Social Masks

When you’re young-minded (immature), you tend to focus on the kind of character you want to be…

As you mature however, your focus tends to shift towards the type of person you really are…

When you’re young, most of the things you value in life will fit into a few basic categories… 1) How you look, 2) What you can do and 3) How important you look to (and/or when compared to) other people.

1. How you look will boil down to the ways you can accessorize, enhance or showcase your flesh. This includes everything ranging from how you dress and style your hair, and the various pieces of flair you use, and the types of marks you brand your body with (tattoos, piercings, etc), all the way to the ways in which you contour your body with diet, exercise or surgery.

2. What you can do basically boils down to your social skills. These can range anywhere from various proficiencies you’d use to entertain or engage others with, all the way to ways in which you hope to capture value (obtain resources) from society.

3. How important you look is all about your status and reputation. It necessarily entails the first two categories, but in addition to them, also includes the various groups you seek to define yourself by and demonstrate value by virture of being linked to. This category also entails demonstrating the quality of life you experience to others, resultant from the types of entertainment, comforts and pleasures you have access to.

These are the priorities of immature thinking. They’re not necessarily “bad” or “wrong”, however, they don’t represent a well-balanced view of reality either.

As you mature, you tend to start getting more honest with yourself. Mature minds tend to tell the truth about how they actually feel about or feel motivated towards things.

Once you stop worrying so much about how you look, and what you can do (as compared to others) and how important these things make you look in other people’s eyes, you start getting honest with yourself.

When you start getting honest with yourself, that’s when you become a real person, and not just some shell of a person trying to capture value from society.

There are lots of kids out here, walking around in adult, middle-aged and elderly flesh suits.

The greatest paradox in it all is that the authentic people these characters keep trying to hide from the world are way more interesting than the masks they wear.