Friday, July 13, 2007

Desires

It sometimes amazes me how we people live each day to see the next day and then again jump to the next day in the sequence. Everyone has something to do everyday to get to the next day. And this is how everyone almost every one of us lives his live. Some people may argue that they see life in a bigger picture than the mere days. I agree, but my point here is that even then how sure are we about what basically motivates us to live this life.

Desires are aplenty and they occur in different ways at different stages leading to different outcomes. If I go and ask this question to ten people I might get ten different answers. But with the same essence may be. I want to become a software engineer, a doctor, a politician, a film-star, a sports-star, a religious leader and so on. These I-want-to-be's seem to be the motivation behind people living their lives. This underlines the desire to live a better life, depending on one's perspective on what one defines as living better life. Most of the desires are vertical in the sense that a good student wants to become a techie, a techie wants to become a product manager and a product manager wants to start his own company. Though the last example might be annotated with all the branching factors leading to various choices at various stages, it more or less signifies the vertical nature of desires.

Moving from this very vertical nature of some desires, there are people who experience a horizontal shift in desire, or let's rather call it desire for a horizontal shift. A techie gets fed up with his daily encounter with unaligned bytes and decides to leave his (not so) high paying job in order to move to an NGO to teach basic mathematics to under privileged children. A full time neurosurgeon quits playing with the nervous system of ailing people and takes up the role of a motivator by conducting workshops and interacting with the people outside his erstwhile surgery room. In these incidents people are not moving vertically but there is a horizontal shift in their career and the desires of life.

People can exercise many permutations of these horizontal and vertical shifts to keep them motivated enough to lead the complete life in a better way. I do not know if I can fit the desires (which has kind of replaced the motivation in this write up) of a person in a three dimensional paradigm, but to most of us the 2D approach will suffice. Generally speaking, people in most of the cases do judge themselves against their peers, neighbors and their own family members. And this kind of attitude leads them towards the vertical shift in desire. On the other hand, some people have their role models to look up to and try to imitate or follow their journey depending on their understanding of the term ‘role model’. This can lead to both vertical and horizontal shift in desires.

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