Ep # 14: The uncommon ways of life.

Hello! and welcome back to yet another episode of my podcast. In today's episode, let's talk about the uncommon ways of life. Those who move away from the herd are looked at as outcasts. But is it that big a deal to move away from the default conditioning of society? Let's find out.

It's time to have a word with me, Rajive Dhavan. 

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of my podcast. In this episode, we will talk about uncommon ways of life. Also, because we are at the end of the year, this will be the last episode for this year, 2022. Next year, I'll come up with more interesting content and while at it, if you like the content I've been creating, please rate it and subscribe to my podcast.
 
 So without any further ado, it's time to have a word with me. Rajive Dhavan. See on the other side of the intro music.
 
 What really is an uncommon way of life? Well, in this country and most countries, the thing is that people are always in a herd—kind of mindset. What a hundred people are doing, I will do the same. And because a hundred people are doing this, it should ideally be the right thing to do. But those few people who break the curse break this herd mentality and think in a contrarian fashion.
 
 Those who move away from the herd are generally labelled arrogant. However, if you look back in history, you will notice that most people who've achieved something in life make a positive impact or change something in the world around us. These have all been people who have had a contrarian thought process.
 
 They were not thinking like the hood. And this uncommon approach is not just limited to their financial life or their professional life. It's, it's a part of them. They do this in every aspect of their life. It takes a lot of guts to be able to think and to act away from what the herd does, to behave differently, and to have goals which the herd doesn't understand or cannot relate with.
 
 If we look at more personal life examples, we hold onto relationships thinking that these need to last forever, whether it's a friendship or something else. But what's more important than a relationship or an association lasting forever is the quality of that relationship or association. For instance, it doesn't matter if a friendship lasted only a few years, but what matters is, was it full of life in those few years?
 
 Was it impactful positively in those few years? Continuing with the pretence of a friendship that doesn't fulfil you is what the herd. The world is full of hollow associations, but one question that you can ask yourself is, was your friendship in those limited years more meaningful? We sometimes tend to get under the pressure of living in certain situations forever, and because we don't wish to question, we believe that time equals good intent.
 
 We've been with people for a long time, so they would have the best intentions for us. Comfort zone and routine are the pills we pop. This also stems from a sense of deep fear. We believe that the moment we think about an uncommon way of leading our life, it'll become for the two gossip mills. And honestly, in most scenarios, we are subjected to hate and negativity when we do something in our life that's way from what most others are doing.
 
 But just because most people find something sensible, it's not necessarily the only way to go about things. Isn't it? The "trying-too-hard-to-fit-in" culture is also equally responsible for this herd mentality. The other aspect is that you also believe that because the person on the other side has been family or a friend for years, they will only want you to bloom.
 
 But the reality, my friend can be far from this. Sometimes family hurts you unintentionally. Sometimes they do it intentionally too. We've all got our reasons to justify our actions, so we can't really generalize everything here. But because of this default conditioning, we justify everything that could be toxic around us as well.
 
 Sometimes people are extremely close to us only to feed off our miseries, and that is something we don't really understand. Some of our closest people, for instance, will be rooting for us and happy for us until they realize that we've broken the glass ceiling and we are moving beyond them in their heads.
 
 All of a sudden, we become competition. And most people don't like their competition to succeed. The irony of life is that we are born with default settings, and these settings are based on the best and worst that our parents have experienced. That's what they impart to us. If they were unsuccessful in some aspect of their life, they are certain that it's bad for us as well, but no single person can be blamed for this.
 
 Typically societal conditioning is mostly responsible for a scenario like this. However, despite the risk of coming across as arrogant, some of us are able to break the curse question, the default setting, and even change it because that's the only way to reach maximum potential. Another common thing that goes around is choosing to disagree with somebody who's older than you would showcase dis.
 
 Now that is a thought process that needs to be re-looked at. We've seen tons of examples around us. We've read about them. That age has nothing to do with maturity or knowledge, and a lot of times, because of this conditioning, we also end up being okay with the idea of a narcissistic elderly person around us or even somebody who's of the same.
 
 But they are narcissists in their approach. Everything revolves around them. Everything is for them. They will provoke you, and then you end up doing stuff, and then they play the victim role. They promise you that they will improve and change, but all that is an act. So all this happens around us, and we do not really know how to get rid of this toxic culture.
 
 Now we are all human beings. We change with time, with experiences, and we are not perfect. We make mistakes. We go wrong. We make blunders. But how is it that some people in our lives are treated as the perfect people who can never go wrong? These could be parents; these could be people who are, uh, your relatives or even friends who've been around you for ages.
 
 How does a relationship or the time that you've spent with somebody guarantee that they were never toxic and could never become toxic in the future? Marriage is the other aspect of this. A lot of people who are older than us will always say that there's a certain time to get married because you don't want to be too old, that your kid barely gets to spend time with.
 
 That could be an apt logic for some of us, but not for everybody. It cannot be an umbrella statement or a piece of advice that would be set for every single person. Some of us are not ready to get married. Some of us are not ready to take up a job because we are probably made for entrepreneurship. Some of us are not ready to have kids.
 
 Deep within, we know that we would be lousy parents, but we go ahead because of the pressure of the elderly and our peers. While I don't know anything about parenting, I know for a fact that the world that our parents grew up in doesn't exist anymore, so I'm not sure if the same parenting concepts will hold good today.
 
 At least. Some of these will need to be re-looked at. For instance, there were no mobiles or the internet when our parents were growing up. And the kind of negative impact that these two things can single-handedly have on a child's well-being is beyond one's imagination. Generalization is probably one of the biggest wars that we have to fight.
 
 The problem is that, What we don't understand, we are very quick to come to a conclusion that it might be wrong, bad, or negative. If somebody's leading a life that we don't understand, then we are sure that there is something terribly wrong with those people. Today I thought that I'd talk about a gender aspect of life, the uncommon way of life, and how this uncommon way impacts us and the people around us.
 
 As always, I hope that you liked this piece of content. If you did, please share. I am sure you will positively impact someone. Thank you.