I’ve been thinking a lot, about life in general and what I want out of life. You know how things get more and more complicated as you grow up? It’s like how I teach my tuitee addition and subtraction in primary school where there’s no negative numbers. Yet after a few years, I start teaching them addition and subtraction with negative numbers. I remembered how it felt like my world shifted when I realized that negative numbers exist. It’s just like the many other things in life that changes as our perspective and cognitive depth changed.
Life and success used to be one direct route for me, and perhaps many Asians. It’s always the traditional study hard, get good results and find a good job so that you can earn enough and start a family. That’s the kind of mindset I was brought up with – that success in life is seemingly a one-way street. I don’t think my parents would have taken it well if I took the unconventional way. Junior Colleges were preferred over Polytechnics – which resulted in 2 years of misery in my study life. I always wonder how I would have turned out if I pursued Mass Communications in a polytechnic instead of heading to Junior College. I suppose I would have landed myself in a job that I liked a lot more, albeit getting paid less.
My perspective changed that year when I took my Masters’ in Sweden. I suppose that’s what exposure does to you, opening up your mind into many different possibilities and perspectives. I love myself a lot more, gained a lot more confidence and sorted many things out. You suddenly realized that there are so many possibilities and people could be happy and fulfilled doing different things (without pursuing financial security and abundance). You don’t have to be married to be happy, neither do you need a high-paying job or car or house to be successful. Those people and things that used to bother you becomes so insignificant when you look at life as a big picture. It’s hard to describe, but they represented freedom – being free to do what they liked without being bounded by conservative societal norms.
I think the previous generation’s idea of success is financial freedom. It doesn’t matter that you liked your job or not, as long as it paid the bills. This, coming from their childhood where poverty were rampant and financial security generally meant success.
So here I am, somewhere around my quarter-life crisis and still searching for what I want in life and what success means to me. I don’t want a ‘secured’ job with a good income every month when I don’t feel fulfilled by what I do for 8 hours daily. I don’t want to be in the rat race with all the superficialities and unspoken rules in the corporate world. I don’t want to spend all my life dreading Monday and getting up to work every morning, hoping that life could pass by quickly and I can ‘get there’. My dad's advice is still to 'climb higher', but putting life in that narrow perspective makes me feel so trapped. Life is afterall, a journey and everything is transient. I'm learning and conditioning myself to be happy with less material needs these days.
I'm contented with what I have now although I'm still searching. No, I'm not ready for kids yet and I still think that my life ‘is pretty much over’ when I have kids (at least for a decade or so). I think young working mums would agree, while older mums who has been through it all have forgotten how it was like or find such self-sacrifice essential. Like it or not, children suck up all your time and energy and sacrifices have to be made. As much as I love children, I think I’m not ready yet and I should be thankful that the husband wants to wait. I don’t doubt that children will be fulfilling, but it’s like…getting a bikini body – you know it’ll be worth it when you look that great but you just don’t feel like putting in that effort and sacrifices to get there, yet.
This describes my state of mind at this point in life:
Success to me is not about money or status or fame. It’s about finding a livelihood that brings joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.
- Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop
No comments:
Post a Comment