If we choose the wrong path, we keep traveling all our lives and yet may not reach the destination. That is why awareness is very crucial. No doubt hard work is required even when we choose the right path, but hard work on a wrong path does not lead us to our destination. One of the biggest problems while choosing the path of life is that when we make such choices, we have a very limited perspective and have no idea about the possibilities. For example, in my entire family and town, there was no civil servant, so I never heard of what it meant till I started a job and my employer guided me in the preparation.
Our mind works on "natural intelligence" the same way as "artificial intelligence" works. AI picks the clues from our search history and starts showing whatever we like. I experimented with the short YouTube videos yesterday. AI keeps calculating the duration of the videos I watch and the type of videos I watch for a longer duration are repeated more often it keeps calibrating based on the time I spend on a particular video and that is how it keeps refining the videos that come next on the screen. Similarly, our brain also keeps receiving inputs from the ecosystem. It becomes more attentive when it likes something. Our likes and dislikes depend upon our parenting and conditioning. Generally, we feel comfortable while listening to the things that we like and ignoring what we do not like and the brain understands that, and the next time we listen to something we do not like, we have more resistance. Thus, we start getting into the trap of a fixed mindset like watching a fixed type of video on the screen of a mobile.
This is where we, as parents, commit blunders. In the present-day world, life has become very fast because there are so many options available to everybody to have fun, entertainment, and socialization. Since money has gained more significance in life, we are all busy earning money. That requires more time to be spent at the workplace. Whatever time is left from the workplace is spent on entertainment, watching Netflix, and YouTube, visiting tourist places, and so on. That leaves little time and energy with the parents to understand life. Since parents do not understand the meaning of life themselves, they pass on their false understanding to their kids. Whatever algorithm their mind has created for life, they end up passing on the same to their kids.
Kids are in a very crucial stage where they are forming the framework of their lives. Since life has become a race, all the kids have to win the race by coming first in the class and examinations. After all, they have to beat the competition to secure their seat in a college or university. Parents somehow pass on their false understanding of life that if kids work hard during their school and college time, they can have fun for the rest of their lives. This does something very disastrous to the kids. They feel that hard work at school and college is just a means to get a comfortable life. After all, the purpose of life is to be comfortable and have fun. Life is definitely not like that. That is the reason why these kids when they grow up, get depressed and stressed. They thought that life would be comfortable after getting the jobs, however, life offers challenges at every step. Every relationship needs a lot of investment. When they become parents, they find it quite tough to handle the kids. They make choices for the easy assignments at their offices and if they have to undertake a tough assignment, they start cribbing and complaining.
I feel that comfort and pleasure post studies can not be set as a motivator for the hard work at the schools and colleges. Kids have to be told the neurological rewards of hard work and challenges. Unless parents undertake new challenges and learn the rewards of taking up challenges, they will pass on their false understanding to their kids. When parents undertake challenging tasks and get the rewards in terms of dopamine, they know for sure that they are taking up these challenges because challenges are fun. They know for sure that comfort and laziness are addictions like the addiction to YouTube and Video Games. We get addicted to video games because our brain secretes a certain amount of dopamine with little effort and when the brain gets an "X" amount of dopamine with little effort, it will not be inclined to make more efforts to get the same amount of dopamine from actual activities. The brain will slowly get addicted to the virtual world and cut off from reality. The virtual world is not real, and soon it will cause us real-life challenges like problems with our jobs and relationships.
Similarly, when we get addicted to fun, comforts, and pleasures in real life, we repeatedly want to get engaged in such activities for fun. We start avoiding the challenges and take up routine assignments at the office. We avoid hard work in relationships and soon our relationships start becoming more and more shallow. On the other hand, if parents understand that the meaning of life is to explore and create. The body and mind have been given to us as a tool to explore this world and create so many new things in this world. The real joy is in testing the limits of this brain and body. That makes life fulfilling. In that case, the kids will not have conflicts. There will not be conflict in their mind between fun and entertainment and hard work for excellence.
The deeper the understanding of life, the parents have the lesser the conflicts and confusion in their kids. However, since we have been passing on a shallow understanding of life generation after generation, probably, it is probably quite difficult to break the chain. But that is the challenge and this challenge is quite interesting and fulfilling. The challenge is for an electron to acquire an escape velocity while orbiting the nucleus in a particular orbit. We all fall into one or the other orbit while living our life. If we choose comfort and laziness, we start shifting to the lower orbits, and if we choose challenges, we start shifting to the larger orbits. We have a choice. I am sure there is a possibility of being a free electron where it does not have to keep circling around an orbit. I have not yet experienced such a state, yet that's the fun and challenge.
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