Why Do We Crave Holidays?
Questioner: Sir, why do people celebrate festivals and are always desperately looking for holidays and vacations?
Acharya Prashant: It is very necessary for the insecure and terrified mind to keep looking towards future. So, some special day must always be there a week or a month ahead. New year goes, then you can look forward to Baisakhi. Then Valentine’s day, then Holi, then your birthday, and so on.
This cycle helps us maintain the illusion as something great is going to come. In fact, this gives you nothing except its continuation till death.
The mind is fed up of its daily, boring, routine, fettered and frustrated life. But it has no faith or courage to break away from this life. So, despite hating its limitations, the mind continues with the limited life.
When you work six days a week in a meaningless job that just makes you a machine, then you desperately need to party on Saturday night and Sunday. So, entertainment and parties and weekends and other ‘special days’ are needed. These entertainments ‘help’ us tolerate the torture of the entire week. So, in a way, it is because of these celebrations that we continue to tolerate hell.
The more frustrated and bored and suppressed the mind will be, the more will be its need to party.
Questioner: Sir, I understand that a frustrated mind will need to party. But if a person is working in any organization or firm then it is obvious that he has to follow certain rules and regulations set by the organization. And so he will definitely get bored by doing the same work again and again. The person continues to perform that work because that is a part of his living/earning. How can he manage to stop doing that work? He cannot get the opportunity to do different type of work every day.
Acharya Prashant: Why does that man continue to work there? Why do most of us work?
Look at the people around. Look at them going to their jobs at 9 a.m. Look at their faces when they return in the night. Look at how people pick jobs, and how students think of placements.
Why do people work?
Questioner: Sir, people work because they want some earning for their survival in the society, or simply to live. I think solution of this problem is that the person must be very much careful in selecting the job and must select that job only in which he enjoys and feel a sense of satisfaction. But in that too he might get bored because he has to do same thing again and again.
Acharya Prashant: Are you sure that people are working so desperately hard ‘simply to live’?
How much money does one require to simply live? And how much is the money people are chasing? Are they chasing it for just the basic needs of physical survival?
For the insecure mind, work and money are cheap substitutes for the real essence of life. Work means social respectability. When there is absence of self-awareness, then getting respect from others becomes important. Work hides our inner hollowness.
Money is a substitute for love and freedom. When life is loveless, then accumulating money becomes important. Collection and display of money is a mental tool of violence for the loveless mind.
This is why people work. Not for bread. Simple bread is so simple to earn.
I generally ask this question to final year students, ‘How much money per month do you spend these days’?
The usual answer is 3,000-8,000. Average 5,000.
Then I ask them, ‘So why do you crave for a job that pays 30,000? There are no free lunches. The more a businessman pays you, the more he will suck your blood. Why should you want 30k?’
The answer is: To feel respected by friends, to uphold the honor of family, and sometimes – to get a good bride with dowry.
We don’t need so much money ‘simply for living’. We sell ourselves away because the mind is complexed.
To maintain the false self, money and designation and brand are desperately needed.
So, people tolerate all kinds of nonsensical works, of which there are plenty. Keynes, the great economist, had said in the first half of the last century that soon the population of the world will need to work only very little, because of improved productivity of machines. Instead we find that we are being pushed to work more and more. A survey says that most jobs in economy today are not productive at all and they actually need not exist.
Man goes on slogging and missing the relaxed joy of life. Not for his needs but for his pitiable greed.
And to maintain his job and his greed and his foolish sense of security, he will tolerate all nonsense for six days a week. And then, he will party on the seventh day to forget his hell. Soon enough, comes another Monday.
