adminThis is a quote I heard on Chris Do’s podcast. I don’t know which episode. I don’t know who the guest was. And I don’t know whose quote it was. But I do know that it made a big impact on me. Let me explain.
My mom was born in a poor farming family in Thailand. They were so poor that when they found a duck egg, they had to share them with eight siblings. During school lunch, my mom had to hide behind a large tree in the school’s courtyard so no one could see that she did not have lunch. That kind of poor.
In contrast, since I was five, I have lived in the Netherlands. My stepdad made me breakfast and lunch every day. We weren’t considered rich. We always had second-hand furniture, and we didn’t go on holidays. But we always had enough food, so I was always able to invite friends over for dinner.
Knowing about that contrast is something I’ve always carried with me. But I never knew what it meant. Until that quote: if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at start to change. Almost weekly, I think about this quote in seeing, doing, and creating things.
Until I was about 24, I lived my life on autopilot. I did everything that was expected of me. I just followed the directions of society. You go to school and if you have the opportunity to go to University, you grab it. When I was 18, I thought I wanted to go to university. After hearing the quote and some time of overthinking, I realized that it was not me, per se, who wanted to go to Uni.
I just followed society’s path. It wasn’t the path that I wanted to go on. It was the path of least friction. The paved path. It was the path of meeting your parents’ expectations. The path of wanting to make them proud. The other path is the difficult one. To go there, you have to be brave. Guides are scarce, but there are always clues.
So, when you realize that things don’t have to be the way they are, things start to get interesting. Why do people do what they do? Why do my friends do what they do? Why does my family do what they do? Why do I do what I do? My conclusion is that most of the things we do can be simply boiled down to basic human psychology.
Mostly, we act out of fear, a sense of belonging, and desire. In group situations, that means you want to be part of the group and not fall out of line so that you’re expelled from the group. This mechanism makes us follow directions without thinking about which directions we want to go for ourselves.
When you look at groups and society in general, and you understand the mechanism, you can then also start bending the rules. When things always go to the left, but you approach it from a different direction, it could go left. But also, it could go up, down, diagonal, in circles, etc. Social mechanisms can go in all sorts of directions. You just have to be able to zoom out to see that you do have control over the things you want and the things you do.
What also helped me was the fact that I was able to have first-person experience in totally different worlds. My poor family in rural Thailand. And my wealthy life, friends, and family in the Netherlands. You would think that people in rich countries are happier. But I could see that people who can’t afford to waste money aren’t necessarily less happy. In some situations, they might even be happier.
It’s all about perspective. If you approach things differently, a whole world of opportunities will open. And that’s a fact that should make you smile.
[Note to self: this is part of “Living Free” and should be later rewritten/revisited]