Conscious Choice
“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” - Charlie Jones
A few years ago, I sat through a female sexuality workshop while at a retreat in Mexico. In truth, I almost skipped the whole thing because, as a gay man, I wasn’t sure that the information would be relevant to me, but I decided to join the audience in the hopes that one moment might catch my eye. About halfway through the workshop, a straight man in his late twenties raised his hand and spoke about how challenging dating apps were to navigate because all the women who hit him up wanted were surface-level physical connections.
Many women I knew shared this concern, which surprised me. I used to think this was an experience unique to women, never realizing that men could feel similarly.
The feeling I experienced in that moment was similar to how I felt early in the last election when it seemed like the only thing our country could agree on was that these were not the two best candidates our country could produce. No matter what side of the aisle you fell on, everyone I spoke to felt at least one (if not both) candidate(s) didn’t belong.
In each moment, my thought was the same, “How can both parties share this belief, and yet each one thinks they are alone? Is no one actually talking to each other?!”
I grew up in a very liberal town in Western Massachusetts full of well-intended people who often preached about the importance of considering others and ensuring everyone felt included. What was outwardly framed as a worldly view was, in fact, just a reflection of a five-college town that lacked diversity and featured predominantly upper-middle-class wealth.
No matter the intent, there was a correct belief and an incorrect one at every term regarding things like politics or religion. Even though the majority classified themselves as Liberal, their views were a direct reflection of their surroundings and seemingly just as narrow as those in other parts of the country, desperately holding on to oppositional beliefs.
I was lucky to be different, just enough to question if things were exactly as they seemed in front of my eyes. I had a Spanish Teacher in High School who loved to go off on rants about the existence of Aliens. As a class, we did our best to get her started down the rabbit hole each day to ensure that we wouldn’t have to do any work. My classmates thought she was crazy, their parents tried to get her fired, and I sat there each day thinking, “But can anyone prove that she is wrong?”
One of the things I have previously judged most harshly is other people who don’t hold their own beliefs and seemingly stand on soap boxes with proclamations made from the voices of everyone else but their own. I have always maintained that I don’t care what someone believes as long as it is theirs. But in actuality, we all are reflections more of our surroundings than our actual selves.
Psychologists call this the “Mere-Exposure Effect.” This idea centers around the fact that people prefer things not because of internal reasons but simply because they’ve been repeatedly exposed to them. This means most of your desires are not your own but reflections of what you have witnessed.
Most of us get the base of our belief system from our parents. We choose our faith practices based on those they previously chose and subjected us to. We vote the way they taught us to vote. We root for the teams they rooted for. From an early age, we are products of our environment and live in a society that does almost anything to teach us not to find our own opinions on everything we see.
More than that, in a world of algorithms designed to cater to us in the exact place that we are, it becomes easier and easier each day to think that everyone should have the same beliefs as we do or that there is a right and a wrong in every situation. Even though others have entirely different backgrounds and life experiences, we expect them to fall in line because that is the safest way to survive in the world, to make ourselves a reflection of those who hold power instead of finding our own.
It wasn’t until I moved out of my hometown that I started to meet people from different walks of life who helped me to begin to question my programming. My favorite example is a coworker I had at my old job. He was born and raised in Waco, Texas. Before he met me, he had never met a gay person (to his knowledge) and had limited interactions with people of other races. I was hesitant to meet him until I reflected that our likely difference in beliefs was less about how we treated other people and more about who we had been taught to believe was “the other.”
If you have never met a gay person and likely have heard one narrative for how we show up in the world your entire life, how are you not going to, on some level, be homophobic? If you grew up believing that someone like me is an “other” and a threat to your beliefs (and safety overall), of course, you are going to have reservations. More importantly, how could I judge him for it when I have held my own internalized homophobia throughout my life?
But the problem is, it is hard to ask ourselves these questions when we are too busy staying safely in our boxes surrounded by other people with the same world views. My old coworker ended up being one of the best guys I worked with, and this was the beginning of what has become the most triggering and critical reflection in my life: surrounding myself with people who hold opposing viewpoints is essential to not only my growth but also to establishing my own beliefs.
We are taught early on not to discuss politics, religion, and other hot-button issues for fear that it will inevitably lead to conflict. But our inability to discuss these things is the base of all the conflict we see in these areas.
Talking to people who have a different life view than you triggers the very core of your being. It requires you to reflect on how narrow your own viewpoint is, which threatens not only your sense of self and how you view the world but also, through that lens, your perceived safety.
If you believe that people who vote one way are wrong, it is easier not to know that someone you care about holds those beliefs than to hold that all that you love about them can exist simultaneously with their reasoning for voting the way they do.
This, of course, has been especially true over the last month.
Jim Rohn famously said, “You are the reflection of the five people you spend the most time with.”
In every area of your life, looking at whether the people around you can help you improve is essential. If you are trying to be successful in business, relationships, or any other area of life, you have to surround yourself with people who are successful in those ways.
We live in a world where people work every day to portray themselves outwardly without having access to themselves internally. If you want to grow and be more rooted in yourself, you need to ask yourself how willing you are to seek out others who are different from you, like those who come from various walks of life or hold oppositional beliefs.
The question is: Are you willing to seek discomfort to get to know yourself better? If you look around and only see reflections of your current self in the faces of those around you, then that is who you will be going forward.
I have resistance to it often. I hate the feeling when others stand firmly in beliefs that oppose my own, and even more fear when, in the end, some part of their argument ends up being right. I can’t count the number of times in my life that I have avoided speaking to ensure that I didn’t say something incorrectly. My fear of being judged by others surpassed my own desire to learn something new or to represent the way I felt at that moment.
But I grew up in a town where everyone shared the same beliefs because they were “the right ones.” It didn’t stop racism, homophobia, and other forms of “othering” from existing. Instead, it caused everyone to look away while holding onto a belief that the bubble they lived in couldn’t possibly have anything other than love inside of it.
I appreciate my hometown daily for challenging my perceptions of reality. I am thankful for my high school Spanish teacher, who believed in aliens, and the professor years later who expelled me from English class on the first day of college for rejecting a classmate’s opinion, which I considered close-minded.
Overall, I’m grateful for everyone I’ve encountered who held different views than mine throughout my journey.
At every oppositional turn, I have been forced to look inward, to question not only myself but also the solidity of the foundations of my current set of beliefs. All of this has made me more rooted in who I am and taught me how much our views are allowed to change as we experience more of the world.
As I move forward, I hope to be a bit more fluid with my identities and views, to judge others less for reflecting on what they have been exposed to, and to seek first to see their humanity. More than anything, I hope to give myself more permission to seek out the “opposition” to realize more and more that there is far more that unites us than initially perceived.
Or, at the very least, to be reminded that I somehow am not the center of the universe as I believe myself to be and that there are other viewpoints other than my own.
With Love,
Clayton