The second half of life typically brings with it a strange paradox. We may have achieved what we set out to do in life, by raising a family, establishing a career, and building a personal identity. Yet, as middle age arrives, persistent trolls with names like meaning and purpose arise out of nowhere, and wake us up for severe rounds of questioning at 3AM without providing any answers themselves. This is all the more surprising when we did exactly what we were supposed to. We struggled yet met the expectations set by our parents, family, friends, and an assorted coterie of acquaintances and colleagues. It is as if society provides us with an exhaustive playbook for how to live until mid-life, and then nothing at all beyond that, leaving us to roam our world without aim like zombies. They say that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. Zombies though are perfectly well adjusted to generally carrying as always post mid-life, watering the lawn, waving to the neighbors, and watching the latest shows, because they are more than a little dead inside.
Even when the energy has disappeared from our ego’s trusted projects and life falls flat, our past patterns continue to have an iron grip on us. We stagnate yet cling to the old ways of doing things, to our history, with tenacity and without question, because to let go is disorienting. To think of ourselves as anything other than what we already are is intimidating and unimaginable. It is as if one is being asked to voluntarily choose to let the ground beneath fall away. What would we do then? Who would we be? Without our tried and tested ways of thinking and living, what can we rely on? How will we know what matters and what doesn’t anymore? Will we turn into a fool, a failure, a degenerate, a despicable person?
If we find ourselves thus transfixed and unable to move, it may be that we are stuck on social constructs. A social construct is a concept that exists not in objective reality, but as a result of human interaction and consensus. These are things that come into being when a group of people agree to make it a thing, whether or not they recognize what they have brought into being and whether or not they give it a formal name. Obvious examples of social constructs are things such as countries and currencies. A good way to test whether a concept is a social construct is to ask if the concept would still matter just as strongly in a completely different social context. For instance, if one is stranded on a deserted island, or one is a tribal living in the Amazon jungle, would it mean anything to them if it is a Tuesday? No, Tuesday is a social construct. Modern civilization agreed to call certain days Tuesdays, but other than that consensus captured in a shared calendar, there is nothing fundamentally more Tuesday-ish about a day than any other day. Yet, given that most of the world works on weekdays and not on weekends, Tuesday acquires an objectively real essence. Besides, if you want to catch a plane on Tuesday, knowing what day it is becomes very real. Social constructs aren’t imaginary things then, given how subjective reality interacts with objective reality.
Similarly, the time, as in when we say it is now 11:30 AM, is clearly a social construct. Time itself – well, that’s a bit more complicated, and can be debated by physicists and philosophers till the end of time itself. There seems to be an objective reality time, not as per the clock but as that thing that passes such as when a flower wilts, although this itself is challenged as an illusion by some models of the great unknowable that we call the universe. The concept of time also folds in a subjective aspect of time, since different societies at different times have held various ideas about it, which undoubtedly influence our conception of it. Back to safer grounds then. Lunchtime is a social construct. Hunger though is not. It arises in our body as a sensation independent of society’s opinion. Social constructs influence things that aren’t social constructs, such as when one looks at the clock near noon and reflexively feels hungry since noon means lunchtime and those two social contructs together overwhelm our belly’s judgement. The influence of a social construct on our lives is proportional to the strength of the shared belief and what aspects of our life it touches.
Money is an obvious and powerful example. As David Graeber explained in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, the history of money is linked tightly to gratitude and guilt. Initially, it arose as a symbolic token for guilt mitigation, in the form of cowry shells, bits of metal, or other artifacts that primitive humans used in ritual offerings to the Gods or spirits of nature to pay off their debt of gratitude. Later, with the rise of agricultural settlements, money became a ticket to trade in and avoid a confrontation with deathly serious matters such as slavery and starvation, arising from being unable to pay tribute to overlords. If you couldn’t deliver ten sacks of grain to the lord at harvest time, you and your family might get beaten or thrown in prison or left undefended against attackers, unless you handed in a token of IOU gotten from a neighbor to whom you had once given ten of your extra sacks, thus creating the money system. Of course, money is easier than bartering goods, but that use of money came later, once its bloody history was established. The memory of past sufferings lingers in our blood today, and everyone believes in money very strongly, which gives it liquidity and validity. Yet, its power is not unlimited, and the trick is to know when extra pursuit is pointless for the well-being of the individual.
