To grow, you often need to forget who you were, to let it go.
But this has limits. Since I have a long standing habit of making everything political, I did again this morning. Specifically, this whole gender confusion thing: what it seems like to me is adding a consumerist mindset to identity. But in liberating some people, it is setting many others adrift.
There are of course true transgender people out there, who feel like they were born in the wrong body, but for every one of those, there are, now, probably 5-10 kids who just feel like being somebody different, just because they can.
But the passion is missing from this, it seems to me. Watch this video, which it seems to me is only barely satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4rrgr0KeU
When we read that kids are not having as much sex nowadays, this makes sense. Allan Bloom talked about this back in the 1980’s, how the passion was missing, how it was inconceivable to the kids he taught that they would kill or die for love. They were just like “whatever dude, it’s just a relationship, you know, the one I’m shacking up with for now.”
Listen to the kid: everything he says is abstract. It’s like he has no hormones at all. This is a comedic exaggeration, but in far, far too many cases, I suspect, not much of one.
In Politically Correct culture, all native impulses, all spontaneity, have to be surrendered. Everything has to be run through a filter which asks if that behavior is presently acceptable. I will reapply Mencken’s famous quote on Puritans: Political Correctness: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
As for me, it seems to me that, while I think identity needs to be flexible, it needs some wide parameters. Rumi was, in the end, a Muslim, even if he recognized other roads. The Buddha formed a set of ideas and practices which he, or at least his disciples, called Buddhism, and which defined them.
I think we all need something like that. Our organism needs something like that. You need to know what you are protecting, what furthering, and why. We are teleological organisms, and if there is nothing seeking a purpose, we will be intrinsically frustrated.
So it is perfectly reasonable to seek to grow as a person, while recognizing that growth in this life has limits, or tends to for nearly all of us, and not to be too greedy. A steady even pace is the ideal.
And I would contrast personal growth, in which each individual processes the world and their experience within it differently, for their own individual use, with putative “social growth”, in which each individual is expected to subordinate their own experience to dictates handed down on high. This latter process cannot but build frustration which cannot be expressed within the system, and cannot but build emotional fools who have learned nothing but the suppression of all their natural instincts, which alone can guide them to true wisdom.