My Mother, My Father, My Money

Interesting. People's tendency to apply a label to themselves and define and categorize themselves is certainly a profound topic. It starts early on, we're labeled via gender, we're labeled via hometown, homestate, nationality, we pack on all these identities and we never really relent any of them, so why would an identity as "loser" or "undateable" be any different? It takes a strong will to shrug off the often burdensome notions of identity, our ego seems to latch onto them and collect them like trinkets. We become Christians, New Yorkers, Eagles fans, Americans, doctors, geeks, jocks, couch potatoes, housewives, victims, cancer survivors, all these silly signifiers that really only serve to occupy and distract from our true nature of simply being alive. Then things come along which are completely ambiguous, yet we somehow make them fit to our predefined paradigm, we act how we think Americans should act, we act the way we expect "dog people" should act, we're trained to beg for the treat of self-assurance, we do tricks to feed ourselves the notion that the world can be quantified and segmented and sifted out to nice neat little piles, we try to enter order into a chaotic world, and therefore when something comes along that truly just is, we feel the need to add a deeper significance to it, we put it into a category, we take our string of bad luck, or our bad habits and define them as something resulting from the fact that we're "losers" or "victims" or "chronically malfunctioning." I think Eckert Tolle hit some of these points in his various ramblings. We'd be so much more at peace if we could simply let go of some of these nonsensical definitions of who we think we are, and instead simply just BE, nothing more, just be.

You are an eloquent writer. Maybe that is a label that is helpful, but to push that point, even positive labels can be their own prison. I like what you wrote.

Why is your friend, the one that goes from job to job, considered a "loser" ? When i think of a loser, i think of some homeless alcoholic or drug addicted prostitute...and i'm guessing your friend is neither of those things....at least she has a job, right?