Hello GiseleB,
I found this comment ironically funny because just yesterday another person had reached out to me saying that this article was helpful for them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure I guess.
Reading this article again, I would agree that my writing and philosophy was not as sophisticated as I would have liked. When I initially wrote this I had an inkling of what I thought I believed and this story was my attempt at articulating that belief.
I agree with you. We are all dependent on others to get what we want. There are gatekeepers in society who may impede your path. But I would say that this argument is giving us only one side of the coin.
As a sovereign individual armed with the power of the Internet, you have the ability to educate yourself in almost every field of study. You are able to create a business online (if the market demands it) or train yourself to become a web developer through courses online (albeit this is a hard path and much saturated nowadays.)
As for friends, I must say it is hard to find people who you can genuinely open up to and have deep conversations about life with. I am fortunate to have great people around me, but I acknowledge that many people do not have this luck and have had bad experiences with friendship in their lives.
Your last line is a generalization that you cannot apply for all jobs available in the market. If you have a specific company that is offering “garbage” wages unlawfully and exploiting its workers, please point it out to me and I’d be happy to agree with you. You also state that “the only jobs available in the market are only menial and poor” — another generalization that does not encapsulate all jobs available, and perhaps is only applicable in the industries that you are interested in.
We are in an unprecedented time and have a high number of unemployed, which means many people have to accept any job to make ends meet. There is no real freedom for these people and they do not get to contemplate what gives them “meaning” and what their “true calling” is.
My argument in this article has never been what you’ve framed it to be: “Don’t worry, be happy”. I was writing this story as an unemployed, recently graduated college student. I had opportunity to be bitter and resentful at the world, but instead I thought that it would be better for me to control what I could control rather than try to control everything else around me.
You could call that naive, because as you’ve pointed out, many things in life are dictated by the decisions of others. But I would say that the philosophy of focusing only on what I could control helped me take responsibility for my own life. I started to find things to busy myself with, rather than be a victim of the cruel world. I stopped comparing myself with other people and tried to find what truly gave me meaning in this world. I figured out that I was too comfortable, and was not willing to push myself to my limit in anything. That’s why I prescribed people who were in a similar position as me to look for something to struggle with. Because the journey uphill gives you hope, and if that’s what it takes to move forward then so be it.
I do not know what you’ve been through and what you’ve experienced. I will agree with you that life is full of suffering and has many parts about it that is unfair.
But if you’re so ready to tear down my proposal for giving life meaning, please be ready to offer an alternative. Destruction is easier than creation — I encourage you to provide a philosophy that is greater and more practical than mine if you’re so willing to call it overly simplistic and naive.
