Big Silly Ambitions
Often, I caught myself to share some unrealistic dreams which lead one’s smirk. “I will be the influential person in my family, be the first generation who runs a multinational company, and make a significant change in society, nothing can hold me.” As a person who can’t come up, and even just to think of such big words, I picture myself as a politician blasting some cringey speeches. The more I try to get adoration, the tackier I get.
The condition was not similar when I was a kid. I could say anything I wanted, dream as high as I wanted, whereas not worried with my own uncountable blah blah blah bullshit I can’t tell. What is more, the others were acting so lovely. Yet as I get older, slowly but surely, that sense of goodness is never recurring once more.
I can’t stop antagonizing my surrounding
Living in a small town with less-motivated people around, those who can’t lay off saying to keep my head down and be grateful with misfortune lemon, is sucks. Totally sucks. But just like me, I believe they too used to have a big dream. Stupid dreams that end up in a diary, and replaced by “I will make a coffee shop or bodega for a living.”
They probably have dreamed too much and failed too much to no longer be able to expect anything in life. Then there everything feels meaningless, bitter, slightly delusional.
Our crappy society undergoes the cycle that has no end. Poor parents give birth to a poor kid. One poverty leads to another poverty. Still, there is an argument that says poverty has something to do with mentality. Would you believe it? You probably would if you read too much Psychology Today. The issue truly is an economy, and we neglect it. Sounds like a leftish-intellectual brat who is always accusing Neoliberalism of all the modern-era problems, huh? To spill cold water on your head, an underclass organism like us, radically can’t be on the same level as the first world, white, civilized English lad.
No matter what, we are always being left so far behind. If life were a concert, then those privileged lads rock the whole stage. Meanwhile, with our little savings, we buy their ticket to stand up in the back row with the millions of others, then ridiculously stir our hands in the heavy and sultry air, swell our eyes with unduly emotional tears, drench our shirts with sweats, and scream so loud as if those perfect humans were our messiah. Here, I come up with a sentence to encapsulate this feeling: the world is just unfair.
Is it our legitimate fate to face such dissatisfaction?
I bet nobody can give out an answer. And quit telling me that God made it this way. Most of the time, we even call upon that divine intervention as a mere excuse, which gradually might turn us into a low-key, until reaching one point where we get no balls to change whatsoever situations. “It will pass… C’est la vie… Either good or bad things are destined…” Screw it. Why is it so hard to accept that we have no choice but to keep struggling? Why do we fail to recognize our own incompetence? Also, most importantly, why do we keep being ignorant? Because heaven awaits us in the next life, is that what you want to hear?
Millions of mankind whose bodies are buried beneath our feet have been longing for the kingdom, the wine, and the flowing river, that yet not, or maybe would never come. Tragically, those who still alive are put themselves down by not doing a single act, just as those dead souls. In consequence, their dissatisfaction is unanticipated and presents itself in many ways: high rates of inequality and corruption, inability to pay rent, worst education system, uncontrollable birth rates, traffic jams, and other things that have been biased by their senile, imagery afterlife concept.
Internalizing such society’s ignorance per se, I start to believe that these worldly successes are futile. To get a promising cubicle urban life will just lead me nowhere, to possess two figures salary and own a tiny apartment in a big city have seemed too much, turns out nothing really moves me to get out of the bed and make a change, not even a revolutionary story. It would appear that my dream is made of jealousy because I see the hype on Instagram feed, or as a mere status-seeking, and hence is truly not something that I need.
People, with their crab mentality, beg me to look around and enjoy things. They might want me to stop lamenting the success of those advantaged kids and insist me to just follow the process. But a hamster also runs on the spinning wheel, right? I mean, that small rodent is undergoing what you call as a process, or more precisely, inescapable process. It doesn’t realize that it has been circling there all its life and is complacent that life is what it is, without a slight willingness to jump off. At last, that pity hamster will just feign interest whenever another hamster talks about the better life out of the cage and its precious spinning wheel.
All of these issues need to be viewed holistically
Funny how we are all competitive about life wisdom. Funny how my tonalization is like a hipster nerd who swallowed Thus Spake Zarathustra during sophomore year in a philosophy department. Nonetheless, if complain and overthink can help me to see things in a more fathomable way, I would not be burdened to spend my life with such certain guts.
Of course, I needn’t blame God or such supernatural beings, neither my parents nor governments. Moreover, to alter my own status quo is either very possible. I could have gotten a job someplace else outside a town, for instance. But, what for? To find other people whining on another stuff? I apparently have become one of them. A hamster, yet in a human-size, or a dead soul who longs for heaven. More hypocritically still, I continue to lift up my egos and find another scapegoat, whilst keep saying to myself that this is just how my conscience works as a mechanic of self-defense.
But that does not mean I would retreat my ambitions. The future can always find ways to scare me. I do anything to get by, so I won’t be dispensable, a burden in society. I muster up my courage to adapt, reeling into the tech and white-collar world that I hate. As I write this, I can say that I am in a fairly stable position. I get paid every month and have no worry about basic needs or losing a job. And yet it is not enough, there is something more I can pursue. This all for the mouth that I need to feed, for the book that I want to finish, for one shoot of opportunity to get a decent life, for my family, and for my personal gratification. More than that, deep down, I still hate the fact that I am a third world citizen. I still want to see my city accommodated with modern public transportation. I still want my surrounding to be more literate and educated. I want it all.
Even if I could not achieve it all, at least, I thought I would be able to find my place in this world. So that I would be able to be grateful, to be more respectful to those around me, to be careful with my own words, to be acknowledged that this life is very much out of my control. Finally, I could quit overestimating myself so I wouldn’t act selfishly to live beyond those big silly ambitions.
