Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. Currently, my life consists of all three. Most of the time, I am ignorant of this disconnect with reality (sometimes willfully). Often it is shrouded in the constant buzz of popular culture, menial life tasks and those ever present reminders that I am a cog in the machine; bills, trainings, tickets, rules, socially agreed upon obligations. But the truth is unavoidable and the truth will always make itself known. Whenever I am reminded of my humanity or brought back to the present, I come face to face with the truth. And the truth is that this way of living is not sustainable. This dissonance between how we naturally are and how we are expected to be slowly eats away and we are left depressed, anxious, stressed, sick, lonely, and never satisfied. We are constantly looking for a way out and an improvement of our lives; given hope that once we attain that job, that house, that family, then our lives will be complete. That once we become those people we dream of being, then we will no longer have to participant and we can break free of the machine. What a dirty trick. What we don’t realize is those dreams have been carefully fabricated and implanted into our psyche by society, governments and culture in order to entrap us in the machine for the entirety of our life cycle. From birth to death, we are literally chasing ideas that have been given to us by people who do not have our best interests and desire to keep us ignorant of our humanity; our true reason for existence.
The great modern philosopher Alan Watts described existence in this way, “the meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” Imagine living in a society based solely on being alive! A society that values mindful living, being present and being satisfied with what we have. A society that values life instead of administering death. People working together for the improvement of all instead of the self. I am not abdicating for Utopia and understand that we live in a world of balance. But I implore my friends, family and neighbors to take a five minute break off of the hamster wheel, get some water and look beyond the cage and what could be instead of what is. We have agency to reach our full potential. Not potential in terms of material gain, but potential to fully self-actualize and become conscious humans who truly embrace humanity. To live free of the cognitive dissonance that encapsulates us.
Like most 25 year olds, I have a useless college degree and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. When I went to college, it was only because I was doing what was expected of me rather than what I wanted to do. I did not know how to think critically and frankly, I had no idea what I wanted to do at that time. My worldview was small and I could not see beyond my own ignorance. The fact is that I cannot go back and change the path that I have taken to get to this point. The debt that I have acquired influences that path that I am currently on. I forgive that younger version of myself because mistakes make us who we are. Like most 25 year olds, I am stuck working in jobs that I am over qualified to make money to pay off debt which never physically existed. Nothing more than numbers in a computer screen. But I am not going to go into the magical world of the monetary system that we were born into. Instead, I am going to focus on how I cope with the cognitive dissonance of working in order to function in our fabricated world of enslavement.
Forgive yourself. I once read our current life experience described in this way. When we are born, our legs are intentionally broken and we are no given any resources to fix them. We are then expected to walk by those same people who broke our legs and it is our fault that we cannot. So we are the problem.
It’s easy to believe that you are at fault for all of your problems. We are taught from a very early age to self-sufficient and to “get it together.” That we are the only ones who can help ourselves. And to an extent, that is true. There is degree of responsibility that we have in our lives to ensure that we are living in a way which reflects our values. However, we are also the products of our environments and we have been born into a world which worships money, death, greed, sex; the pursuit of personal pleasure over the common good. We are surrounded by the falsehoods of media, government, healthcare, education; systems operating under the guise of progress but are in actuality being used for the opposite of their proposed purposes. All of these fictions were in place before we got here and how lucky we are to be able to finally see them for what they are. Most people do not get to see cage let alone what’s beyond the cage. That said, it is important to forgive yourself for your personal ignorance and for the subscribing to the cognitive dissonance our society perpetuates. This step is crucial because if we cannot forgive ourselves than we can never truly move forward beyond ourselves. We are our own best friends, our most trusted ally and we need to be able to look in a mirror and accept what we see; all aspects of complex selves (the subjectively “good” and “bad” sides we have).
Take responsibility. While we did not choose the environment we were born into, it is our responsibility to do the best we can with where we are. For me, this means setting realistic expectations for how I can live my life in way that does not compromise my values or impede the lives of other people. We will never be able to live perfectly or be the “ideal self” so it essential create a realistic idea of what I can right now to live as meaningful of a life as possible. This includes forgiving myself when I fail to live with integrity and accept the cognitive dissonance of our society.
We are also responsible for generating our own meaning and purpose out of what we do with our lives. I do not want to be working in the job I am currently in, but if I was to check-out and stop working, my family would be burdened with debt that they did not ask for and that they would feel obligated to pay because they are fully entrapped within the system. So because I am working, I try to create as much meaning out of my role as possible. How can the skills I am learning now be used to help people in the long run? What little things can I do to continue growing and evolving as a human instead of becoming stuck in arrested development?
Mastering yourself. Every day, we can increase our levels of self-efficacy by mastering skills or having new experiences. The greatest factor in self-efficacy development is knowing that you have successfully accomplished something already before. Self-efficacy can be increased every single day if we have a goal in mind and a purpose for why we would like to increase our skill set or add to our experiences. Personally, I want to increase my communication skills in order to be more effective at getting information to people. This is a skill that I can work on every day, even while performing a job that I dislike. And why stop there? At work, I keep a list of “commitments” which I chose to work on every single day; accountability, efficiency, being present, integrity and honesty, to name a few. All of them are broad concepts but I try to apply them as much as possible to my life because they are values which reflect the person that I want to be. Each commitment has it’s own purpose for incorporation into my life.
