Musings on Life and Work

Hey 👋

This is going to be a series of random musings/rant/talk.

This September is one of the weirdest months I’ve ever experienced. It’s like I am living life but also floating around. I did a lot of things these past couple of weeks but I don’t even remember all of them.

You could say it’s a dreamlike feeling. But you know it’s not. While I have a lot to share here, sometimes I find it hard to start.

Like words don’t come out easily these days & it’s why to even write one thing that happened a few weeks back, to me some days to finish.

These days, there’s so much going on in my life & I don’t think I’ve enforced good boundaries. I learned that life is all about limitations, boundaries and reserving our energy.

Think about all the possibilities you could have. If you don’t prioritize, you’ll drown and feel overwhelmed like I did.

In 24 hours these days, I spent about half of being out and about, like a headless chicken. I don’t think my going outside really had a purpose but I just had to. I spent a lot of time lately on meetings, being in places I am not so familiar with which adds another layer to my day.

I’ve been ruminating a lot about freedom & whether it’s good to have it in excess. Perhaps I am not ready yet to actually bear the responsibility of having freedom? Maybe I think too much and that also is another layer of it all.

I know some people who enjoyed freedom to an extent and they can do whatever they want but I learned that now that I've achieved it, I feel like I have the need to enforce some limitations. Such is life I guess.

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Have you ever lost your motivation to work hard and struggled to find motivation to keep on going?

I wondered if I talked about the idea of “Shadow” that if you read psychology, you might be aware of.

Here’s the thing, a shadow is a part of ourselves that we do not want to accept. We mask it in so many ways. For me, I have to admit that living minimalistically, almost a pursuit of ascetic life was a way for me to renounce money. But the truth is, I love money and when it’s unchecked, money will be my God. Having to admit it, I felt liberated. It’s like embracing another shadow of me that I’ve been masking for so long.

For a long time, there was this denial, a shame or even guilt for wanting comfort and money. I think we associate wanting money because many label it as something negative. I mean think of portrayals of successful people around social media who make a lot of money.

Our society makes it so that sometimes they appear as evil. But that’s only 1 or small fraction of the entire population, the rest of the people who are wealthy and successful , they are lowkey, they work really hard to get where they are and that’s something admirable.

Money is only a tool for comfort, to help others, to help a cause. In the end, it’s not really something I shouldn’t be shying away from.

I came to this realization only now that after all, comfort, which can only be achieved by money, is my actual sole motivation in life. So, how do I get as comfortable as I had been before? That was the question that kept circling around my head.

I guess it’s why I’ve been spending a lot of time IRL. I am finding more jobs, getting more involved in my family’s social enterprises, and a lot more things that will lead me back to comfort again.

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Think about making millions in the name of a good cause.

I got this epiphany recently that basically there are people attempting to balance between making profit vs purpose. This concept should have been something I understood long and at some point I was even a part of it. But a long time ago, it was a concept I felt conflicted about because in my brain, social work is social and enterprise is enterprise for profit.

This realization came after some weeks doing some social work again. I realized that often social work doesn't come with money. It’s not the type of work you do when you’re jobless. These jobs are only ideal when you have other streams of income & this is what helps you feel better about yourself and leaving some legacy behind.

When I was younger and much more idealistic, I was fine doing social work without getting paid for it. I didn’t even know it’s a giant business and very lucrative too. Once, I was in the trenches and saw things, social enterprises are very lucrative opportunities. For a long time, that didn’t sit well with me. Did it sit well with me now? It still didn’t but a lot of things these days use a good cause to make money.

Sometimes I felt like it’s like one foot in, one foot out.

I know a lot of social good causes make money off things. It’s just that sometimes they are not so upfront about it. In this type of business, there’s even people hired as “consultants” or even program coordinators. Do you think it’s justifiable to make money off charity or maybe brand it as social enterprises?

What I am saying is that I think one should do this when they’re pretty much comfortable with their life. Like you’re basically helping people and not make money off of it. But again, a lot of lines are blurred these days.

On top of that quite a bit of social enterprises that made it to the statistics of failed ones where its leader took away all the money.

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This took a while to actually write despite being a random musings/rant/ jumbled thoughts. You see how slow I am these days with so much on my mind 😂