“I did not know what stress is until I came to the west!»Stunned, I gaze intently at my interlocutor. Kalson is an orphan who left his native Tibet at the age of eight years and lived half his life without documents;Now he works as a school principal in the city of Daramsala in the north of India. He never experienced stress?
In response, Kalson tells me about the two years spent in the United States: he graduated there is a magistracy in pedagogy. “I lived with American students. Whatever we do, we have always missed something. We went to the store – we had to rush home to do homework;We sat down for books – we had to finish as soon as possible, because friends would come soon to watch TV;We watched the match on TV, and the commentators said that the next match would be a real event … ”How we reached such a life? We are envied by billions of inhabitants of the planet. How can we experience more stress than refugees who are fighting every day with need, which sometimes even lack water? In his essay on this topic, the English philosopher Alain de Botton wrote: as soon as our main needs are satisfied (protecting against hunger, cold and violence), our greatest need besides love and sex is the approval and recognition of others*.
We really desperately want to feel that they are significant for others, that they pay attention to us, listen to us. But in order to achieve this, we have only one tool – to observe what others do, those whom sociologists call our reference group and with whom, in our opinion, are really considered … and imitate them as much as possible. Most often we are talking about our neighbors, friends, people, next to whom we have grown. If their children play piano, go to ski resorts, if they have a
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country house and a large jeep, if they feed on environmentally friendly products, run forty-five, and not twenty minutes, they speak English, do yoga … ThenAnd we must “correspond”. And for this you need to constantly run, run, run. Although this is rarely enough.
My Tibetan interlocutor has no feeling that he should chase after someone to earn the respect of those who surround him. He feels that he benefits children and helps the matter of preserving the Tibetan culture, and this is enough for him. And it doesn’t matter what salary he has and whether he has a car. He knows that he is appreciated, and does not seek to achieve more. Does this mean that we are doomed to stress, because we live in a consumer society that measures a person’s value by its performance and an abundance of different activities?