Blog: Concept of Individualism

Featured image: She Calls Herself Clover

Is the concept of individualism, the individual, self, dying like art and the concept of artist is dying? Is the concept of freedom changing?

How is the identity of the individual and the identity of art formed? Does our culture and or society design our concepts of I, art and freedom? Is that why they are always changing? Perhaps it is the way that the concepts of self, art, and freedom are changing that causes me to think that they are dying. Perhaps I should just say, "The concepts of self, the individual, art, artist and freedom are changing, and I don’t like they way they are changing." Rather than saying, "They are dying."

That would just not work for me because I sincerely believe that for any one of those concepts to exist, there has to be an absolute notion of a sovereign self – and that is what is disappearing.

Every morning I start my day with all things natural, all things, yes. I surround myself with all things beautiful as I ponder the wind, the rain, the trees, flowers in my garden, critters scampering about, the sky and the clouds. If the "I" in me is, "Yes, Yes," as I surrender to the natural, then I am in harmony with myself and the concept of self. When that happens, I am able to be free. If the answer is, "No," then I am chained to something that is not allowing me to surrender and is trying to govern my self. I need to figure what that is that is causing the "no." Then, I need to work around it, not surrender to it. I need to challenge it, not surrender to it, and if it is really really bad, then I need to get rid of it.

Do technology and social media allow us to feel this way? Do they allow us to be able to find the I in the concept of self? Or do they merely allow us to disguise the self and in turn, kill our self, the I in us? Is this a change that I will fight and not surrender to? My answer is, "Yes, yes, yes."

It's not that technology is bad. It has become a part of our culture and social networking. It offers answers quickly that used to take forever to find, and then, once we had found it, it appeared to be outdated. These are good things, but they should not govern us and allow us to disguise who we are. We need to question the sources that we find just like we used to when we went to the library to research a question that we had. We need to question the designers of the software that we use. We need to ask ourselves, "What does it not allow me to do?"

A good example for me here is that I personally don’t like apple products because they make things so simple that it takes the creativity and challenge out of figuring something out on your own and enriching your own notion of self, and self-worth.