Beauty is complicated. One kind of beauty is clearly a social construct. That’s the kind that changes with fashion and the times. That’s the kind that explains why the Rubenesque women of the middle ages were replaced by the skinny women of the Instagram age. That’s the kind that Naomi Wolf railed against as unrealistic patriarchal standards in The Beauty Myth. That’s the kind that commerce peddles as a narrow ideal in mass manufactured images that promote one kind of body, skin color, and cultural aesthetic as prettier than all other varieties. The other kind of beauty is universal and timeless, and transcends fickle human preferences and prejudices. Flowers have existed for 200 million years, which is 200 million years longer than humans have been around with eyes to appreciate them. Magnificent birds, dazzling fish, iridiscent butterflies, hypnotic shells, brilliant crystals, and breathtaking galaxies, all suggest that the universe has a long history of preference for aesthetic forms. Symmetry hiding asymmetry, smooth curves, fractals and spirals, and signs that hint at life-giving potential, these are some beauty universals of the universe. She likes to look good. We do too, since others judge us, whether we like it or not. Yet, when it comes to our own preferences, we as individuals can decide what kind of beauty we worship and how much to be in service to it.
Belief systems of all sorts are invariably social constructs. Republican, Democrat, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddism, atheism, agnosticism, veganism, stoicism, environmentalism, communism, captalism, nihilism, all -isms, arise from the collective and are then adopted as tenets by individuals. Sex is biologically driven, but sexism is a construct. Gender is also socially constructed, and represents yet another way that different cultures have categorized humans. Race is another social construct that ignores the inherent intermixing and diversity even in nominally homogenous groups, as is its ugly counterpart of racism. A key element of any belief system is that it offers the adherent a claim of being different from the believers of other systems, and therefore somehow unique, when in reality the very nature of believing brings one back into the herd. We are continually churning culture for froth and identifying smaller and smaller bubbles to call home, but foam eventually goes away and melts into the background water.
Social constructs arise as shared belief systems. The trick is to know when we should opt out as individuals.
We ourselves, our physical selves, are objectively real. Thankfully, we do not disappear if others cease to believe in our existence. Our consciousness is a subjective phenomenon, not provable as objectively real, but then neither is it a social construct. Our virtual identities on the other hand, are a total mind-fuck of a social construct that we inflict upon ourselves. It derives from ideas we hold about how we should be perceived rather than who we actually are. Humans evolved in close knit tribes where any discrepancy between reality and one’s claims would be instantly unearthed and flattened by others who knew us intimately. This process served to keep us grounded and sane by preventing a split forming between our real and ideal selves. Today, we live mostly disconnected from others, and our image of ourselves swings unhinged from reality. In social media platforms, an ideal second image takes form and sustains itself with curated pictures of us appearing as we want to be viewed. Unlike most other social constructs, where a group of people come together to create a shared image that we then adopt as individuals, this is the exact reverse situation – a social construct primarily of individual creation. Perhaps this is why we are so attached to it, because it is our baby. We impose our constructed image of ourselves upon the world. This feels powerful, but simultaneously, we become slave to it. The strength of the virtual identity may exceed that of the real person behind it. We find ourselves trapped by our own creation in terms of how we look, what we do, how we present ourselves to the world. In Neurosis and Human Growth, Karen Horney described this as the basis for neurotic suffering, because our despised selves arise when we try but fail to bridge the unbridgeable gap between our real and ideal selves. When we treat ourselves like a social construct, we lose our psychological independence.
What about love? Is it a social construct? That’s a big one. We can spend our entire lives trying to figure it out, which is what makes the whole thing simultaneously so much fun and yet not, since one does not find out till the very end what kind of love story it was. One could argue that the very purpose of human existence may be to try to answer that question, and the path we chart in doing this exploration becomes our life. Some know – not believe, but feel deeply within themselves – that love is a fundamental construct of the universe, something real that unites all there is. Others find their idea of love to exist in categorical forms such as love for a God or a partner or family or nature. At least when it comes to romantic love, there are myriad choices such as lifelong monogamy or serial monogamy or polygamy or polyamory or any other variations and combinations thereof, all of which are ultimately conventions with varying acceptability depending on which society and what time we are talking about. Are any of these inherently more natural or appropriate to human existence? The debate is likely to continue in perpetuity because nobody knows the answers, but in the meantime much suffering occurs when people do not agree on their choices.
Everything we do is socially conditioned. From the moment we wake up, what we eat for breakfast, where we work, how we spend free time, who we hang out with, when we fall asleep, all have a certain unconscious element mixed in with conscious choices. Even restricting ourselves to what is sensible, practical and expedient, there are an infinite range of options for living every moment, but the specific variant we choose is a function of our conditioning. What people around us did when we grew up and what they do now continues to influence how we act. For the most part, we don’t question these choices. We rationalize our desire for cognitive ease, of not having to think about our choices, as personal choice. Where does it lead us to conduct a re-examination of all the ways in which our lives are lived in conditioned ways, in service to social constructs? Obviously, it is neither possible nor necessary to question everything. Yet, there are clues as to where we should focus our inquiry, so we know where we can opt out.
