The Broken Treadmill

A few days ago I was at Tehran airport. It was 10.30 pm, and I was waiting for my flight back home. At the end of a long day I was in the last place I wanted to be. I began to observe other business travellers, who looked as washed out as I felt. Suddenly my eyes happened to glance on an open laptop with a screensaver depicting a picture of an exotic island, with blue water, beach, sun and coconut trees. You know the one that I am talking about…. The owner of that laptop could not have been further from that idyllic scene!

Suddenly I had an epiphany as I thought about screensavers. They portray our aspirations, quite often projecting our inner desires of either being somewhere else with the people who matter, or doing what we are passionate about. How many laptops have you seen with a screensaver depicting an office? Or the products you sell, or your office colleagues? How many more with vacation snaps, children playing or the owner indulging in his favourite hobby?

I thought to myself that we are all like little hamsters running on a treadmill in a cage. As anyone who has ever used one will know, a treadmill gives one a good workout without actually taking him or her anywhere. The funny thing is that 20th and 21st century life is exactly like that. We are all working harder and harder to be in the same place. We beaver away at jobs, work ridiculous hours – and for what? I ask you if any man, on his dying day, will ever wish that he had spent more time at the office?

Society puts huge pressures on us to live our lives along predefined norms of acceptability, with very little room to manoeuvre or chart an independent course. If we decide to break away from the beaten path, the only way to redeem ourselves is through huge success. People who decide to live their lives according to their own dictates and fail (in the conventional sense of the word) will not be accepted beyond the peripheries of their immediate family (if that).

When any child is born, endless possibilities lie ahead - will the child become a painter, or an artist? Maybe a sportsman? How many parents actually dream about their child becoming an accountant, or even a senior manager in a commercial organisation? The dreams start to crumble once the child enters school. From then on, comparisons become inevitable. Teachers are very quick to draw attention to every quirk or deviation from the norm, hinting at inferiority that they are hardly qualified to judge. It is ironical that we draw first impressions of our children, from people who are qualified to do nothing else but teach, and hence are the lowest paid profession in the world.

The curriculum over the next 16 years is enough to squeeze all creativity out of the child. Any attempt at individuality is severely dealt with, so that by the end of that period, even the most stubborn non-adherent comes out moulded. The great circle of life then continues, with the neophyte graduate told that the world is her oyster (only problem being that no one has taught her how to catch it!). Which is the reason why young people take up whatever jobs they can land to start with, and then it is a big lottery as to whether they like what they do. From then on, it is all downhill. The road to perdition is littered with the corpses of dreams long forgotten, and passions laid waste, on our path to individual mediocrity.

The child has entered a world where success is measured in terms of career, money and material possessions. The pace keeps increasing, and with every decision taken and an additional responsibility accepted, the ability to get off the treadmill diminishes. When we cannot choose the way we live our lives, we fool ourselves into believing that we want to live it the way we do. With the passage of time we assuage our frustrations by trying to live it up. We spend more than we should and less than we want, thereby increasing the pressure. We are expected to spend our money with an intensity that is just that one step ahead of our ability to earn the same, ensuring that we never get off the treadmill. We celebrate our successes and drown our sorrows in material possessions. Spending and acquisitions become the great equalizers.

We start life with little, and before we know it, have committed to loans and mortgages that ensure the Banks own the assets that we call ours, for the majority of our lives. Temptations are rife, and every nook and cranny of every wall, magazine, newspaper, website or TV channel, are crammed with offers that seem like the best ever. Even though we know that we do not really need the latest widget, we use two deep seated rationale' to justify picking them up all the same. We are earning so we deserve it, or life is too short, so enjoy while you can.

Even if you have been able to resist the allure, your loved ones whispering the above, force you to rethink. And while we are feeding this monster, our ability to do what we want, diminishes day by day. In most of the developed world, the retirement age has been pushed from 60 to 65 and even 70. I have heard that some countries have no retirement age at all, and one can continue to be employed till he keels over. The imperative to carry on working does not come from a sense of enjoyment in what we do, but from our inability to control our spending. How can we do anything different, when in today’s world our worth is measured, not by the contents of our character, but rather by the extent of our expenditure?

The definition of a wealthy man is one whose spend is less than his income. The sooner we curb our acquisitive instincts, the sooner we can get off this rut and devote time to more fulfilling activities, whatever they may be. However it is easier said than done. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so intense that even light cannot escape it. It is the same with this treadmill that we are on - we know that it is taking us nowhere, yet we cannot pull the plug (on our spending) out.