Near the end of Winter Break, I spoke with an ex-real estate agent about why she left her profession. She replied that her decision had been rather simple: selling houses was just too easy.
She had decided to get her realtor's license because she wanted to help people find a place they would love to call home in an area that she was fond of. Sadly, her clients had different ideas of what was important.
Almost no one had decisive answers when asked what kind of house they wanted to live in, and—while a lack of concrete vision is perfectly normal—few of them had any interest in giving the question due thought.
Far too many of her clients came to her with no intention of finding a house they thought was beautiful, or perfect to raise children in, or where they had always wanted to live. Most simply wanted a place that would impress their friends.
The conversation finally gave shape to something I'd been pondering for many weeks. I often felt that I was stuck in a loop as I drove through Houston's seemingly endless suburbs.
All of the subdivisions were so alike. It seemed ridiculous that everyone's taste in homes was so similar. There are millions of ways to design a house, but everyone had settled on only a few dozen as the ideal floor plans.
But of course, few people pick a house for what they want. The houses that everyone inhabits are functions of what is in style and what people find impressive. Thus, our houses have high, airy, frigid ceilings when most would prefer cozy warmth. The few brave souls who want a homey abode are thwarted, as developers only erect standard, cookie-cutter designs.
Generic housing is just another aspect of the human geography that makes America so homogeneous. Hills may roll, rivers may surge, but the strip malls invariably stretch to the horizon.
For a culture that claims to pride itself on individuality, and holds individual choice as being the paragon of virtue, we let others' views influence our own actions to a shocking extent.
If this effect were only tangible in the realm of the material, then it wouldn't be a huge issue. Fashion has always existed in one form or another, and it would not be reasonable or desirable for it to disappear. But along with a cookie-cutter house comes a cookie-cutter life, which is what we will lead when we live based on what we think others will be impressed by, rather than what we truly want.
We may think we are exempt from this, as students at liberal arts colleges make up a tiny minority of the U.S. population. But Brunswick, while not a suburb, is in many ways just another college town.
This column is not just another self-help-style piece advocating that you all be yourselves. "Be Unique!" is a tired mantra that we are all subjected to from our first years of schooling.
We have all internalized it to such an extent that we hardly think about it any more. Being unique is often interpreted as doing what one wants, regardless of where those desires come from.
But, as liberal arts students, no matter how generic we may be, we should strive not to be unique, but to understand our own uniqueness. We pick apart theories and criticize great works, but all too often we neglect to subject ourselves to the same level of analysis that we do the world at large.
We drift along doing great things, but perhaps not doing the things that would really make us happy. Too often, we shut our analytical faculties off when we leave the classroom.
While we worry about what we want to do, we should also ask ourselves why we want to do it. There is no point of being unique just for uniqueness's sake.
"Being different" is often just thinly veiled pretension. But if we examine our own motives, we may discover surprising things.
Such introspection may lead us to change our behavior, but that's not what matters. At the end of the day, if we all really do want the same kinds of houses, then we should all buy them.
The point is that we do what we really want to do. We are here at Bowdoin to prepare us life after college. We study broad swathes of human knowledge and become proficient in many disciplines.
But the point of it all is to make us happy. We are here to learn, and we should ensure that we learn about ourselves just as much as we do our chosen field of study.