Something I read recently about some existentialist philosophy that I thought applies to CDing and how we can be reluctant to express ourselves/be ourselves fully. It is Heidegger's concept of Das Man, roughly translated to The They.
The way I understood it was that we live our lives with a kind of existential anxiety, and to help deal with the anxiety we create this construct of The They, which is kind of "the muggles" or "the general public" I guess. The unwashed masses, all of those people who aren't us. They aren't really anyone, but they are everyone else... Well, we create The They, and then we tend to follow their dictate, we do what we think they would like us to do, and live how we think they want us to live. We've created them though, they only exist in our heads. It helps us to reduce the anxiety we feel by giving us some structure to live by, but it ends up turning us into conformists, doing things that we don't necessarily want to do but motivated by The They's opinion.
The follow on being that because we created them, it is only us who are creating the limits that we feel are "imposed by society" on us.
Unfortunately, this makes most of us live in ways that are not authentic, we just go with what we think they want us to do, and we do that all of our lives. Sometimes people might have an existential crisis where this lack of authenticity is felt strongly and the person is motivated to do something about it (i.e., maybe a mid life crisis).
Anyway, just an idea I read that I wanted to share, I thought it was quite relevant to people who might be struggling with what we think others might think of our whole thing...
