#bakry

So, the other day I was sitting in a cafe with an old friend after one of those long days at work just unwinding and enjoying the evening breeze. After going through our usual conversations (politics, the good old days, etc), I asked him “Don’t you find it a bit worrisome that we’re not married yet and we are currently in our very late twenties?”

I mean, I wasn’t exactly ringing the alarm bells, but you’ve got to admit, it’s kind of disconcerting. Thirty is right around the corner. My friend gave me an indifferent look, took a deep breath out of his cigarette then said: “الجواز زي أي حاجة تانية فالدنيا…..قسمة و نصيب ا. Besides, we’re nice decent guys with a promising career; it’ll happen when it happens.” 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 

For those of you non-Arabic speakers who somehow stumbled upon my F-rated piece of writing, what my friend said was an Arabic sentence which stated that “Marriage like anything else in life; is decided by fate and if its destined to happen, it shall happen regardless of any efforts you make to hinder it and vice versa. 

AWESOME! So hey! By this concept, if I’m destined to become rich…no, make that if I’m destined to make ends meet each and every month, then why the FUCK am I busting my ass at work, doing the best I can to distinguish myself, all the while trying to climb and scuffle my way up the corporate ladder as fast as I could just so I could at best, end the month with a decent amount of savings? Well, instead, I’ll just spend my days eating pizza on the couch watching TV and if I’m destined to get money, it’ll just magically find its way to me, won’t it? 

Oh, and “we’re nice decent guys with a promising career”. DUUUUDE!!!! THAT IS SO SPECIAL!!!! Only if it weren’t for the fact that all the eligible bachelors in the world share those holy virtues you just mentioned so proudly. What you just mentioned is the “bare minimum” one is expected to posses in order to even begin to have the slightest of chances. You could say those are the admission fees for the competition, BUT by no means are they getting you in anyway whatsoever closer to the prize. 

Having a real chance depends on what more you have to “offer” in addition to being nice and decent; could be charm, could be money, could be excitement, could be a million other things. At the end of the day it's business as usual, you offer something and you get something in return. Admittedly, having a “promising career” was the least stupid thing my friend mentioned, although it would be much better if that promising career had already fulfilled a healthy portion of this “so-called promise”. 

Also, whatever you do, DO NOT read too much into Hollywood movies. A certain movie comes to mind called “She’s Out Of My League”. Basically, this movie tells the story of a beautiful, rich, successful young woman who is used to dating handsome rich successful guys. Long story short, she falls in love with an airport security guy, mainly because he’s a nice guy with a kind pure heart…Yeah. Well. FUCK THIS SHIT. Star Wars are far more realistic movies than this piece of shit. It’s like Maroon 5 sing in their latest album “All these fairy tales are full of shit, one more fucking love song and I’ll be sick”. 

You want to be popular? You want be wanted? Well, you better have something decent to offer. A thick paycheck with lots of zeros and a fancy car will never hurt your chances. A high profile job wouldn’t be too shabby. A clever sense of humor perhaps? You also get points for talents, maybe playing a musical instrument. Hitting the gym is highly recommended. True that girls care a lot about personality but that doesn’t mean they find your flabby belly sexy.If you’ve got a yacht though, you probably don’t have to worry about the talents part, you’re obviously very talented at making money.

  Oh, and by the way, I’m not trying to portray women in a negative image here. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Why go for a nice loser when you can go for a nice winner?  It’s simply being practical or proper decision making and nothing is wrong with that. I never said they would go for an evil bastard who saved a few bucks.

You might think I’m being too shallow or materialistic and that in the end, all which matters is the essence of the soul. Well, BULL FUCKING SHIT. Does it matter? Sure! All that matters? Hell NO! 

Honestly, nice and decent are all over the place. What you should do is give yourself value and don’t just wait for things to happen because they never will on their own. Unless you enjoy waiting…in which case, carry on.

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Why am I living in a materialistic, money driven, survival of the fittest, pressurized world ?

