Societal Drag
In physics drag is the force that opposes the motion of a solid object through a medium such as air or water.
Societal drag is what you experience when attempting to develop as a person as you move through the medium of life. People around you produce drag. This drag can make your self-improvement and personal development sluggish.
The perception of who we are by other people, how we behave, what we say, what we think, who we socialize with, where we go, what job we do or don’t do, even the games we play, create a public personae, an avatar, that other people use to measure us and set their expectations of how we will respond to a given stimulus, situation or statement.
This projected perception by other people allows society to function by stereotyping and pigeon holing everyone in to convenient slots. Before we developed the labels that we use today, such as Gen X, Millennium Generation, gamer, nerd, emo, and so on, we created names and attached them to people based on their profession, Miller, Baker, Smith, Tanner. All of these names, and many more besides, came about based on the group’s assessment of a person.
This classification put us neatly in to little round holes where we were expected to stay for the better part of our lives. The problem with this pigeon holing is that it encumbers us and hauls us down to a level of behaviour that society and other people anticipate of us and without a considerably conscious effort we behave, for the most part, exactly how the world expects us to. When someone acts outside of the norm they are referred to as a maverick, or a hero, and are often treated with cautious suspicion. People acting outside of what is expected of them becomes often a noteworthy event.
How people perceive us in our daily lives, real or imagined, has a strong influence on how we behave and how we are expected to behave. The people around you may perceive you as serious and intelligent, or they may perceive as clumsy and withdrawn. No two people or groups of people will view us quite the same. This perception subtly alters who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be.
The way that people distinguish us will dictate what we try to change about ourselves. If we desire to improve and we are perceived as being frugal with our money to the point of recklessness, even if we are not, we will often swing slowly but inexorably the opposite direction into abject miserliness. I am perceived as being overly lavish in my lifestyle because I think nothing of dropping a bundle of money on a new laptop I desire or a cashmere jacket that I have had my eye on for a while. But in that regard I live well within my means, I don’t have a credit card, and I save for the items I want. The people viewing me as lavish and a spendthrift have credit card debts ranging between $15,000 and $35,000, debts that have accumulated based on what I personally consider frivolous purchases. Perhaps they are frivolous, perhaps necessity, but it comes down to the perceived reality of the situation.
Because people have perceived you one particular way in the past that specific observation is likely to persist even years later when we are a completely different person. We can have changed so much about ourselves but a single incident earlier in life will set the tone for expectation for ever more.
You might have at one time in your life had a really bad dress sense and you have a pretty messy, disorganized lifestyle to match. I’m not saying these two attributes go together but let’s just say you’ve got those two traits in abundance. The past two years you’ve spent improving yourself. You’ve changed your entire wardrobe with a personal style guru to help you pick out clothes that work for your body type, your build and they even helped select colours that match your skin tone. You’ve hired a professional organizer to help you straighten up and organize your home and a lifestyle assistant to turn you around and put you on the straight path. You’ve become a fabulous success at dressing right and keeping your life perfectly organized for the past 18 months without any more help from any assistants or gurus. And then you meet a friend or a relative from your past, they can see the changes in you, they note your perfectly organized home and meticulous appearance, they even comment on the revolutionary transformation and complement you on it, and yet… to them you are still that badly dressed, disorganized air head that can’t ever find their keys or their spectacles no matter how much evidence presents itself to the contrary. In their eyes, you are who you were.
People will actively seek to slow you down when you attempt to change. This may stem from their desire to keep you just as you are, their desire to not let changes in others change them, their fear of change, and other motivations. They are fully aware they are doing it and they will erect mental and physical barriers to put the brakes on and prevent you from achieving your goals.
People can also and are more likely to subconsciously slow you down. They aren’t aware they are doing it, it just happens. They have internalized, but also suppressed, their desire to slow you down. Even when you question the person about their actions they cannot vocalize their wants even to themselves. Their subconscious desire comes through in subtle comments designed to sabotage you, little distractions to steer you off course, and in the most extreme cases they may act out, possibly even explosively and violently. The subconscious person sabotages you as though they were using self-sabotage, they make you run late for an appointment or completely miss it altogether, they always find one more thing to do before they are ready to leave. A second tactic that they may use is an endless stream of minor interruptions, all of these interruptions will be justified by brushing off your objections as though what you are doing is not important;“You aren’t doing anything important right now” and “Studying the piano may be important but I don’t see how it will help you in your work” are just two examples of sweeping aside your own objections to their actions.
The strongest tactic that people will use against your progress is the attempt to destroy your self-confidence, it manifests in the form of insidious comments masquerading as something positive: “But I like you just the way you are,” “You don’t need to change for anyone else” and “You should change for yourself, not because others want you to.”
If you persist in pursuing your goals they may even use derogatory comments of how bad you are at something: “You aren’t serious about following through on this” and “You’ve never stuck to anything in your life.”
People don’t want you to change. They fear something new and they fear change in others. Once people realise that the pursuit of your goals is improving your life they may become jealous of the change, anxiety will also be apparent if the person is close to you as they will fear you are outgrowing them and leaving them behind.
The people that love us the most don’t want us to change at all, even if the change is for the better. They love us just the way we are. Changing our hair, our sense of style, our career, our hobbies, any of these may be resisted by our families, spouses or friends. The change makes our loved ones feel threatened; by changing ourselves we are somehow changing them. They have a fear that if we change too much, even a little bit of change can be too much of course, that we will no longer be the same person, that they will no longer know us, that they will no longer be able to love us. This is of course quite absurd but who ever said emotions or people were logical.
