- Stuck on the hamster wheel of life?
Rasika Jayakody[/caption]
Now, the roots of this agenda for life are a little hard to pin down, but the role they play in how we develop as individuals and as a society is monumental. It defines almost, if not every, aspect of our lives – from what we learn in school, to what we learn in university or pursue after school, our choice of career, who and when we marry, what we do as adults and then as senior citizens.
But what is the point of all this, beyond the basic idea of “living well”? And how fulfilled are we running on this hamster wheel of life? Brunch chatted with independent thinker and free spirit Rasika Jayakody on what he calls “The Story of the Sri Lankan Middle Class”, and on how breaking away from these established norms can give us a much stronger sense of personal fulfilment.
How has the hamster wheel come into place?
For Rasika, who has a distinguished career of his own (that he opted not to highlight because part of the problem of the hamster wheel is that people listen to titles and work histories but not to people and what they’re trying to say), in life, we are all given these “goals” that must be met lest you be seen a failure, and at that stage, your next goal is seen as the key to contentment.
Over the last six months, Rasika has focused on making social media content that communicates a more mindful way of living that allows you to find more personal fulfilment. One of his recent posts, “The Story of the Sri Lankan Middle Class” draws attention to the hamster wheel of life, outlining three common dreams the hamster wheel propagates – having a grand wedding, buying a fancy car, and building a luxurious home – pointing out that to achieve these dreams, people, especially young people, entrap themselves in crippling debt that robs them of being able to find any fulfilment from achieving these goals.
[caption id="attachment_175720" align="alignleft" width="344"]
Rasika Jayakody's The Story of the Sri Lankan Middle Class[/caption]
“What I say/write is similar to that of an artist working on a piece of art,” Rasika shared on his approach to creating alternative mindful content for his social media. “The artist primarily focuses on the work he generates – not on the audience or on the response he receives.”
Examining how we get caught up in this never-ending cycle, Rasika started by noting that we’re all born free human beings, untainted by any sort of expectation. It is society that places these expectations on us and in the process, strips us of a huge part of our free will and ability to think critically and pursue what makes us most content.
“In school, you think everything will be sorted once you pass your O/Ls (well), but after your O/Ls you can’t feel that contentment you were expecting because then you have your A/Ls, which is followed by another target; getting into university, then finding a job, then building a career, getting married, building a house, buying a car, upgrading the house, having children, educating them, and on and on it goes,” Rasika shared. Expanding on what he calls the story of the Sri Lankan middle class, he noted: “We move from one incident to another seeking some kind of satisfaction that is never there because suddenly another target will come up and you move in that direction. Any person or human in that cycle should think about what is happening to them. There should be something here, but there isn’t. There’s only emptiness, and when you see that you see another dimension to life.”
The reasoning behind these expectations, Rasika explained, is not altogether invalid, it is led by achieving security. While the hamster wheel of life is universal, in a country like Sri Lanka, an island nation that is not a rich country and has its fair share of problems, people have very limited avenues and guaranteed options. “Pursuing different paths, your success will not be guaranteed. Everyone wants to become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer because they will be guaranteed a job and an income. Because of this, over time, society has created certain moulds for everyone and every person to fit into,” Rasika said, adding that in Sri Lanka, particularly, because we do not have the same variety of life paths to pursue as wealthier countries, there are a very few moulds sanctioned by society, and they are quite restrictive.
Why break the wheel?
With these rigid expectations firmly in place and strengthened by generations of tradition, a question that first comes to mind is: “Why should we move away from this approach to life?”
And the answer to that, Rasika explains, is how these cycles make us feel. “What I’m saying is you don’t really have to take that path,” he said, adding: “Most people think it is the only path to follow and do not think out of the box. They think it is necessary to go through this.”
