Offbeat of individualism

Gabby Tjiroze
Justicia Shipena



Do more of what makes you happy. Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Mind. Body. Spirit. I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Take the next 60 minutes to be completely selfish.

These are snippets of what I hear during an average day while moving around Windhoek, or read on Pinterest and on the covers of magazines.

To my generation, these quotes seem inspirational and positive overall; there is nothing inherently wrong with their intentions.

But I feel as though the overarching theme should be further examined. The quotes promote a sort of mentality and lifestyle that I have learned to exalt. Recently, I have begun to question the level of individualism we have been indoctrinated with in the past years.

An increasing number of students feel anxious, alienated and depressed. With the increased connectedness to others through the internet and social media, this doesn’t seem like it just be the case.

But more and more I have realised that by remotely watching other people’s lives, we feel more alone than ever. When this happens, we tend to ease our anxiety and insecurities by buying into the mantra of selfishness; of focusing on ourselves or a contorted version of Ayn Rand’s objectivism and a vicious cycle of individualism.

Her philosophy, ‘objectivism’, identifies the principles behind living a happy, thriving, free life. To do this, objectivism addresses the major questions of religion and philosophy in every branch, from the most basic theory of reality to the nature of knowledge and the purpose of art.

Every principle of objectivism locks up logically with every other, and all of them are rooted in the facts of reality we know through science and common sense. The elements of objectivism do not fit together because Rand or anyone wants them to: They fit together because they have to.

The most essential aspects of her philosophy are that it can be expressed in four basic values: freedom, achievement, individualism, and reason. To understand objectivism as a system, one needs to grasp what these values are and how they fit together.

According to Rand, attaining knowledge beyond what is given in perception requires both volition (or the exercise of free will) and adherence to a specific method of validation through observation, concept formation and the application of inductive and deductive reasoning.

For example, a belief in dragons, however sincere, does not mean reality contains any dragons. A process of proof identifying the basis in reality of a claimed item of knowledge is necessary to establish its truth.

Sometimes we unknowingly fall into this pattern and only realise that over time something feels largely missing in our lives, which leads to a constant quest for fulfilment. Many a business models prey on this weakness and desire for meaning and belonging. Lately, more than ever, I am glad that at least most people have a built-in community that can be tapped into at any point.

I think overall what I am trying to understand is how our generation has slowly lost, for example, religion; one of the most inherently communal aspects of life, and how we look for it in other ways. Scrolling through Facebook or Instagram is a solitary exercise; going to a yoga class and working on you is something experienced alone as well. Yet these are both lauded.

Whatever happened to Friday night bowling groups, book clubs and women’s guilds? They seem to be becoming the past, and everywhere I look around me I see people desperately grasping onto something to give their lives meaning and community.

People keep their pain and loneliness to themselves and thus become more isolated, since they have been trained to handle it themselves. The cult of individualism may be indoctrinated, but that does not mean it has been effective. As a friend used to say: “The middle is golden.”