My young friend is a good
sounding board on the attitudes of youth in Maldives . In today’s discussion he
told me with delight that that many of them including himself admired luxury. Latest
phones, laptops, ipads, itablets, designer clothes, perfumes, and even the
features of the latest cars. Perhaps it’s not wrong to say, we admire luxury to
some extent, we all do, but if the intensity of it is not kept in check, that
admiration can lead to coveting and just wanting for the sake of wanting which
never fulfils our craving. When needs and wants are confused, the seed of
selfishness is planted.
Selfishness and
individualism begin in childhood. While individualism is important to
understand our roles and responsibilities in our society and to achieve
individual excellence that can contribute to societal improvement,
individualism when carried to levels of vanity and self importance, the
collective attitude can make for a cynical society, where we become overly
critical of the other person’s views to the point of even rejecting what
someone else has to say because we truly believe that what we have to say is
the truth. Consequently we become bad listeners with short attention spans who
in the context of a conversation fidget in restlessness with an overpowering
desire always to quickly shift over to our own story.
From an inter-personal point
of view, no one really likes to be in such company where someone keeps harping
about his/her own successes. But what is sad is that while we may not like the
individual with this quality, subconsciously we too behave the same way when
the opportunity to open our mouths arises – we too go on talking about
ourselves without choosing to listen more than we speak. When such weaknesses in
youth are not pointed out and sympathetically addressed by those with more
experience and wisdom, these cynical and disruptive attitudes can become hardened
as youth grow into adulthood and become the collective norm in our society. The
signal that this is becoming so in our society - picked from my young friend’s sounding
to me – is evident, and is a mix of many reasons. We should all reflect on this
creatively to unravel the causes behind this pervasive attitude. To my mind, one
reason may relate to doting parents who pamper their children without the
requisite discipline needed to build a child's character (why a parent behaves
that way also has its reasons that will have to be revealed and addressed).
Another reason may be the lack of contact with grandparents who now live away
from the nuclear family settings that new couples in Maldives have chosen to adopt in
the pursuit of modern ways of living that our western world practices and which
we take to as being modern and fashionable. Parents may not be aware that keeping
grandparents at such distance is really a forfeiting of the immense lessons of
life that grandparents have to offer their young grand-children. It is really a
breaking of the bond that nature has devised for us to keep inter-generational
knowledge intact.
So, while our youth’s (even
adults, for such youth have become the parents of today) desire to be selfish
is understandable, and young people cannot be pushed to take the blame for
wanting the latest gadgets, be unhealthily competitive and wanting to show off
and feel being better than their peers. The ego is at its deceptive work here,
and because, somewhere in the past, it has been nurtured through the neglect of
building more responsible character in our children. Without addressing a suppression of the
ego, our future may well be chaotic societies. This is a nationwide issue for
us in Maldives
that our leaders need to understand and begin building our primary school
systems and family values that will breed more responsible future generations
of Maldivians.
2 comments:
Humans have two opposing urges according to biologists, the urge to cooperate and the urge to compete. Both are needed for survival.
True, Could we try to play out a healthy balance of the two?
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