Stuck

The other day I was talking to a friend's parents who are visiting him. My friend's dad, whom I call Uncle, suddenly happened to say that one should have the aptitude for things which one does, and excel at it, without it, it's just a mediocre attempt, a wasted effort. The trick, we discussed, was to find out if we had this aptitude for a certain thing somehow, and somehow find it out early enough to be able to pursue it. That brings me to a state of things that I've observed lately, in my circle of friends. Many of us, have reached where we are today, after years of mugga, slogging, an excess focus on studies by our environment and ourselves. Peer pressure and peer following brought us outside our home, to pursue a degree further, a job further. It wasn't an easy road, but we somehow managed through that, found success, and became professionals or academicians, working in an 8 to 5 job, or publishing papers trying to get that thesis done.

And now that we've arrived here, the world is wider and larger than before, life is longer, and there are no goals. In professional life atleast, you don't really know much about what the next thing your peers in your company, and others at the same level as you, are doing, preparing for. It's not that close knit, not that open. So there's no peer pressure driving you, guiding you, except for the things that you find out about your old friends, like how much they earn. There's no environmental pressure either, your parents no longer worry about whether you'll get promoted or not, like they did on whether you'll top the class or not. And so, we are stuck. We don't know what to do anymore. We don't know what our potential is, because until know, we've lived our life being told what to do, and what we could do.

Maybe I am over reading things. But it is my feeling that this is a problem if we are always looking for preset goals which we can strive to achieve. I feel it's stuckness. Not knowing what to do, when nobody is telling you what to do.