On what not to do

I have yoga tattoos. The first time my girlfriend saw them she left a conspicuous moment of silence. I said what do you think and she said it’s okay baby no one’s perfect. It was funny. I’m not exactly embarrassed about the tattoos, but I’m usually quick to point out how ridiculous they are, and the fact I didn’t with E is because I somehow knew that she knew that I knew they’re ridiculous. I got the tattoos during a time when I thought that having a passion meant advertising it to others, and that signaling identity could separate me from the large swaths of the world that I deemed as stupid, wrong, or dangerous. It probably goes without saying that this was a time of my life during which I was quick to utter phrases like late-stage capitalism. It was my early twenties, and of course my identity creation was characterized by other forms of petulant rebellion—new clothes, new posters, new music, new diet, new Facebook posts. In my defense, all the newness was part of an excited exploration of something I loved and cared about, but/and/also my misunderstanding of the essence of both yoga and identity made my life appear as a performative attempt at being something special, and more: being right. I was an affluent intellectual white hippie who used big words I hadn’t integrated to rebel against things I didn’t understand while high on drugs I knew were the answer to everything broken in society. 

It’s cute to look back on, and I feel sorry for the people that had to interact with me. What I didn’t understand then is that I was using my beliefs to bolster separateness. Leave aside for now just how oxymoronic this is with regard to yoga—a practice meant to bridge rather than divide, to dismantle identity creation rather than supercharge it—but what happened for me is a by-the-book example of hypocrisy and piousness. People hate hypocrisy and piousness. And pretty much everyone has a strong radar for both. This is why it can be appealing to choose forthright negativity over condescending goodness.

That’s a second-order effect though, one that exists as a direct result of separating people by identity and personal belief, which in turn incentivizes a specific kind of laziness. All you have to do in order to overcome the age-old difficulties of loneliness, uncertainty and death is package those things in your favorite hobby or philosophy or yard sign, and then use that to define your character. At last: Belonging! Wisdom! Comfort!

Two things I’ve learned the hard way. When we take what’s given to us without personal investigation, it comes across as blind fundamentalism. If after personal investigation we rebel against what’s given and adhere only to the beliefs of a shiny in-group, it comes across as desperate reactivity. Either way, pretty cringy. Think vitriolic vegans, Burning Man ayahuasca polyamorists, the religiously intolerant, science-worshipping atheists, rich libertarians, entitled socialists, platitude-filled yoga people, anyone who becomes what they decry in the act of decrying it. In other words: the noble eight-fold path of my twenties.

To be honest I’m still doing it, right now, in writing this—trying to package something I personally understand as being correct. Pointing this out is an attempt to forestall my own hypocrisy, and also to say that persuasion isn’t something we should avoid. It’s great to have strong views, but those views cannot prize belonging to a group above all else. Conformity kills complexity. Those views also cannot be based only in reaction to the idiots or moral nags over there. Arrogance kills conversation. I’ve been trying to avoid words like red and blue here, but yeah: societal disconnection is a byproduct of large groups of people lining up to get bad tattoos. The great thing about literally everything but skin ink, though, is that it’s impermanent. We can change.

Thankfully for me and the people in my life, a persevering yoga practice is pretty effective at stripping away layers of dishonesty and ignorance, and while I still have a real long way to go with that, I’m glad I’ve stuck with it—now I can make an identity out of thinking identity creation is bad because I have visible proof of my understanding in the form of tattoos of the gods of someone else’s religion. But no one’s perfect, and thank those gods and all the other ones too that my girlfriend still loves me.

Lol, exactly this