Which do you hear louder? the your own voice or others’?
For me most of the time it’s others’. I don’t like it but somehow I have a very tendency to think about what would people think of me and the things I do. Will they like it? will they hate it? will they find it annoying? And that consideration influence my action and behavior tremendously.Why does that matter to me all of a sudden? First of all, it’s not all of a sudden, but it’s just that lately I came to realize that the influence is stronger than I thought.
I’ve always thought that I’m the type of person who always know what I want in life but I come to doubt that recently. After some sharing with some peers at work, I became quite puzzled. Some people tell me good income is the key to being happy. Some people say career satisfaction is the key not pay. Some people it’s neither, it’s whether the job can benefit and value-add to your career goal, which in turn, it’ll result in the achievement of both job satisfaction and monetary desire. The third also implies that you’ll achieve neither if you approaches things wrongly. However, what bugs me is not these difference in opinions it’s how they constantly judging people who’re doing thing differently. For instance, for those , who didn’t do that well in academic and end up with a good start-off job, would look to their highly-academically qualified friends with a very egoistic sense of victory. On the other hand, they also being judged as materialistic and myopic. Either way, neither of the side know what each other is really thinking. All they are doing is making assumption about each other to make them feel better about themselves.
They say human nature is selfish. This truly reflects very clearly through our opinions. If you observe carefully, you would be able to see the fact that people always tend to think that other people is in a way similar to themselves if not the same. When we’re smart, we automatically treat people around us as if nobody is really that stupid. When you live in an environment where everyone is well-off, the next person you know, you would assume that they at least well off as well. When you spend a lot, people think you’re rich. When you save a lot, people think you’re stingy. When you plan, people say you think too much. When you don’t plan, people say you live on impulse. We are basically stereotyping everything about each other. Why? Because it’s a very quick and convenient way to form an image of a person in our head. The problem with that is that image is very influential towards our behavior toward that person. The best part is we know this is happening and why. The real mystery is the fact that we still succumb to it.
The fact really sadden me. It’s a big reminder to why we have lesser and lesser friends as we grow older. When older, we’re are less susceptible to influence and change. And we know that about each other, so we choose stay away from people with conflicting interest/opinion/goal/etc…. This is probably one of the damn wonderful things about childhood, we just don’t care and don’t give a damn about all these and laugh everything off.
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