It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.
― Stephen Fry, The Liar
Peer pressure, being part of the in-crowd dominates Western culture; our lives spent in virtual slavery to the expectations and normality as determined by friends, family, employers and society in general. A normality that is pounded into our brains through an endless succession of questions as we reach each predetermined milestone.
When will you graduate High School?
What are you studying at University?
What do you do for a living?
Is she the one?
When do you plan to have kids?
Are you sending the kids to a private school?
Enough already! There is only one question you should ask of anyone:
Are you happy?
Such a simple question, yet one I am rarely asked to answer. So I am going to ask myself this question every day, and live a life that produces more yes than no responses. Easy right? Yes but well no.
The other questions are designed to make us unhappy, to want the new thingamajig or the perfect suburban home to raise our pigeon pair kids (a boy and a girl). It’s not wrong to want them but do you want to be seen to have them rather than enjoying having them? I am seeking out the experiences that I want to have not the ones I’m supposed to have. That is Dangerously Subversive.