The World of Transactions.

 I was talking with a dear friend of mine about the concept of buying ourselves. We were talking about it in the context of discipline and emotional intelligence. In the sense that we pay by our youth to buy education, we pay by skipping our lunch to buy our fitness, we pay by losing our sleep to buy good grades, and the like.  

My friend wrote a beautiful poem saying that maybe she should put herself in an auction and see how high the price goes. It was fascinating and thought-provoking.  Our conversation didn’t go on for long as we switched to something casual. It had me thinking and led me to what I am writing right now.

Our world is a world of transactions. In which you must give something to get something. Everything is a pitch, a sales pitch. Even what I am writing right now is a sales pitch. In this world, to get as much as we want, we need to get the value of what we sell as high as possible. Our demand will only increase by how much we are valued in the eyes of those we are trying to sell to.

As we went along, our sales pitches involved the external world more than its innate nature. We started using ads to cover up our deficits. We used makeup for all the rough spots and used brands to categorize ourselves with them.

We started to identify what we owned with who we are; we see ourselves in the realm of what we have, what we wear, what we drive, and where we live. We started to associate our being with the surrounding. The more we gathered around us fancy and classy, the more we thought to be identified as such.

This has become our norm today. We identify whose brand we wear and associate whom we stand with, with who we are. We started a game of chasing what people valued and went after them to make them ours. Letting go of one and getting another, seeking out different clothing to try to stand out, and running after social media to see whom to follow and not.

I am not saying that getting the new stuff, buying a brand, and following the market are harmful per se. But when we start to identify with what we have around us, we lose ourselves in the process then we are at a loss.

Our search for our identity should not be to the outside but within; It should be brought into life from underneath our covers and brought to light from the darkness that hovers. We should stop the endless pursuit of external validation. We should put the price tags on ourselves and sell, not the other way around.

A Ralph Lauren shirt is sold for 500 dollars, not because it is made of fancy material that’s not on the market. Most of the time, it is probably made from some cotton and polyester like any other shirt. The reason it is priced that high is because of the name printed on it-Ralph Lauren: he made himself valuable enough that any cloth with his name is.

We should be working inside out to build our identity, not outside in. We fall into this trap; it is in our very nature to look for human validation. We need it, there is no doubt, but it should not be at the cost of our self-validation.

We don’t become gold because we eat out of gold-plated dishes, drink out of one, or feed with one. We enjoy those things when we become valuable enough to deserve those things. The life we want should not be dictated by what we see on social media or what celebrities do with their lives. It should be what we feel our lives should be. If you want to live out in the woods, in solitude, then do it.

So, let us go deep within ourselves and write our price tags; let us go deep within ourselves and find our precious jewels; let us go deep within ourselves and define our lives. Let us go work on ourselves until no amount of external validation of who we are will degrade it.

                       Let us be all we can be.✌

Let me know what you think in the comments below. 👇