Why settling down is sinful

In today’s Podcast, I champion why we must celebrate being clueless, unsettled and living dangerously! Listen here: 5:43 minutes

Making the world blissful, one person at a time

The key operative word in the ‘Follow Your Bliss’ philosophy is ‘your’.

I lead a monthly conversation series called The Bliss Catchers  at Odyssey Bookstore in Chennai. The series is inspired by American mythologist and author Joseph Campbell’s (1904~1987) philosophy of Follow Your Bliss. Vaani and I bring in people into the conversation each month who have dared to give up predictable paths and go do what they love doing in Life.

So, I am often asked these questions. What if everyone in the world follows their bliss? Won’t society collapse because there may be no one to do those jobs that are a drudgery or are menial? Someone who visited us last week too asked me these questions again. And this person insisted that ‘following your bliss’ is detrimental to our social structure. This is what I shared with him.

First, let’s focus on what ails our society and what can possibly be the fix. There’s so much emphasis right from birth, through the growing up years, that by the time a person turns an adult, she or he is obsessed with earning a living. Our social conditioning has forced people to look for material wealth – money and things – all the time. But materialism leaves people incomplete, there’s a lack of fulfilment all around. Which is why people across the world are hugely unhappy. Folks like Campbell and British philosopher Alan Watts (195~1973) have stood up to remind us, again and again, that our lifetime is limited. So, they have championed that it is more important to be happy doing what we love doing than just earning money. They encouraged us, in their own ways, to follow our bliss, to live as if money were not an object, and watch how Life always, unfailingly, helps us to be happy doing what we love the most. Vaani and I have personally experienced the ‘opening of doors, where only walls existed’, when we have stayed rooted to our bliss. Campbell, in fact, said, ‘follow your bliss’. He didn’t say ‘follow bliss’. The ‘your’ is very significant. It means focus only on what gives you joy. The emphasis is on the individual. Not on society. The point here is that if each one follows her or his bliss, we will find our world to be a happier place than it is now.

Second, too much logic, too much analysis, constant comparison of the individual with peers, with social trends, is what has wrecked inner peace and happiness. Life is meant to be lived in the moment and enjoyed from moment to moment. If you can do what you love doing, for all your Life, then you are alive, you are living, and not merely existing. That’s how you live in the moment – immersed, in bliss. So, drop all your analyses, stop looking at others, follow your bliss first. See how you feel, see how your Life unfolds magically in the direction of your bliss and then see who else you can inject this spirit of discovery and inner joy with.

Third, even if, hypothetically speaking, all the 7.5 billion+ people in the world follow their bliss, it’s a cause for celebration not worry. The world will be so much more happier! Everyone on the planet will be thriving. Not existing. And in branding a job as drudgery you are being judgmental. Cleaning toilets may seem like drudgery to you, but may surely be someone else’s bliss. I am sure for almost every vocation out there, champions exist. And through following their bliss, of doing what they love doing, they will not only do things, that you may loathe, better, they will also do them happily!

Bottomline: just focus on your bliss. Nothing else. As they say on a plane, place the oxygen mask on you, before you help another get it on. So, you be happy first. When you are following your bliss, your happiness becomes infectious and your immediate world becomes happier. This is the way we can make our world blissful – one person at a time!     

Why ‘settling down’ is sinful

It is to live dangerously that we have been created!

Ever since senior journalist and TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai asked Tennis ace Sania Mirza that question about ‘settling down and motherhood’ a couple of days ago, the question itself is being seen as an affront to gender equality. I believe going forward this question will be categorized as one among those that we must never ask a woman. I don’t disagree.

Further, while I believe that the entire argument in favor of ‘settling down’, if at all, must be gender neutral, I prefer to campaign for avoiding the very argument.

Anxious parents and a ‘holier-than-thou’ society define ‘settling down’ as ‘having an income, saving money, creating material assets, raising a family and begetting children’. It’s a simple thumb rule that the world expects you to conform to – “if you have attained adulthood, necessarily, you shall earn money, marry, buy a house and procreate”. If you notice, in the popular notion or context of ‘settling down’, no one talks about ‘being happy’. Which is why I find this ‘settling down’ discourse sinful.

I believe we are missing the moot point here. The reason we have been created – to be sure, each of us has been born without our asking to be born; that’s incontrovertible evidence that we have been created – is not to merely ‘earn a living’. We have been created human so that we can experience the beauty and magic of this ‘uncertain, inscrutable’ Life and be happy. Osho, the Master, says we have ruined this experience by building a social framework, partly financial, partly material, and wholesomely driven by our wants and expectations, around something that can never be boxed or contained. Life is free-flowing, it has a mind of its own. It is unpredictable. And every moment of living is like a bungee jump, a deep dive into the unknown. Into this deep dive, by introducing a pay check, we think we have stemmed the uncertainty and made the whole experience predictable. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Financial security is an illusion – it is human-made and so doesn’t conform to Life’s free spirit. Which is why, despite all the money you may have, you still can’t fix some quirky health situations, you can’t unentangle complex relationship issues, you can’t buy happiness, you can’t find inner peace or you just can’t get a good night’s sleep!

Osho encouraged us to dump the false comfort that financial security gave us. He invited us to embrace uncertainty and live dangerously. He called his point of view ‘the joy of living dangerously’. He championed for a Life beyond ‘earning a living’, beyond the ‘slaving-earning-saving-procreating’ paradigm. He invited people to be happy, doing whatever gave them happiness. Alan Watts, the British philosopher, invited us to choose the Life we want to live by first imagining what we would be doing in a world where money was not an object. Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist and author, beseeched us to follow our bliss. All their clarion calls asked of us to choose to be happy even if it meant being unsettled. Happiness above all else, was their mantra. I completely agree with all of them.

For reasons that I can never understand or explain beyond what I share daily, here on this Blog, or what I have shared in my Book ‘Fall Like A Rose Petal’ (Westland), Vaani and I have been ‘living dangerously’ for years now. We have no money and we have ceased to seek financial security. Yet we are not insecure, we are not unhappy and we are not spending all our time – or sleepless nights – worrying. In a purely worldly sense we have still not “settled down” – we have no income, no savings, no assets, no health or Life insurance and a mountain of debt to repay – yet Life goes on for us. Just as it goes on for so, so many “unsettled” people around us, all over the world. The common thread that links all of us “unsettled folks” is that perhaps through discovering the “joy of living dangerously” we have learnt the art of “living in the now, in the present moment”. Let me hasten to add that living “unsettled” is very, very challenging no doubt, but it is the adventure that is the reward here! Which is why, having tasted that adventure, and enjoyed the reward, we find that “settling down” is perhaps sinful – if ever anything is sinful!