Do People Change?
self portrait
I think one of the main reasons I get creative is to make sure I do other things besides watch TV. Well, when I was younger it was more about boredom when there was nothing to watch on TV. Now it’s to prevent myself from just consuming the endless entertainment available to all of us. And that, dear reader, is the reason we find ourselves here right now.
I’m a pretty self-centered person. I always have been. I’m mainly interested in myself and what makes me happy. I’m curious about myself. What makes me tick? Maybe everyone spends lots of time thinking about themselves. I don’t know. I'm too focused on me.
The nature of my self-centeredness has changed over my 42 years though. I guess when I was younger it presented more as pleasure seeking. Now it’s more about self-discovery and self-growth. At least I try to make it more about those things.
Once, in my early 30s I found myself in a heated debate with a family member about whether or not people can change. At the time I felt like I had gone through a huge amount of growth myself, so I knew it was possible. My opponent insisted that people are who they are. They don’t change and they don’t want to change.
We were both right and we were both wrong. The question really isn’t can people change. It’s will people change. The will is mainly based on will. It’s entirely up to that person.
I think the part of me that changed the most is my shopping habits and my relationship to material things. Growing up in America, watching plenty of TV, I was an eager and devoted consumer. I loved getting new things and wanted more and more all the time.
I expressed my identity through my belongings and my clothing. I thought, if I have the right jeans and the right shoes, it wouldn’t matter if I was strange or uninteresting. Living in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by massive malls and outlet stores didn't help.
It seemed criminal to see amazing prices on great clothes and not buy them. I was for sure a shopaholic. Addiction experts like Dr Anne Lembke (author or “Dopamine Nation,” - a fascinating read that I highly recommended) say that accessibility is one of the leading causes of addiction.
When I moved to Israel I lost accessibility. Clothing shopping in Israel sucks. There’s a lot of cheaply made clothing that is sold for insanely expensive prices.
When I would travel back to the States to visit relatives, my shopping addiction would come back full force. I would spend the last day of my trip shopping, making sure to carefully comb through favorite stores, instead of spending time with my relatives. I literally could not help myself.
These days I am working on building my minimalism muscles. Nowadays I much prefer to have a handful of decent quality clothes that I wear all the time, to an ever expanding wardrobe that I am constantly adding to. I think this change has helped get me a bit closer to discovering what my actual identity is, instead of using clothing to define me.
The argument that people don’t change has become more visible to me now, because it seems like a lot of people don’t want to change. Why should anyone want to change? We work so hard to find a lifestyle that works and feels familiar and safe. I’m a huge fan of familiarity and safety.
I have lots of fear, but I am also a fan of novelty and adventure. I’m trying to shift my perspective on fear, from something negative that holds me back, or something positive to prevent me from danger, to just plain energy that is neither good nor bad. Keeping that energy entirely free of judgement enables me to just see it as energy.
I think of it as energy. I don’t know if it actually is, like, scientifically speaking, but for the sake of the argument let’s just go with it. If fear is energy and energy can neither be created or destroyed, that energy is there to be used. You can either take control of it and use it as fuel, or you can let it control you.
When I say ‘you,’ I mean ‘me.’ Because, like I said, I’m self-centered. This blog is really just me coaching myself and then asking all my friends and family to read all the things I want to say to myself.
I say that I’m self-centered but maybe I should say that I have behaved in self-centered ways in the past. If I believe people change, I shouldn’t identify myself with certain traits that I’m trying to shed. When we define we confine.
But I’m not actually trying to shed my self-centeredness. Maybe self-centered sounds like a bad thing, but who else should I center myself around? I am the only one who is consistently with me. I think it’s a good thing for the most part. I just want to add more interest in other people and things outside myself and my imagination.
I mean, I definitely have interest in other people but I’m not one of those people who can make conversation with anyone. I can make conversation with anyone who asks me a lot of questions about myself. But if I have to be the one being curious and asking questions, my window of interest narrows. I am also not wild about crowds or small talk.
I hope I never stop changing and growing, but that will require a great deal of effort and bravery on my part. I’ve already managed to figure out how to change my anger into fuel. Now I need to work on turning fear into fuel.