Do you know what I love? It’s a great hobby of mine where I constantly think about how great life could be if I achieved all of the goals I set for myself. Obtaining financial stability, hanging out with people I like, and having the ability to do almost whatever I want with full clarity. If that was all done, I’d have achieved the meaning of life and lived it to the fullest.
Hold on, I have to actually put in work for that?
Well, okay.
Uh, actually… I’m not so sure if I want to now. I’ll just go back to dreaming, and I’ll feel like doing it once I’ve dreamt enough.
A month later and… well, believe it or not, something’s different: I now feel hopeless, and I’ve lost 30 days. I don’t understand. Humans were able to evolve from crawling monkeys, splashing mud on the walls, to a civilised society where you have to buy the walls before splashing them. We weren’t supposed to make it to the moon, but we chose to and we did. So why is it that I can’t even get up in the morning without wasting 30–40 minutes while the rest of humanity has gone rogue with their capabilities?
That’s it: I just need the right motivation. I pull up a good-old motivational video with EIGHTY-EIGHT MILLION VIEWS. As a score by Hans Zimmer plays in the background, the speaker utters their spells of inspiration, forcing me to realise that I’m INVINCIBLE, and that the pain behind my effort will subside once I get through it. That the possibility of snapping under that pain is impossible, and that distractions like physical health, mental health, social life, and probably life in general, you cannot allow to get in your way.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have parents who wish the best for them, provide for them, and care enough to give them advice and guidance for the big, mean world on the other side of a wall made of our childhood years, constantly decaying until time runs out. This is my last year in this school before I go to university and have to twist my head around student loans.
You’ve heard the sayings:
“You can’t rely on your parents forever.”
“You won’t be able to live under the wings of your parents for much longer.”
“I’ll kick you out as soon as you turn 18.”
Now, let’s be real for a second. Kids do need to know that independence is gonna form a foundation for the rest of their lives, and they should develop it for a more fulfilling and comfortable journey. BUT… they should also know that it’s something they should look forward to, and not think of it as the impending doom awaiting them at the end of the amusement ride. (This is not to say that all that fear stems from the pressure of your parents alone, but it’s worth mentioning.)
There are more layers behind this reliance. Beyond basic child-support, you’ll be told ancient tales about how your parents may have messed up in the past so you won’t make the same mistakes, and you’ll be told what steps they’ve taken that you can follow. If you’re lost in the woods, and you see a path somebody already made for themselves, then by all means, follow it. None of us is stuck in the woods, but rather in a huge maze. This maze has a seemingly infinite number of passageways that people before you have already carved. No path is an easy path, as they contain all kinds of threats that life throws at you, like career costs, time consumption, and potential harm. A couple of them may lead to a way out, a sign that you’ve made it, or you might be led into a pit of snakes.
How do we know which path will lead out? Nowadays, with social media and everything, people can draw maps to the exit, in which they conveniently fold into packages for algorithm pigeons to deliver what you might know as ‘self-help’ videos, articles, verbal advice, and all that stuff to reach you and give you a sense of clarity. But if a list of instructions, brief advice, and a short ‘help’ video was enough for you to become a millionaire and happy tappy forever, why are so many of us not at that point already? Is it a lack of patience, a lack of effort, being ‘built different’? I think that you’re either born different, or you naturally have the strength to build yourself into something different. Either way, your potential is there, lying dormant, waiting for you to wake it up.
Hustle Culture is a term used to describe a toxic mindset of relentless productivity, often leading to the neglect of physical/mental health and your entire life. There are plenty of books, articles, and videos with insightfully original titles like, “How to work harder than everyone else”, or even better; “How to ACTUALLY work harder than everyone else.” You end up exhausted, feeling guilty for not being able to follow every single step, and worst of all, you’ve wasted 30 minutes of your life on that video. The motivational speakers are loud with their words, and they will probably inspire you, but I crashed after a day of a motivational sugar high, feeling super guilty for not living up to the grind. I’m not gonna try a chain viewing, where I keep watching those videos to maintain the high, because I’m honestly worried about where I’d end up. Sure, a daily dose of unyielding anger may have worked for those speakers, but it isn’t for everyone. They’ll say, “Only 1% of the people who watch this succeed because they are the only ones choosing to put in the effort”.
