Ramble on.

This week we were encouraged to make a wish everyday. I thought I might ramble on some thoughts I had.

I realized most of the wishes I made that profoundly excite me are about education and how that word should encompass more subjects. 

To start with a practical example, I wish we were taught how to be financially responsible, or how to make the right choices regarding money. It shouldn’t have to be led by the strive of financial growth, but would rather be a place to guide us through what the decisions we need to take to live a life that suits us. For instance, if your goal is to retire early, and then live a simple and calm life, how can you achieve that ? Or if your dream is to invest in various businesses, how can you do that smartly ? 

I was also struck by the fact that never in my school career, was I ever taught about emotional and psychological growth. We did have in high school philosophy classes, a brief and abstract introduction to Freud’s phases. But never those lessons were about how those concepts might apply to our own lifes. The idea that lessons around mental and emotional growth should have a place at school. How can we turn our children into knowledgeable people but also into secure individuals, with a healthy sense of self confidence and trust . Shouldn’t we teach our youth empathy ? Some may wonder, can it be taught ? Well, I believe anything mental is a muscle, it doesn’t only apply to creativity. Surely we all have different innate capacities, in any other field, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be worked on. 

And why shouldn’t it only be a matter for parents to tackle with, not one for school and teachers ? I will sound optimistic or simplistic, but I believe putting that kind of knowledge in school would mean that it is socially valued and respected, therefore wanted. Wouldn’t it change the mindset of a generation ? 

I wish we were taught what the basic capacities, abilities of human are. What our brain is made for, how it works. Our brain naturally is made to find a way to minimize all effort, therefore develop and encourage habits in the way we think, process information. If we all had those facts in mind, maybe that would put the way we are expected to function in our society in a different light. It might show how demanding it is, in mental and physical resources. I know many of us don’t need to hunt to survive. My reasoning overlooks a few steps here, but the life our ancestors who millennials ago, thanks to agriculture, enabled humankind to exit a state of day to day survival, might also be the beginning of Anxiety. Isn’t anxiety that feeling you have when overwhelmed by a far away future ? When faced to day to day challenges, you don’t have time or space to consider things far from present time. 

(Yuval Noah Harari’s books might interest you if you want to have an interesting view on humankind) 

Those thoughts and ideas, weirdly, help me put my own situation and accomplishments into perspective : If I struggle with certain subjects or tasks, this is usually because they were not found in conversations I had at home, nor at school nor with friends, and were not brought to my attention until a bit later in my life. If I find that I can’t keep up an hyper productive rhythm for more than a few days, that might be because our body and mind are not made to sustain such a rhythm for a long time. If I find myself stressing over a far away future, I will find calm by centering myself on the present moment.