First of all, this isn't a god damn competition.
Whoa whoa, I thought it was pretty obvious that my post was a bit of a joke. I thought the last sentence and the smiley gave it away pretty clearly. If I offended you, I'm sorry for that.
But just to make this a bit of an interesting discussion perhaps, let me just say I don't believe in idealism of idea to be any greater than idealism of matter (materialism, if you like). The things surrounding us do not come with preset meaning, and even if they did you have the power to reset them. To me, being unique is about appropriating the existing world and all its meanings and social conventions and distort them for your own purpose. For example: a post-punk band dressing up in white-collar suits during their performance did so not to associate with the middle class, but to recontextualize their signs. The clothes became their identity, they used what was available in society to point out a path to change. Conforming is something you do in your head, either by telling it to yourself or letting others tell it to you.
Regarding the discussion concrete/abstract, abstract is always material in the sense that they're tangible phenomena. A building to express the idea of architecture is only another way of communicating this idea than words, spoken or written. The difference is that words aren't very interesting beyond their message. A building, on the other hand, can both hold the idea and be something more. It can be appropriated by its visitors. In fact, the same happens when a reader reads an theoretic essay - he appropriates it based on previous experiences. My personal preference is for the material world instead of the abstract, because the material is always more, it is richer, it has more meanings, more ambiguity, more diversity. An idea doesn't really become anything more than an idea. And because all ideas must first and foremost come from the material world (as children, the world is first, ideas are later), stripping away the physical from the abstract only leaves us with a poorer experience of the world.
Abstract ideas and definitions are like virtual reality; they may be clearer at expressing the character of a thing, place or event, but they sacrifice diversity and tension for that clarity. I'd much rather be living in the real world as opposed to a simulated one, as the simulated one is but a caricature of the real world. In the same way, I'd much rather be a material character than an abstract, idea-based one, because the abstract character is only a caricature of the material. Taking away to find identity is in fact loss of identity, to me. When you've finally reduced yourself to one word, you'll realize this word is not your own creation; it was borrowed from ages of human communication.
By "confinement is home", I mean that it is up to every person to choose his place of living. You can't live outside of something, because that outside is still inside something else. You wear your ideas like they were clothes, that's a fact to me. Coming up with your own ideas isn't different from sewing your own clothes. I don't believe that you can go against any flow or be free of the confinement of society. All those limits are limits that you impose onto yourself, and by stepping outside of those limits you only impose new limits onto yourself. What's your 'car'? What's your 'job'? You're really just swapping something for something else.
To finish off: what I'm describing here is a description of my idea of life. My actual
life is something I don't bother to lock into ideas. For that I have the material world and how I interact with it, and I can do so in whatever way I see fit. Freedom is the ability to move between confinements on a whim, not finding a particular confinement to live in that just happen to be so different to the rest of society that it is mistaken for freedom.
I've already been in your shoes. I used to think the same way, but this is what I arrived to after a few more years of thinking. Maybe you arrive at something else, I don't know. The reason it might seem like I'm arguing is because I've had this argument with myself for way too long. So, again, sorry if I offended you in some way.
