#INSECURE

“The important thing isn’t what other people think you are, it’s who you are”…Shannon L. Alder

Who art thou?

This is probably the question that we ask of other people the most without actually asking same of ourselves. Globally, and from time past, prevailing circumstances have constantly caused identity crisis amongst us to an extent whereby we virtually forget who we really are, tempting us to want to be like other people other than ourselves.

Have you ever found yourself distraught by an awkward situation where you were betrayed or disappointed by acquaintances that you could swear were loyal to you? Of course we all have, in fact it becomes such a very difficult situation that burdens our minds, making it hard for us to trust people, but if you want to be smart, perhaps you could do a self-check to find out if you are the one who has problems, naturally though, we aren’t all perfect. 

If we had discerning minds like psychologists and psychiatrists, we would discover that we all are looking for ourselves in other people and the conditions that constantly surround us, for instance majority of the world populace are all addicted to distractions such as gadgets, movies, politics and sports that cause us to be unconsciously self-centered and obsessed with the lives of others, losing ourselves in their world of lucid fantasy, knowing and idolizing them better than we do ourselves.

“Often romantic relationships fail because you are trying to get someone to fall in love with the ‘YOU’ that you never discovered”…Shannon L. Alder

Bored?

What would you do if the entire world suddenly has one supreme leader and a law was passed that bans internet, gadgets, movies, music, flights, cars, cruises, electricity and even cuisines, would you survive? Even if you did survive, you’d probably go insane or become a zombie (walking corpse).

Well, not everyone would actually get bored or go crazy because people such as monks and the original spiritual sages are used to avoiding world pleasures and luxuries in order to discover the deep within them and are content, like Pico Iyer points out in his Ted original classic best seller ‘The Art of Stillness’ with machines coming to seem part of our nervous sytems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off…our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

The rest of us however are accustomed to being dependent on the new world that has been made relatively easier at the expense of our health and life spans, our lives and future indirectly used as a substitute for the bottom line of industries where low cadre workers are maltreated in a lifelong vicious cycle.

Canned foods are preserved with laced chemicals that slowly deteriorates our health, gadgets such as phones, computers and TVs allows radio waves to interact with our delicate human systems reducing the effectiveness of our internal organs. Guns are manufactured to directly and immorally end lives, while accidents, capsizes and crashes threaten car, boat and air travels respectively.    

“Insecure people only eclipse your sun because they are jealous of your daylight and tired of their dark, starless nights”…Shonnon L. Alder

Can’t hold me down

There is a Nigerian adage which says ‘a child that doesn’t allow his mother sleep will also not get rest’, by implication, anyone that employs himself with the job of not letting someone rest or succeed, he himself will definitely be on his toes.

Imagine a situation where you have no water in the house and unfortunately there is absolutely no alternative. Then all of a sudden, a massive shower of rain graces you, at that point doesn’t it feel magical? Insecure, most people in this situation would scramble to get buckets to store up the rain water.

I think this scenario kind of explains the situation with corruption especially in Nigeria. Most Nigerians like a flower from a concrete sprung up from humble backgrounds, usually not out of deprivation, but lack of contentment due to apparent exposure to the stereotypically idolized western world and her cultures that make us realize we can be more ambitious and do more, thus realizing that we are probably under-achievers with potential.

Nigerian politicians after obtaining mandates to occupy public offices have a reputation of embarking on spending, amassing and laundering spree for a number of reasons. Firstly, they have never been given an opportunity to manage such mega budgets allocated to their offices, secondly, they have invested quite a lot of their personal resources and those donated to them by their expectant godfathers, and thirdly, they owe  their kinsmen the cultural obligation of taking care of financial obligations of family, relatives and friends who constantly remind them that this may be their last time to benefit from the national cake, urging them to make the most of it, just like the rain which falls during water scarcity, fill all the empty buckets available.

“I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isn’t at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that view is glorious where ever you stand”…Shannon L. Alder

 

Emotional Intelligence

Take a moment to picture this scenario. Your friend visits you in your home, while hosting him as a guest, a violent knock is heard at your door, and then in some way you realized the uninvited visitor at the door is a villain seeking to end your friend’s life. Would you let him in right away and have him hurt your friend, or would you hide your friend for his safety and tell the villain that your friend isn’t around?

