The things you are saying and doing are a product of your surroundings. Your thought patterns are regurgitated quotes from the people who have molded your habits in life, whatever they may be. It is important that we spend a lot of our lives educating ourselves. Yes, many of us in places like an alternative music scene are doing so, but we do not understand what it means to truly educate ourselves. So, let us break it down.
From a very young age, we are forced into education due to the norm of society. We spend our first few years being educated naturally by whatever parental figures we have at our disposal, as well as extended Family and others who happen to be around. This we cannot control. Things are defined and laid out for us. Therefore, when we are trapped into the conventional mold of education - let it be private, or public - we are braced with flat out definitions of what everything means. What we learn is a science, and everything has a right answer. This is vastly untrue, and a misconceived way to raise our children.
A large amount of us remain in this education path for our youth, attempting to please the right and steer away from the wrong without learning why the answer is interpreted as either. We learn by the book, and an open discussion of the book itself is thrown to the wayside until we leave the education system.
For us that exit at a young age, we remain attempting to educate ourselves while grasping at a life where we can live and work and integrate ourselves into society. The widespread failure in education of yourself is that you have spent the majority of your life not knowing how to think freely, even if you believe you have. Those books you dive into during whatever spare time you might obtain between working long hours, having fun, and growing into an adult have no objective way of reaching your brain. Print is fact. Film is magic. Music is potent. Everything remains in fact, and your opinion and thoughts - as much of a natural part of you they may feel - are simple falsities created by your notion of right and wrong that has been built up by you and yourself over the years.
But it isn’t your fault.
No one has told you otherwise.
Things in your life may have made you feel like you are grasping at that straw, reaching for the freedom of your own mind, but you never fully have grabbed it. You proceed to create a notion that your mind is a free, vast ocean of individuality. Your taste presents itself as something that is yours, and will never belong to another. Your opinions feel as if you created them alone.
None of it is true. It is pieces of you as well as pieces of the people who have created you. You are spending time quoting your heroes, your idols, your gods, your books, your films, and your artists without creating or being objective of them.
It’s time for a change.
