Yes, you should keep using “should.”
Over the years I’ve noticed a trending subset of progressivism that rallies against the word “should,” as it is a term often fraught with shame, self-doubt, self-hate, and an impertinent form of judgment, constituting a pernicious predisposition towards conformance to seemingly self-evident societal standards and norms. Anti-should proponents argue that we should ignore the toxic elements of conventional thought that is the source of all things we should do, and instead look within ourselves for answers regarding what is truly right for us. At its core, this notion is based on the premise that each individual has a unique identity that is completely disparate from external influence. It falls within the same train of thought that I found problematic with Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star, where she attempts to adumbrate human identity with this fundamentally flawed bifurcation of the “essential” self and “social” self, the former being a mode of consciousness unadulterated by our socialization and our circumstances, factors that in turn ultimately define the latter as its counterpart.
The problem is that human psychology is incredibly complex and messy; it rarely, if ever, strictly confines itself to such clear-cut divisions. As humans, we exalt the notion of free will—we desperately want to believe that we’re in control, that we’re the ones in charge, that we will shape our destiny, that we do indeed understand these endlessly convoluted networks of cause and effect. We want to believe that there is some inexorable part of us, the intangible being that constitutes “you” or “me.” But the reality is that our socialization and our individual circumstances—factors that are virtually completely out of our control—define the vast majority of our identity; the sum of these external influences inevitably imbue themselves within each and every one of our actions, our words, and our thoughts. If we truly decide to use these terms to define ourselves, the “essential” and “social” are fundamentally inseparable, so much so that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between either. An individual denuded of socialization and external influence is not one that retains an essential self; not only would they have no social self, but they would have no self and no identity to begin with.
The truth is that we cannot liberate ourselves from the psychological grasp of “should.” It is as human of a tendency as our desire for love or for war, for friendship or for rivalry, for truth or for purpose. It is an integral component within our tendency to conform; as Seth Godin would say, “People like us do things like this.” What all this is, is a constant battle of acculturation, of which “should” gains the most prominence in our cultures. The anti-should proponents are merely arguing for a different should by saying we shouldn’t use should in the traditional sense of using the word. And the reason this movement has not gained significant traction is because it appears to fight against our very nature. As Seth Godin would also say, “Ideas that spread, win.” So instead of tearing apart the fabric of our own language, instead of hurling ourselves into a dizzying battle of semantics and the baseless rhetoric that is characteristic of so much self-help content out there, we must recognize that in the end, all there is to do is to fight for a culture we believe in. That is, to fight for what we all should do, to make the world a better place and to live a life we’re proud to live.
