One of the hardest things to learn is that I didn’t really know myself very well, and I had trouble differentiating which were my dreams, or if the dreams I thought mine were actually imposed upon me through the mass consciousness. I can have many romantic notions of my ideal self – for example, if I thought space exploration was meaningful, perhaps I would have applied for a job at SpaceX to fulfil my dream.
What I didn’t realize earlier was that admiring the audacious attempts to go into space (which I don’t actually) or a politician like Aung San Suu Kyi (she went through a lot to get to where she is, regardless of what you think of her politics) does not mean I have to do similar things.
What I admire, what I love, what I am good at doing, what I feel I should do, and what I am innately called to do – all of these are separate and they all can lead to different trajectories. For some lucky people they may be the same. In modern times we were all conditioned to believe we need to have One True Career, and for a long time I believed this story, that every single step I made had to be coherent to my One True Career.
It is not enough that society convinces us that we need to have one true love, turns out we can also only do one thing (or a few at most) for the rest of our lives or risk being alienated.
We’re taught that we can have hobbies or side projects along with our real job. But what does having a job even mean? Do we see our jobs as our vocation? What if we separated the means to earn a living from our actual vocation? What if being present in life is more important than answering our professional callings?
I have begun to learn that there is really no right or wrong in our choices, as long as we are able to live with them. But if we do not begin to question our choices, our history, our present, our future – as humanity, where are we progressing to? What is all this truly for?
What does it mean to live? I continue to question. Even if we achieve year-on-year growth in our national GDPs, what does that even mean?
Most of us are just growing, without even realizing where we’re growing towards, or why are our dreams, even came to be ours in the first place.