Eleanor Roosevelt said it best:
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right-for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
People live for others. Their thoughts influenced by fear, and actions governed by apprehensions. “Would my actions be considered appropriate by my parents, friends, neighbours?” People even think about those who don’t even know them, nor care.
It’s in satiating everybody that we do what we don’t want to, become what we don’t want to. This brings mental pain and fatigue. This fatigue creeps up over the life’s course every day, a million times a day.
We are told we are not supposed to feel fatigued. It’s a taboo to feel fatigued, or talk about it because we have been taught, conditioned, to think, that “THAT’S THE WAY LIFE IS”.
When we sacrifice our desires for others, we make ourselves unhappy. Others are not happy because they also live under the same fallacy. The result is a society where everybody’s trying to please others and everybody is unhappy.
Some odd human tendencies:
- “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. What matters is if other’s think you are happy and successful or not”.
- “You have to be rich because others think being rich is cool.”
- “You have to marry or else others won’t find you socially acceptable.” (I wrote this one when I was a bachelor)
The ‘others’ cancer is so deep-rooted that we work hard, not for ourselves, not for our desires, but so that others think we are successful. Instead of working towards our primary interests, we get off by the second-hand indirect happiness that comes from approval of others.
I have a dream. I want to live in a world:
- where a man’s actions are not governed by ‘will others like me for this?’ but by ‘will I like this?’ and ‘will it lead to common good?’
- where we don’t prostitute to the opinion of others.
- where we don’t make others suffer because we suffered.
- where free will reigns.
- where generosity is not a virtue but default.
- where the man learns only to learn and not to be perceived as learned.
- where one doesn’t force himself on others, not because it’s unethical but there is just no need to do so.