Tunnel Vision.

My father (my natural one, that is) was a driver. He started off driving a company’s first lorry when he was about sixteen, before spending most of his life as a bus driver and moving to part time taxi driving when he retired. Driving was all he ever wanted to do; driving was in his blood; driving was his career.

I’m not made that way; I’ve never been career minded. As soon as any job began to suggest the prospect of building a career, I lost interest. I became dissatisfied, restless, I wanted to move on. I’d observed enough, learned enough, gained whatever level of expertise I wanted to gain, and now it was time to go and experience something completely different.

My reason for saying this is the fact that we live in a high pressure world now in which the emphasis is so much on prosperity, comfort and the acquisition of material possessions. Even when more humane aspects enter the picture, it usually comes back to the same thing. When we place importance on family life, for example, there’s so much talk of ‘providing for my family; working hard to give them the material accoutrements required for a “successful” life.’ All too often it isn’t about the core issues of close relationships, the ones that endure through prosperity and poverty alike. It sometimes seems that even kids are conditioned to seeing their parents as relative failures if they haven’t provided all the gadgets going by the time they’re twelve.

And that attitude insinuates itself into the educational system and the parental mindset. Young people are constantly bludgeoned with the view that the only way to be successful in life is to study hard, work hard, get into a well paid career and climb the ladder, hanging on for dear life if there’s any prospect of a slip.

Well, that might work for most people, but not all. I’m the living proof. Had I tried to stay on one of my many potential career paths, I would probably be more prosperous now, but I would have been constantly dissatisfied and I would have learned a lot less than I have. And I’m sure there must be many more people made the same way as me.

Society needs to somehow recognise and accommodate this fact. It needs to be less tunnel-visioned. It needs to wake up to the reality that trying to force square pegs through round holes doesn’t make for happy pegs.