I’ve got a new fancy running watch and it means I can track my running now without having to take my phone with me. I was walking home the other day from a run around the park and thinking how lovely and freeing it was not to have a phone, and not to feel influenced for that hour by Instagram, or emails or the news. ‘Ooh it’s so nice not to be influenced by anything at all right now’ I cheerily said to myself.
But then I realised, I was of course still influenced by so much in that moment. Influenced by the infrastructure around me, influenced by some guy who years ago decided there should be a road there, and that cars would drive on the left in this country, and that there would be a recreation ground on the other side of the hedge, that recreation grounds are a thing, that houses are a thing that we live in, that soon I would be home and ready to work again, that work is a thing that we do to earn money, that money has value and is worth us committing to blocks of time for.
Systems and influences are everywhere. In her book ‘Seven and a half lessons about the Brain’ Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about how humans create social reality. We create systems, and we also understand systems and act by them. We are super adept at pulling a tonne of information in and wading through it to understand what’s around us. When enough of us take in a system or belief then it becomes a social norm and we live by it and see it as part of ‘the way things are’. We become blind to the fact that most things in our lives are ideas made up by other humans.
Personally, when I remember this, I feel pretty free and empowered. When I remember that lots of the systems I live within aren’t just ‘the way it is’ but are actually ideas that other humans came up with, I remind myself that I have a human brain too, and thus, I can make up my own experience. I can work differently, live differently, find food differently, have relationships that look a bit different. And those choices aren’t wrong, they’re just different. We can make an impact on our reality, we can question how things are done, we can challenge who gets access to what, we can be in the driving seat of our lives.
So yes, we are heavily influenced by others for much of the time. But we do still have agency, and it’s important to question things around us, and ask ourselves how we really want to live our lives.
With love as always, Hannah and Team Bird
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash