One of the frustrating parts of trying to become yourself, to find your real self, is that so much of who you are was shaped during a period for which you have no memories. The first memory that I have that I can date accurately was from when I was four years old. Before then, I was taught things, watched television, heard things, and did things that shaped me now, determined what I liked, showed me how people are "supposed" to live. However, I think that "being yourself," if it is possible, means that the beliefs that you hold because someone told you to believe them need to be re-examined.
I think that most people understand that when it comes to things like racism. If you were taught as a child to be prejudiced against people of different races for you, it seems obvious that your job is to root those beliefs out of your mind. However, I think that most people assume that what they want in life is an expression of their real self. If you want to eat ice cream and be a billionaire, most people assume that these are natural urges. Because school and parents aren't the ones teaching them, they must be "real" values. However, this idea is problematic.
So, the "real me" is the person that I am without any influences from the outside. Let's pretend that such a thing is possible for now, though that seems ridiculous, too (who taught me the word that I am using right now?).
Money is an invention of the adult world; it not a natural thing. You can't "naturally" want money. You have to be taught to want money. Strangely, too, when people state that they wish to be "rich," they rarely have an amount of money in mind. This kind of desire is really widely held, and must be learned. Because almost everybody I know wants to "be rich" (I certainly wouldn't turn down a big pile of money if somebody offered it to me), people think that it must be natural to want. It can't be, though, since there were thousands of years when people didn't have money (it didn't exist), and they were probably happy and miserable just like us.
Of course, it seems to me that if you learn from the world around you to want money, but not how much you are supposed to want, you can't ever know if you have enough. To have a desire that can never be filled -- that strikes me as something that would make most people unhappy, like if you were hungry constantly and could never be full.
So, what should we do? The desire to "be rich" seems to be universal, but it seems also to make most people unhappy (they don't get enough money to feel rich). I would argue that if we learned to want something, that we can unlearn to want it (or, to be more clear, learn to want something else more). So, I think that to be happy, it's important for people to unlearn their desire to be rich.
What makes this impossible for most people, I think, is their refusal to believe that they can learn to want other things from what they want now. I don't think that you should unlearn wanting natural things, like food or sunlight or the company of other humans. That seems foolish. However, wouldn't you be happier if you could unlearn your desire for things that cost a lot of money? I don't mean a better person, either -- I mean just happier.
One way to unlearn something is to unplug yourself from it. For example, I want the Mets to win, but they refuse to win enough to make me happy. I can't control how many games the Mets win, and it seems as though I am not going to get the 90+ wins that would make me happy. So, if I continue wanting this, I'll probably be unhappy. However, I could just stop watching the Mets on television, reading the sports news on the internet, and talking about the Mets with my father and my friend Clint. I would think that, then, it would be tougher for me to care about how the Mets are doing -- because I wouldn't know. If the Mets lose to the Braves and I don't hear about it, I don't have to get annoyed about it. I am free to choose to like other things.
I am not pretending that it's easy to break habits that have formed in your life -- I know that it's not. However, it's a lot easier to teach yourself not to want something that you don't need anyway than it is to get it. Even if the Mets won 90+ games this year and made the playoffs, I wouldn't be happy unless they got to the World Series. If the got to the World Series, I wouldn't be happy unless they won it. If they won the World Series, I'd be happy for about a week, and then I'd go right back to wanting them to win it the next year. Even Yankee fans find baseball to be more aggravation than pleasure. Loving a sports team is a bad idea, honestly. You generally get ten times more disappointment than joy.
Why do I love the New York Mets? One guess. My childhood. When I was seven, the 1986 Mets won one of the greatest World Series ever. I sat with my father in a basement and watched some of the games, which were among the greatest ever played (Game 6 is maybe THE greatest game ever played). My father took my to a game the next year, and I watched the Mets starter, Sid Fernandez, strike out 17 San Francisco Giants. My childhood taught me to care about whether the Mets won. They've never done as well, since. I learned it accidentally.
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