Intuition and natural motivations
As humans we like to learn and develop new skills. This seems to be an intrinsic motivation, fueled by our desire to learn more and more about a certain topic or develop phenominal skills in sports and anything you can imagine. When we engage into these activities that intrests us we naturally gain enormous amounts of energy from them, in the form of joy wich leads to fulfillment.
The above is based on an intrinsic motivation, something what comes from within yourself. Not others that have influence on it. The story in a concrete sense is people who go into the woods with their camera alone, just to explore. People who get caught up in writing stories, drawing, painting, poëtry, sports, film and a desire to persue science to discover unexplored area's.
Early School
on the contrary of these intrinsic values, wich make us happy and fulfilled. We have build a society arround "education" where 1/4 of your life you have to sit daily in a room to do tasks. At an early age these tasks are pretty essential, like reading and writing. We must learn these models of thinking, we must learn this form of symbolism to communicate with the rest of the world. Math is an usefull contruct to categorize and make usefull models of certain aspects of the world.
Attaching emotions to observations
But further in school things change, we start memorizing data. Like a computer's harddrive. We start losing our creativity more and more along this path. We get formed into a mall to properly function within jobs our society has to offer. This is obviously not a strange thing, that's just how our system works.
As we grow up society primes us on our individualism, we start focussing on how other people look different than us. While we do that we make destinctions about he's uglier, smarter, dumber, slower or better than me. The moment we do that we attach an emotion to this observation, negative or positive. At this moment extrinsic motivation kicks into gear.
Society embraces the achievers, people who have big bank accounts, beautiful houses, fancy cars and extremely perfect lives (seen on facebook, instagram). Because you relate yourself with an other person that seems to be in a better situation you attach a negative feeling to yourself. As humans we naturally want to eliminate those feelings.
So what do we need to do to avoid the negative thoughts and feeling? We have to achieve aswell! And persue succes, fancy houses and cars. Hurray you found the anwser... But no. It's not.
Persuing a deception
Following this path will for most people be unfulfilling. Because they force them self to engage in activities they don't like doing. Only to get to that end goal, wich seems so perfect. But, it isn't. It's just a deception, just a frame made by society, made by yourself to thinking that's fulfillment.
The consequenses of these dogma's is that it leads alot of people in society to persue things that they will most likely never get. They build their whole lifes believing that they will reach that end goal. That bigger salary, bigger house and nicer car. But the moment they get there, they feel cheated and think, did I sacrifice all that time for just this? And for the people who get into trouble persueing the big deception, they get depressed along the way or they just loose all their intrests and just cope with the situation.
To make an example. Most of the people I hear talking about college. They are so happy when they are done. They go travelling for a few months, the time of their lives. Then they come home and "the corporate life" is fun just for a while. But then you realise. Am I going to do this for the rest of my life? I have nearly any time left for friends and family or hobby's.
Conclusion
To sum it all up. Most of the people just have a temporary goal and when they achieve it. they realise it's not gonna lead them towards a fulfilled life. When it hits them they create an other lie to just keep them going into the lifestyle they are in. They feel stuck emotionally and probably financially aswell, because the extreme consumer behavior we have, moves us into debt. Extracting value from our future self. As time goes by it gets harder and harder to get out of that life.
As a result we have build a construct of though in our minds, only to make us misarble. Because we can't see clear enough into the future. We see people slipping into depression, falling into a burnout, or worse even psychoses. We get eductated rationally, but we miss education emotionally.
As time goes by we start to see more mental illness, more mania and more misarble people. Because we lack emotional strenght and critical thinking, reflecting about life.
I truly hope technology allowes us to engage into fulfilled activities..
Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts about the matter!