What Will Others Think About Me? (Reflections After Returning From My 3m Sabbatical)

Monday, 11th March 2024, marks the date I return to work from a sabbatical break. 12 weeks, 84 days. This break was primarily taken to renew the dynamic and energy of both myself and my family. It allowed me to reflect on certain aspects and demands of my ambitions that too often left me feeling drained, unclear, and with a sense of emptiness. It was a much-needed break to be present again for both myself and my husband.

There’s much that comes to mind when I think of this period, but throughout the most intense reflections I’ve had, I can identify 3 phases that led to a sort of transformation in how I approach things nowadays.

1. Playing the Social Game

The more I reflect on my own traits, the more I see that we are in constant competition, playing the endless game called society: the game of getting ahead. From childhood, we are educated and trained to desire, to conform to educational norms, and as we enter the workforce, to grow our desires even more. We're taught we cannot afford mistakes, proclaiming our wish to be “the best”.

But what does 'the best' even mean? Is it being the best among our friends, within a certain group, or compared to those we see on social media? 

How do we even define our 'best'? The best, is an abstraction of the mind in my opinion. 

Aiming for the 'best' implies no room for error. One mistake, and you can't be the best, can you? In fact, we minimize our chances of success by aiming for the best. Imagine doing your 'best' for a month and then one day, you fail at something. Haven't we ruined everything? We can't afford mistakes, so we destroy our 1 and only chance to be 'the best'.

In this status game, we conform, adhere to specific behaviours deemed appropriate here and there, which leads to the development of a dual self – the true self and the one constructed by societal conditional validation. And all this leads to hierarchies.

There can't be a middle class without the poor and wealthy; no poor without the middle class; no wealthy without the middle and poor. And everyone aspires to be at the top.

Say the world has 6 people in total: 2 are poor, 2 are middle-class, 2 are wealthy. The poor strive to overcome their condition, the middle class aims for the wealth, and the wealthy... well, they know they exist only in comparison to the middle and poor classes; but they never stop either - the sky is the limit they say.

For those 2 poor people to make the jump and join the middle class means overcoming those 2 middle-class individuals. It's about winning over them, competing, and taking their seat. Remember, the middle wouldn’t exist without the poor, so at any point in time someone must be poor and someone must be middle class.

This competition is relentless, from childhood through to our careers. And after 3 months of reflection, I’ve realized that this competition, often unnoticed, is absolutely toxic. At least for me. 

The game brought me all its negatives until I began questioning it and sought ways out.

My need for this sabbatical was a symptom of me growing tired of society's game – its imposed norms, beliefs, money-making mindset, and the culture of being the best, fighting for it, never allowing for mistakes. Never allowing a sense of 'enough' without facing the fears and anxieties that arise, which are often the result of external pressures to conform to the game.

I was tired of playing the game.

And I naturally started to grow in another direction, like a river carving its path through unexplored terrain or like a new branch of a tree.

2.  We spend our entire lives pursuing material desires.

The problem with the material desires is that everything is fleeting.

You buy a car. The second you have it, your desire to have that car is fulfilled, giving you a spark of good feeling. Once you've accomplished your desire, it's over. However, what gives us the good feeling is not the car itself, but marking a desire as 'Done.' That's the neuroscience of desire. 

You desire to ascend in your career. You climb the ladder, get a new promo. The moment you reach that point, your desire is satisfied. And still, the only way you know to give yourself that feeling again is to repeat what you know — climb again and again.

So even if you’ve done these things before, you've desired something you've already had, and it didn't work for you because here you are again, desiring the same thing, you still find yourself in the same cycle, desiring it once more, and again, and again. 

The chase of desires simply does not work. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with desires, whatever they may be. The issue isn't the desires themselves; it's that we seek these things out believing fulfilling them will give us a lasting good feeling. 

Desires are the wrong reasons we use in our life on our path to finding a state of good. And society's game has been using desires as a weapon to keep people in this game — like social media uses engagement tricks to keep people engaged.

And just like with social media, where we know very well how things work, in life we keep chasing desires and never learn.

Like any other human being, what you do is a result of you aspiring for a life where, most of the time, what you feel is good, positive, and happy. It's a survival instinct underneath. And to that end, you try to minimize all possible risks in the world so that, if something happens, you have a better chance to be happy. 'Better' is a word used in comparison with something. And that something is 'others.' So to rephrase that, you want to have a better chance than others to be happy. You’ll say, 'No, I want to be happier in comparison with my previous self.' Your previous self’s state of being happy is only defined in comparison with something else, with someone else who isn’t as happy. Do you see the constant competition game? For any inner group, there must be an outer group.

