Summary

Can social ideologies reconfigure our core beliefs? Absolutely! Prominent examples are how we experience success, view beauty, and measure intelligence. Society Sayz is a story that follows the protagonist Aida. After the shock of being fired from her first real job, she begins to critically question all of her major life decisions. Her apparent success, in the eyes of society, is contradictory to how she truly feels. While in turmoil, she begins to realize that her career choice was not her own. Has she conformed to the ideas and expectations of others in making her life decisions?

Where do collective beliefs come from?

When did they originate?

Could they have come out of actual laws, written down sometime in history? Perhaps, long ago, law makers conceived a set of rules to dictate people’s behaviours, emotions or life goals, and then crafted them into legislation. For example, in order to get people to hide their true feelings and to strive for common life goals, our forefathers created laws such as the Regulation of Emotions and the Major Milestones Act. Constitutions or charts may be responsible for our common social beliefs. What about our perspective on success? Undoubtedly created by capitalist ideologies and written into law as the Declaration of Success. Throughout the book, Aida comes up with a dozen laws that could be responsible for some of our most universal beliefs.

Active in imagination, Aida hears and visualizes all sorts of things. She gets so caught up in her imagery that they come to life before her eyes.

Aida often turns to mental imagery as a coping mechanism when life gets challenging.

Now, panicked at the thought of never having planned life around her own principles, she relies on her visualizations more than ever. Aida’s overactive mind sees things like a patch of grass along the sidewalk emerge into a thousand tiny military soldiers armed with sharp swords. She once saw a cargo ship flowing in the middle of a dense forest. One day, the tree at the corner of her street jumped on her back, wapping its branches around her chest. As she walked, the lengthy roots dragged behind her like a dress train.

While helpful in small doses, in large doses the imagery can create a detachment from reality. In pursuit of trying to rediscover her core beliefs, will the imagery help, or will it swallow her up in a fantasy world?