Self-Reliance Essay

Aatem Cooke

July 22, 2018

Write Alaska

Society

What my idea of Emerson’s message is independence and more specifically is independence of

society. He talks about being your own person and that only you know your full potential. Later on in

the excerpt of Ralph Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” he goes on about society being against individuality

instead valuing conformity and Emerson promotes them to be nonconformist or original, to know

one’s place in life. Then Emerson talks a lot about progressing and to keep on changing, “....

contradict every thing you said to-day.” and it shows that people change their opinions and ideas

everyday, nothing lasts forever. The central theme in the excerpt is independence of society in

decision of how to live your life, accepting one’s place in life, and continuously changing.

Throughout life people will tell you that you can’t do it, that it’s not your strong suit but people

don’t start out as experts in their field, everyone was once terrible. Like Einstein once said,

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life

believing that it is stupid.” and no one else but you knows whether you’re a fish or a monkey. So you

must not imitate because imitation is suicide and that none but he knows what that is which he can

do because people are one of a kind and society treats them as the same(Emerson). It’s seen in

magazines, articles, tv shows, in just about every part of people’s life society is something telling

them what to do, what to buy, and who to hang out with; it’s friends and family, it’s the ad on tvs and

phones, and the idols influencing you with their lives.

“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you,” - Emerson, I interpret this as

appreciating the things you have in life. This idea is mentioned throughout like when he talks about

envy being ignorance. When your envious of others you generally think of what you don’t have and

desire that, but many times that blinds you from the important things. Like when one sibling gets ice

cream everyone else wants one too, it’s similar monkey see monkey do or monkey see monkey eat.

So I think his message is not to compete with others to see who has more stuff but to value what is

already there and progress. Though it isn’t apart from society it’s necessary to where you are within

the world.

Finally is the idea of continuously changing, to not be tied down by what you said yesterday but

to say what you truly think, because people don’t stay the same forever and every single day changes

their ideas and beliefs. The people he mentioned have all been people against society and the

thinking of the time they lived in, they had ideas differing like Isaac’s laws of motion or Socrates and

him being one of the founders of Western thinking. Emerson is saying that it’s important of what you

think of to be your true thoughts and you don’t need to have your peers’ opinion or your past

opinion.

The central idea of being individual of society is present in Emerson’s writing about having made decision of your own will, being apart of the world, and continuously moving through life. Though Emerson didn’t know about tvs and cell phones and social media his ideas still apply to the world around us, just in a different way of what he expected. He wanted the messages of being yourself and continuously growing to get to the reader, but it applies to more today because of how much smaller our world has become.