Whose Dream Are You Living For?

Have you ever felt like you are living someone else’s dream?

Each day, you are working on someone else’s projects, in a company that isn’t yours, towards goals and objectives that were not initially set by you. You are probably hired for the role for your competencies, skills and attitude to be an operating part of the overall machinery that keeps the whole system moving forward.

Many times I feel like a cog in the overall machinery of the whole system. Yet I also feel powerless because I don’t know how else can I earn sufficient money to pay the bills and lead a relatively decent standard of living.

While working on and contributing towards the dreams of others, the focus shifts towards gaining skillsets and mastering specific roles. Maybe you try to be more efficient and create pockets of time and mental space for your manifesting your dreams.

If I follow my dreams and hobbies to write, heal, teach and explore life mindfully with little care for practicalities, I might be out on the streets and unable to fulfil my responsibilities.

Choices

Maybe life comes with choices. How many choices are available to you depends on your outer and inner resources. If you do not have all the choices available, you make do with the best choice you can at that point, and work towards creating more choices for your life so that you can choose more of what you want next time.

A teacher once told me, you work on yourself so that you can have more choices.

Having the freedom to choose is a blessing.

In default state, we follow the systems laid out for us or we do not survive. This sounds sad, doesn’t it?

The System and the Games

Yet I feel this state of living for someone else’s dreams reflects most of the modus operandi that we humans currently operate in, at least in the places I lived in.

The overall machinery of an organisation is made of the organisation, departments, ranks, defined job scopes and operating systems. Going beyond the organisation, we look at the larger machinery of how organisations interact, how societies and countries interact and the overarching rules and systems that govern how this world works.

Who designed and engineered this amazing engineering? With parts and structures that move and interact systematically, such as race, country, society, education, jobs, housing and supporting systems such as healthcare, infrastructure, diplomatic relations and so on.

We play the games.

A large majority of us are the pieces moving within these systems to enable them to function as designed. Each organising and region features different games with different rules and environments.

We still have some choice.

We may choose which system you want to be part of (e.g. be a worker, entrepreneur, creator, etc.).

We may choose which part of the system you want to be a cog in (in other words, which job or role you want to take up).

We may choose which machine you want to work in and which machine operating part you want to become (in other words, which industry, type of company).

And which dreams and projects you want to assist in fulfilling (in other words, which team, people or which projects you want to work for).

While it is idealistic to say let us all be founders and creators of new systems and new world orders, it is a tall order that only a select few can manage. Most of us are able to contribute simply as the operating parts of the system, at different levels.

We have fancy names for the different levels of operating parts, like assistant executive, executive officer, manager, senior manager, director, senior director, department head and so on. Each part has a defined role, defined place and specific areas of contribution. And as a whole, we make up the organisation, the economy, the country, the regions and the human world that we live in.

From another perspective…

Sometimes, the majority of us who are working on someone else’s dream may feel less good than the stars who create and drive new orders. From another perspective, are most of us not contributing in our own way, with a titbit of our input and our dreams in specific areas, within the larger context of an organisation?

Without the pieces moving within the rules, the machinery does not work. It seems like each person has their own role, level and timing.

It is okay to be where you are at.

Maybe it is about understanding where you are at now, and realising the reality of the current situation gives you the possibility to choose and work towards where you want to be in the future.