Disparaging And Discouraging Diatribe Dissuades Our Desires
Drag puts psychological barriers in our way. Societal drag slows down our personal development by altering what we change about ourselves. That same drag alters how we perceive ourselves. The drag slows down our progress by making us move slowly and carefully so as not to upset anyone. It prevents us from changing certain aspects about ourselves so that we will still be loved. Drag also puts physical barriers in our way by stopping us from acquiring money, finding happiness, and getting the career we want. The perception of us by other people after we have changed remains the same.
In physics the faster an object moves through the medium, the more the drag increases.
Humans are social mammals with a strong desire to fit in to a social group. Within that social group anything different is interpreted with suspicion and fear and may well be rejected. We all have skeletons in the closet of some type, however small they are, interesting peccadilloes we hide from the world, little traits that only our immediate family know of.
Social pressure, from the mores and expectations of our peers, what is considered acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, from cultural taboos, all of these things conspire to slow down our personal development as we strive to fit in otherwise we risk being ostracized by the herd. If you are a thinking human just ask any nerd what school was like for them to see how being ostracized can be a powerful factor in your psychological and academic development.
Sheeple move in flocks. You can watch this in life as people follow internet memes, say the same things over and over again, say the same things everyone else is saying, and repeat the same “facts” or opinions endlessly. They wear the same fashions, they think the same thoughts, and they listen to the same music. They delude themselves into thinking they belong to a tribe, or a class, or culture, or a sub-group but what it all boils down to is people are identifying themselves by the clothes they wear, the music they listen to and the emotions they portray rather than finding a deeper and more meaningful identification. Flocks are aggregate examples of group think. A flock, like a herd, moves for protection.
When the flock is startled it will begin bleating annoyingly and moving quickly but erratically away from the danger, away from the thing that is different that scares the flock.
Not being a part of the flock is hard, often when the flock moves, you move with it whether you want to or not. Manoeuvring the flock is quite difficult, it takes skill and planning and coercion to get a flock to move in the direction you need them too.
Moving through a flock is slow progress, the sheeple get in your way, they don’t really mean to, they’re barely conscious of you half the time, the other half of the time they are barely conscious of themselves, just when you manage to side step around one sheeple another wanders in from a different direction to block your progress.
It’s been said before and not just by me but sharing your goals with like-minded and positive minded people will encourage you to pursue those goals. Sharing with positive people can give you a massive boost in self-esteem, encouragement, affirmative energy, forward progress and a myriad other factors that can ensure your success.
There are huge reasons not to share your goals with negative people.
If you:
- Lack self-confidence
- Have a low self-discipline quotient
- Lack personal development skills
- Are not good at verbal defence
- Cannot deflect negativity away from you
- Allow other people to manipulate you
- Are easily made to feel guilty
- Let other people change your plans
Stay away from negative people!
Don’t share your inner most desires and life’s goals with these sorts of people, they will derail you and put you at the lowest rung of the personal development ladder and keep you there for as long as they can, whether they do it consciously or subconsciously. These negative people are generally not successful people themselves; to be successful it takes a certain mind set and particular attitude, you cannot cultivate those without the right outlook. Once we are on that bottom ladder rung, right along with those negative people, they will do their earnest best – if only they applied themselves so completely to other aspects of their lives – to keep us there with them. Misery loves company and negative people are out to make you miserable.
And you may find yourself in small town America.
And you may find yourself living in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind someone really large at the grocery checkout.
And you may find yourself saving for a beautiful house, with your beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, well… why am I sharing my goals with these negative people?
If you can only find negative people, stop sharing!
Can’t find anyone positive to share your goals with that will support you and help you grow? Then stop sharing your goals completely, at least for now. Become that better person, become that movie star, become wealthy, learn that foreign language, release that music CD, and when you’ve achieved your goals, you can tell those negative people your next goal protected with the armour that comes from having done something with your life.
Even if you don’t share your goals with negative or positive people as you journey forwards and make progress each day, you will still receive lots of criticism. There will more negative criticism than positive, it may even masquerade as useful advice. The negativity will be aimed to slow you down or push you off the path from where you want to be.
Even when you reach your goal and you are now at the top of your game and you are the best you can be and successful at all of your achievements, the real negativity will begin. Jealously, back biting, the green eyed monster, these will be waiting in the wings to drag you back off the plateau you’ve reached to make you do it all over again. Negative comments, on the journey and at the final destination of the goal will hurt you, they will slow you down, and they will suck away your energy. You need to learn to develop a really thick skin and shrug off the comments of others. The goals you are pursuing are for your gratification and your improvement and your enjoyment and nobody else’s.
It takes a stronger and better person than me to develop a skin thick enough to ignore all negative comments that come my way. And over the course of my life I’ve had a lot of negativity directed at me. I might not have a really thick skin and the negative comments may cut me to the quick but I have developed self-defence tactics to prevent myself from showing how hurt I am, tactics to prevent me being de-railed by people who want to hinder rather than help, tactics that build my energy right back up so I can keep going. I often shrug off negative comments with a non-committal or canned response. There are a lot of scoffers in the world and you won’t be able to protect yourself from all of them but you can develop these same tactics and others I will write about in a future article that will protect you from the majority of them.