Think For Yourself

© RCM Sheep and a Trampoline, Combremont-le-Grand, Vaud, Switzerland

I heard that a lot at school.

“Think for yourself.”

It took me years to realize that thinking for yourself is the last thing that people want, that society as a whole wants.

In fact, it’s actively discouraged.

Even in school or at university, there are actually very strict rules in place, and you have to follow those rules if you want to get the highest grades. If you write a paper for an English class, for example, no one gives a fig for your opinion. You have to refer to every Tom, Dick or Harry’s thoughts about the novel you read, synthesise their viewpoints acceptably and then: bingo! Good grade.

Silly me. I actually thought that when people said, “Think for yourself,” they meant just that.

But what people actually mean by thinking for yourself is “observe the rules and play the game.” These are the people consistently lauded by the majority of citizens.

Not that I’m complaining. Thinking for yourself makes life at once simpler, richer and more complicated. I wouldn’t want it any other way. But I do get exasperated by the double-talk.

Example: be very careful when your boss asks you what you think at work.

Does (s)he really want to know what you think or does (s)he simply want confirmation of her/his ideas?

In my experience, there are very few people in positions of responsibility who really want to hear what you think. They can’t handle it. If your viewpoint diverges from theirs, they see it as a coup d’état.

I would go further. As long as a relationship is power-based, there can be no real communication.

I have been living in Switzerland for over thirty years now and I’m often asked if I miss England, the land of my birth.

I usually state the obvious – that if I really missed England, I would be living there and not in Switzerland.

If I’m pressed for details, I go on to explain that life in the UK is complicated on a relationship level.

Why is that?

At that point, I explain that it is impossible to have genuine communication between a person who says what he thinks and a person who says what he thinks you want to hear.

Believe me when I say that the person who truly says what he thinks is in a very tiny minority.

Most people don’t know what they think. They respond to how those around them behave. Not unlike sheep.

Take tattoos, for example. Goodness only knows why this has become such a fad in recent years, but I bet that a huge majority of people got a tattoo because someone in their entourage got one.

Beards. Another sudden craze. Did you grow one because it suits you or because everyone else started growing them?

BAAH!

So much for thinking for yourself.

“To thine own self be true,” as Polonius put it.

Difficult to do if you don’t know who you are.

So start by identifying the voices.

You know, the ones in your head.

Now which ones really belong to you?

By sorting out what belongs to you and what doesn’t: parental voices, voices of friends or not-so friends, co-workers….

Remove the clutter and then you can think for yourself.

It doesn’t matter if you got a tattoo or grew a beard or whatever crowd pleasing activity you may have indulged in, as long as you acknowledge that you were following the crowd and not yourself.

Only by checking those voices, those impulses on a regular basis can you eliminate what does not belong to you and find your way back to yourself.

If thinking for yourself is what you really want to do….

Have a great week and may your life never become an endurance test.

Love

Richard

Breakfast with a butterfly, Zakynthos.

Support me at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/endurancefree

Scandinavian Logic

We’ve just come back from a trip to Stockholm, Sweden.

While there, we coined a new term: Scandinavian logic.

It describes situations where a certain amount of information is given but not enough to be really useful.

Example: The parking at the hotel.

The lady at reception indicated that it was in a red building across the road, that the name of the hotel was marked and then she gave us a code to enter the car park.

We drive across the road.

It is dark, so all colours are relative.

There’s a brick building that seems to be a car park but no mention of the hotel.

We drive around for a bit and eventually come back to the building.

We enter the code in the command box which is accessible from the car.

Nothing happens.

I get out of the car and approach a man working on a lorry nearby. He informs us that there is another command box.

In fact, we discover that there are three in all. For two of them, including the hotel one, you have to get out of the car to punch the code in.

The name of the hotel was taped onto the command box, but not visible anywhere else outside.

A number of similar things happened to us during our stay, hence our coming up with the term.

The problem seems to be an incapacity to put one’s self in another person’s shoes.

People seem increasingly unable to think about anyone else but themselves.

And it’s not because everyone spends a huge portion of their day hunched over a mobile phone that communication is improving.

The opposite is true.

Communication is getting poorer and poorer with every new means of communication that we invent.

It’s important to reverse this trend.

Do not make assumptions.

The situation is not necessarily clear to the other person.

What you are saying is not necessarily clear to the other person either, even if it seems clear to you.

Try to imagine the situation from the other person’s point of view.

And try to use simple and succinct language.

In the example above, a few simple words of explanation could have avoided twenty wasted minutes of searching.

What can you do to improve your communication this week?

Have a great week!

Love

Richard

mesunglasses

About Language

I want to thank everybody for their comments on these pages – and there have been a lot since I revamped the site.  It’s great to have so much feedback and to hear that these posts are useful for you.

But I also wanted to make an appeal:

If you can avoid using a translating programme or plugin, please do.

As you know, computer language is utterly logical – it’s on or off, 1 or 0, yes or no.  Any question must be a closed question, resulting in a positive or a negative reply.  At best,  “If 1, do 0.”  That sort of thing.

Organic languages such as English or French have evolved over thousands of years from various sources and their development has not been dictated by logic alone.  They are the expression of a national or tribal identity and have as much to do with emotions as with logic.

This means that it is extremely difficult for a computer programme to do a good job in translating from one language to another.  The result is that many computer translations are, quite frankly, unintelligible.

So I would like to ask you please wherever possible to try and write your thoughts in English yourself, rather than resorting to your computer to do it for you.  Even if you think your English is lousy and that you’ll never be able to do it.  Just try.

I can almost guarantee that your message will come across more clearly than with an automatic translator.

Many thanks.

As this is more of a personal appeal, I’ll try to get another post up this week with a more satisfying tip for endurance free living.

Love

Richard

mesunglasses