No. That probably just means your steps to succeed only work on 1% of the population. And probably not us, whether we choose not to go hyperdrive every single day, or because we can’t. Maybe if the steps were more practical, not oversimplified, and maybe a little less annoyingly preachy, they might make more of a difference. But it’s a bit hard to do that, knowing that a single prompt isn’t gonna produce the same result for billions of individual carbon units with different programming. From my perspective, many of those motivational speeches are really just trying to promote their energy drinks to ‘increase your chances of survival’. Then you’d crash earlier, and you’d rewatch the video earlier: a vicious cycle of mental and real caffeine to unlock the unstoppable mindset known as severe chronic depression.
The toxic mindset of relentless productivity being spread to millions of people is a pretty overrated influence, and I hope you can agree. Many people think about it the wrong way, going as far as glorifying it. Some people may feel like the fear induced by the pressure of their parents is lacking, and that motivational speeches are the only supply left to keep us going.
We’re all so caught up in trying to find the way out of this maze that we can’t even navigate our way through ourselves! Then there’s always more to navigate your way through, constantly going from goal to goal, grinding like crazy, suffering like crazy. And we are never truly gonna find the way out. Slaves to society—even if you’re built different.
When I was 11, I hated doing my homework, except for fun ones like building a Minecraft replica of the Anzac trenches during the Covid lockdown. That was fun. But, as anyone would expect, my neglect for trying had rewarded me with horrendous grades. So I got told I would be kicked out of the nest and die if I didn’t develop my wings properly. In an ongoing conclusion that’ll continue for the rest of my life: I’m trying to.
Do I want to pursue my ambitions and live a fulfilling life? Yeah, but nowadays it feels mostly out of intense fear of getting eaten alive by the world beyond the nest. I often get so paralysed by the fear that every action I take seems so useless in the grand scheme of things. That dread makes me forget that I can pull through, or even breathe. Homework hurts, effort hurts, the thought of not succeeding – it all hurts.
I’ll order another motivational speech to go with that hurt, please.
Nature is pretty, but it’s ridiculously depressing to think about as well. Earth’s inhabitants have only gotten this far by culling the weak and letting only the strong get as far as they are right now. Survival of the fittest. It’s simple: if you aren’t as strong as others, aren’t able to push through life’s obstacles, are unable to develop consistent discipline the way everyone advises you should, then what is the point in living?
All of this is to say that if you feel like you always need to work harder consistently, that can backfire hard. Long ago, an artist you may or may not have heard of had an enormous drive to create. But, like many of us today, talented or not, he was a victim of unrealistic expectations and was devastated by the thought of not working hard enough. He was someone who rarely finished the projects he started, the goals he set for himself, and ultimately died believing that he wasted his life. He stated on his deathbed, “I have offended God and mankind for doing so little in my life.”
That lowly man was Leonardo Da Vinci, widely acclaimed as the best artist of the 15th century and one of the most glorified people in history. Sadly, he passed thinking the opposite, maybe because he couldn’t finish most of his projects and live up to the hype he built for himself. All those expectations may have been driven by the pressure of needing to please the standards of society, and he might have been more content if his expectations were healthier for his character. I mean, sure, those expectations got him somewhere. But in the end, famous or not, those of us who relentlessly strive to reach really high standards may die full of regrets for working too hard, failing to maintain relationships, and not allowing ourselves to be happy. What we regret is fully dependent on our values, and yet we’re still too naive to realise what the ‘right’ way to live life is. No matter what those motivational gurus say, there is no ‘right’ way, and their way to live through non-stop grinding is merely one of the billions of ‘the way to live’ books piled among each other, none of which work for every individual. Obviously, some of these books work for more people than others, but they are in the same realm of objectivity as the simple question, “What is the meaning of life?”
My answer to that: “I don’t friggin’ know, just make it up!”
Living life the ‘right’ way seems to mean following the necessary steps like a robot to achieve THE meaning, as if the meaning is some specific goal that satisfies everyone.
In short, the question should be, “What’s your meaning of life?”
Some premade meanings are great for inspiration, but writing your own story and methods to live your life is going to be a lot more interesting and less torturous than mindlessly following a script someone else wrote. I don’t recommend plagiarising someone else’s meaning; I recommend adding your own, and to live the life that makes you happy.
Marcus Liang – Year 13
