It was visible to me as insiders that the decision of these youngsters made to police the group identity didn't come from a place of deliberate malevolence, but certainly more from the place of solidarity, soul-searching, and---as clich as it might seem (but inherently true)---love. Searching for a group to belong and maintaining it once they are settled down is a natural state for youngsters. It's essential for their character development and growth, and it benefits them as a form of physical and mental self-defence---a pleasant stage of life to prepare youngsters to face the real world, if you may.
It was completely natural for these young people to wish this particular stage would never ends, so they could be forever inside the warmth of the herd, never to move on to the next phase of life, stay with their band of caring folks and sustain the melancholy of togetherness as best as they could. Why would they ever think to move? They had everything there, things that they've never had a taste before: acceptance, friends, respect, and love. But like any other things, this good phase would come to a transitional end along with their increasing age.
Around the time of graduation, I've been faced directly with the inevitable question we all had growing up; What do I want to do with my life? Armed with the ideological beliefs and fragments on how to live my life to its fullest taught by from the echo chamber, I took a confident step towards the real life, trying to seize my potential into its fullest, ready to change the world as a new radical contender---but only to realise that some of those methods and ideologies back then were quite impractical and unsustainable to be applied in the workforce. It was a devastating failures after failures for me; on the company that I started with my partner (on the first few years after graduation), on my past love relationships, on my relationship with my parents, and even on my personal spiritual well-being--- How could these methods which served me well from all these years fails? I often thought to myself.
3---Getting Out the Chamber
On my moments of reflection I remembered the jargons and manifestos our chamber's orators shouted through the dead of the night on our pre-initiation days. I couldn't help to think about how those things weren't merely inapplicable, but incredibly harmful to apply in my post-graduation life phase.
Turned out, profit-minded practices weren't just incredibly important to sustain a livelihood, but they were also not vile in nature because we could generate savings from it and make more jobs available to people who needed it the most.
Turned out, punctuality and discipline were essential in business and human relationship, because the seemingly cool and rebellious practice of being late to meetings or delaying work because of art block hurts trust more than it's building it.
Turned out, hierarchy is important to make a quintessential organisation, because without hierarchy everyone in the boat would paddle to each of their own direction, ripping the boat apart as the boat tried to sail.
The disconnection between the ideologies of my former chamber and the real world was so prevalent, that it ultimately made me rethink about the practicality of those obscure ideologies when applied in high resolution practices, which ended up to be incapably naive, or even, borderline ignorant to reality.
