Jul
24
The Invisible Cages of Belief
Filed Under Making changes, Self Discovery, Sociology |
I’ve just finished reading these two great articles that talk about the mentality of students attending elite schools, specifically Yale and Harvard. The crux of them both is that student education has taken a back seat to student entitlement and their impending success, post education but the articles also imply that many of the students can’t see the cage they, and the processes that got them there, have built around their world view. Largely that those who are here (at the institutions) have made it and now, with their unlimited credit of success, they just need to figure out where they should put all the booty. This is something that I have come across myself, the Invisible Cage of Belief. The set of ideas that limits the expectations and modifies the experience of our lives.
I always thought that the world was just how I saw it. That I was perpetually doomed to be a raiser of cats, doer of mundane work and payer of bills. Even though I could see that it was such a stupid idea to work five days, complain about work on the next two and repeat until I was 65 - I still signed up for it.
My life isn’t exactly ideal:
- Even though I don’t work 38 hour weeks, “I need a real job”.
- Even though I don’t do much on the weekends, “When will I get time to rest?”.
- Even though I bought a weird little house that suits me just fine, “I need a bigger house”.
And I felt BAD because I was having those thoughts.
My Invisible Cage of Belief was too small to hold me, but as my own jailer I was trying very hard to keep me in there. How did I get out? I went on holiday. A long holiday. To Europe, somewhere I have always wanted to go, but always managed to never make it.
It took me a long time to get to that point. I had to have weekends off from work. Then weekends away from home. Then a short holiday overseas, somewhere close but definitely out of mobile range. Then another short holiday slightly further away, for slightly longer, in a slightly more “backpacker” mode. And slowly, with the iron will of someone else’s expectations that people are allowed to go on holiday and a solid but quickly eroding belief that this was not the case, I made it out of the cage.
The first one was the hardest. It seems there are larger ones around it, like a Matryoshka doll, but with the knowledge that they exist and experience of what they feel like, escaping them seems to get easier.
I don’t know what those elite leaders of tomorrow are going to be like. I hope there will be some real human beings in the crowd. Some people who spent a lot more time tinkering with their inner workings than the outer workings of the world they want to take control of.
It’s easy for me to say this now, I can see the Invisible Cages of Belief I have escaped from. I’m looking forward to finding more.