seeing divorce and saying, "ok, marriage ends in divorce, so I just won't get married." Can we be a LITTLE more sophisticated than this?

THERE IS NO RULE OF THUMB FOR LIFE

Marry young, marry old, don't get married
Have kids young, have kids old, don't have kids
Go to college, don't go to college
Get a job, take a break and live at home
Travel, don't travel (that's a big one. People of my generation MUST travel, you are cool if you travel, and if you don't you probably don't have a sense of adventure or enough culture to be interested in traveling)
Move to a new town, stay in the town you grew up in
Have a religion, don't have a religion
Work a desk job, work a physical, outdoor job
Live downtown, Live in the country
Work for a large corporation, work for a small business, work for a non-profit
Be the breadwinner, be a housewife
Be thin, be fat
Be womanly, be manly

Why does anyone care what their kids do anyway? Does any parent really have the illusion their kids Belong to them in the sense of ownership? We belong to our families only in the sense of a communal connection of belonging. We borrow our kids from God and send them on their way to find God again however they like. Is there any other definition of parenting?