Our society is constricted by the idea of security for its children. Beginning at childhood, parents demand better education and expect better results from them.
What initially starts as, and should remain as a process of learning, ends up becoming a game of ‘marks’ and “scoring”.
Eventually, when we reach the stage of choosing our career paths, we are caught in the same race. The race of being better than others or the race which society think is right for us to fit in.
Our minds get moulded in the shape of what’s been fed into it over the years, without realising whether it’s suitable for us or not.
There are so many theories related to finding your passion coming up these days. Some people say that every person is destined to do a particular thing that he is good at.
While others totally disregard it saying that there is nothing like ‘passion’ and people should find it in the work they are doing by giving it their best effort.
I deny both of these lines of reasoning.
Passion, for me, is doing something that one loves to do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a person has only one particular passion which he or she can pursue with his mind, heart and soul.
Some people love to dance, others like singing, some love coding, while others live for writing. There are people who find passion in helping others, and some are there whose passion is to earn more and more money.
None of them are right or wrong. They are all a person’s choice.
What’s wrong is the fact that we give up on our passion way too early. More than wrong, it’s sad to see that young adults, instead of doing what they want, choose to do something that is said to give them security, in the long run.
Take the example of engineering, the stream that the vast majority of people in our society choose when they want a “safe” future. But what our society has failed to understand is that a degree is not a criteria for having a content life, financially or mentally.
A person, whichever field he or she chooses, needs to excel in it. In order to do that, one needs to have enough interest in that subject or course.
Students at the time of deciding their subject fail to pick the path that they want to pursue. This is because of the fear of failure.
They are scared of the consequences of opting for their passion. And this thought in them has been cultivated by years of portrayal of certain kind of jobs as having more certainty and security over others.
In this confusion, many of them leave their passion for something else, in which the fear of failure is less.
Though, the chances of one being successful in any field is more or less the same because of stigmatisation of the fields that are not mainstream, they are avoided by many.
What we are doing wrong here is that we have hyped the words like success, failure, passion to such a great extent that we have lost ourselves in it.
The youth and, our society in general, is under the misconception that a person needs a certain amount of money or a certain degree to be happy or contented. But that’s not the case.
Different people find happiness in different things. It’s impractical to say that money is not important in today’s world. But money not is everything for everyone.
Sitting in a cubicle from 9 to 5, for years of your life, when you don’t love what you are doing is not worth it.
If you have something in your mind which you love to do, but aren’t doing because it’s a bit risky, that is losing something in your life.
Moreover, the thing about passion is that it’s not a once in a lifetime thing. If at some point a person is not able to follow what the heart wants, it’s not the end of it.
The day one decides to go for it, he or she can start walking towards it that very day. Also, what we want to do in life changes as we grow up.
The more we know, the more we explore, the more we are able to understand what we actually want in our life. A person doesn’t fail because they have the urge of doing something in life.
There might be hurdles in our path, but finding a purpose and living for it is the meaning of life. That’s why one should not stop learning and acquiring knowledge about different things for that is the only way of finding the path to success and happiness, together.