By Princess Folakemi
In today’s world, the media has completely polluted what it means to make it and what itis that comprises a good life. Young ones want to be like their favorite celebrities. They want to
ride the fastest cars, have the best girls, use the nicest bling and they want it now!
Happiness I snow measured by net-worth and how much money you “seem” to have. People go to the extremeto prove to the world that they are living the “fly” life. They snap pictures in front of expensive houseswhen they are struggling to pay rent, they borrow lots of money just to buy a Mercedes Benz, even when they are just trying to get 3 square meals.
They post on social media how much they are “balling” when they infact are not doing financially OK. The advent of social media has added a great deal to this problem. We cannot eat our food in peace and enjoy it without posting for people to know we had a good meal. Our self esteem is based now on the number of followers or LIKES we have.
Life generally has now moved from serving others to self-service (we all want to claim to be better than our neighbors).
The results of all these can be seen everywhere and in every aspect of life these days. The so-called “Jet age” has become an age where people see a young boy beaten to stupor for claims that he stole and instead of saving him or call the police, we carry out our cell phones to get the next hot video to post to Facebook.
We have lazy youths that, instead of getting creative and believe in the process, they try to find the shorter and easier route (which almost always is criminal) so they can quickly be the next “balling guy” in town. Our youths now fail in schools because their minds are no longer there. They are thinking of how to become the next Ronaldo and Wizkid but don’t want to put in Ronaldo and Wizkid’s effort.
We no longer want to say hello to the neighbor next door since we can chat him on Facebook. We now value the opinions of strangers in unreahable places than the people that really matter in our lives. That is why we have more sadness, more kidnappings, more desperation for wealth and more crime.
For us to really live a full life of happiness and fulfillment, we should go back to what matters.
We should start valuing our families and relationships. We should start valuing things that really matter in our lives. We should change the source of our happiness from “self service” to “serving humanity”. Our score board for success should be the number of people we have made a positive impact in our life time. It should be the service we render to humanity.
For example, if a teacher sees his job as just a means of income, he would never derive happiness from it because wants and needs would always increase but if he sees himself as someone that is helping the world by educating the next generation, he would be more committed and efficient at his job and find more pleasure in it.
Life is not about being better than the next individual because you can never be better than everybody. Life is really about service to humanity. Let us stop raising our children just to be competitive, because from history we learn that, unbriddled competition or rivalry, has never bred happiness, it only breeds greed and self-service (you need to just look at the people in government if you want examples).
Let us start to train our kids to care and to love the next person. When our children start to grow with this genuine care and love, that’s when the change we desire in the country and in the world will materialize. Lets all give it a try!