But how do people feel stuck in the hamster wheel, doing what is expected? Are most people happy in their traditional jobs doing the traditional things in life, having built their careers and their families and luxurious houses? In Rasika’s view, the answer is often that they are not. “I see stressed-out people. I don’t see people going to their dream jobs. I see people who have sacrificed, who have had to undercut people or go behind politicians to be where they are. It has paid dividends; they live good lives with good houses and fancy cars, but how many blissful people do you see in those fancy cars going to work in the morning?” Rasika noted: “In my personal experience, the higher up you go, the more stressed out and miserable you are. Why is there so much misery? Because something has failed, but people blindly follow this path anyway, hoping to find happiness.”
This is not to say that people shouldn’t become doctors, lawyers, engineers, or other similar “steady” jobs, but that those who do should follow such careers because it is where their talent or passion lies.
“It’s important to have your own list of priorities and stop and think about if you really want to get into this mess, and if not, then to find a different path. It is important to stop for a moment and think, “Is this really what I am looking for? Why am I following this path? Am I following the people ahead of me or thinking for myself?” Rasika said, noting that doing this comes with its struggles because options will be limited, especially in the Sri Lankan context. “Every society has its own unique challenges when going outside the norm. This is true everywhere, whether in Sri Lanka, the UK, the US, or wherever. There is no human society that is free of challenges, but if you think about it differently, these challenges are also opportunities.”
In a country like Sri Lanka with such strong ties to tradition and the status quo, Rasika shared that it is imperative to initiate this kind of dialogue.
Speaking on the hamster wheel of life on a social level as well, Rasika explained that it is important to stop and think about the “why” aspect of what you’re doing. “In Sri Lanka, there is this mentality of the biological clock. You have to do X by 25, X by 30, X by 35 etc., and by following this, people create a prison for themselves and struggle their entire lives to meet those expectations,” he said.
One area where this is easily illustrated is in our views on marriage. You are expected to be married by a certain age and have children by a certain age or else you will find yourself alone in your old age with no one to look after you – and this is why most people get married and have children, Rasika explained, not because they really need marriage or companionship or truly want to raise a family. It’s a mixture of societal expectation and self-preservation.
However, as Rasika points out, the values of our world are changing, and we need to change along with them. In the job market, basic requirements are changing, traditional professional qualifications are becoming less and less important, jobs are becoming more skill-based and problem-solving and critical thinking oriented. With the digital space, knowledge has become much more democratic and accessible. The professional world is going through a paradigm shift and the hamster wheel approach will no longer be sustainable.
Socially and emotionally, the whole world is moving towards finding inner peace and fulfilment and this will influence our values over the coming decades. “Thirty years from now, we will be living in a very fast-paced, complicated and competitive world with very different value systems,” Rasika said. “Right now we think looking after our parents in their old age is a core societal value, but will people think the same way in 30 years? They’ll have different ways and values of looking at life. A young person today getting married and having children so they can be looked after in their old age is on a path to disaster, because that child won’t have the time to do anything, and they will still end up lonely.”
The answer lies within
Fundamentally, everyone has a sense of emptiness within them that they spend their lives trying to fill. The traditional hamster wheel is one of these methods.
“People think that if they get educated, they will fill that emptiness, but they know that after educating themselves, there’ll be another set of problems. Then they get married hoping to resolve that emptiness, then they have children and look to educate them, hoping that emptiness will fill, but fundamentally, the problem is internal,” Rasika said. “The solution is to look inwards and work on yourself, to fix it from within, because the moment you start looking for external solutions, you will waste your life doing all kinds of things to fill that emptiness and live with that emptiness until you die.”
For true fulfilment and to break away from cycles that perpetuate emptiness, Rasika shared that it is important to be mindful and pay attention to the things we do and why we do them. To ask questions like: “Do I really need to do this or am I looking to fix an internal issue?”
Living mindfully needs to become a key concept in how we live our lives, Rasika explained, and not mindfulness in the sense of meditation and yoga, but in the sense of paying attention. “When you pay attention,” Rasika said, “you will see that you’re doing various things that produce no results in order to fix that internal emptiness.”
And that sense of awareness, of mindfulness, is your first step towards internal fulfilment.