That’s not a bad essay (BTW, essays should be in quote marks, and the book itself, The Simpsons and Philosophy, in italics), but I don’t think the quote is very interesting in isolation without any of the examples or comparisons.
I suspect you’re probably right that more examples makes this more interesting, given the lack of upvotes. In fact, I probably found the quote relevant mostly because it more or less summed up the experience of my OWN life at the time I read it years ago.
I spent much of my youth being contrarian for contradiction’s sake, and thinking myself to be revolutionary or somehow different from those who just joined the cliques and conformed, or blindly followed their parents, or any other authority.
When I realized that defining myself against social norms, or my parents, or society was really fundamentally no different from blind conformity, only then was I free to figure out who I really was and wanted to be. Probably related: this quote.
That’s not a bad essay (BTW, essays should be in quote marks, and the book itself, The Simpsons and Philosophy, in italics), but I don’t think the quote is very interesting in isolation without any of the examples or comparisons.
Edited, thanks for the style correction.
I suspect you’re probably right that more examples makes this more interesting, given the lack of upvotes. In fact, I probably found the quote relevant mostly because it more or less summed up the experience of my OWN life at the time I read it years ago.
I spent much of my youth being contrarian for contradiction’s sake, and thinking myself to be revolutionary or somehow different from those who just joined the cliques and conformed, or blindly followed their parents, or any other authority.
When I realized that defining myself against social norms, or my parents, or society was really fundamentally no different from blind conformity, only then was I free to figure out who I really was and wanted to be. Probably related: this quote.