Living on Purpose. (featuring Netherlands)
It’s been two years since I travelled last and in my mind I was overdue. In my head, I am happy with where I am standing in life, but at the same time, I felt like I needed time to get away from it temporarily (by myself) and reflect on everything. I’m glad I did.
Seeing a different culture and country with an open mind and fresh eyes was food for the soul. It reminded me (again) that the ‘now’ is something to be more cherished.
There is a term I learnt while reading Steve Job’s biography, ‘status quo’. It is a term which refers to the norm, what is accepted and not accepted in society. For example, in Australia chewing with your mouth open is considered rude and disgusting while in Japan, it is considered polite as it is complimenting how good the food tastes. Going from one country to another there is the challenge of adjusting. How to treat people, how to act, and of course the road rules (or in this case a bike), not to mention the new living conditions. The funny thing that came to my thoughts is that people have different ways of what is considered a normal way of living.
Surprisingly the Netherlands is a westernised society, but way more progressive compared to my hometown Melbourne, Australia. They are more lenient with rules; they adopt a more energy efficient lifestyle and more focused on the arts even though they were the birth of capitalism.
At the moment we are universally going through the current friction of computer technology rising at a rapid pace. We, functioning as a society can’t progress fast enough with it.
As we have all experienced in our lives, change is hard and challenging. Being used to one way, and being pushed to go another route requires us to change habits, sometimes pick up bad ones, and cause inconvenient commitments despite the added convenience (eg. Driving a car becomes a liability and an ongoing maintenance commitment).
As with every nation, it’s decisions tend to become double edged swords which bring a short/long term solution to it’s people but soon enough bring a short/long term problem. Fast food once upon the time was a solution to starvation but soon it become a problem for obesity and health problems.
Each movement is a baby of the mistakes made by a previous movement such as industrialism causing the birth of romanticism. In some westernised regions we have a time poor culture in which doing more and achieving more is a must due to higher costs of living and high expectation caused by media.
In Netherlands this was different as it had a slower culture. It was great but I didn’t have the benefit of having a coffee and going to the gym 5am in the morning.
One topic that has me obsessed lately is conditioned mindsets. Depending on how we are raised, where we lived etc., we have packaged a lot of thoughts to stay stable in our brain for our whole lives (sometimes requiring psychological help to change). The more we reinforced them then the harder it is to move away from them, especially if we have enforced an identity to uphold. This is a topic that became an interest through the current ‘entitlement’ culture going on (mostly with millennials). In layman’s terms entitlement refers to identifying yourself in a certain way, thus believing the world should treat you in a certain way, or believing it owes you something which, gets a lot of people feel high and mighty. Religion and feminism are examples, not saying they are bad faiths/movements but when it goes to the extremes of undermining other people then it is a problem.
A conditioned mindset plays on what the norm is and what isn’t. Morality is one part, knowing what is wrong and right (I believe every action should benefit all parties long term) and ‘fitting in’ is another. We can say the norm of norms would be something like getting an excellent education, going to a good uni, getting a great job, buying a house, getting married and having kids, all before your 30. In reality with our current economy and culture, I can tell you this is very hard for the average person. But we have also learnt that there are norms of the anti norms as well, such as artists. A lot of these norms are driven by beliefs which are either created by experience (money buys me things so is good to earn), or passed down from mentors (dad always thought me that respect and manners go a long way). Some are great and work universally, and others can be very toxic resulting in the unhappiness of people long term.
Happiness. There are a lot of theories out there on what happiness is and how to get it. There are millions of books out there describing how to be happy, each defining a whole different method whether it’s through ‘being positive’ or making a legacy which gets you ‘fans’. Out of the abundance of books I’ve read, and from personal experience, I believe happiness is a byproduct of ‘living on purpose’. When I got my mind focused on solutions to a problem at work that’s when I am happy. When I am fully in the present moment on holiday looking at everything with fresh eyes, that’s when I am happy. When I am having lunch with a good friend with undivided attention that’s when I am happy. We all need to go through a process of self discovery and find what things move us and commit ourselves to it.
Some people (including my parents which I found out not long ago) believe that pleasure and happiness are the same. After reading Mark Mason’s books and articles, I stopped believing this (another belief I had installed in my brain). There is evidence all over the news about lottery winners who hung themselves weeks later after winning, celebrities overdosing on drugs etc. Yes, I know depression is a thing, but it doesn’t rule out that pleasure equals happiness. It’s just a high that distracts you from your life’s problems temporarily until it wears off and then you have to face it, hungover!
There are a few movements but unfortunately not any are big enough to be able to cause much disruption to materialism and capitalism. The two main movements which promote owning more to being of more value. Not only does it breed lust, greed, envy and pride within people but it damages the human soul within us. The humility from which we function with starts to die down more, the more attention we focus on building our ambitious drives and class/financial efforts. Charity gets used for just a mere image boosting technique for the public rather than a cause businesses’ truly care about. We stop talking about ideas and the beauty of the world to start backstabbing each other and talking about ourselves trying to impress one another (even if we don’t like each other). There is a specific culture I have seen growing especially out of the youtube community about being authentic and genuine. Guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, Casey Neistat and Elle Mills are clear examples of this culture, and hopefully, it continues to grow. Small businesses’ are adopting these practices of coming off as a human to one another increasing trust and honesty. I believe this will show peoples’ true colours and give credit to those who truly deserve it.
Solo-backpacking for the first time gave me a taste of this culture too (which unfortunately in my line of business I don’t get too much of), and it’s one of the things that made me fall in love with backpacking. I had very genuine human interactions with the people I met while travelling in hostels, going on tours and meeting randomly in cafes. When we spoke to each other, there was no underlying motive involved in what we wanted in the other person, and there was no room for really being dishonest with one another, even if we were it was easy to tell. We were together, living on purpose in another country, talking about our walks of life, things that moved our heart and minds, and the things we loved/would love to see in the country we are in.
I don’t know where in your trail of thoughts this article has led you; I am writing this to hopefully breed a level of self-awareness (another new movement happening!). It mainly rests on faith and duty. According to (again!) Mark Mason, he gives us the confidence that commitment to a purpose (money making, religious faith, family) is what provides us with the energy (let’s not call it motivation as I feel like it’s overused) to commit to our problem solving and endure suffering. Self-awareness, well part of it requires you to watch your thoughts and know what is determining your actions. Are you doing this for your identity? Are you doing this because your motivated to put food on the table? Are you not doing something because you’re scared of what people think? It’s a higher level of thinking and one which I believe will give you more freedom on how you live your own life based on your terms instead of fitting into a culture that focuses on pleasing other people.
To conclude, the significant challenge of the 21st century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving the rest of life as possible. We must learn to make ourselves vulnerable to the beauty of life, which will in turn allow us to fight for it.
