Every one of us wants to land on Mars one day. Achieve the impossible.
DO BIG!
But this got me thinking. If everyone wants to reach the stars, who would watch us?
What are we doing? Why are we doing this?
And it reminded me of a dialogue from the movie Tamasha (Hindi) which says - “Kyuki sab bhaag rahe hain, isliye mai bhi bhaag raha hoon!” (Translation - "Because everyone's running, I am too!")
Isn't it the truth? I guess most of us can relate to this. We generally do not think right while doing the most important things in life. Be it choosing a course, a profession, or even about the person you marry. We just do it just because we are conditioned that way and not because it's good for us or that's what we want to do. I have in fact, seen many teens, as well as adults going down this lane without even sensing that there are many other options out there.
Is it because all the other options are not being displayed? Or, is it because the people voluntarily are not looking at them? I believe this is majorly happening because we are stuck in a loop. We are influenced by the external factors in life to ever think this way.
Again, why do we not think when it's needed?
Ever caught yourself feeling that it is too late to be thinking? I did too.
In most of the cases I have studied, I have observed that the person only knew about the options and choices they had only after it was too late.
I feel this keeps happening to us as our ability to think on our own for ourselves is being taken away since the beginning of our lives.
Educational institutions, the companies you work for, and everyone around want us to depend on them for a reason or two rather than us thinking about what we actually want or what's good for us.
Honestly, we cannot blame them either. Each of us is in the same loop of life.
We all are in a rush to build ourselves and we have long forgotten that we need a foundation to build anything (including humans). Overnight success is all that we want.
Although we might feel that this is not a bigger problem, it indeed is.
Just like how a building with no/poor foundation simply collapses with a little inconvenience caused, we fall too. The fact that we are living beings makes the collapse different from that of non-living buildings. One might collapse physically, mentally, financially, and socially depending on where our human building is built no matter how far we've gone in life.
I get it. We go to schools and universities to lay this foundation for ourselves, but are we really doing it?
Sure, educational institutions are definitely helping the individuals learn the subjects they chose for their career advancement but is that really being enough?
The focus is only on academics but never on the overall development of a student. The Psycho-Socioeconomic-Bio behavioral aspects of an individual aren't being dealt with at any point of time in their lives.
Rather than laying a proper foundation and 4 pillars to make a building stand on, it feels like we are expecting a building to stand on a single pillar (the academics).
Now see a problem?
I think you do.
It isn't always about career milestones.
We never give an individual the chance to give look at his/her actual self.
As a result, we are seeing a decline in work-life balance, mental health, physical health, managing finances, maintaining relationships, and whatnot.
Everything seems to be troubling us.
If we think deeply, we cannot point out one single reason for causing all this.
There are many. It might be toxic parenting, bad acquaintances, the education system, or our very own Psycho-Socioeconomic-Bio aspects in life.
Nothing can be flawless but how are we dealing with those flaws?
As said, we are no way dealing with them at any point in our lives.
We are just running a race with a fear of missing out just because everyone else is running and with no idea about why we are doing it.
I get it, we spend almost all the time we have got on academics to be able to compete with the world. But that isn't simply enough because it doesn't teach us a lot of other things. Be it working on our own flaws or weaknesses. Dealing with our traumas. Breaking the cycles by not passing down the generational trauma. Developing a learning mindset and learning at every stage of life. Managing emotions. We have a lot of skills to learn and keep working on that we generally do not.
Especially as teens transition into adulthood, they will need to develop a variety of skills in order to be successful. While some teens may have learned some of these skills from their parents or guardians, others may not have had the opportunity to do so which is why it's so important for teens to learn these life skills before they enter adulthood. If they don't, they may find themselves struggling to keep up with the demands of adulthood like how it is for many of us. It has become a silent battle we all fight.
So what do we do?
It's high time we get back to the BASICS. It's time we focus on the foundation first rather than pushing ourselves to finish the building. There isn't a single way of doing this because as we discussed earlier, we are more focused on grades but not on an individual's real-life skills needed.
We need to learn, understand and create pathways for all of us to start focusing on ourselves with time. I believe every one of us is good at something and the only thing that bothers me is those very few people who know they are successful while the others are still not. Only when we begin to search for that within and start working on ourselves, can we lay the concrete foundation we need to build our building.