Living in the "Matrix"

Florina
Sep 9
3 min read

From an early age we are programmed by questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.

And when you answer “I want to be a pony instructor” you get met with resistance by adults telling you to become a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer.

And so from early years of our lives we are deprived of real choices.

Sure, when you turn 18 you have the choice to choose a university, but if you have been told all your life that you have to get a “good job” that pays a lot and is safe and secure and prestigious, do you really still have a choice or are you brainwashed?

So we pick a safe degree in university because it pays well, promises a safe future. But in all fairness, do we really know what we want to do when we are so young and have not been independent a day in our lives?

We don’t understand what it means to earn a living, pay the bills and feel that responsibility on our shoulders.

Sure, some people get a weekend job when they turn 18, but that’s just for pocket money. When you start working a job to pay the bills that’s when you realise that the job may or may not be for you.

Because when you spend 8-10 hrs a day doing it, that’s when it reveals itself to you.

Theory is one thing, but practice is another.

No wonder you see all these people quitting their jobs in their 30s or 40s trying to rediscover themselves.

Some call it mid-life crisis, I call it awakening.

In some countries it is quite fashionable to do a gap year before going to university and I am a big fan of the idea. As long as the parents are not still paying the bills. The whole point is to try to be fully independent and really learn what it takes to keep yourself alive and then decide on a career path or life path that will resonate with you and you can do in a sustainable way.

When I was a law student, many teachers told me it would be hard, and I would be working long hours etc. While I believed them, I could not really understand it until I actually went through it myself. It’s one thing to listen to the stories and another thing to experience working until 3 am every day for weeks.

So what is the solution?

When you finish high school, take a gap year or two or three and experiment and experience living life with no restrictions. Try to earn a living, learn practical skills, travel the world, open your horizons, don’t limit yourself to the traditional path of going to university.

And if you are now in your 30s, 40s, 50s quit the job if it makes you miserable and find something else. It is not impossible. Might seem daunting at the beginning but if you approach it like climbing a mountain you will most certainly climb that mountain one step at a time.

We are so conditioned to live in the confines of our own minds, the confines of society, the rules imposed on us by those before us.

But we are the ones setting the tone and paving the way for those that are coming after us. Do we want our children to live the same “choice-less” lives or do we want them to live a sustainable life in full creativity and abundance?

By escaping the matrix, you are not just doing it for yourself, you are doing it for the future generation, for the future of the planet.

We are showing our parents there is another way and we are showing our children that they have choices.