Whose life are you living?

Yes, whose life are you living?

Are you really alive? Or you just think you are? Are you living your own life, or somebody else’s life? If yes, is this your best? If no, why? What is your excuse? And have you identified whose life you are living? Your dad’s?  Your mum’s? A friend you admire?/ the Joneses? Or even a long dead historical figure? We must all be honest enough to answer this question truthfully.

This question is at the root of what it means to be a human being, and to be a true success. So the question must be asked again, are you living your own life or not? Whose life are you really living?

No two human beings are totally alike. So what works for one will not work for another, consequently  it is wrong to go through life living another person’s life.

Now if the answer is that you sincerely believe that you are living your own life, then the logical follow-up question is, is this the best you can offer? What percentage of your life potential are you living? Why are you sabotaging yourself?

It is a fact that we are all unique. We each have something to contribute to life that no other person quite can contribute. Therefore, while it is good to be inspired by other people’s achievements and successes and ideas, it is wrong to live one’s life as a copy of another, no matter how highly we revere that person.

We human beings have free will as an integral part of our makeup. Regardless of the criticisms we may have against it, free will is a great gift. You can have everything or you can have nothing, depending on you, and you alone. The tragedy of it is that we all have something to add to our society and families and we fail for one untenable reason or the other to contribute it.

This is at the root of the stagnation in human development in many areas of the world. The black man is today at the foot of virtually every  ladder because a significant portion of us still look at life through the lens of other races. We are always waiting for a contribution from other races before we copy. Be it in food, music, or religion. We have a tendency to copy others wholesale. And even turn it into a craze that the original inventors never envisaged. Our leaders are really not leading.

On an individual basis, many of us are busy trying to be like the other person. This copying is usually of our parents. Is it not funny that our parent lived decades before us, and yet, we want to live according to their own tenets? If it worked for them at their own time, it can only partially work for us now.

We are of course, here not talking about moral guidance. For that, there are universal laws applicable in all ages laid down by our cultures, as well as our religions. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is a good religious summary of it. Immanuel Kant’s injunction that we should only do things that can be made into a universal law (the universability test) is a philosophical rendering of the same golden law. We can copy good moral injunctions.

In fact, if we all insist, as we should, on choosing our own paths, less of the tragic stories owing to peer pressure will be recorded.

Even recruiters of political thugs and religious and tribal rioters will have fewer recruits to work with, if the potential recruits stop a bit to reason for themselves, rather than agree to what they are told by the mindless political godfathers.

I also believe each person should ask himself if, even when we are not living other people’s lives, are we really living up to our own potential? If not, why not?

We are told by psychologists that most of us are living far within our potential. Also that no man living or dead has utilized up to 20% of the human potential. Yes, even geniuses like Albert Einstein are not excluded.

What we are saying is that with independent thinking, we can increase the threshold of achievement from a miserly 5% of potential to something like 10%.. The point is, we must develop the conviction to go against the grain, to examine issues dispassionately, and then take our own stand, and stop going with the crowd. Such attitude has a better chance of unleashing our potential than the general way of simply living according to dictations from anyone.

What applies for the individual also applies to countries. Nigeria for instance has been a perennial underachiever partly because our leaders have consistently followed false prophets from abroad. Not many of our leaders has been bold enough to initiate developmental ideas that will differ from the West.

Ideas that are strictly developed by others to further their own national interests, are repeated here by our policy makers, and made the basis of national development.

The danger in this is made very stark by recent happenings in the international financial system.

The gospel of free market capitalism, withdrawal of government from business are the ideas that were imposed on the hapless people of this nation for several decades, with government carrying on a wholesale and unplanned auction of public corporations.

Today, our local free market prophets watch as their lords in Western Europe and North America are changing face in an about turn.

Today, in North America and Western Europe, governments are buying stakes, controlling stakes, in private companies. Public money is being set aside to bail out mismanaged private Companies. In Britain, competition law was even set aside to allow bailouts, and Gordon Brown personally was involved in one of the mergers.

This shows the about turns that the people we copy can always make, to further their own interests, leaving imitators stranded.

What we can conclude from all these is not that we should not look at other people’s examples , but a valid conclusion is that we look at others and ideas from several sources and then synthesize our own values and conduct from them, not copy them.

This is also a wakeup call to those parents who want to live a vicarious life in their children. Out of so called love, some parents force their children to choose a path in life for which the children are unsuited.

Apart from condemning some of these children to a life of misery, regardless of material success, such parents also deny the wider  world of the contributions the children could have made to society had they been allowed to follow their natural inclinations.

Imagine, for instance, if the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti had not been bold (rascally?) enough to insist on pursuing music when his stern parents wanted him to study Medicine. The world would have lost his contributions to music.

The gift of free will is a hint from our Creator that we have to be individuals, not clones of others. If we live according to anybody’s thoughts, we are a shadow of that person, and even his unrecognized slave.

The world will be a better place if we all resolve to follow our independent paths as much as possible.