Why am I living a life where every day is a battle to preserve my position in the pecking order of the corporate which I work for? Why am I constantly trying to improve myself and specialize in things that I don’t really like in order to keep myself needed and keep myself from being relegated to the bench or worse, from being fired altogether?

In this battle I refer to, I am completely on my own. The only allies you would have are your family. Specifically mother, father and sibling. (I would assume wife would also fit that category, but then again I am not married, so I wouldn’t know ). Those allies, however are only moral support, the battle is yours, and yours alone. Furthermore, they will not be there forever, and – lest you forget - are also consumed by their own problems.

Once the moral support you get from them stops, for whatever reason, you are on your own out there.

You are on your own, in a world where everybody is a politician; a person who will play the dirtiest trick in the book to screw you if it’s in his best interest. For that, in order to survive you must be constantly on your toes, constantly on the lookout. If you wish to strive, you MUST be a politician yourself, you must participate in the game and try to sleep at night, readily presenting the excuses you need. Some people can do it, others cannot. Problem is that no matter how much you convince yourself, there is always that pure remaining honest part of you that knows very well that you’ve betrayed your values.

We are living in a world were politics have spread from governments and countries to your day to day life. We are living in a world where mistakes are not tolerated. What a ridiculous sentence! I am a human being, I will make mistakes. It is part of nature. How can I be denied a part of my nature?  I’m not saying I should be careless, but every now and then I shall screw up whether I like it or not. We live in a world where only the best will do. It doesn’t matter how you get there, it doesn’t matter how many moral codes you’ve broken, JUST GET IT DONE AND SHOW ME THE MONEY.

Why am I living in a world where I am constantly under pressure to perform a huge quantity of tasks, to deliver an end product with flawless quality, with little regard to what my capabilities can actually realize? Why do such tasks take up all my time ( work + life ) to an extent that at times you wish the day had more than 24 hours or the week had more than 7 days so that you would simply meet your deadline. That dreaded word ” Deadline “. How many of us did not,  several times, dread and curse this word during countless long sleepless nights?

It’s like they say "Drive the car to the last drop of fuel….then continue driving all the same".

No, that’s not a famous saying, I just made that up now. I think it is a good metaphor to the way we are living our lives. Why is it that the better I am at what I do, the more expectations I need to deal with. This in turn gradually raises the pressure on you, till the inevitable event of you cracking occurs and make no mistake about it, it will occur (Isn’t it ironic that you shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming you shall not make a mistake?). At this point, not only do you feel the utter disappointment of failure, but your failure is also less tolerated by your superiors who expected a lot more from you.  You are then humbled by your error and you start re-building your image from scratch until the next error which you can never completely avoid but you try to postpone to the best of your abilities. Otherwise you risk losing your name in the organization chart.

Part of your soul must die in agony with every passing day under such circumstances until at the end you are rendered soul-less. Just another robot working on the production line doing his part so the big guy upstairs can afford his private jet.

I have nothing against the man. He can buy all he wants and do as he pleases, but by what logic does he enjoy that luxury, while I’m deprived from it? Why do I no longer have time to enjoy my hobbies? Why do I no longer have the luxury to plan a trip abroad? Most basically why do I no longer have a chance to look into my soul and explore myself? Why am I staring at figures, numbers and emails for 9 hours a day, and spend the rest it thinking about similar figures, number and emails that I will inevitably see the next day…and the next day….and the next day….and the next day.

Why do weekends never seem enough any longer? Why do I start to worry about Monday morning by Saturday evening? Why can’t I completely engross myself in an activity without the back part of my brain thinking about the next meeting at work? The only thing left that I could safely say takes up my undivided attention is the thought of a girl. But that’s another story for another day.

