Today, while
performing my daily browsing ritual, I came across an article on the ever-increasing
desire and the waning ambition, the millennial’s hate for Mondays and their
effort of ‘finding themselves’ in the abyss.
With every
brand targeting the millennial and the Facebook’s insatiable urge to follow us
to the grave – the new consumer generation, find things overwhelming. While being
ambitious is branded gluttony, the market never leaves a stone unturned to entice
us into buying more without keeping a constant flow of purchasing power.
Now if we
follow the social demand of keeping the desires alive without ambition— we
might just end up squabbling over the same piece of meat like little hungry
dogs and at the end no one is content. We cannot stoop to this level, can we? After
all, we’re humans.
Well, the market
and the government will do what it has to do, to maintain the rigmarole of its existence.
We can’t change it; however, efforts can be made to change ourselves. I'm neither asking
anyone to stop desiring nor am I advocating high ambition.
I
can only say what few Zen masters have said before:
Do not desire too much, not to desire to
stop desiring.
Let’s be
pragmatic, we all can’t be ambitious together, nevertheless we can do our best
to what we do (even on Mondays) and let the effort pave our course. Let not everyone
be a creator, we need more people to sustain the creation. The world now, needs
less heroes and more humans.
Humans need
less – they’re ‘Minimalist’. Minimalism isn’t a fad, it’s a way of living,
living with what you need, not what you want. It’s not shunning desire, it’s
living with it and having a check on it. Every desire can never be fulfilled,
or we would’ve had ‘fishes on trees’.
Minimalism
doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with owning material. The problem is the meaning
we assign to stuffs we own. We end up giving more meaning to our things than
health, relationship, passion, etc. If you dream of owning a car, go buy it,
see if it’s important to you. If you want to own a house, go own it. Minimalism
simply helps you to make decision consciously, but not deliberately because ‘Sharma ji k bete neh kharid liya, to mujhe
bhi lena hai’.
Minimalism is a
tool to identify what’s important in your life and focus on it, as we all know—
a man with less, sleeps well.
