Those without compensate throughout

When someone doesn't have something they're supposed to, or even that they believe they're supposed to, the brain naturally seeks to compensate. We know this occurs physically, like when people lose their sight or sense of hearing, and over time their remaining senses seem to grow sharper. There are also examples of this dynamic breaking down, like with "ghost limbs", where the brain is receiving sensory input from an appendage which is simply no longer present.

So if this occurs in the physical realm, is it a surprise that the same compensation occurs in the psychological realm?

Fathers of daughters, without sons, will tend to push at least one of their daughters towards more masculine activities, and due to the natural mirroring of the young female mind to a dominant male mind, they'll go right along with it, completely unaware of how odd the circumstances may become. This is the "tomboy" phenomenon, and while not necessarily a good or bad thing in and of itself, against the backdrop of a more and more feminized society, what was otherwise innocuous takes on a more foreboding connotation.

To contrast with a more intrinsically masculine society, women would still have had skills and talents which may overlap with men, but the overlap was never taken to be a form of equality. A frontier mother would need to know how to shoot, to dress game, to care for livestock and such, not because her husband couldn't or wouldn't be the one primarily responsible for accomplishing those tasks, but because sometimes she needed to help out, sometimes her husband would be gone for a time, sometimes he'd be sick or injured, and especially if her sons were still young, she'd need to step up.

In one case, the compensation is natural, driven by external circumstances, and in the other, the compensation is unnatural, driven by internal expectations.

Parents have an intrinsic desire, a deep seated need, to pass on what they know to their offspring. This passage of information played a role in our current social dynamics, because young boys and girls are constantly being taught that there is no difference between them, that any lesson meant for a boy can be taught to a girl, and vice versa.

The problem with this is that the compensation for boys and girls is, again, forced, not naturally occurring. The boys and girls are psychologically compensating for reasons that are terrible, in that the boys are pushed to compensate for not being girls, and the girls for not being boys.

The result of this over time is that girls don't ever become very good women, and boys don't ever become very good men. Both end up in the middle somewhere, poorly defined, no specialization based on inherent capability, and thus no excellence to be found either.

Such reasons to compensate then, to adapt, are obviously unwise and should be avoided, but why aren't they? Why do people even go so far as to double-down on such experiments by forcing other people to behave like them as well through social or legal pressure?

What has happened is that, thanks to resource abundance, the selective pressures which sustained the constraints for which people properly compensated or died, have now been replaced with abstract or arbitrary constraints, defined by ideals and hypothesis absent any real negative consequences should a choice turn out to have been the wrong one.

Specifically, in the current era, you can be entirely pathetic as an individual, lacking in any real redeeming qualities, and your survival on a day-to-day basis isn't really threatened at all. Even if you have a lot of resources at your beck and call, the results of your efforts are little more than altars to waste and excess.

The lifted short-bed pickup truck with low-profile mud terrain tires.

The headphones that cost hundreds because of the brand and not their audio fidelity.

The handheld devices that filling every minute of your day with pointless distractions.

Each of them had a tangible, pragmatic, useful ancestor. Each of them, at one time, had constraints on them which shaped and formed them based on their actual utility, and not just on how they made someone feel.

And this is where psychological compensation gets its grounding, albeit subjectively and shakily, in feelings.

The tacticool rifle and useless survival gear makes the guy feel like he can survive SHTF.

The social media account with tons of followers and interaction makes the girl feel like she has value.

The successful career and freedom to do anything he wants means he's been successful in life.

In each case, they are compensating, adapting, in alignment with a subjective belief, and not an objective reality. In each compensation for something that these people think they don't have, and either need or need a workaround for, they're shifting their behaviors based on perception, not truth. Sure, an individual can get lucky every now and again, and what one feels does align with reality, but that's usually more of a coincidence than a result of the individual being correct or trustworthy.

As bad as things can get, however, because these prompts for compensation are synthetic, they can always be replaced, and if done intentionally, by grounding them objective truths as well. You can synthetically apply to yourself the restrictions necessary to shape you in objectively better ways.

Even for someone who has journeyed down the wrong path for even the majority of their life, it's never too late to make better choices, to ground themselves in what really is or isn't instead of what one merely thinks is or isn't. People are never beyond redemption so long as they can still make choices.

It just takes more effort, since nature and fate have stepped back for a time and aren't forcing one to choose better.

So choose better, even if you're not being forced to do so, in how you raise your children, in the type of vehicle you drive, in the type of foods you eat, in the company of folks you keep.

Even better, what you'll also find is that over time, what you feel will align to what you do. Instead of being driven by emotion, what you do will shape how you feel, and so the greatest difficulty is mostly in the beginning, when your feelings are still calibrated by chance instead of your choice.