It’s often said that it’s easier to go from one ringgit to a thousand than from a thousand to a million — and easier still to go from a thousand to a million than from a million to a billion. The higher you climb, the harder each step becomes.
The same rule applies to personal growth.
If you’re merely surviving and feeling alienated, you don’t need to change much to rise above survival and find a sense of belonging. But once survival is no longer an issue, and you’ve found your place in the world, it takes far more effort to move from belonging to self-respect — to look in the mirror and feel that you need not be ashamed of yourself, or even feel proud that you stand above the rest.
And when you’ve reached that point — when you’ve satisfied your need for self-esteem — the next step, self-actualisation, demands a transformation a thousand times greater than the one before. To go from feeling proud to becoming the best version of yourself you can imagine requires exponential change.
Almost everyone can survive. Many find belonging. Few achieve real self-respect. And very few ever come close to self-actualisation. I doubt any of us personally know someone who has.
This rule doesn’t apply only to individuals. Nations evolve in the same way.
It’s common to hear the older generation speak nostalgically of a happier, simpler past. They don’t do this because life was actually better back then — in truth, life in the past was far harsher. Running water was a luxury, diseases were rampant, illiteracy widespread. But it was precisely the difficulty of life that made contentment easy. When you’re a fisherman who struggles just to return home alive, or a soldier who counts each day as borrowed time, satisfaction is simple — survival itself is enough – just returning home alive is enough to give you all the peace and contentment you need from life.
Today, when you’re a programmer or a social media executive, survival is guaranteed — but satisfaction isn’t. If all you can look forward to is three meals a day, a warm bed, and a safe return home, you’ll probably feel that your life went to waste.
When you’re a child, a one-ringgit toy can make you happy. When you’re an adult, even a crown might not. The higher you rise, the harder it becomes to find contentment.
When people find it difficult to be content with life, or when they can’t help but suspect that your life is going to waste, people look back longingly to the past — not because the past was good, but because it was easier to feel good in it.
There’s no point saying Malaysia was happier when we were just surviving. Even if it’s true, that world is gone. We can’t go back. What we can do is accept that the challenges of our generation — to build self-respect, pride, and dignity — are exponentially harder than those of the generation before us.
And having accepted that truth, it’s better to roll up our sleeves and meet the demands of our time — rather than mourn a world that no longer exists.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
