The Plunge

“You ask me those many questions and I can never work!”. What a statement to welcome you in to your new work life. Back in college the teachers would say “What is wrong with you boy, do you not have the urge to learn. If you do not ask the right kind and amount of questions, you will never learn.”

That is where the difference comes in between your student life and your work life, going opposite ways. It might make you wonder, how is it that I always write about something this boring or on a topic that has been debated about for centuries. The answer to it is, I do not write to give you the conclusion of a new theory or a study, but I write to express my thoughts and convey it to those who might feel the same way as I do and are able to relate to.

I feel at this juncture where I have very recently entered the work environment to be most perplexing. As a student all you had to do was pursue your studies. At this stage, I feel confounded due to a lack of direction. It is here that I feel, I hardly know myself at all, or whether I should be taking up familial responsibilities or should I fulfil the desires that I wanted to but could not afford to.

Are all the rich (a.k.a successful) people happy with the colossal amount of money that they possess? If they have earned that kind of money, then it must have taken them a lot of hard work and consumed 80% of their time (leaving the rest of the 20% to be accounted for sleep). Are they happy with their lives? In my view they must be addicted to money, they might be petrified to take a vacation for the fear of a change in direction of the flow of money. Suppose even if they were to go on a vacation even for a day, will they be able to say “This is it, I am on vacation now and I shall not think about my work at all for this one day”. Will they be able to do that? I think not. The more the amount of money you earn, the more it demands your perpetual attention.

This is not where it ends. What about the people who do not have that kind of money, are they happy? They are not happy either; they have their own set of problems. There are many who have seen their near and dear ones pass away because they did not have the required amount of money for the necessary medication.

Where is the break-even point? Where is it that we humans remain happy? Do we feel satisfied with money or do we feel complete even without it. A lot of religions say that renounce it all and there you will find satisfaction. That does not seem to be a satisfactory rejoinder. To me that seems more like “If you cannot have it, give up on it”. There must be some other alternative where you can even out the odds.