Big thanks to my dear friend and daily inspiration Solène for helping me with this article.
Please, don’t ask me anymore what I would like to do for a living, what my professional goals are. I can’t stand this question. As students approaching the end of high school, we feel the urging pressure to apply to universities for studies that we do not care for, because society tells us that we need to have a job to gain a living. We are expected to conform to the ideals of the society in which we have grown, without asking why, without understanding why we are following this path made for the masses.
In our society, our jobs are one of the most important things people rely on to judge if we are successful or not. If you are at the head of a company, people admire you; if you earn a lot of money, people suddenly care about you. Most people think in order to be happy they need money, power and glory. To achieve this, they are not afraid to step on others, foregoing their morals. We are made to think that there is only one way to bring us close to these goals: high school – university – job – family. Rich people only constitute a fragment of the population so these materialistic goals are not even likely to come true.
But do you really think that the most successful people are the ones that forget their beliefs? I mean, when you think about it I’m sure you guys have all heard of people who are living off their dreams. For instance, there is JK Rowling, who started from nothing and went through some difficult times before her first novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone was published. She is now a billionaire. Thus, we can establish that it is in fact possible to achieve success without sacrificing who you are.
What happened between the little child full of dreams that you once were and the person that you are today sitting in a class room waiting for the hours to slowly drag by?
The way our society is made leads to individual dreams being stifled in favor of codes and rules. Since we are very little we have been taught to distinguish our dreams from reality: dreams are fictitious and unrealizable whereas reality is constant and reliable.
But when the voices of the society we live in are drowned out, when it is just you and your private thoughts, can you not still hear the earnest voice of your dreams? We should nurture that voice instead of muting it, let it breathe and flourish.
Are we truly as free and independent as we feel we are, if we are just following what everyone else wants us to do, too afraid to go out of the norm?
I don’t want you to change your current life radically, but simply make room for aspirations that are truly your own. I don’t blame anyone in particular for society’s rules. We are all, as many as we are, responsible because we created this, we are the ones that have let it become rooted in our minds, and we are the ones that are blindly following it.
I have a single question for you : please answer it not to please me but for yourself, at the end of the day is what you are doing today resonating with the person you truly are?
