6 AM on a holiday morning and my old and trusted aide blackberry wakes up with the inbuilt wake up time and then non-stop notifications . I peer through the haze of my sleep into the glare of the screen. A "basking in his own glory" relative seems to have gone on a morning jog and decided to announce this fact to all his Whatsapp contacts with the message: “Arise and Shine! Life is too short to spend in slothful slumber! Let’s do something worthwhile!”
It seems everybody these days is busy sending motivational messages to everybody else. From the prime minister to the local goon , everyone is doing it (not that I have received any motivational message from any goon. I just assume that they send such messages too). No social media platform, be it Facebook, Whatsapp or Twitter is free from this plague. But why exactly do people want to motivate other people?
I mean, the way human beings are manufactured, we’re highly self-centered creatures. We mostly think of ourselves and our own needs. For instance, when we wish to defecate, we just sit over the nearest commode and do it. We don’t invite all our friends and acquaintances to do it together. Similarly, when our hormones rage inside us and get us all heated up for sex, we simply reach out to our partners and do it. We do not invite the entire neighbourhood over to an orgy. So why is it that when we feel the desire to be motivated, we immediately wish to share the desire with everyone we know?
Also, if some quote motivates you to achieve your goals, why should you share the secret with me?after all you seem to revel in your own oneupmanship . Life is a rat race, a struggle for survival, a Darwinian dog eat dog world where only the fittest will survive and get to the end of the rainbow to find the Ferrari and what not. Some 'friend' sent me this message the other day:
“Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.”
Now why share this extraordinarily important insight with me? Maybe, right now I’m feeling so low and defeated with life that I might have given up all hope and am packing a sparse bag to retire to a quiet hut in Himalayas , leaving you without competition . But now that you’ve given me hope that tomorrow might give me a fresh chance to outdo you, I might just decide to stay and snatch away that promotion from you! Isn’t it?
Also, this motivational stuff usually jumbles up my brain rather than helping me do things. Here I am, having a lark doing something I thoroughly enjoy when this message comes on my Whatsapp:
“Time can be your Best Friend or your Worst Enemy depending on whether you Use it or Waste it”
And now I start thinking whether I’m wasting my time by doing something that I merely enjoy when I could use that time by doing something that could earn me more money. After a lot of careful deliberation, I convince myself that doing things that make you happy is actually a use of time, but the whole process has taken away the spontaneity of my actions and forced me to find a logical reason for doing something I love. And that has destroyed the purity of my enjoyment, and I find that I no longer enjoy doing that thing so much. That f*****g motivational message has poisoned my happiness.
This, I feel is the biggest problem with motivational messages. If you take them seriously, and try to follow them, you find that your life has been robbed of its spontaneity, and you have become a mere algorithm running on the diesel inside your pipes rather than an organic creature of throbbing heart and pulsating veins.
I think the main reason why people send motivational messages to each other is to remind others of their own existence. Each man is an island in the ocean of life’s misery, and the only way he can communicate with others is by throwing out a bottle with a message in it. And since most people are not really creative enough to actually be able to say anything much, they just take up a quote from the internet and send it across to other human beings. But the real purpose of these motivational messages is not to motivate. The real purpose is to say:
“Hey there guys! I’m alive, and lonely, and miserable. Please notice me you bugger ! "
It seems everybody these days is busy sending motivational messages to everybody else. From the prime minister to the local goon , everyone is doing it (not that I have received any motivational message from any goon. I just assume that they send such messages too). No social media platform, be it Facebook, Whatsapp or Twitter is free from this plague. But why exactly do people want to motivate other people?
I mean, the way human beings are manufactured, we’re highly self-centered creatures. We mostly think of ourselves and our own needs. For instance, when we wish to defecate, we just sit over the nearest commode and do it. We don’t invite all our friends and acquaintances to do it together. Similarly, when our hormones rage inside us and get us all heated up for sex, we simply reach out to our partners and do it. We do not invite the entire neighbourhood over to an orgy. So why is it that when we feel the desire to be motivated, we immediately wish to share the desire with everyone we know?
Also, if some quote motivates you to achieve your goals, why should you share the secret with me?after all you seem to revel in your own oneupmanship . Life is a rat race, a struggle for survival, a Darwinian dog eat dog world where only the fittest will survive and get to the end of the rainbow to find the Ferrari and what not. Some 'friend' sent me this message the other day:
“Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.”
Now why share this extraordinarily important insight with me? Maybe, right now I’m feeling so low and defeated with life that I might have given up all hope and am packing a sparse bag to retire to a quiet hut in Himalayas , leaving you without competition . But now that you’ve given me hope that tomorrow might give me a fresh chance to outdo you, I might just decide to stay and snatch away that promotion from you! Isn’t it?
Also, this motivational stuff usually jumbles up my brain rather than helping me do things. Here I am, having a lark doing something I thoroughly enjoy when this message comes on my Whatsapp:
“Time can be your Best Friend or your Worst Enemy depending on whether you Use it or Waste it”
And now I start thinking whether I’m wasting my time by doing something that I merely enjoy when I could use that time by doing something that could earn me more money. After a lot of careful deliberation, I convince myself that doing things that make you happy is actually a use of time, but the whole process has taken away the spontaneity of my actions and forced me to find a logical reason for doing something I love. And that has destroyed the purity of my enjoyment, and I find that I no longer enjoy doing that thing so much. That f*****g motivational message has poisoned my happiness.
This, I feel is the biggest problem with motivational messages. If you take them seriously, and try to follow them, you find that your life has been robbed of its spontaneity, and you have become a mere algorithm running on the diesel inside your pipes rather than an organic creature of throbbing heart and pulsating veins.
I think the main reason why people send motivational messages to each other is to remind others of their own existence. Each man is an island in the ocean of life’s misery, and the only way he can communicate with others is by throwing out a bottle with a message in it. And since most people are not really creative enough to actually be able to say anything much, they just take up a quote from the internet and send it across to other human beings. But the real purpose of these motivational messages is not to motivate. The real purpose is to say:
“Hey there guys! I’m alive, and lonely, and miserable. Please notice me you bugger ! "
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