So we have to choose what we want in life; what if we chose wrongly? What if things we choose turned out to be not as great as we expected? Do we still want to take ownership of that choice?
But if the choice I make is just a product of my upbringing, of what the society encourages me to do, then it’s someone else’s fault. And I’m happy to take that choice that my family and the society kind of gradually box me into. Then I don’t have to take ownership, I can blame someone else for the life I’m living. Because that’s not my fault.
I wrote previously about tanking in school, where we decide to ‘opt out of effort’ in school because we are creating psychological distance with our failures, running away from the responsibility of the performance of the moment. In life, we sometimes ‘give up’ our real choice and decide to follow the script of the society because we are really afraid of taking ownership of the full consequences of that choice. We are running from that responsibility of the potential performance. We prefer ‘fake knowns’ rather than ‘unknowns’. And when I say ‘fake knowns’, I’m referring to the sense of prestige, the glamour that you perceive in certain jobs or roles that the society is nudging you towards. I’m referring to the happiness you think you’ll get in making the money you’ll make from a high-paying job.
All that is fine. Because, maybe you really don’t know what you want and so money is a placeholder for all that. At least, money can buy most things. The question is, when you make money the placeholder for all that you want in your life, do the behaviours you adopt, the habits you form, the work you do everyday, bring you closer or further from the person you want to be? Are you really getting closer to what you might want?