I'm blogging after more than a year now. I guess this post was way overdue.
Who are we, why are we caught up in life's humdrum affair, and what is our identity? "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players", this powerful Shakespearean quote is of great relevance even five centuries later.
The stage is our life; and the audience - our society. There are only a few successful playwrights who survive narrating the stories they want to narrate, while the rest are drawn into the evils of commercialism to tell the audience exactly what they want to hear. The originality and uniqueness of one's story is hence lost because of what the audience wants to see. The same is our life, a spectacle for the audience. The true essence of what we are and who we are, is hence lost because of what society wants us to be. There's that universal conflict, "to be or not to be" yourself.
So are we who we are because of the way we are, or because of where we are in front of who we are? The pace of time catches the best of us off guard, and we are forced to conform to what society wants us to be and what society sees us as. We are intensely engrossed in leading lives of characters we aren't, thereby forgetting who we are. We try to fit in, but get ridiculed by the critics for not being ourselves and for being too mechanical. On the flip-side, we are blamed for not portraying the character well enough, when the critics are being to analytical; a very common mistake, because being ourselves is what makes us extraordinary.
However, sometimes we can't do much about the influence that society has on us, and the way it shapes us to actually be nobody else but ourselves. Albert Bandura's social learning theory explains this phenomenon very well. Innately, all of us conform to society unintentionally in a few ways, without any actual reason. We imitate actions of others without the thought of actually imitating them. Sometimes we're successful, but other times we aren't. Contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. Every time we fail to become more like someone else, we become more like ourselves.
Quantum physics tells us that nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer. That statement, from science, holds an enormous and powerful insight. It means that everyone sees a different truth.
How ridiculous would it be to have the tyranny of Duke Frederick narrated through the knavery of Touchstone? You're born to play yourself on stage, so be yourself, because everyone is anyway creating what they see.
Who are we, why are we caught up in life's humdrum affair, and what is our identity? "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players", this powerful Shakespearean quote is of great relevance even five centuries later.
The stage is our life; and the audience - our society. There are only a few successful playwrights who survive narrating the stories they want to narrate, while the rest are drawn into the evils of commercialism to tell the audience exactly what they want to hear. The originality and uniqueness of one's story is hence lost because of what the audience wants to see. The same is our life, a spectacle for the audience. The true essence of what we are and who we are, is hence lost because of what society wants us to be. There's that universal conflict, "to be or not to be" yourself.
So are we who we are because of the way we are, or because of where we are in front of who we are? The pace of time catches the best of us off guard, and we are forced to conform to what society wants us to be and what society sees us as. We are intensely engrossed in leading lives of characters we aren't, thereby forgetting who we are. We try to fit in, but get ridiculed by the critics for not being ourselves and for being too mechanical. On the flip-side, we are blamed for not portraying the character well enough, when the critics are being to analytical; a very common mistake, because being ourselves is what makes us extraordinary.
However, sometimes we can't do much about the influence that society has on us, and the way it shapes us to actually be nobody else but ourselves. Albert Bandura's social learning theory explains this phenomenon very well. Innately, all of us conform to society unintentionally in a few ways, without any actual reason. We imitate actions of others without the thought of actually imitating them. Sometimes we're successful, but other times we aren't. Contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. Every time we fail to become more like someone else, we become more like ourselves.
Quantum physics tells us that nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer. That statement, from science, holds an enormous and powerful insight. It means that everyone sees a different truth.
How ridiculous would it be to have the tyranny of Duke Frederick narrated through the knavery of Touchstone? You're born to play yourself on stage, so be yourself, because everyone is anyway creating what they see.
