“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
We live a borrowed life, someone else’s idea of what we ought to be. Most people I know fit this definition. I know an artist who is now a mediocre doctor and a great physicist trapped in a desk job, the list goes on. Why we live borrowed lives? The answer normally resides in unfulfilled dreams of a previous generation. The mother who wanted to become a doctor herself and couldn’t. The father, who believes what was good enough for him, should be good enough for his son.
It’s not just career choices that are borrowed, what is borrowed is an entire ideology of life. Our identities, our concepts, our values are all someone else’s notion of what they ought to be. An emotional baggage being carried forward, from one generation to the next. Economics of course is a strong driving force, at least where the career choices are concerned. All parents want their children to have a stable secure income. In a country like Pakistan, where the price hikes are crippling the society and professions such as artists starving in alleys, we can’t really blame the forces that bend us, or can we?
Selfishness in its coarsest form is not what is being proposed. Here, selfishness is only limited to our faculties of choosing the patterns in our life and the elements that govern it. To be selfish in the pursuit of whatever drives us. Not the selfishness of taking away from needy or the selfishness of furthering ourselves at the cost of someone else.
There is a reason why mediocrity thrives in our society. We give up our right to self actualization as toddlers. As we grow up, choice of subjects, universities, friends, careers and even spouses in most cases are determined for us by other people. Question is, are we really entirely unconcerned with our lives or are we just complacent people who shirk from taking any responsibility. Taking responsibility of making a decision is a huge deal. A lot of people can tell you the exact ways of bettering their conditions, most of them know the steps they need to take to reclaim their lives, but they don’t. Talk is always easy; we can bicker and bitch all day about the injustices that have befallen us and at night complacently admit that this how fate planned it for us.
We cannot hold poverty, misfortune, failure and suffering of one, to be a claim check on another person’s lives. Parents do not perform a favor to the children by having them and so cannot or should not be in a position to bargain on that account. We cannot judge life as if it were a mortgage and claim it at a bank. People who are constantly talking of what you owe to your family or society, and constantly advocating of sacrifice for others, intend to be the collectors of the sacrificial offerings.
Most of us slave through our entire waking lives bound by these invisible chains of “altruism for the sake of altruism”. To do good for the sake of others, for we are told, it will bring with it the glory of inner peace and contentment. Why that inner peace never arrives is a question that is often carefully swept under the carpet. Ultimately, the cost of living for the sake of others, costs us our soul.
Amongst us, there are those who do not follow the “norms”. These people are almost always made out to be bad examples. However, the time for insulting the selfish should come to an end; and in retrospect selfishness should be embraced. There is no grace, in being called a victim, of circumstances or of people. Evil has always required the sanction of the victim. The need of the hour is a very very selfish society. Where each individual, looks to creating a life of his or her own, utmost happiness. Pursuing careers that we love, being with people that we like. Breaking free, from our need to conform to another person’s ideology and subsequently for others, to conform to our own. The consequences of such rebellious independence once faced, can open doors to unlimited freedom.
“Existence is identity and we cannot exist if we don’t believe. What is it that we have to believe? Believe in the one thing that we are born free and have no one has claims to our faculties and our self. And that to strive to achieve happiness in the simplistic of everyday functions and to be able to perform every single act in our lives according to free will is not a gift but a birthright. To question everything obsolete taught to us and to create new rules and laws governing our own life are the only principles that govern civilized people.”
—Ayn Rand
