datum
To recognize creativity in the data of dailiness is no easy task; people continue to do what they understand to be expected of them. But these data test expectations and theories too, shifting them unconsciously to incorporate lived experience. For many today, orthodox interpretations of the world and its workings are baffling because the strategies they provide don’t mesh with what is really happening to us. They don’t explain what seems to be going on, or offer identifying roles that we can accept as suitable to the selves we know. Trying to make a fit between self and role is wearing, expensive of energy that might otherwise be used in the outside world. Meaningless work, contingent connections to others, leave people in a quandary that recalls the confused children who find it so hard to declare a sure identity by saying “I.” […] We see this confusion expressed, I believe, in our tendency to prize sincerity as if it were rare; and to prize it, moreover, without going on to ask what a sincere person is sincere about.