We in today’s world are buying everything including experiences. Buying of experiences means asking people about their past experiences in some event and using that experience and its outcome to decide upon our action plan for some future event in our life. This is apparently called a smart approach. Smart it is surely if we know what the word smart means these days.
I look at it as a strategy to avoid our life’s problems. But it would not be bad were it restricted to that only. But in this way, we also happen to avoid life’s fun. It is said that a man is the sum of his experiences. By buying or borrowing experiences from others, I think it is similar to living other’s lives. Just imagine how many lives we are living by asking people about their choices, their mistakes, their perceptions, their suggestions etc. If a man travels down a path, that path is not his choice but his identity. If we look at it from the point of view of an opportunist or a professional, we can only take out his choices and outcomes but not what he was as a man and why he was like that.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong about taking guidance from experienced people. In fact, it is very right. But when we try to exploit each and every opportunity to extrapolate the present and the past to try to reach out to the future; when we take decision not on the basis of believed principles but on the cost-benefit analysis; when we are interested in knowing only about choices and results of other people but not in what they are made of; then there is some problem.
Taking a particular case about career choices, we take decisions about our choices based on the analysis of different people’s efforts and outcomes. When we meet some person who is successful by our standards, we quickly ask him success mantra. This is I think, disrespect towards that person’s efforts and talents. When we meet some person who is failure or mediocre by our standards, we quickly ask him what not to do. This is I think, disrespect towards that person’s struggles and capabilities.
In today’s times of networking, connectivity, keeping in touch, seeing you later, catching you later, what is going on, what is your plan, I am fine, I am nice, I am good, we ignore what we are and what others are. What we find in most of our conversations is this: AC is not working here, accommodation is best there, connectivity is not good from there, there is not any city life here, this career will give power but not money, that job will give free time but not growth, salary is good here but comfort is better there, this girl is beautiful but not very tall and thin, his analytical skills is good but communication skill is poor, his jeans is branded but shaving cream is local, her hair style is modern but clothing is out of fashion and so on. This indicates our evaluative criterions of the people as well as the ideas which govern our thinking and decision making.
We ask people about experiences but are we just the sum of what to do and what not to do? Are our life is an optimization equation based on constraints and objective function? Can our life be only the union of successes but not any elements of failures? Can we at the dusk of our life be satisfied in observing ourselves as nothing but just the random collection of other lives’ data points?
I say that before asking anyone, before taking guidance or advice, before buying others’ experiences, we should form our principles, encounter our experiences, learn from our mistakes and move on. Learning from other’s mistakes is smart but mistake of not trying to make any mistake, I think, is not smart.
