It is ok to diagnose a universal malaise from your own subjective assessment, from that thorn in your side that you feel many times you talk with others, when you observe how the culture organises life today, when you hear people speak about their dissatisfactions, their anxieties, their fears, or when you notice a generalised difficulty to articulate our own thoughts on topics that you deem essential.
Most probably, you will be projecting some of your own fears, dissatisfactions, and failings upon it. And some people might say that “it is not actually a problem” because they do not recognise themselves in it or what they perceive in their surroundigs. That is ok as well.
You are seeking to make the world a better place and your initial scope happens to be ridiculously ambitious. That is no matter; you will learn through trial and error. And sure, you have exposed many of your insecurities or your own insufficiency, which others will try to deduce from what they think you are projecting. It does not matter either. Your soul will grow and you will eventually find that specific part of that universal problem that you are uniquely qualified to campaign against. You will find your particular role in this sublimely great, utterly complicated mission to make a better life for everyone in the community —no matter its size.
This ambition overshadows any of these “gotcha” that are beside the point. This is mere solemnity, the necessary role of the antagonist, the one who criticises. It is a role some people sacrifice themselves to fulfil. This possibility of projecting some of our inner pain in our missions is what makes us human. When we project, many others secretly sharing our sensibilities will recognise themselves in these projections.
In a way, you are also sacrificing yourself. You are symbolically sacrificing something of yourself to reveal a malaise that many feel but nobody articulates or dares to openly claim as an enemy, because it will show that they are vulnerable, that they can feel lost and imperfect, not knowing what they are doing. They might feel dishonest, endangering their carefully tailored façade upon which they think their value in society depends.
And probably, you are not only that sacrificial figure that can make a problem be recognised as such, and give existence to missions to battle it. Most probably, you yourself are one of the great sufferers of this malaise.
This does not make you weak or less capable of turning this issue around. On the contrary, you know it too well, you are in the thick of it, down in the trenches. You carry insider information. So do not be afraid if your great diagnosis, born in the fog of war, turns out to be a ghost chase. You are not crazy, pretentious1, puerile, or too self-absorbed. You are a human being with a soul right in the process of widening its capabilities of fully living.
As long as you do it from an honest, heartfelt place (and you will know when it is heartfelt), as long as you are detecting something that is constantly nagging at you and somehow nobody talks about, then you have the responsibility to say it out loud.
And maybe what you have to say will actually save someone, spark something, not only be of consequence to the discovery of your identity, but turn out to be something that somehow nobody uttered before, and it remains so obvious to you. This turn of events is far from uncommon, and it is a waste to consistently elude it out of unfounded fears.
- Bob Dylan, possibly one of the great pop artists most accused of being pretentious rightfully objected “What’s wrong with being pretentious”? And went on producing his unique art. I could not find the primary source for this quote, but you will find a fun way to access it through this Bret Easton Ellis interview on the Paris Review ↩︎