Opinion
Remaining busy all the time is not what we are here for
How I started living more by doing less!
I was so preoccupied with my work and daily chores of life — I never realized what was going on outside my little office. My office was like hibernation and my most favorite comfort zone.
Never could I think much beyond my work and duties and timings and schedules.
My life lacked much to be fulfilled.
Monotonous routine seemed to me to be the hallmark of success; I appreciated busy time as a reward for pouring myself fully into my profession.
People seem to appreciate you when you are productive for yourself and others 24/7.
The Goal of Life
But the flip side of this was yet to be uncovered. It’s quite saddening to realize a few things about life: the goal of life is not just to be productive all the time.
The goal of life is not just to be appreciated by others for the output you are giving to keep things going.
The goal of life is not just to sell yourself and your skills all the time and make everybody around you as comfortable as possible, too.
Society has trained us in the language of ‘more’. More study, more reading, more education, more work, more activities, more exercise, more health, more wealth, bigger house, better cars, exotic vacations.
And the avalanche of social media fueled this tradition. Constant comparison is a new normal for us. Constant updates are a basic norm. It’s difficult to remain silent and unnoticed.
So my point of writing is simple — we have learned to be confined to the utmost comfort zones of our daily work, and yet we have also learned to wander into the jungle of constant updates and bombardment of information.
We keep consuming and we keep adjusting to each new update and information while being under pressure to be most productive. Our routines may be monotonous, but our minds are constantly getting their dopamine dose.
Because of this pseudo non-monotonicity, we are missing the real charm of life and being offered an illusion — one of living a multidimensional, adventurous, happy, easy, fulfilling life. But it’s not real.
We have certainly bought this idea of virtual life being real life.
Let me explain it some more. It’s difficult to realize that the life we live in this hyper-connected and yet isolated era is not fully humane. So many covers of pseudo things surround us and they actually hide the real mis-happenings of our day-to-day life…
In my case, I hibernated in my workplace and never realized many dimensions of life were missing and there was no cue about what was absent till I realized the stagnant waters were deep and stinking!
It was a real difficulty to get past the idea of ‘can’t do anything social or non professional without harming my workflow and performance’.
Since then, I am now taking it all a little easy. I have stopped falling into the trap of being ‘tightly scheduled means more successful and productive’.
I avoid falling into the numbers game, and it’s quite reliving. Doing less has also added to the quality of whatever I do, and I feel more like a human being and less like a robot.
A little social media detox also has helped me transform my ways — what we see on our digital screens is not the real world. I am stepping out of closed doors and breathing under the vast sky full of innumerable possibilities.
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