My problem is that I’m an extremist. There’s a day-to-day social reality that requires the adoption of several distinct and differentiated personas depending on the situation at hand, and it’s an adaptation of social evolution which I’ve never been able to hone properly.
There are twenty-four hours in any given day. Theoretically, we’re supposed to sleep for eight of them (not that I know many people who manage that), so put that third aside. Of the remaining sixteen hours, a standard full-time job occupies fully half that.
As a general proposition (with exceptions, of course), the working half of the day requires one of those alternative personas. If you’re someone who dislikes it when other people don’t care about doing things correctly, then in a workplace which, say, consists of co-workers who are idiots and/or management who are idiots, social standards dictate that you ignore all of that, focus on your own tasks, and go home at the end of the day.
In other words, you have to shutter off and shelter your own personality and character in favor of enacting the Workplace Persona.
Let me put it this way: Masks piss me off.
I don’t have a private persona for when I’m at home alone, a separate social persona for when I’m at the coffeeshop or meeting friends for a drink, and then another separate work persona.
But the normal dynamics of the Real World™ frequently require at least the creation and maintenance of the latter. And I’ve never been particularly good at pulling it off.
It’s a sort of socially-mandated multiple personality disorder which disturbs me. It’s also the sort of juggling act that most people, apparently, are able to pull off (or at least pretend to) far more adeptly than I’ve historically ever been able to manage.
Shutting yourself (your self?) down or off for half of your waking day seems like a remarkably suffocating way in which to live life. One, of course, that until recently I had managed to stave off for nearly three years by lurching my way through work that was completely self-motivated.
Now, here I am trying to figure out whether or not I managed to pack, into any of the blue storage bins I used for my move last April, any of the masks I’ve had to try to wear back when I last had to do the routine and workaday Real World™.
Masks piss me off.
The Bardos Thodol emphasizes the “state of inbetween” as one where nothing is as it seems — and everything is illusion. In this view — all of reality is a mask. Now *that* pisses me off.
Which is all well and good but mainly irrelevant from an everyday perspective, especially for a devout agnostic whose response would be, “You say all of reality is a mask? Well, since that can’t be proven true or false, it doesn’t factor into making decisions anyway.”