We see kids as well as parents focussed on outcomes, more so nowadays. Good packages and powers attract everybody. Somebody was telling me one day that government service is still one of the biggest criteria for marriage. I don't know why people do not understand the side effects of the fixations on the outcomes. Most parents too somehow want to hide their own experiences. I keep talking to many of the parents and I feel that most of the parents are dissatisfied with their careers I am talking about the premier careers of the country life CAs, Civil Servants, Advocates, and Doctors.
I am not at all denying the need for money, security, authority, positions, etc. They have their value in life. They make life comfortable. But then what? What parents shy away from telling their kids is that the utility of these things not only diminishes but almost falls flat beyond a point. The time and effort required to earn that extra is definitely not worth it since that has a very limited utility. I feel that there are three fundamental reasons why people remain obsessed with the outcomes their entire life.
First, we live in a very unequal society and see poverty and exploitation everywhere. Thus, the whole of society is divided into two parts: exploiters and exploited. For example, we see maids, drivers, domestic servants, and beggars on the streets every day. We see their struggle for money and how they are being exploited by their vendors. We see the harsh conditions in which they live. We develop a fear that if we don't run the race, we may enter into the vicious cycle of poverty and exploitation. This fear is more prominent among the adults who have come from a poor and exploited background and by their hard work, they have gained money and powers.
Second, we see quite a lot of uncertainties. We often see in media so many diseases and the huge resources required to meet the medical expenses. Most of the systems are quite imperfect and unpredictable. That is the reason why adults always feel uncertain about life and want to save more and more. This has no limit. Many of my friends often discuss what is the safe corpus with which one can start exploring his true call. However, with the type of uncertainties we have in society, it is quite difficult for adults to dare to define the safe corpus, and most of the adults remain in the race due to the fear of falling short of money in case of emergencies.
Third, most of the adults have lived almost the whole of their lives running after money, powers, and positions and they don't see any alternative. They have never inculcated their areas of interest and inner call. That is the reason, even if they feel the hollowness of money and power, they hardly find an alternative. The brain has already been conditioned with very strong habit patterns of routine. That is the reason why we see a lot of people getting depressed after retirement and they develop all types of diseases post retirement. The struggle of coming out of these habit patterns is like the struggle of a patient to come out of life support. Since the struggle is painful, neither these adults undertake such efforts for their lives nor do they recommend these efforts for their kids. Society, as a whole, too is also trapped in the routine and that is how it keeps getting passed on from one generation to the other generation.
This appears to be a big problem with no solution. Yes, there is no easy solution. The only solution that I can foresee is that the kids start very early. If they get into mindfulness at an early stage of their lives, they can experience the joy of inner connection and the joy of the processes carried out with that inner connection. If kids get to live a part of their lives without fear and experience the joy of work at hand, like painting, sculpting, drawing, playing games, discussions about the cosmos, science, nature, and mythology, story-writing, reading books, living with nature, and such other things, they will develop the capacity to connect to their inner being without fears. This capacity will help them carve out an alternative path for themselves when they feel the hollowness of their lives running after money and power. After all, human life is too precious to be wasted in making efforts to just survive. We have the entire cosmos to explore. The best of survival does not give us a fulfilled life. Rather it is exploration that makes life fulfilled.
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