Muting the Audiobook- Your life, Your soundtrack. | Saurabh Choraria | TEDxSTG Youth
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-od353n7O8 Video ID: _-od353n7O8 ============================================================ Sometimes I wonder what I would say if I had a chance to talk to my younger self. Perhaps I could imagine that my younger self is probably sitting somewhere right beside one of you. Do I have anything meaningful to say at all? Should I warn and direct? Should I preach and influence? I have to be honest. Even as a child, I did not like influencers. So, there's no point in me saying, "Bro, don't take up that bad habit or avoid that bad person or never start that business because it will fail. I know I am from the future." Nevertheless, I could show him how unlearning helped me to stick to my core identity, to stick to what's beneath the layers of my identity. We have always been fighting. Learning to talk, walk, read, write was once a battle. Then battles for grades, battles for awards, followed by battles for social acceptance and belonging. Battles then for success and a safety net, battles for successful relationships, and hopes to someday have progeny to be proud of. laid out right in front of me is a complete battle plan for life. Now I am a warrior and life is a battle. Unlearning the amount of importance given to these checkpoints in life is essential before I can even decide if I want checkpoints to begin with. I would like to ask you a very simple yet profoundly complex question. Why are you here listening to the speakers today? Are you here to learn something? Are you here hoping that an insight, a lesson from a another person's life, another person's mistakes and faults might help you or guide you in some way? So, are we here because there is constant movement in the mind to achieve, to become, to acquire, to arrive? Maybe instead of learning more, we should see what needs to be unlearned. Expectations pile upon us and some we end up piling upon others. All this creates is an image to uphold, a conflict to have and pretends to perform. Similarly, as I grew up with my own acquired worldview, expectations kept growing too. As long as I was winning, I kept failing to notice the flip side of the coin. What happens when any one of those expectations are not fulfilled? I produce music professionally and if I had a 20 rupee coin for every time somebody doubted me, it wouldn't have mattered because I would have spent it all by now anyway. But for a very limited amount of time, I would have been very wealthy. Fortunately, so far I have been able to keep my head and my answers straight. media and the ad industry have tried hard to convince me that AI might make me irrelevant. I've been told that there is a lot of competition everywhere. Well, I don't believe in competition. The universe is humongous and there is enough space for each one of us. When one walks away from that prescribed negativity, one starts walking into themselves. And do not get me wrong here. To have a certain comfortable life, money is necessary. I must therefore clearly define what a comfortable life looks like for me. I must unlearn that there is one set route to it. Possibilities are endless. What is crucial here is to ensure that I never imitate anybody's idea of a good life. Unlearning what you've wrongly been inspired by brings a kind of subtle confidence. I do not need to rebel. I just need to take a stand and walk my path. That unique and untradden path is with each of us hidden beneath the world's definition of success, happiness, excellence and so on. It took courage to start my journey because our identity, this layer of inherited expectations, subconsciously directs every step we take, every move we make. Nobody made me aware of these until life had to eventually do so. To understand this not as an abstract idea, but as a tangible choice, I thought to myself, where does this effortless joy come from? It comes from a place of no judgment. This level of simplicity was truly a revelation. We go astray from that simplicity when inherited expectations begin to pile upon us. Happiness becomes conditional. Is it possible at all to reach this elusive mirage called happiness? It was never an object for us to reach. I must allow myself to be me and them to be them. To me, life is a two-way street where I shall give only that which I can endure. For now, it is love and peace. So, I circle back to the first question. Why are you here? Which is that one troubling filter you would remove first?