Remember, no matter what you do at this point, if you are extremely religious, which usually robs us of our blurred faith or obscure confidence, in some extreme context; you would be committing a sin. For me, I would hide my friend to safety and say that he isn’t around, although that would be a lie, but it is obviously better than surrendering him to be slaughtered.

My point? We are in the wisdom age, having transcended glorious antecedences ranging from the stone, agrarian, industrial and jet ages. Understanding of relativity has indeed stepped out of its shadow, letting light shine upon darkness, giving us the opportunity and option to embrace the knowledge we require to move us to the next level and to further understand the mysterious and unique principles that govern earth.

What is truth and what is courage?

Just as they say geek is the new cute, I’d say empathy is the new smart.

Emotional intelligence has been discovered to be perhaps the most powerful consideration we can offer, not only to our fellow humans, but also to the earth we live in, others such as even animals, and the ways we preserve the planet and not add to the currently lingering global warming.

“A man’s spirit is free, but his pride binds him with chains of suffocation in a prison of his own insecurities”…Jeremy Aldana

Content

 

Content is an impressive homograph as stated in a previous critical lyric post (Content: What’s on your inside?). So we are invariably saying two different things here that are happening simultaneously and perhaps also meet at a crucial point.

What is on our inside, and are we satisfied? Answers to these questions have a tendency to help determine our future.

If we are distracted by excessive involvement in work especially with an ulterior motive to wrongly enrich ourselves at the expense of hapless people, we lose concentration and are also devoid of the will and ability to show and share empathy for the needy. In this case we have greed inherent in us (which becomes our content), and we then become dissatisfied

(not content), and then it ironically gets better from there, leaving us to become nothing but insensitive monsters.

Nigeria for instance which boasts of a massive population of over 170 million people has been classed as a developing nation for as long as I can remember, with the potential of her growing economy glowing to the discerning world like a diamond in the dirt that is yet to be honed.

Nigeria has been largely plagued with the most unbelievable system of misplaced priorities, not out of ignorance, but out of greed, self-centredness and unchecked corruption. An average Nigerian citizen is afraid, not out of obvious panic for an impending disaster, but fear of the unknown, trepidation for the future due to the constant trampling of the government upon the citizens, which causes her residents to feel inferior, saddled with low self esteem and not having a sense of belonging that they yearn for and truly require

With the main opposition party, All Progressive Congress (APC) winning the hearts of Nigerians and presently occupying the seat of power perhaps through their ‘change’ slogan, there is extremely high expectation from Nigerians for the new government to diminish the persistent insecurities such as jobs, infrastructure, economy and safety of lives and property.

However, with the present crisis rocking the leadership stratum in the country as previously predicted by political analysts, and which is perceived a result of greed for juicy positions as opposed to the ‘change’ selling point used to gain people’s attention and trust, and with the proposal to dish out huge sums of monies as allowances to the members of the house of parliament, it is still obscure to Nigerians if the insecurity which burdens the land will ever go away.

Thank you.

Akin Abimbola (akinzogee@gmail.com)

Sources:

Google

Goodreads

Brainyquote

Time Magazine

The Art of Stillness

TED books

About Education

#UNEMPLOYMENT: DO WE REALLY NEED JOBS?

“I’m a man of leisure. That’s because I have an English degree and can’t get a job.”…Jarod Kintz

Look around you

I know, it either sounds like a dim-witted or a rhetorical question right? (Yeah right!), perhaps a quarter of the entire world are unemployed and here we are apparently speaking grammar and reducing countless precious lives to facts, figures, pizza-sized pie charts and chocolate-like bar charts, where government enthusiastically release scary statistics of unemployed population, yet provide feigned drastic approach, so much for a presumed sane, negatively stereotyped and culturally flawed and imperfect world that we have to adapt to creatively or weakly. Interestingly, considering relativity, reversal psychology and paradigm shifts, anyway you look at it, you may actually be right, look around you, life is probably perfect.

“People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty…George Orwell

Are you busy?

Did you have any busy body friend while growing up…who didn’t? That is if you weren’t actually one yourself, anyway, remember how a pain in the ‘you know what’ it was? More like getting into very ‘unprofitable’ venture, I could still without guilt give the bumble bee more credit, at least it supplies us with blessed honey which is more than useful to humanity.

