Sometimes, we are depicted as being masked. A mask may be used to hide our face to avoid being identified. But the word "persona", Latin for actor's mask, is the root of our words "person" and "personality". You react to my face as at the same time, I react to yours and to the world as I am perceiving it just then. There gets to be a typical set of actions and reactions from me. You perceive most of them and tend to bundle them as what you can expect from me, my personality.
Inside my head, I have sets of admonitions and urges. Eat when hungry! Drink enough water! Keep regular hours! Exercise! Get back to that good book! But as I listen to David Livermore discussing "Customs of the World" in his Great Course, I begin to suspect that I might live quite differently and be happy, maybe even happier. Uh-oh! I see a difficulty: once again, I run into the limitation of being only one person, of having only one life, "YOLO" (You Only Live Once). So, as I hear about other ways to live and work with the world, I realize at my age that I am not going to have the chance to start all over.
Experimentally, I will not have a chance to try changing some of the basic variables human societies use to orient themselves and live a life at other points on several scales of importance. Livermore and others focus on
Identity—Individualist versus Collectivist
Authority—Low versus High Power Distance
Risk—Low versus High Uncertainty Avoidance
Achievement—Cooperative versus Competitive
Time—Punctuality versus Relationships
Communication—Direct versus Indirect
Lifestyle—Being versus Doing
Rules—Particularist versus Universalist
Expressiveness—Neutral versus Affective
Social Norms—Tight versus Loose
After considering all these cultural variables, it is easy to wonder if anything much is left to be uniquely individual. I also wonder if everything I have experienced is not only culturally determined but is somewhat arbitrary. I have an orientation toward punctuality and I am confident I have cut people off or committed other actions in the name of staying on time when it would have been better, more humane and more fun to forget the deadline and chat. So, I not only see a picture of having taken just one path of several possible ones but I carry a suspicion that my choices may not have been the best. Can I have a do-over?
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
