The exception or rule: what are you?

It struck me this afternoon how torn we are in life by ever conflicting advice. 
The two most conflicting? For me, by far, it's the decision of whether to be the exception, or the rule.

Let's start as we mean to go on, with an honest, and perhaps blunt, reality: everyone strives for the exception. 

Who wants to be normal, to have found a normal route into their career, to have just met their partner through no bout of fate nor bearing a love story so sweet it'd melt the coldest man's heart? No one. Sure, getting by or falling in to place is fine, in fact it's the reality for most, but then there's this distant hope, a glistening dream of how your life could be, if only you could reach it...

And this of course is fed to us through every aspect of our lives. The Olympic hero you look up to so greatly who overcame a diagnosis that he'd never walk again, and yet won gold the next year. The child who was told she'd never make it as an actress picking up her Oscar. The childhood sweethearts who drifted but met again at a train station and fell back in love. Our lives are saturated with seemingly unachievable aspirations that, miraculously become achievable. It's what keeps our spirits alive, it's what pushes us to become the best.

I guess what strikes me so much is why life has to be universal and why that naturally entails our being the rule. We spend our whole lives measuring ourselves against others, seeing how others live and then comparing ourselves against an invisible ratio. It's invisible because there really is no way of comparing one story to the next; we are all born into different histories, economics, and social backgrounds. Undeniably we all partake in the same activity, of being together on this earth, but we, ourselves, are unique.

This isn't about crushing someone's dreams, and I apologise profusely if that's what I have done; it's about being a realist. Maybe if we all became somewhat more realistic in our life expectations, we'd appreciate the promotion we got that little bit more, or celebrate that first we worked so hard to achieve in an essay. The time you realise your life is unique to you, will be the time you realise you're the exception to everybody else.

I'll 'have it all', please.

Say, for example, you hear a really crazy and shocking statistic, well it normally sticks in your mind because it's really quite out of the ordinary. So I'm not quite sure how I managed to bypass remembering the outstandingly low and, to me, disproportionate figure that only 3% of the young female population aspire to be a boss. THREE PERCENT?! I hear you say/cry/weep. Yep, you heard me right, it genuinely really is that low. (According to my bible of all sources, Grazia magazine.) 

I went to an all girls school, and I would go so far to say that I think my feminist stances are causally related to my educational upbringing. I'll never forget being told "you are the women of the future". So in that sense I'm a real pro-women-achieving-the-top-of-their-career-and-having-the-bestest-and-most-perfect-family-life type of person, a modern-day feminist some might say. I'm no bra burner, but I most definitely advocate the position that women should be financially independent. Love doesn't always last, just saying.

I'm not necessarily saying that the whole 'having it all' idealised scenario is achievable for every person, primarily due to subjective life choices and unexpected babies and far from perfect financial situations. The list is exhaustive. However, I think the key difference in current society is that while you may not want to be top of your career whilst balancing home life and everything that goes with it, you have the choice. Choice. The word that suffragettes once dreamed of, and 'tis now a common place reality for females. 

In my Political Philosophy module I recently learned of a term stemming from Utilitarianism known as 'adaptive preferences'. (Utilitarianism, in it's most basic decision-making form is 'the greatest good for the greatest number' - google it if you wish to know more, it's interesting stuff). Anyhow, adaptive preferences are the result of  a situation whereby people who cannot achieve a desired goal gradually lose their desire for it. This may be the case that you forego your career to have a child and then front the "well I didn't want a career anyway" card. Where everyone is thinking, well actually.. you kinda did. Of course, this could be true vice-versa where you miss out on the chance of having children in order to climb the career ladder. Adaptive preferences are based around how it would be disappointing to live with an unsatisfied preference, perhaps of 'having it all', and so in order to deal with this disappointment it is a way of persuading oneself that the unattainable goal was not worth seeking in the first place. 

Naturally, this got me thinking. The philosophical, and thus hazy, realistic conclusion that I came to is that I think many people live their lives in denial of their primary goals, for many reasons. Life gets in the way of the big dreams you start with, and if you're not careful it can pop every dream you had. Naturally not everyone's goals in life are to achieve managerial status in their workplace but everyone has a dream they aspire to and I think it's really important, more so in the face of these tough economic times, to keep the dream going and to strive to 'have it all' in your own personal interpretation of what 'all' is to you.