Alan Watts: "What makes you itch. What sort of situation would you like. Lets suppose, I do this often in vocational guidence of students, they come to me and say "we are getting out of college and I have the faintest idea of what to do". So I always ask the question - What would you like to do if money were no object. How would you really enjoy spending your life.
Well it's so amazing, as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say -- well, we like to be painters, we like to be poets, we like to be writers but as everyone knows you cannot earn any money that way. Another person says I'd like to live an outdoor life and ride horses. I said do you want to teach in a writing school? Lets go through with it, what do you want to do? When we finally got to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I would say to him you do that and forget the money. Because if you say getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living that is to go one doing things you don't like doing -- which is stupid.
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way and after all if you do really like what your are doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is if you really like it. Then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry to much, somebody is interested in everything and you can be interested in you'll find others who are but it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on spending things you don't like and doing things you don't like and to then teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we are doing, is we are bringing up our children, educating them, to live the same soft of lives we are living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to do the same things so it's all retro and no vomit -- it never gets there. And so, therefore it's so important to consider this question - What do I desire?" |
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