Who Chose Your Life? You? Your Parents? Society?

Did you choose your life or did society choose it for you? Did you spend most of your childhood going to school learning things that maybe aren’t very important to you and then go to university to study something else that you don’t have a real passion for? Are you working a 9-5 job in a big office where everyone is going around stressed all of the time trying to meet deadlines or trying to finish off some work so they can get home to spend their last few exhausted hours of the day with their families? Don’t get me wrong about education, it is important and necessary but I feel that it is lacking some very important subjects such as; ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, creativity, change etc.

There is so much pressure on people growing up these days to go to university and get a ‘good’ job. Society’s understanding of a good job is a banker, doctor, lawyer, or you could open your own business maybe, that would probably be sufficient enough to please everyone too.

But what about you? Is that what you really want to do with your life? To me, personally, all of these seem to be very stressful jobs and would leave me with very little free time to do activities that I enjoy doing.

There are over 7.5 billion people on this planet so you can only imagine the diversity that is out there. A world so diverse yet we are all being forced/pressurised into this same way of living and working. This diversity means that there must be people out there that desire and enjoy the above type of work and the lifestyle that comes with it and I have the upmost respect for those people. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with them jobs, we need doctors, teachers and so on but it’s just not for everyone. I feel that we should be encouraging diversity and creativity instead of narrowing it down to a certain type of lifestyle/life. I wonder what we could achieve and how different the world be if we did so.

You may be thinking that these jobs and the 9-5 trap is the only practical way that you can earn money to support your family and pay the bills etc. and you are probably right but this is only true because of the lack of encouragement for diversity and creativity. If we would have encouraged these things more, it would have lead to a different system, we could have ended up with a system that could benefit and support everyone who was willing to contribute in different ways.

Not so long ago, I came to a crossroads in my life. If a societal judge was sitting tall on his bench looking down on me, he would have sent me away forever. No university degree, no desire to work in an office or do a 9-5 job and not a clue where my life was going. Fear and pressure started to creep in. I knew what I wanted to do but I had no idea how to do it or where to start. I want to help people feel better, help them to free themselves from the mind and the suffering that comes with it and I want to change the world for the better, even if it’s only the tinniest little contribution. The fear and pressure had me leaning towards a psychology degree so I started looking them up online and trying to figure out how I would support myself through the four year course but through all of this I had an incessant niggle telling me that it wasn’t what I wanted to do. My heart’s true desire overpowered the security that my conditioned mind longed for.

Not long after, I stumbled upon steemit and started writing. I moved abroad and am now teaching English as a foreign language, writing when I have time and planning to create my own website in the near future.

Whether this works out for me or not, only time will tell, but more importantly, mind based fears and societal pressure no longer rule my life. I do, and you can rule yours too! Allow yourself to feel your hearts true desire, release your fears through the practice of allowing (see previous posts on this and there is more to come) and move towards a life that is more meaningful to you.