Brevity. Or not.

So after careful consideration, I've determined that the only way to truly know yourself is to seperate yourself from any and all attachments. Friends, family, job, home, society. Total seclusion, armed with nothing but your instincts, and exercising nothing short of total honesty regarding your reactions to every situation you face in the savage wild.
On the other hand, fulfillment, and thus, happiness, comes from action, and actions in the wild have no meaning beyond survival. No helping little old ladies cross the straight, no stealing a candy bar because you're positive that no one's looking, no indecision stemming from socially ingrained concepts like right and wrong, morality and depravity. So, in a sense, one could argue that accomplishment is only possible through interaction with a society, though not necessarily a community.
The objective then, if the preceding concepts are held as truth, is balance. Integrating one's self with society without losing one's autonomy, accepting a mutually understood code of ethics without submitting completely to it, without becoming nothing more than just another copy of a template that someone, at some point, made the decision was ideal. That person, after all, possessed individual will, created a standard, and set it into action, thus creating the ideal society that you risk allowing yourself to become engulfed in.
Without accepting the rules of a society while keeping one's mind open to the possibility of a flaw, a chink in the armor of social order, the world would fall into a stagnant routine, and growth would become myth, evolution a forgotten concept, progress an impossibility, and the status quo a dictator of itself.
So there're no answers here, no epiphany, only opinions, ramblings of a borderline insomniac trying desperately to find or make a place in the world, and the echoes of men who've lived since the dawn of time who dare to question what they're told and attempt to find a better way, their own way. You swim upstream to either drown or find the source, and when you get there, you're faced with yet another question. Leave it as it was, attempt to shore it up so as to make the journey of the fish you passed along the way less difficult, or block it off, thus leaving everyone in the river twitching in their final moments, some deprived of momentum, others robbed of something to rail against, and a painfully select few laying in the same place they fought to stay in, watching the swimmers on either other side of the spectrum dying despite their own hopes and dreams, fear and dread.
So many questions.
And I'm out of caffeine.
'Night.