The other day in our research class my adviser referred to me as an ethnographer. It wasn't so much as she said it. It was more in the way she said it. Sort of offhand, like it was obvious. Like the sun is going to come up. It was the way it was such a given to her that through me. You see I had not begun to think of myself that way. And it called to mind a favorite quote from a favorite author Kurt Vonnegut, who said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
Vonnegut's quote is all about self-actualization. And I'm all about that. I love the human capacity to continuously reinvent oneself. To learn from our past and use it to make a better future. In my life I've pretended to be a lot of things. Some good. Some not so much. Recently I've been pretending to be a marathoner, an educator, a writer. Now an ethnographer.
And so it goes.
Vonnegut's quote is all about self-actualization. And I'm all about that. I love the human capacity to continuously reinvent oneself. To learn from our past and use it to make a better future. In my life I've pretended to be a lot of things. Some good. Some not so much. Recently I've been pretending to be a marathoner, an educator, a writer. Now an ethnographer.
And so it goes.
I like this. A lot. I'm finding out more and more that Vonnegut pretty much had it dead on in that quote. Well played. But it must be said, I don't really see you pretending. I see you as being. Perhaps that's what makes the difference?
Boy, I took that quote in a totally different way, and I love that quote also. My feeling was he was talking along the line of a Buddhist proverb "know what you know, don't know what you don't know."
Pretending gets you in trouble, because eventually you will get called on it. For example, if you pretend you are a writer and produce nothing but wordy, pretentious nonsense, people quickly see the emperor has no clothes. If you pretend to be an accountant, people will soon see things figuratively and literally don't add up.
You didn't pretend, Jeff, to run marathons. You DID it. It's not like you were running on a treadmill and imagined chugging along through the streets of Philadelphia. Your writing is sound, and interesting. You are an expert in instructional design, etc., not a pretender.
And if your adviser offhand called you an ethnographer like she would call you "Jeff," well, there's a true reason for that.
Pretending does things like scam, fail, cost money, destroy projects, embarrass, and mislead. To quote another great character, George Costanza, I always wanted to pretend I was an architect.
See where that got him....