Adam Blatner

There are so many things to do, so many roles to play: Going to the toilet has many sub-roles, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman, depending on whether you’re constipated or have diarrhea, on the quality of the plumbing and the warmth of the toilet, on whether the toilet is in the bathroom or in an outhouse, depending on the quality of toilet paper and whether you’ve run out—so many variables! Multiply that by some un-nameable but large number that applies to a lot of other roles in life and you get very multi-complex indeed! Yet we take it all as one lifetime and treat it as ordinary. But it is extra-ordinary how many and varied are these roles!

More, the roles become more and more differentiated as we age, we take on different jobs, hobbies, have different numbers of kids and marital situations, live in different countries, cultures, have different religions, are differently devout in our practices even if we share (on the surface) the same religion. Wow!

More, our collective undergoes many shifts: Our profession or type of job, within a nation with a certain cultural heritage, within a class of a certain cultural background, within an extended family with its own peculiarities, within a family with its own peculiarities, and our birth order too, give us certain unspoken roles!

Life is very multi-complex because within all those inherited roles we also have individual preferences depending on our temperament, interests, talents, exposure to whatever games or books or laboratories or household or farm tasks we face, we are also influenced—sometimes driven—by political exigencies, teachers and attractions to teachers and other students.

All this according to our species, our special talents or extraordinary sensitivities, our blind spots or what we’re just not able to do or be sensitive to… all this and we’re subject to larger systems that variably are sensitive to our individual differ-ences—or ignore them. And yet we’re expected to succeed in what the culture or class deems successful, rather than be pulled out of the main-stream values by our individual and often peculiar preferences.

…It’s a wonder anyone makes it, achieves success, or relative success, or even adjustment.