What is life really about?

What is life really about? We see, meet, and hear about so many people who are feeling depressed, unhappy, and sick. Sometimes it can feel like the world has become a much darker and much sadder place to live in. No one is truly willing to help out anyone else anymore. Why is the world undergoing this shift? Our world is full of all this amazing knowledge, yet we struggle to communicate with, to understand, to listen to one another. Many people don’t listen to understand, they listen to be able to talk back. We want to receive, yet we don’t really want to give. We want to be loved, but we don’t want to love. We want to have everything, but we want to do nothing. We want to know everything, but we want to learn nothing. We have become selfish.

We have forgotten, perhaps, what life is really all about. We have forgotten its fundamental meaning. We have forgotten the meaning of love, of friendship, of love for our job, of being a good boss, of love for life and for meaningful conversations, of love for walks at the beach and park, and of love for nature. We hate our jobs from the moment we wake up and start our day. We hate our bosses from the moment we see them. In turn, as bosses we are encouraged to promote survival of the fittest, to promote competition and resentment. Team building is so last century. We ask our employees to not have lives outside of work and to dedicate themselves fully to our jobs, to forget about family and friends in the process.

Equally, we have forgotten how to lead long-lasting friendships; instead, we chose to lie, to cheat, and to hurt others whenever it benefits us. We keep friends around for social gatherings and to have a good time, but we do not keep them around to rely on or to support them. More and more people get married because that’s the social norm, not because they are truly in love.

We work and we work and we forget to live our lives. We forgot how short life is. We don’t stop to smell the flowers; we rush through our days to get things done. We become obsessed with fake social media posts instead of entering into meaningful conversations. We hold down a job solely to support ourselves, but we do not have a job that actually gives us joy and fulfillment. We eat to eat, not to enjoy our food.

We try so hard to be likeable that we just end up being fake and we do so little to just show honestly who we really are to the outside world. We may even forget who we really are, because we try so hard to be someone else, someone who will be liked by everyone. We are convinced that something is good for us, just because it is good for someone else. We don’t spend time to learn, to research, to find ourselves. We just do what we are told we should do. It seems like we don’t even know who we are, what we want, and who we should be as we are constantly bombarded with messages about who we are meant to be, what we should do, and what we should want.

Even the happiest people are not actually all that happy. When they leave this world, we sometimes find out how sad they really were deep down. So, how do we change this? We have to change this! For our kids and our grandkids. What world are we going to leave to them? We can’t be this selfish. We need change. And that change has to come from you and me and everyone individually. It is our task, our effort that will make a difference.

If this change requires us to start a new movement, then let’s do so together. We have to help each other out. We can no longer tell our bosses that group effort doesn’t count, we have to become those bosses that encourage their employees to help each other, be there for each other, to enjoy life, to travel, to experience different things. We have to be those coworkers that really take an interest and care, we have to be those strangers that want to help, even when it isn’t convenient for us. We have to be that friend that’s there no matter what. We have to be that spouse – till death you do part. All of this has to change, and it has to change now. Like the gratitude journals many of us keep, we need to start counting five things that we did each day to help others in a meaningful way. Not for the sake of keeping track, but for the sake of making sure we are on the right path toward meaning.

We have to become a majority that the rest can follow We have to care for each other. We have to love each other. It is not about outdoing each other; it’s about succeeding together as a human nation.