I never stopped living for other people. I am completely dependent on others, as are most of us, unless you live off the grid in the woods and never see anyone and do everything for yourself. But most of us live in a community and we are dependent on others to make life possible. We use cars, houses and infrastructure that other people build. We work at jobs provided by other people. Or we are dependent on others to do the work we hire them to do. Show me a person who says they aren’t dependent on and therefore living for others, and I’ll show you someone who is oblivious to reality.
It is not possible to stop living for other people unless, like I said, you take yourself off the grid. Every choice in the day takes into account a calculation about how others will be affected. Perhaps people aren’t aware of it, but your subconscious mind knows and is having its say, too. We live in a web of relationships and we are all like spiders who can feel every little tug made by every single person in that web. I don’t think most of us stop living for other people until we have stopped living. I don’t believe anyone stops caring about the judgments of others, either.
What I think happens is that we start learning to be more sophisticated about it. We learn how to manage other people’s perceptions. We learn how to hide the things they won’t like from them. We learn how to hide from society, if necessary, perhaps by not talking to people in the real world and making most of our contacts online. Maybe we live way out in the sticks and spend most of our time with animals. Maybe we hide in our rooms and write. Maybe we get drunk or high a lot. Maybe we move thousands of miles from our families of origin and live among people who don’t speak our language (as my sister does). Maybe we become artists and live in NYC and gain latitude because everyone knows artists are nuts (as my brother did). Maybe, indeed, we go mentally ill, thus creating a little more room for ourselves as the others become more tolerant of weirdness on the part of the mentally ill (as I did).
I’m not saying we might go mentally ill on purpose. But that the response to too much social pressure we can’t submit to would trigger mental illness. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me.
I do not mean to say we hide or create space between us and others in a pejorative way. I see it as a survival mechanism—a way of coping with the need to account for others all the fucking time. We all have unique ways of creating a little space between us and society, but we can never get very far away. Never far enough to have the mental freedom many of us wish for. It is always there—that pressure, like being twenty feet beneath the surface of the water and feeling that constant pressure on our sinuses.
These survival mechanisms are like blowing our noses to equalize the pressure. That is all we can do. We can’t make the pressure go away. We can only cope as best possible. Even if we went into space, it wouldn’t go away. We’d be in constant contact with earth and also having to deal with our fellow astronauts all the time. In fact, it would probably be worse then ever in space.