Our egos are by nature very insecure and prefer clarity, authority, and control at all costs. Societal narratives impose themselves on us by a process of first creating anxiety with information overload and constant messages of uncertainty, and then assuaging that anxiety with pre-formed opinions for our consumption. One obvious place to focus the questioning then is wherever we feel anxiety arising from, especially if we are generally safe, healthy, and fed. This may require shutting out extraneous information sources such as the news media to reclaim our authentic view of reality. Being able to hold the tension of not knowing, of being able to tolerate ambiguity and change, is one of the best traits a human individual can possess at all times, but especially in uncertain times. Alan Watts recognized this in The Wisdom of Insecurity, where he makes the point that we engage our belief systems to avoid feeling insecure, but the desire for security is the same thing as the feeling of insecurity, just as our desire to never feel afraid is the same as fear. To be a mindful practitioner of life then means operating with a minimum of belief systems and dynamically questioning what is right and wrong, and developing the ability to wrestle for the answers.
Suffering is not a social construct. Romantic love? Who knows.
If we hold beliefs lightly, does anything matter? Yes, of course some things matter! This isn’t about nihilism, which is just another social construct. Suffering is real. Pain and suffering are not social constructs. As conscious beings, we suffer and we observe the suffering of others like us. Some suffering is owing to physical pain, but most of it is due to mental anguish. We hurt when something doesn’t meet our expectations, which is usually linked to our conditioning. To the extent that we can hold our own personal beliefs as loosely as possible, that is how one minimizes personal suffering and charts a path forward. Our beliefs also matter because when they impose on and clash with those of others, that can indeed cause real suffering to them. The vast majority of suffering is largely self-inflicted by the human race upon itself, as in when one of our cherished -isms is not respected by others with different -isms. The moral and ethical response becomes to avoid attaching to social constructs so strongly that we lash out at others when our core ideas feel threatened. Indeed, morality and ethics aren’t fixed concepts. It is precisely through the act of letting go of our past prejudices that we evolve and become better human beings. When our egos try to carry with it to all manner of idea loads is when forward movement becomes impossible; to walk along the path of life, we have to let some things go. And identifying the presence and power of social constructs in our lives is a great way to find out what why we feel stagnant.
According to Hinduism, the life of a human being ideally goes through four stages, lasting roughly 25 years each. The first stage, Brahmacharya, consists of play, exploration and formal study, as one acquires the knowledge and skills needed to later become a successful adult. The second stage, Grihasta, is where one takes on responsibilities, in terms of a job or a family, becomes a householder or a partner in a relationship, and engages in the pursuit of worldly pleasures such as wealth, sexual and artistic passions, recognition, mastery, or fame. The third stage, Vanaprastha, is one of gradual withdrawal, where one relaxes a bit of the grip that passions formerly held. The need to make one’s mark on the world in terms of material wealth or professional success or romantic conquests loses its compulsive aspect. One slowly renounces exernal responsibilities, perhaps as any children establish lives of their own, and work projects become a smaller part of one’s identity yet are chosen with increasing selectivity. This is also the stage when one becomes an elder, which is neither a guarantee nor the same thing as getting older. We become an elder by taking responsibility for our inner lives, which is what allows us to guide those who are coming behind us. The last stage, Sannyasa, is the hermit stage, where one has little attachments, having renounced all desires, fears, hopes, duties, and responsibilities, and is preparing for one’s end and release from the cycle of birth and death, in deep spiritual communion with a personal God. Our problem in modernity is that society loves to keep individuals stuck in the second stage, Grihasta, because that’s what benefits society. Lacking the deep connections to our community, our traditions, and our ancestors who in the past would remind us to move beyond being merely succesful, we have relinquished all control of our life path and progression to the whims of commercial culture. Social constructs are the chains used to bind us to regressive life stages. We get so identified with and in love with what worked in the past that we forget to evolve. Some folks will spend their entire lifetime stuck in the second stage and wonder why things feel so wrong.
Carl Jung wrote that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. In the Vedic tradition of yoga, one typically ends the practice by laying down flat on the ground in savasana. The word comes from the Sanskrit shav (corpse) and asana (pose). The idea is to restore oneself with a symbolic death before going back to daily life. Destruction always precedes Creation. This is why the Hindu God Shiva, who also happens to be patron God of yoga, is simultaneously revered as both a fearsome destroyer of the world and as one who creates and transforms the world. When we reach mid-life and things start to stagnate, it is a sign that we cannot create because of what we are afraid to destroy. To feel alive, we must first come undone from social constructs and then create a fresh reality.
