My friend J just emailed me this:
"-Georgia O'Keefe loved flowers and rich, wet gardens so much that she moved to the desert so that she wouldn't be distracted from her painting. It seems like she gave up what was second-best to her to allow her energies to be more fully realized. I wonder if I could ever make that kind of sacrifice?"
Today, before coming home and reading this email, I was at work creating a little module on learning strategies and goal-setting. One of the things in the material I looked at asked students to consider what a person has to sacrifice in order to pursue a goal of winning an Olympic medal. I expanded on this saying something like "we usually have to sacrifice something to get something else we want. We might decide to give up time or money or habits or even relationships if there's something that matters even more."
As I wrote it, I thought about Ruby Payne's work saying that people living in generational poverty have to give up a lot if they are to get out of that poverty. She says that relationships are central to cultures in poverty (because people are the only possessions you reliably have), while in middle class culture individual striving and effort are more important (inanimate possessions are the marks of success). She talks about middle class people giving up relationships for other things (like you might move in order to get a better job, even if it means leaving friends and family), but that would be unthinkable for many people in generational poverty (family comes first, including extended families and dysfunctional families and abusive family members).
Somehow, amidst all this, I find myself wondering if the idea of sacrifice is old-fashioned, not current, even in middle class culture? It seems like "you can have it all" is a more popular notion; "you deserve it" is the underlying notion in many ads. Then again, there's also the "you've worked hard for this--you deserve it" message.
Is there a culture of self-indulgence? Is sacrifice an outdated concept? What do YOU think? What about the role of sacrifice in religion? What about people who feel that if they pre-emptively punish themselves, they won't be so severely punished by their god or by the fates?
Bittersweet
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Eyal and I always knew that it would be difficult building a family from
two different countries. It is just now, however, that we have to really
put that ...
12 years ago
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2 comments:
I realise that I think of different types of sacrifice differently. I agree that working Americans sacrifice a lot in their pursuit of material goods or a certain "lifestyle." What I question is why they are not willing to sacrifice some of those material goods in pursuit of peace of mind, leisure time, good health, or even in pursuit of financial solvency.
I think the high consumer debt in America is due to people feeling like they deserve to live the same lifestyle as the rich and famous. And of course this is not unreasonable of them because everyone can see that there's nothing superior about the rich and famous--they don't necessarily seem to work harder or be smarter than the rest of us.
So, to bring this digression around, maybe what I'm really wondering about how do people decide what they will sacrifice for what?
Why are some people willing to sacrifice their lives (and the lives of others) to a cause (as in suicide bombers and soldiers) and other people are not willing to sacrifice the power, security or status that they gain by driving a Hummer, for example?
I think that people make sacrifices based on what they value in the first place, or maybe to put it better, what are the values underlying their sense of identity and how they value themselves. If I value myself as a family member more than I value myself as a suicide bomber, I am more likely to sacrifice my career ( to be with my family) than my life. And of course your values are a direct result of the cultural worldview that you have formed in your time on earth ( umm among other things... I could diverge here (!!) but I wont)
I have been thinking alot about what kind of things make life meaningful to different people, and I thought all the different things that are meaningful are kind of all roads that lead to the same place, which is inclusion, or interaction in some kind of group- or connection with some other peoples. Without this any sacrifice would be meaningless.
What I am trying to say is that maybe the reason that people sacrifice different things is because of the many layers of meaning each sacrifice has... and these layers of meaning are dictated by the society at large and either include or exclude you from a group. Each to there own level of need, but all for the same purpose of interaction with the values of the larger society. People like to make sacrifices if it makes tham part of a group that they value.
The whole point of living independantly so that you can be wealthier ( as opposed to living with a large family) presupposes that wealth is measured in terms of money.
Maybe the question needs to be reversed to read, why is it that our (Western)economic structure that defines our culture rather than vice versa?
Or something like that anyway!!
(Your blog is always so interesting Catalin!)
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