I’ve been in the business world for the past 16 years – but I graduated from college 1 year younger than my classmates, so you do the math. My POV is that by your mid-30s we are all segmented into professions, with titles, that are supposed to mean something. We are evaluated on what that means, and what we get paid, and how that translates to our bank account…you get the picture.
So what I think happens to a lot of people, is that they “become” their assigned professional role. They become their company. They start to embody their professional life and it becomes their identity. My POV is that with few exceptions, and I’ll point to them later in another entry, you become your job.
What I have also seen, is that a lot of people become their societal roles — Mother and Father specifically amongst the 30+ gen (and by the way, I think those are the BEST roles in the world and look forward to when I have that role). What I see is that we lose our sense of self. We “become” what society tells us to become — our work and our role.
What we lose sight of is our dreams. We lose sight of how we want to continuously evolve — and that we have the choice to evolve. We achieve specific life goals, but we forget about what we dreamed of becoming as a child, a teenager, a college student — what we specifically aspired to in life.
However, with that said, I think that the creation of online communities, such as WordPress and Facebook, have allowed “my generation”, if you will, to pick up pen to paper or paintbrush to canvas and start to dream again.
I was first adverse to Facebook — I was like, “who has the time for this?”. I’m busy working. I am doing something important. The online medium is just another escape. It decreases our ability to communicate with humans. It is a barrier to open communication and it shuts us off. (I have a whole POV on texting and Gen Y regarding this, but for now I’ll remain silent)
But I think that the 35+ generation have really leveraged this medium beautifully. They are usually, and I say usually, expressive and are open to sharing themselves, and usually doing it with decorum and taste. There’s still a bit of mystery and getting to know you. They talk about their lives, their dreams, their fears, their hopes, their successes and their failures. It is refreshing to me and inspiring. It causes me to become creative.
Whether someone reads it or not. Reacts or not. Validates or not. We can be expressive with ourselves. We can also create.
I could get more spiritual, on how we have the ability to make choices and create our lives. I’ll talk more on that later. I also want to explore “choices” as it relates to the state of our economic environment…
But for now I’ll have you ponder on how you want to create, express yourself and dream. What are you dreaming of next?