As a child, I never really had an answer for the classic question What do you want to be when you grow up? I always took it very seriously and I’m pretty sure it always stressed me out. But I was a sassy kid as well as serious, so when I got tired of saying “I don’t know,” I started to make up bogus answers for people. We were at my grandparents’ house in Ohio one summer when this exchange took place:
My Uncle: So Elizabeth, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Me: I want to be… A LOONATIC!!! [Insane laughter.]
This is one of the stories my family still feels the need to resurrect every so often. It came back to me this morning when I was (yet again) pondering what the hell I’m going to do with myself after my JV year. …And I thought, you know, I might really have been onto something there. Is that such a terrible thing to aspire to be? A lunatic, in effect, is someone who does not conform to our social norms. And what good does conforming to social norms do anyone? You’re accepted by society; okay, I guess I get why you would want that. It’s good to be accepted, and it’s probably the easiest way to function. (I guess I don’t see a whole lot of value in ‘easy’.) What else do the social norms get us?
My current theory is that society is trying to sell us a meaningless existence of isolation and boredom while placating us with consumerism and alcohol and pills and reality TV. The way I see it,* society’s set up so that we work at jobs we don’t like, producing goods we don’t need, in order to earn more money that allows us to buy more stuff we don’t need and will throw out shortly anyway, essentially using up the world’s resources and creating waste for no reason aside from making more money. The cycle exists only to perpetuate itself. Many of the social expectations placed on us (go to school, get a job, buy a house, etc.) are there to make us into “productive members of society,” which to me means cogs in a giant wheel that is turning for the sake of turning, filling the pockets of a select few without really making anyone happy or bringing anyone peace. Where is the good in that?
So for now, I think that I would repeat my answer again and again. YES, I want to be a lunatic when I grow up. I want to be absolutely fucking bat-shit crazy, if it means that I’m rejecting the dominant paradigm and defining life on my own terms. I want connection in place of isolation, and I want individuality and self-expression in place of conformity. I want genuine human interaction and social consciousness and a stronger sense of community. I want to challenge our preconceived notions of life and how we as a society define “success,” just as I am seeking out and challenging the preconceived notions I hold within myself. There is so much more to life than meets the untrained eye, and there is so much more potential out there that I think we just forget sometimes. What we could be is so much greater than what we are, and the adventure is in getting there. And if all of this labels me a lunatic, then so be it. Bring on the madness.
*I would like to acknowledge that I’m presenting an extremely abbreviated and one-sided view of things for the purposes of this particular post. I would also like to cite The Story of Stuff, which I watched a few months ago and which synthesizes these points pretty nicely.
