4 Habits Mainstream Culture Frames as Weird (That Are Actually Shortcuts to Personal Growth)

Integrate your inner authority, even though no one else is doing it

“Culture is not your friend.” — Terence McKenna

The engines of mainstream culture — whether it’s news, music, or film — advocate for ways of thinking and acting that run directly counter to individual empowerment.

There are thousands of reasons for this, yet one of the most straightforward is that when the masses aren’t in touch with their own power, they’re easier to influence.

The following habits are so embedded into our collective consciousness that you may never have questioned them.

Though they’re subtle, when looked at in a different light, they can enhance your self-trust, and with it, the potency of your daily actions.

Habit 1: Talking to Yourself in Public: A Time for Reflection or a Sign You’ve Lost Your Mind?

I used to think of walks by myself as opportunities to listen to podcasts or music. But I’ve recently begun using them as periods for inner reflection and problem-solving.

When I internally reflect during my walks, I notice it’s easier to stay with my train of thought when I speak my ideas out loud. This also happens to be one of the most frowned upon of behaviors.

Normally, if you’re talking to yourself, you’re a freak. But if you’re on the phone, you’re in the clear.

In this culture, going inward is weird, but constant stimulation is the norm. Hmm.

If you use walks to reflect on solutions to your problems, this will help your focus when you return to work. Training your mind to stay with a single topic amidst changing surroundings is precisely the type of exercise that equips you to enter flow states more regularly.

Conversely, the need to constantly stimulate yourself — whether it’s through media consumption or conversation — reflects a lack of inner composure.

And it makes sense. When we think about the powers at be (that is, big pharma, big food, media conglomerates, and the like) it’s easy to see that it may be in their best interest if the masses need constant stimulation.

When we don’t know how to go inward, we throw our money toward entertainment, fast food, and the like.

Talking to yourself is thus conceived as an aberration from normal — despite the improvements in focus and inner stillness it can bring to your life and mind. Got it.

Habit 2: Devoting Your Weekends to This

Mainstream culture encourages people to see the weekend as a time for passive consumption. And if you’re using your weekends to work, your friends or family may insinuate that you’re enslaved or taking yourself too seriously.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with using your weekends for leisure. But if you’re not currently 100% satisfied with the conditions of your life, weekends are two full days you can devote to changing it.

Yet if you’re spending those days mindlessly consuming, you’re setting yourself up to remain in the same position.

If you’re wondering about the difference between passive consumption and healthy leisure, ask yourself, “If I did this activity every day for 10 years, would I like where I end up?” If the answer is no, you might want to do something different.

Habit 3: Doing Things You’re Bad At

Ever been told to “stay in your lane”?

There’s a meme in mainstream culture that says unless you’ve received a Ph.D. in a subject, it’s inappropriate or even dangerous (gasp!) to make decisions based on your own investigations.

People suggest you can’t make informed decisions without encyclopedic-level knowledge about complex topics because you don’t know what you don’t know.

Yet when it comes to decisions that affect your very ability to remain alive (for instance, your health), trusting a board of distant experts is a strategy for renouncing your inner authority, throwing your hands up, and saying “Fix me, Daddy!”

Sure, in principle, the idea of consensus medicine makes sense. But in practice, medicine is overrun by special interests that sway regulators out of the direction of safety and toward profit.

This doesn’t mean that experts shouldn’t influence your thinking. Instead, you want to cultivate trust in your ability to come to conclusions based on many different kinds of evidence.

People are conditioned to believe it’s a sign of intelligence to throw up their hands and say “What do I know?”, yet with this gesture, they’re throwing away the very opportunity to grow psychologically, spiritually, and intellectually.

This is an invitation to stop treating authority figures as oracles.

When you prioritize your own understanding, you expand your zone of competence. When you do this in one area, it becomes easier to do it in the next. And then your competence expands in a domino-like manner.

Soon, what once felt alienating will feel well within your capacity. This type of growth can’t happen if you’re outsourcing your knowledge to authority, as culture bullies you into doing.

Habit 4: Listening to the Natural Peaks & Valleys in Your Energy Levels

Culture normalizes the habits of using caffeine to wake up and alcohol to fall asleep.

But when you’re constantly altering yourself to align with the demands of your day, you learn to manhandle your body into desired states, rather than trusting that your energy levels are offering you precious insight into your capacity in a given moment.

This habit is a natural extension of compulsory schooling: we had to raise our hands to pee. Authority told us when it was okay to listen to our body’s signals. Then many of us move into offices where our breaks are determined, not by the rhythms of our bodies, but by our employers.

You come to believe you need exogenous tools to feel prepared to meet whatever’s in front of you. This destroys your self-trust.

Yet the truth is that when you let sensations unfold naturally, you find that your energy follows an intelligent rhythm. There are moments when you’ll feel effortlessly active, motivated, and energetic. And there are moments when you’re tranquil, serene, and ready to rest.

These come unbidden when the moment is right.

The advantage of listening to your body is this: when you make a habit of letting yourself feel how you feel without intervention, very often the quality of your performance actually increases. After giving up caffeine, for instance, my capacity for focus has improved (despite caffeine’s reputation as a productivity hero).

Over time, listening to your body, rather than changing it to conform to your will, can diminish performance anxiety. Once you have the lived experience of seeing how action alone can shift your state, you break the assumption that you need to feel a certain way to take action in support of your goals.

This is a ticket to freedom.

Going against the grain in these small ways will whet your appetite for fresh ways of seeing reality.

The bizarre truth is this: we’re living in a clown world, where whatever we’re trained to see as normal is actually distorted. And everything we’re trained to see as distorted is healthy.

As a result, the following question can be a powerful source of guidance: “Do mainstream voices consider this way of acting healthy?”

Yes? Alright, do the opposite ;)