To Grind or not to Grind...

[Parable]

When Doktor Sleepless tells the grinder's that authenticity is bullshit (issue #5) and suggests they become mad scientists, grinding themselves into their own dream, what was your first response?

Is it responsible advice? Does the suggestion have a reasonable structure? Is personal identity bullshit as well?

More than anything else in DS, these questions have been haunting my head meat the most. We grow up being subject to various aspects of our culture, filling in the "life template" with our own familiarities until we get full enough to claim an identity. It might just be that I'm hitting an identity crisis spot in my life, but I can't help but feel a sort of detachment from my particular environment. I'm just another person among other people that have a particular way of functioning within a society.
It really is starting to feel like people are the the same wherever I go, and that "the magic is never where I'm at".

I remember Warren addressing this concept in Transmet when Spider goes on about monoculture and culture preservation societies, presenting the argument that cultures should be preserved for what they originally were. Is preservation and separation of different cultures and identities important?
Or, with technological advances shortening the gaps, should we accept that a step towards monoculture is the next logical direction in human evolution and embrace it? Maybe humans in general already have a set template that they function on, in a mental sense. Subscribe to an unknown faith, learn scientific truths, establish societal mannerisms, side with a political preference, and fill in the rest with details until you're complete.

With current happenings in DS, is it safe to suggest that aligning people's life templates into similar layouts and accepting monoculture is a dangerous idea? If checks and balances are eventually reduced to smaller amounts of variable "weights" (weights, as in weights being applied to a balancing scale) then whats to stop one sudden rush from significantly altering and possibly toppling the scale all together? If you know everyone is going to respond the same way and have the charisma and ability to make something happen, then applying one suggestion could cause the whole world to go inside out.

Hell, maybe monoculture would be good for us. Make peace, establish similar beliefs, adopt similar customs, install the same operating system in everyone for reasons of compatibility, ya know? Increase the productivity of the world and bring everyone together into one tightly-knit work force that can produce amazing leaps and bounds in technology and do it all in unbelievably short periods of time? Or does that sound a bit too much like Hitler's plan?

Or is it worth grinding just to be different? Live out your weirdest dream and become a troublesome cog just to keep the eschatonic gears of some doom machine from turning? Maintain the checks and balance system through seeming insanity? If you believe that you can fill your own life template with whatever bits and pieces you want, what would you fill it with?

Sorry if I bounced around a bit, insomnia is unforgiving to my thought process sometimes. So... Thoughts?

[Mark Crabtree]

(I'm not quite sure this is what you're asking, but it's the first thing that occurred.)

DS isn't about a monoculture, really. Heavenside has been described as an unusual city, but even inside it there are myriad differrent groups, the first volume mainly focussed on the grinders but there does seem to be a fair amount of cultural segregation going on. At least among the dealers.

Problems seem to arise due to the inability of the different groups to accept each other. Which holds pretty true to the rest of the world as well.

What gets me about that whole speech is that although the Doktor seems to be saying they should be themselves and not do what they're told, the grinders actually present a pretty uniform front (leather, piercings swirly tattoos etc.) and end up doing exactly what he wants them to.

Reminds me of the time I saw someone wearing a t-shirt saying "you think I'm strange because I'm different, I think you're strange because you're the same". And then further down the road saw another person wearing the exact same thing. Heh.

[Parable]

Yeah, this just keeps going scattershot whenever I try to compile something larger than a paragraph, so basic questions...

Is suggesting that someone become their own creation responsible advice (can it work that way?), or do you think we have a set identity we adhere to, regardless of our choices? The idea had never even crossed my mind to become my own invention and now it's really interesting me. I figured this would be a good place to discuss it.

[Mark Crabtree]

Haircuts, tattoos, piercings, excercise, therapy, self help books, education, new years resolotions and a million other things.

Becoming your own invention doesn't necessarilly mean turning into a cartoon character, getting a load of tags and having an mp3 player in your penis. To an extent we all take some contol over our identity.

I like the idea of making it into a deliberate choice though, sitting and working out who (or what) you want to be and making that into the primary force shaping your identity. I suppose the fact that the choices you make are influenced by who you are to begin with makes the idea of becoming completely your own invention slightly impossible, but that's a bit too wishy washy to be a real problem.

Grinding is a good word for it as well, captures the hard work involved in reshaping yourself. (Which is not to say that I personally have successfully ground myself into the person of my dreams, but it certainly seems like something worth working on. I'm not even 100% sure who I even want to be.)

No?

[Bonus Thought! Some changes are certainly easier than others, with some being near enough impossible, maybe a sensible approach would be to change the bits of us that dislikes the bits we can't change?]

[Stephanie Wilson]

I am always re-inventing myself, in my own way. I am not the same person I was 6 months ago. A year. Two years ago. I change as I need to, but always let myself decide for these changes. I won't dis-conform just to non-conform, but I will not do certain things simply because everyone else is doing them. Boring! Plus I'm of the mentality of blazing my own path - I might not get there when everyone else does, but I will have more fun.

And I believe the magic is always there, most people just can't see it.

[Parable]

Okay, I'm in agreement with everything both of you are saying (except I'm less of a trail blazer and more of a pathfinder in the surveying sense), but I'm interested in what Crabtree said about the bits you can't change. You're saying an option might be to alter the parts of ourselves that dislike what we can't change... So, basically, turning it in to acceptance? We take what we can't change about ourselves and "re-decorate" it to a point where we can view it as something tolerable/workable/anything positive, yeah? Also, what bits would you say are either impossible to change or just harder to change?

[Mark Crabtree]

That's pretty much what I was getting at, yeah. Redefine success.

Difficulty levels are gonna vary from person to person, what might take me years of work might be an afternoon for you or a couple of weeks for someone else. Obvious impossible changes would be things that are just crazy: growing wings, lazer vision, prehensile tails. The only real option is to come to terms with the idea that it aint gonna happen.

Much more seriously...

Somebody suffering from Anerexia sets themselves an impossible physical image to acheive, which is clearly damaging to their health. So rather than helping them lose weight, treatments aim to help them feel more comfortable in their own skin.

Or anger issues, rather than irradicating the emotion entirely, some people work on controlling and directing it towards desirable goals.



I'd love a prehensile tail though.