...or, rather I’ve heard the following more than the clichéd amount of bunnies breeding to upkeep the consumer economy of breeding to eat carrots: “Fake it till you make it.”
Unsolicited Advice
Under the exacting subheading of
Unsolicited Advice--I move to place the infamous “Fake it till you make it” in the TOP FIVE. After all, I am a 26-year-old human being in the United States with exposure to the social structure of social interactions--having gone through public school, an undergraduate program, and a graduate program. What I intend to say in this paragraphed snippet is: Why the heck do sayers of such a phrase think that I have not been exposed to this phrase ad nauseum in my time and experiences so far?
Carrot Dynamics
I entered graduate school in August 2012. Little did I know that my exposure to, for anti-economical purposes I will refer to “Fake it till you make it” as The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase, The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase in graduate school would rise to such the extent that the potential in
Chobani employees’ ownership stake in the company now looks like employee disenfranchisement.
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| Image Credit: Christopher Tovo |
The professors and graduate students in the program I completed, the latter on a lateral level to my own I might add, have developed quite an intricate propensity for giving unsolicited advice. I think the motivator for this phenomenon is two-fold. One deals in the professor or graduate student reaffirming his or her wavering ego in an attempt to establish some semblance of authority in a setting that, keyword,
seemingly requires the outward expression of an informed opinion. People do have the more keen and humble choice to partake in not partaking (i.e. keep quiet and listen), but insecure peacocking dominates false education in the education field. I have come to realize that quite a few professors, not all, are like wild, lonesome jungle leopards--they piss their names on any paper, poem, book, anthology, etc. that they can spell their names out on in the cold. It is, plainly put, annoying. A certain prowess does exist in the gait of these lonesome leopards as yes it is impressive to publish with an outside publisher. It would be remiss not to mention that the capability for these professors being able to publish is permitted by their established contacts and all this name-establishing/pissing. However, the bag of publications is separate from the self-talk and purporting that can take place in the company of these lonesome leopards. This is the defining difference between the few and not all professors. There are professors that have publications and an established name and then there are professors that have publications, an established name, and no human being will hear the end of it in the professor’s all-too-talkative presence. I will detail the unfortunate ripple effect of the lonesome jungle leopards on their clientele--graduate students--later.
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| Image Credit: Nevit Dilmen |
The second motivator for professors and graduate students to give unsolicited advice has to do with The Big Carrot. The Big Carrot being the be-all and end-all of carrots dangling in front of an individual’s face--future happiness. Therein lies a couple of different assumptions. An assumption that my future happiness is the same as the sayer of The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase and an assumption that happiness is such a construct as to only be a dangling carrot--taunting and never to be acquired.
Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” applies more so to more concrete ideas than that of happiness. As happiness is a malleable construct that is ever-changing in the individual’s perception. Sure--some sort of Buddhist generalization can be applied that all happiness for all individuals deals with a meditative sense of the moment and nothingness, but, again, not all humans subscribe, whether wise to do so or not, to this mindset as definitionally happy.
The Unfortunate Ripple Effect
As an introvert--a natural non-sayer of sayings, my exposure to unsolicited advice has been excessive in comparison to all of the professor and graduate student sayers. Oftentimes, which has been established again and again as a character development in literature, people misinterpret quietude from an individual as arrogance, aloofness, egotism, stupidity, or helplessness. These misinterpretations then inspire sayers to take peacocking corrective actions by fluffing their feathers about the individual’s, in reality, too-polite and seemingly smaller physical presence. The sayers fill and subsequently suck the air out of the room leaving the non-sayer, or introvert, with a confused sense of being--inspiring internal questions such as:
Why does he think I am so stupid? Or
what makes her think I want to in any way have a life resembling her own?
“Fake it till you make it” poignantly insults the individual. The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase aggressively commands the individual to lie to themselves internally and disrupts whatever confident and unwavering sense of self he or she precedingly developed all while being condescending to the individual. Some might make the argument that The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase is a cute and positive motivational phrase that
really means an individual should adopt habits outside of his or her comfort zone to achieve some established goal. An issue that exists in this previous unpacking is that it is a secondary interpretation to the actual language present in the phrase itself. Another issue being, perhaps, the very thesis of this rant--that the context of The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase within my graduate program has only, yes only, been for a lonesome leopard or insecure graduate student to piss all over me trying to establish some kind of dominance over my quietude.
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| Image Credit: Bracewalk |
I myself wish to establish that I do not need to fake anything to be myself. I am an individual and I do not want to be her, do not want to acquire his personality, do not want The Big Carrot. I am unapologetic about being quiet, so I say to the sayers of The-Stop-Saying-That-Phrase-Phrase nothing because there is no advice to give. Nobody asked.