My point? The world is full of bunches of potentially multi-talented critics that usually maintain a standpoint for the optimal goal of being vaguely relevant, perhaps due to a pressure on their egos for being or feeling remotely inferior and eventually incompetent, for instance, how many critics do you know that actually made a point and a good living and you choose as a role model? I can’t think of any.

They get busy quite alright, more like wasting precious time identifying problems without actually balancing the equation by finding solutions, this makes them destructive critics. It’s like it’s hard to build a house, so if you actually want to do it then put your back to it and completely get the job done, not stop midway, make someone else look bad and drool over spilled juice or whatever.

Global Issue

Each time there is an international crisis and it is so very well announced on cable news, I get a mischievous smirk hanging freely upon my face, seriously, they actually think that we haven’t actually figured it out yet?

Where do we start to outline global issues and not stop to throw a hiss of it….is it security first of, guns and ammo manufacturing, drugs use and trafficking, trades and investment, manufacturing, money laundering, unfairly stringent economic policies and so much more?

“The problem of getting a job is that it gets in the way of getting rich”…Robert Kiyosaki

There was this very fine article I saw some time ago titled ‘The Emigrant’s attitude’. It kind of outlined the maximum commitment that emigrants put into their work and hustle perhaps because they have literally burnt their bridges while travelling to chart a new course in an unfamiliar territory, working round the clock to earn a good living and reasonable savings, exploiting opportunities that even the true citizens fail to take advantage of.

All of that for what? right? Here, there is a valid opportunity to have a pretty much bigger picture, the desire to actually become rich, rich in a sense however as you’d predict I’ll admit is awesomely relative.

Well, it gets better as a school of thought naturally brings a twist to the story in such an explanatory way. Poor guys keep churning out resume’s while rich folks design and present proposals. This means it is imperative to emphasize the big picture, having intention to do great things all the way, that way you inspire your successors in this world to surpass your big dreams record.

Some folks are not overtly ambitious for lots of material wealth, perhaps it makes them uncomfortable, or maybe they’ve had a near death experience which makes them realize that a life with so much frivolities and overbearing luxury is not at all as worth it as it seems so much that they give most of their wealth away when they start to feel apparently crazy, and so they seek peace, in quiet places which is now actually expensive by the way.

“Some people work to live, and other people live to work. Then some people, like me, are both unemployed and alive (at least at the time of this writing)”…Jarod Kintz

Want to work or just get rich?

Be true to yourself, if you had a billion dollars would you ever work again? You don’t have to tell me the answer, rather you should tell yourself the answer, that way you cannot lie to yourself.

My answer to that question would be, in as much as I’d have as much fun as can be, I’d still work anyway, even if my work would be planning and creatively investing my mysterious pot of gold, it’s just that there might be a slight problem.

Ever heard of ‘self-concept’? Technically it’s the mental image or perception that one has of oneself. It is also called self-identity and it’s a collection of beliefs about oneself that includes elements such as academic performance, gender roles, sexuality and racial identity. So by implication, the proportionality of this to my new found wealth will determine if I will well utilize the money or go ahead to unconsciously destroy it, my choice.

“When employees unite, they form a union but when business owners unite, they form a team”…Robert Kiyosaki

Are you employed?

So do you have or want to get a job? I know what you’re thinking, is this guy stupid or crazy, who’s going to pay the bills, duh?

Well let’s rephrase it then, what type of job are you presently engaged in and why?

Perhaps your geographical location is what determines if your current job is by choice or circumstance, and with your level of education and exposure whether you want to be rich and what being rich actually means to you.

All these multiple webs of choices, circumstances, destinies, meaning, content and purpose also have a huge part to play in your life whether you’ll easily adopt the emigrant’s employment mentality attitude or if you’re going to be handing out colourful proposals.

Mind you, if you already have a job you’re comfortable with, you best hold unto it even if you have big dreams, just remember there is a word called multi-tasking, just set a target before all that backlog of personal sacrifice takes its toll on your health (I’m not being judgmental).

Do we really need jobs? Seriously, are you kidding?, of course our jobs are the reasons we are still here, the question is what kind of job are you presently doing, why and how can you use it to make life better? Remember, its an opinion, you choose.

Sources:

Google

Wikipedia

Down and out in Paris and London

At even one penny, this book is over-priced

Rich dad poor dad