What if “To Belong” is the Last Thing You Want?

How can a sense of belonging have negative effects on your life now and in the future?

image: Wayne-lee-sing-Unsplash

What does it mean “to belong” to something? It’s the notion that your ideas, way of living, and your way of thinking are being validated by an outside group other than yourself. It is a good deal, as you feel less isolated and more like “where you want to be for the rest of your life”, but you don’t actually want to be there for too long.

We survived for years because of outside factors that helped us navigate the uncertainties of every day, these uncertainties could be small (not knowing how you’d perform during an exam) to even bigger ones (what to do if a catastrophe happens…), but these uncertainties aren’t always external.

Obviously, we get a stack load of ideas of all sorts of stuff during the day, and most of the time these ideas are new, unexpected, and at times surprising.

To go back, having a sense of belonging does help bring warmness and coziness that is so much needed in such messed up circumstances, it’s what could save us again, and again. The problem is that when the group that we’re holding onto is what’s actually holding us back. They don’t see clearly the big picture as we do, our ideologies and ways of living -the ones that were validated by our group- are not as stable and reliable as we thought them to be… it could lead o suspicions, unexpressed desires, and potential pinned up anxieties.

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