I was born behind the Berlin Wall in a family of intellectuals at a time when a degree was a valuable possession and a hard to get asset in the countries of the Eastern Block. There and at that time, having a degree equated with having a secure future, with having a good job and earning enough money to have a comfortable life – as long as you didn’t wish for exotic things like bananas… or to travel to Western countries.
I wish I had then the opportunities you have now.
As a young adult, I heard this over and over again. The limits one had before 1989 were many, someone couldn’t even be aware of how many. You didn’t know what you didn’t know, or you didn’t know what lay behind the Berlin Wall. The path your followed was drawn for you in advance and the variations were few and far between.
It also meant that if your heart craved for anything outside of the ordinary, the challenge to achieve that was greater and the obstacles were many.
However, if you were contempt with passing through life in default mode, if you just wanted a comfortable existence where someone took away your choices and lifted the responsibilities that come with them off your shoulders, life was good to you.
By limiting the choices one had, the path was straighter and with less distractions; life was easier and more predictable.
When the Berlin Wall fell, the horizon expanded and gradually people understood what they had been deprived of, they saw how it was in the West, they realised what they had missed out on and how it could have been. The amount of possibilities that were now available was immensely higher.
Suddenly people who craved for what was forbidden before, now had the liberty to pursue their goals. Knowing what you wanted became more important than ever. Firstly, because it was now allowed to dream and to pursue your dreams and secondly, because the path wasn’t drawn for you any longer and not knowing where you wanted to go, took you nowhere.
By expanding the number of possibilities one has, the number of choices increases too and so do the number of distractions and challenges.
This is very much where most people are now – stuck and/or overwhelmed with the number of choices and possibilities. It is now more crucial than ever to know what you want to do and where you want to get.
But knowing which path to choose is not just a matter of reasons, of adding up pros and cons scribbled on a piece of paper. When picking a path to follow, be it a career, a job, a business, a domain to study, moving to a new city or country, etc, our decision isn’t (just) logical and sensible. The underlying factors that influence our decisions are most often unconscious, like our values, our culture and our beliefs. Therefore, learning to trust our unconscious is the key to making the right choices for ourselves.
Read more about your unconscious in ‘How do you know you have an unconscious mind?‘.
