Recently I had an interesting discussion about society. It’s a burden, but you can not go without it. Wikipedia says society is a group of people involved in persistent interpersonal relationships, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory. So you can’t do much about it. Most of the time you are born into it. You are raised in it and you are influenced by it before you have developed enough brain to realize it.

The funny thing is, society comes with lots of rules and even worse, it comes with lots of expectations. Society forces you to behave in certain ways. It demands what to do and what not to do. It influences your entire behavior, your way to interact with people, the way you are organizing your life. Simple example, have you ever farted in a noisy way in a restaurant? Probably not intentionally. Suddenly all people around ignore you with an OMG face or stare at you, trying to kill you with their eyes. It’s a normal body function, designed by nature to avoid random ugly human explosions. There is air inside your body which needs to get out, and there are not too many body exits. Everybody farts, but most of us secretly, pretending they never did. And the society stands in front of you, looking shocked and waving with a raised index finger, saying “no no no, you are not supposed to do that, you are a bad bad boy”.

Society forces you to suppress your natural body functions and needs, wow. Well, in this case I would support society in the restaurant case. Not because of the “oh noo, nice people don’t do that” reason, rather because this might influences my taste experience in a negative way. And I simply don’t wanna smell what the other person had for breakfast. But you get the point, society forces you to behave in certain ways and if somebody steps out of the row, society will punish him or her. There are so many examples, showing too much skin,  tattoos, faces full of metal, and much more. Just being different triggers the society punishment machine already. This is actually quite sad.

So what expects society from you? Are you expected to behave polite, honest, respectable? Certainly. Boys don’t cry for example, they are supposed to be strong. The interesting thing here is, society slowly changes its mind and it becomes accepted slowly that men can be sensitive and soft. Some decades ago no man would have agreed to advertise body lotions, no way. But this makes it even more difficult. Those society expectations are at times even contradicting. As before men are expected to lead, to be strong, to drive, to create, to establish, to make a point. And at the same time they are expected to be emotional, sensitive, romantic, caring and compassionate. This rarely works out. What usually happens is that girls are attracted by the first kind and then they try to transform the men after marriage into the second kind, which of course generates some friction. And know what, when they succeed with that transformation, then they complain that you are not the tough guy anymore they married some years back. Irony of society.

But same problems for girls. They have to fit into the current beauty ideal. which is almost impossible. But to give all girls some hope, the beauty ideal changes over time. In times of less food and starving we might switch back to the ideal from the time of Rubens. Current society expects girls to be beautiful, agile, sporty and sexy. And at the same time girls have to behave modest, polite, shy, cautious . This doesn’t fit. Men expect their women to be presentable, they wanna boast with their girls and at the same time they get angry and jealous of another guy gets attracted and dares a look. World is full of contradictions triggered by society.

Some people don’t accept the pressure from society and become rebellious. They actively behave against societies expectations. And there are many ways to do this, starting with fancy hair cuts, tattoos, piercings and different clothing styles. There are so many different scenes out there, revolting against the expectations of society. But most of them give up over time and become society conform, owning a little house, having children, running to work every day. It’s hard to fight society long-term.

And it’s also hard to escape society completely. Some people try, with leaving the country, moving to different parts of the world. But this is no real escape. They just move into a different society with different expectations and rules and sooner or later they will be caught by the new society and adapt. A very few people try to escape completely, living alone up in the mountains or deep in forests. This is the only way to get out of this game. But then you have eliminated also the good sides of society. Then you have to live without any health care, without dentists. In fact you have to do everything on your own, you have to get the knowledge and skills to survive without society. All the knowledge which is distributed over many people in a society, dentists, butchers, farmers, construction workers, … You do not have access to this knowledge anymore and you have to gather it as good as you can by yourself.

So, it’s hard to live with and without society. But a little rebellion can not harm. So next time you are sitting in a restaurant, fart as loud as you can and feel good about it. Or simply play with societies hate and say out loudly to your neighbors table with a shocked facial expression “oh my god, did you really do that here?! what the hell did you eat?!”. And then lean back with a huge internal smile and watch the show of society. Life is beautiful, isn’t it?