zushi's place

In the circle I hang out in nowadays, there is a lot of lament that people don't take the small risk of taking time to discover themselves even if they don't feel passionate about their jobs.

There is a book called “The Pathless Path” that does basically exactly this. It argues that too many people are stuck at the grindy jobs prescribed to them by society for a sense of safety, and that one day it would be too late for them to do so.

The book has a lot of followers, and I said a lot of such laments myself – why aren't people doing more to actualize themselves, even when the risks appear to be so low?

A few months ago I saw a thread on Twitter that changed my opinions on this. I've only read it once and the thread has now been deleted, but at some point I realized that I've been passively thinking about it for a few months.

The gist of it is that “a person pursuing their own path is on a constant, endless quest to discover their value systems, pursue it, and justify yourself to other people. A person on the default path does not need to justify their purpose and usefulness, while someone on the non-default path needs to be thinking about it all the time. This is effortful enough that it can be rational to do away with the process altogether and stay with the default path”.

Over the past few month, this thread has been reworking my perception of people with common day-jobs, to the point that I don't really think negatively about people on the default path more. Sometimes, I even admire it. And overall, this has been a beneficial change to me.

— Categorized under: #social, #interactions, #life