First, everyone mentioned their goals in life. The following were the various goals of our group
- Contribution to technology - through research - programming
- Contribution to society by being an Civil servant or by other means
- Better CGPA
- Computer scientist
- Financially stable
- No goal as such - live every day
We checked why we desired for 'better CGPA'. 'Better CGPA' was needed in order to achieve a 'better job' and 'better job' was needed to achieve a good 'status' in the society. We then examined what happened after we achieved the 'status' that we desired for. The unanimous opinion of the group was after we achieved 'status', we would then aim for 'status+1'. After 'status+1' was achieved, 'status+2' will be the goal. This process is never ending. In this scenario, two things were happening
- Our goal in life becomes ever elusive
- This goal would take primary priority in life and we might not enjoy other things that we can do.
We then discussed some solutions.
One possible way we could frame our 'goals of life' is to choose such goals which are not abrupt endings, because in such case, we don't have to find ourselves new goals after achieving one. Also, the goals could be such that they are based on our talents and interests. Also, one might choose extremely 'broad goals' where they act merely as 'guidelines' rather than 'something to be achieved or acquired'. The 'broad goals' might also enable us not to have any narrow objective as our goal, thereby enjoying other things in life too.
Then, we examined whether being a 'computer scientist' would qualify as a good goal. The reason why 'computer scientist' was set as a goal was because it is considered very highly to be a computer scientist. We then examined whether our goals are set by us only, or sometimes they are set by our society too. We then saw that we sometimes fix something as our goal because society gives more importance to it, and not because we really want to pursue that goal. Certain jobs are respected by the society, and they naturally become the goals of most people in the society. We considered an example of some courses such as humanities and basic sciences in our country. These streams are not considered the best areas to pursue in our country, not because of our interests, but because these streams are perceived to provide us not too many opportunities. So, the best in our country opt only for engineering or for medicine. This might be a reason why sometimes our parents insist that we pursue a particular area, and not something else that we might insist on. We didn't have a solution for this in our discussion, but we just felt the need to be conscious of this fact.
We dispersed at this point. In the next class, we examined if we had any confusions in our mind because of our discussions in the last class. No body had any confusions. Everyone in the group reexamined their goals based on our discussions in the last class. It was great to find that most of us had goals that were based on our interests and talents, and were sustainable. At this point, one of us raised the point that some of us have 'financial well-being' as our goal because we need to reach a point where we can help our society. This was an extremely valid point. However, it was pointed out that we can help our society at any time in any capacity, and that, it might not be necessary for us to reach a particular point. If we really want to, we have something or the other to give to our society irrespective of our position.
One of the points that we might have missed during the discussion was that do we really need to have goals. One of the us had mentioned his goal as 'no goal - live every day'. There was no discussion on it in the group, but my personal opinion is that having goals might be necessary to provide us a general guidelines based on which we make our decisions, or set our priorities. Without a general goal in life, we might end up pursuing or doing some things that we really didn't intend to do. Of course, this is my personal opinion, and was not discussed on the floor. Others can comment on this ...
That was the summary of our discussion on 'goals in life'.
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