How to make difficult choices? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Question: If a student has to select a stream after class twelfth and he is interested in both medical and engineering, how does he select the stream without thinking about the future?

Speaker: See, the problem is that we make our choices by looking at the future. We make our choices just in the way a man purchases land. Do you know how do people make investments in land?

Listeners (in one voice): By predicting the future prospects.

Speaker: Yes. And in a similar way, we make life choices. We ask: ‘Whether doing this will be helpful in the *future*or not?’

Do you see that there is no love in this; there is only calculation.

Now, you cannot live your life through calculations. It is alright if you are purchasing a share, a stock, or a piece of land. There you can look at the future; you must look at the future probably, because you purchase these for the sake of money. Don’t you ask: ‘How much money will I get when I will sell it?’ So it is alright to be concerned about the future in this case. But that is not the way you decide your career. You don’t ask: ‘What is it that would keep me happy while working?’ No! That’s not the way you pick up a life partner, a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You don’t say that this person is going to earn a lot in the future, so I must hitch up with him. No! But unfortunately, a lot of us do this. We often ask: ‘What is the earning prospect of this groom?’