Out With The Old, In With The New? Or Is It In With The Old, Out With The New?

Plenty of articles will tell you how to clear the junk out of your house, your apartment, the dorm, the back bedroom. What about clearing out your life, or your head? Think about how long we keep old ideas the same way we keep worn shoes or a stack of newspapers. Years go by and we never stop to ask whether those ideas still do anything for us, or whether they still match who we've become. You've probably seen a man or woman wearing the same haircut and the same clothes they wore decades ago. It doesn't flatter them now, and still they keep it.

Young people pick things up fast and drop them just as fast. Once we're older, do we ever swap out the people who shape us, or the things we hold to be true, even after we've run into evidence or lived through something that points the other way? Some of us take pride in never budging. Fine, if a belief still holds up, keep it. But there's a difference between keeping a belief that makes sense and clinging to one out of stubbornness or ego. Maybe you're afraid that changing your mind will mark you as someone who can be led around by a ring in the nose, or dismissed as spineless. So ask yourself: who is actually running your life, and is that the arrangement you wanted?

Who runs your life, really? Something good, or something that isn't? How settled do you feel about the choices you've already locked in? There's a fear buried in all of this, the fear of losing your sense of self, of waking up unsure who you are the moment you admit a few of your old decisions deserve a second look. What suits one person can leave another miserable. Chase whatever the crowd seems to prize and keep grading yourself against their imagined standards, and you may end up unhappy for no good reason. Anthropology, the study of how people live across different cultures and places, would jolt a few readers if they took it up. What counts as civilized or attractive shifts wildly from one society to the next. For a local example, consider how much attention Kim Kardashian's figure draws from certain men.

This gets sharper when someone was raised to meet a standard built entirely around other people's opinions. It holds for a teenager in a gang and it held for a teenager in Beverly Hills. And isn't it strange how one person wears or does something genuinely unusual, and before long the thing becomes a trend everyone feels obligated to copy and praise? I grew up inside that logic, always puzzled about why everyone else counted for more than I did. It chips away at your sense of your own worth.

If you actually believe in freedom, the world has plenty of space for different beliefs to sit side by side. So why do some people feel they must wipe out or convert anyone who sees things differently, sometimes with a threat of death behind it? Variety does a lot of good. It helps that people are drawn to different work and different pastimes. If nobody enjoyed cooking, where would our meals come from? What makes one job rank above another? Someone has to repair the toilet and haul away the trash. Is a pilot more skilled than the mechanic who keeps the plane flying? When my brother served in the U.S. Air Force, he told me the Canadian Air Force flipped the ranks: pilots were sergeants and mechanics were lieutenants, exactly backward from the American setup.

There's also the question of whether we should keep lurching toward whatever's new, like the new core curriculum in schools. It looks too tangled for grade-schoolers to follow, maybe too tangled for adults too. Who's supposed to walk the kids through their math now? Homework was already hard enough for parents to help with. Where did common sense go? And where did the freedom of local school districts go, the freedom to decide what to teach and how to teach it? Teachers have different strengths and reach the same material by different routes, adjusting from one classroom or one student to the next. Why are those calls landing more and more in the hands of people nowhere near the situation they're deciding on? A capable leader draws on what their staff already know and can do, and hands off authority when the moment calls for it.

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