And, as much as you try, even if you reach the pinnacle in some things, there's never enough, is there? Is there a moment in your life when you've looked back and truly said, 'This is enough for me'. Now I have what I need to be happy most of my time.'? You might have said that, but have you been loyal to that thought? Every single day, have you been loyal to what you said is enough for you?

Desires are just a form of momentary happiness.

And that has made me really question the entire framework this society, and therefore I, are built on; and most importantly, it leaves me with the open question — if I don't know anyone who has stopped and felt absolutely fulfilled from material desires and financial means, in their pursuit of finding that good feeling, why do I still chase this model of 'more'? Why do I continue to play the game?

Let me explain — in my bubble, 90% of the people I know have more than enough of everything. (however they still chase)

I'm not questioning the concept of money (which is anyway just imaginary, a label associated with a piece of paper for trade). It does have a meaning in the society we've built because we've built the entire framework on it. 

What I'm questioning is our unconscious drive to chase the wrong reasons, like desires. I’m questioning the framework we've built and which does not teach us two things: how to live life and how to settle for enough.

3. Settle on Inner Values

Lastly, here's where I am today. 

If I've found in this period that what most of us do is a competition game of society, and that material desires are not something I wish to pursue in the hope of finding my 'enough' or satisfaction, what else can I do or find to lead me to a sustainable path and not fall back into the competition game? 

From what I’ve reflected on, I think our inner values are the answer.

Values are not desires or emotions. They are those things we say - 'This is important to me. This is something I care about.'

And the beautiful part I'm discovering about values is that it feels like through them, we can build a resilient wall against negativity, or the conditional validation and judgment of others. We can build a wall and just be. In most of the cases at least.

One thing I can see through my reflections over the last 12 weeks is that something has remained constant in my mind - chase if you want, go nuts if you want, do whatever you want, but make sure you understand what part of what you do is important to you. Having that understanding and pursuing things in this way, I believe, will give us the chance to feel a lasting feeling of good or satisfaction. Otherwise, we’ll never find what we’re chasing for.

And I’m not naive thinking one can live a purely joyful life. I'm talking about an imbalanced approach, where the weight leans more towards the 'I feel good' part, feels right, feels you.

Rather than doing something because you've seen someone else doing it, or because that's how "it should be done" try to ask yourself - 'What about it is important to me?’. And then do a bit of introspection on that.

The reason why I believe values are the answers is that only if we care enough, we build the resistance to go through that. In my case, when I chased too much, without the right reasons, I broke myself. I did not have the right resistance to go through it. I was chasing things which were not in fact important to me. They were not mine.

So, when you're faced with a choice - to pursue something or not - ask yourself, ‘What is more important to me now?'.

And I’m finding that as I move in this direction, I can make consistent progress towards a state that gives me consistent satisfaction. I find that the minute I look inside of me for what’s important and I peel away as many things as I've accumulated from the external world, from the societal game of competition, I feel good.

As an analogy, the way I’ve been feeling, and I’m sure many people would resonate with, is like having the surface of the lake as the satisfaction or good state I’ve been searching for - you can see it, it’s rather shockingly beautiful when you look at it. However, what I’ve been doing is trying to look at that calm surface of the lake from a speedboat zooming around because that’s what people do. And the more I was speeding, trying to find that calm and good state of the lake I knew exists, the more the speedboat would leave traces and ripples, and I could find nothing but agitation. And I tried more, and more and more without having any evidence that people who had been zooming around in speedboats for longer had really found it. Those were just promises.

And yet, I bought a bigger and more powerful boat. I carried on, continuing the game alongside others — some with smaller boats, some with bigger ones. I was doing as they said.

And then, in a huge emptiness of chasing but not finding what I was looking for, I stopped. Without even knowing, the more I was fighting, the more I was speeding, the fewer chances there were for me to find that lasting feeling of good; that feeling which was not fleeting as a result of a material desire.

And when I stopped, when I paused in the middle of the lake, when I stopped the speedboat and let things rest for a minute, I finally saw the peace of the lake. It has always been there.

But I saw that it was not MY game I was trying to play in finding that state.

And I saw that it’s not a state we need to create. Rather, it is the underlying reality of the society game what we're searching for - it’s what’s important purely to us, deep down, beneath all the layers built by the game. It's our inner values, whatever they are. But to uncover them, in the modern world full of judgement and conducts, it’s damn hard.

That's it for this one, I'll see you next week,

Luciana