Is it the myth of financial security? I say a myth but I am not really sure. At the end of the day, you need to put food on the table. You need to survive. But does it have to be a choice between survival and happiness?  Is there no formula where you can combine the two? Is there such a thing as happy survival? Getting a paycheck towards the end of every month is pleasing, but I would certainly not call it happiness. At best, I would call it a volatile pleasing sensation before you start cutting chunks out of it  to pay bills for stuff you yourself don’t really need, they’re just needed to preserve your role as a gear in the evil corporate giant wheel.

So back to our main point, WHY? AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT? One not so popular opinion is to take a risk. Take a leap of faith. Throw it all behind in search and pursuit of the unknown, that which is vague and unclear. But, vague and unclear is scary, especially considering the way modern society has programmed us. You must have a plan. Be an engineer. Be a doctor. But I like writing! The all too convincing answer I would usually think of to such a thought “Do you wanna end up begging at the streets”. Don’t get me wrong, I do not blame who gave me those answers. In the end, they had my best interest in mind, they said it out of love and they might very well be right about it. It’s just our programming, and to snap out of this program after 28 years is not a thought to be taken lightly. Especially when you have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living. Would you risk your life as you know it? Would you risk guaranteed survival with little to no happiness in pursuit of pure happiness, but also with the possibility of absolute misery should the risk not pay off ?

If you had asked me this question a year ago, no, 6 months ago I would have answered HELL NO. However, as time passes, I find myself tempted to flirt with the idea of a Yes. I mean, life is not fair by nature, so the least we could do is be fair to ourselves.

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“I’m never going to succeed at this.”, “it’s hopeless.”, “she is out of my league.”, “that’s way harder and more complicated than I thought it ever would be.” are phrases I find myself uttering a lot more than one would like.

We are all born with a certain amount of self-confidence instilled inside each and every one of us. Some have it in abundance, while others possess it in very scarce amounts. The fate of that initial dose of self-confidence we enter this world bearing, however, is very much if not completely dependent on what life throws at us. Our self-confidence flourishes with every success, victory or triumph we experience throughout our lives. Accordingly, it diminishes with every failure or setback. The more unexpected the failure, the more damage it inflicts.

The latter is not really a problem when it occurs as isolated individual incidents that are relatively far apart. After all, failure is an integral part of life that we can never avoid, whether we like it or not. It is part of the learning process; of the school of life where everyone is forced to attend class, and the only way to play hooky is suicide.

The real problem with failure is when it hits us in consecutive blows, like someone punching you repeatedly in the face & you have no chance to defend yourself. Worse yet, you barely have a chance to comprehend what is happening. It is at times like these when “shit hits the fan” that our self-confidence suffers the most and I’m pretty sure most of us can relate through similar experiences.

A famous movie quote once went like “It ain’t how hard you hit…It’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”. While that is true, the trick here is believing in the potential that I won’t get hit again in my next try, that I have a real chance. Because if I reach a point where I almost “know” that this is the unavoidable outcome, well, it gives me little reason really to get up and try again. Consecutive failure does that to people, some sooner than others, but in the end, it is the eventual outcome.

Now, don’t mistake what I’m trying to portray here as mere negativity just yet. On the other side of the coin, there are individuals who carry a very decent amount of self-confidence and have managed to garnish it throughout their lives, assisted by a fine mixture of will power and good fortune. Failure for those is very hard to accept or acknowledge which is a blessing in most cases, but quite devastating in a few cases where one is simply destined for failure.

I guess the point I’m trying to delineate here is that, while self-confidence is an integral part of a successful life, it is also important to acquire that fine balance between healthy self-confidence and the ability to admit failure upon defeat. When our ego prevents us from admitting failure, it prevents us from learning from it thus preventing us from eventually succeeding.

Some people say “Fake it till you make it”. But how can I make it if I already consciously admitted I’m a faking it? Instead of faking it, wouldn’t I be better off searching for something that I am truly good at?In the end, it’s picking our true calling and not wasting time on what we’re not meant to do that counts.

This, however, was just my humble opinion and my take on the matter, which could very well be wrong. I never claimed to know it all.

After all, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here babbling about self-confidence now, would I?

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