All tagged personal choices
At the end of season 2 of the HBO series, Succession, one of the show’s main characters, Tom, tells his wife, Shiv, something I found to be especially poignant:
“I wonder if the sad I’d be without you, would be less than the sad I’d get from being with you.”
While I’m not a “gamer” in any real sense of the word, there is one that I downloaded on my phone years ago and play when I have some downtime. It’s called Wordscapes and involves rearranging a set of scrambled letters into words in a crossword-like fashion.
I’ve played it enough that I’m now at Level 2,744.
Whenever I go to Karachi, I'm amazed by how the city functions and how people go about their daily lives, especially when so much we take for granted in the west, just doesn't exist in the same way over there.
But, as I discuss in today's episode, people get on with things. They live their lives. Because it isn't just about what's around us and the way things are, it's about our own will.
In today's episode, I talk about how we make so many key decisions in our lives, not based on what we want, but on what others will think about them.
From the professional to the personal, we put credence where it doesn't belong, as compensating mechanisms, when really, at the end of the day, it's all down to us. We are responsible - no matter what.
Is it an investment or a cost?
That seems like semantics but I think there’s a bit more to the question.
I feel like I’ve been writing a lot about “forcing mechanisms” recently - ideas and beliefs that translate into behaviors and actions that force specific outcomes, in ourselves or in others.
Forcing mechanisms serve a purpose if we’re conscious about them, leading us towards or away from the kinds of results we’re looking for.
Ideologies are a useful mobilizing force. They rally our communities and allow resources to be effectively deployed towards a common goal.
Everyone involved knows exactly what they need to do and the ends towards which they’re working.
I’ve been mulling over this tweet ever since it was posted about a week ago:
“Every time I have a programming question and I rly need help, I post it on Reddit and then log into another account and reply to it with an obscenely incorrect answer. Ppl don’t care about helping others but they LOVE correcting others. Works 100% of the time”
“It’s not fair.”
Each and every one of us can recount situations where things didn’t go our way, for reasons that, in our minds, were less than equitable.
Not getting that promotion when we had the experience and the achievements. Losing out on that business opportunity when we’d done what the client asked for. Not making that investment when we had the chance (Bitcoin, anyone?).
There’s a perception many of us have that what we need is more choice.
It’s a perception that has filtered its way into all aspects of our lives.
When we’re deciding which college to go to, we’ll stack the number we apply to, to give us more options. I personally applied to 8 schools when I was planning on Business School, even though a couple of them I had absolutely no intention of attending, even if I got in. Why did I do that?
I’ve always had this problem when it comes to the concept and practice of self-improvement. And that is, that I’m incredibly hard on myself as I’m in the process of achieving my goals.
What I mean by that is that once I’ve set a goal, then I presume myself to be not ‘fully complete’ until that goal has been achieved.
I’ve been thinking about what “essential” in our lives truly means.
At the beginning of our lives, we need very little - a place to sleep, food to eat and little else. Everything else, we fill in with our imaginations. Late in our lives, it seems pretty similar.
It’s the stuff in-between that, I think, confuses us.
It’s easy to lose our sense of playfulness. In fact, at some point in our adult lives, so many of us do. We don’t realize it in the process. We really only figure it out well after the fact (if at all).
We tend to put it down to ‘growing up’, to becoming an adult. Just a normal part of life, because life is serious business, and only kids can afford the luxury of play.
