I’d like to share some of my thoughts on culture. The way I see it, a culture should originate from the ideas, values, and decisions of individuals, and it should adjust to the people living in it. This, as far as I can tell, is the opposite of the way it usually works; cultures are often shaped long before the people currently living in them are ever born and require people to adjust to them, which tends to suppress their individuality and preferences. A culture that is shaped by people inclines them to be proactive, while a culture that shapes people generally ends up making them reactive. Being proactive allows you to avoid the tendency to consume and accumulate resources. I think that this tendency is changing as people are becoming less reactive. I know many people around my age that regularly work on some sort of creative project and have chosen to live simply. Most of them create purely for the joy it gives them, but a few get paid for their creations. Either way, I love seeing their work, especially when I get to watch them in action and can see the passion behind their projects.
An unmistakable sign of being reactive is acting without thinking. So many people automatically follow whatever is popular, commonplace, or traditional without even realizing what they’re doing. It’s always fascinated me to see someone stop what they’re doing, think about it from a fresh perspective, and then decide that it’s not worth continuing. Thinking differently about common activities is the first step on the journey from being reactive to proactive. When you’re proactive, you can walk down a life path of your choosing instead of being pushed around and forced down a path that others choose for you.
There is value in studying and learning from many different cultures. For example, a lot of what I’ve learned about meditation and mindfulness originated in Eastern cultures, so I credit a great deal of my mental peace to the people from those cultures who figured this stuff out long ago and recorded their discoveries for future generations. In addition to learning about useful things, studying different cultures also provides opportunities to learn from the mistakes of others so we can avoid repeating them. It’s possible to do this by studying just one culture, but studying several cultures offers many more examples of some things that worked well and others things that didn’t. The more cultures you study, the better your chances of finding the best way to live and avoiding the many traps that can drag you down.
A lot of the inspiration for this post, including several of the ideas I’ve discussed, came from Island by Aldous Huxley. Huxley talks about so much in that book that makes perfect sense to me. Reading Island has helped me better organize my existing thoughts on this subject and has given me a lot of new things to consider. I’ll do a full review of the book once I’ve finished it, but for now, it’s worth mentioning how it’s shaped my thoughts on culture. I enjoyed thinking about this and putting my thoughts into words, and I hope you found this post interesting and thought-provoking.