Living in a box

Hello Family, Friends, and the few random people who stumbled upon my blog,

Today, I am going to talk about the box in which we live. The box is an interesting thing. It is kind of like a prison cell. Prisoners enter the box, and once years pass, they go. But it is not really a box that quite literally traps you, it is more like keeps you in a bubble, or in this case the box. You are completely oblivious that you are in it but it still affects you. And where  this really comes in is mostly with people who go to school. Now I am not saying that it happens to all of them. Now that I think about it, it is not just the school. It is being raised in an institution. Frankly, there are a lot of people in different boxes. That includes me.

It is more a way of thinking than anything. We can take some examples. The big example for me is of course the opposite genders. Most seven year old girls are all about pink dolls, lollipops, the color pink itself, barbies, princesses. They don’t realize that it is the society that is deciding what they are and not them. It is because of Barbie. It tells them that this is the way girls are supposed to act, supposed to be. It raises them with an idea that pink is a girl color and that blue is a boy color. It makes them think that video games and boys are icky. It means that they are not necessarily themselves. They are just following a stereotype. It is what society tells them subconsciously. That traps them in a box. It makes them think in a different mindset than they what might really be.

To be honest, the same thing goes for boys. For what they see, boys are supposed to be gross to girls, hate the color pink, play video games and for some reason, they are not supposed to like math and school. And because it traps both of them in the box, it is not until they mature and grow up into the real world, they become aware of the box. Once they are aware, they could get out of it. Actually, I am aware of it, but I might still be trapped in it.

I feel I am more trapped in the un-wantingness to be different. I don’t want to be thought of as different by anyone else But I am different. I feel different because I am unschooled and I am not religious. So when I go to social things like soccer or lego robotics (for example), I am not trying to be like them but I try to hide that I am not like them. I try to hide myself. That makes me come across as a shy person. I don’t really talk much. I never really want to even say Hi. To be honest, there are some people that I don’t want to talk to. But then, there are some people that I never stopping talking to because they are just like me. A certain friend of mine puts the letter z in every one of her sentences.  Another seems to obsessed about a certain Youtuber with a certain aspect which makes them original. I am looking at you, Madeline.

But I can say that the box affects a lot. There are many more institutions that there create the boxes around you. Schools, TV, religion, social media, books, pop culture, politics, parents and family, and a ton of other things. It would take a whole week if I were to name them all. Probably not! 🙂 In some aspects it affects people in their teen years and high school. I have heard people in high school are being pushed to be something they are not. I am talking about kids because because people that I have seen fall into category go to school and are about my age. I am realizing that kids are quite impressionable. When I was five, I used to copy what I saw on TV. I used to eat the same foods, use the same sentences. I even copied the advertisements and pretty much said what they said when they eat their treat or food or whatever. A big example is back then when I watched commercials for Magi Masala Noodles. There were a bunch of kids and their mom was playing with a bowl of noodles and masala soup. The mother was playing something like Simon Says, where you have to use the spoon to take one sip of the soup or the fork to eat a bit of noodles. And I ended up doing it even without my mom participating in the game.

Now I realize that it is because of that, more start falling into boxes and maintain the boxes. It is like kinda a baby being born. There can be a foetus but it is not a baby yet. Obviously, with the food cravings of the mother, it slowly becomes bigger and bigger until it is finally born. Like the fetus, the kids are given a slight impression to begin with which keeps getting fed and reinforced eventually giving them a whole mindset. I hope more people reading my blog will realize that.

Maybe some people reading my blog are stuck in their own boxes too. But then again, aren’t we all?