QUOTES
What Henry David Thoreau Taught Me?
Every Action has its Consequences
Some time ago, I read a quote by Henry David Thoreau. The quote goes,
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life that is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
I could immediately relate to this sentence and that is why I decided to write about what is my learning from this quote.
Let us suppose you want to buy a house for yourself by the end of your twenties and you are in your early twenties now. You did some research and found out that you need to earn 100,000 dollars every year from now on till your late thirties to fulfill your wish. So, you start looking for job profiles that pay 100,000 dollars a year. You shortlist a few job profiles that you feel will comfort you and start preparing to get those jobs. Now, the cost of that house is the amount of time and energy that you will spend in making sure that you get that job and retain it till your house is fully paid off. The cost of that house also includes all the things that you will not do to devote your time and energy to your job. The cost of that house also includes all those job profiles that you will not even look into because they do not pay enough but might be a far better match to your inner longings. In short, the cost of that house is the collection of experiences that you choose to go through for that house to be yours, plus the collection of experiences you choose to avoid consciously or unconsciously to free your time and energy. Since life is what you experience, it is basically the amount of life you will have to exchange for the ownership of that house. Does it sound a bit frightening?
According to me, it should sound frightening. When you think about it, you want to buy that house because you want a good place to live for yourself and your family. Some other factors that contribute to your wish may be security, social status, peer pressure, following the crowd, leaving resources for progeny, and retirement plans. Beyond these, I cannot see any possible reason that will motivate you to work so hard for almost two decades. But consider this, you can rent a good place to live for yourself and your family. So, it is these other factors that are playing on your mind and making you do all the work. Here, two scenarios arise.
First is that you think that things like security, social status, peer pressure, following the crowd, leaving resources for progeny, and retirement plans are things that are needed to be taken off to live a happy and satisfying life. In this case, you need to remember that you are mortal. How can a mortal life find its full potential by succumbing to peer pressure or following the crowd?
Your life is like a movie in which you are the main character. Just like in every movie, your life has a starting point and an end. There is just one twist. Unlike a movie, your life plays out only once. But there is one advantage, you get to write the script as well. Succumbing to peer pressure means you do not recognize all this and you decide to be a part of somebody else’s movie. Similarly, following the crowd means you decide to write your movie script as most people have written. In both cases, you do not value your own life enough to live it your own way. You do not realize that regret is far worse than failure. All because you keep forgetting that you are mortal and you only live once.
Once you are fully conscious of your mortality, you will not seek security in your life. You begin to understand that the walls of self-protection that you build around yourself start turning into walls of self-imprisonment after a point of time. You get entangled with things that provide you with safety, so you cannot just walk away one fine day. Also, you realize that your silly plans for the future will not stand the test of time. Your planning for retirement sounds like you are here forever, so you will collect all the resources first and then start enjoying your life. On the other hand, mortality teaches you that every second of your brief life is equally important and should be invested in activities that ensure your survival and fulfillment at the same time. Talking about taking care of your progeny, they need to learn the truths of life through your life story more than anything else. If you will be able to give them a good story, resources will never be a problem for them. Lastly, you will not care about your social status, i.e., what people think of you because you know that their thoughts and opinions are of no existential consequence.
The second scenario is that you know that security, social status, peer pressure, following the crowd, leaving resources for progeny, retirement plans, etc. are not the factors to consider while making the decision because they are quite irrelevant. But at the same time, you feel that there is no other way around these things. You feel that you have to follow society because you are unable to find out an alternative. In this case, you need to give yourself more time to figure things out and educate yourself on how to better deal with situations like this.
Now comes the price that you will pay for making the decision to buy that house without knowing all this. You will most probably get stuck in an office job in the accounting department or something like that, looking at numbers 40 hours a week. You will most probably never think of leaving that job because you worked so hard to get it. Even if you are bored and question your purpose in life sitting in the office one day, you will not have the courage to quit because your monthly income goes into home loan EMI which you have to pay at all costs. You will regret not taking those extra courses in literature and tried pursuing a career in writing which was always your inner longing. You will miss all the travel that you could have done had you rented a house and saved a lot of money. This list can go on and on. The price cannot even be calculated, it is so overwhelming that only the word life can capture it. In short, you will exchange a huge part of your life for that house.
On the other hand, if you drop your plan of buying a house because you realized that it is not the smartest thing to do, life will be different. You may become a writer, working remotely from a hill station, exploring different places around the world now and then. Again, this list can go on and on. You will be able to live a lot more. But most importantly, you will have a story for your children.
I imagined a hypothetical case of buying a house just to explain how the system works. There is a cost for everything. Nothing comes free in life. All I learned from this quote is that when you decide to do something, remember the cost in terms of the amount of life that has to be paid to do it. You may be able to get some things for a very less cost, maybe buying a house also comes under this category of you. Just be aware of that one wrong choice that can take your chunk of life.
