New Year's Optimism

As the year 2008 was drawing to a close I got increasingly indisposed towards my work and my general role in Serbia’s development process. I wondered whether I could ever make any difference, whether I was fooling myself to think I was contributing to anything etc. You know, all the usual thoughts associated with the painful process of disillusionment, or starting to finally see the world with all the bad and all the ugly (i.e. the way it really is). End of year stress and fatigue were seriously fuelling my disillusionment so I went for my New Year’s holiday with one of those expressionless faces that you see on people who decide that emotions are just not going to do it for them anymore, so they block out all external stimulus and turn numb to life in general.

Thank God, my expressionless face was a temporary phenomenon, and a few days off helped me get out of the black and dig dipper into the roots of my motivation for being in this profession. Things started to make sense again and my new rationale came to life.

The world is as ugly and as bad as it is, and I am not going to be the one to change this. A real change can only come from my learning how to accept it and cope with it. I will not be the one to change irresponsible people and irresponsible governments, the one to end corruption, politicized decision making, the one to resolve tantrums stemming from clashes of intra- and inter-national interests. I will not be the motivating force for anyone but myself and I will not have the discretion to allocate individual and collective rights based on my subjective concept of social justice. Thus, how can I feel frustrated about these issues? Frustration by definition is a wish that cannot be fulfilled. So, why wish for something that is not in my power to change and then feel frustrated about it? Why should I set impossible goals to achieve?

Some say that the current financial crisis is intellectually a great time as people struggle to come up with alternative solutions and think outside the box in order to reduce the impact of the crisis. So my new source of motivation is to think of all the things that frustrate me as a continuous crisis, and to make an intellectual challenge out of attempting to reduce the impact of this crisis on my own goals and interests (which could be altruistic or personal). This is as if I were running a hurdle race, and I needed to figure out a way to jump over hurdles instead of attempting to get rid of them or persuade the referee that this should be a race without hurdles.

So, to bring up a stylized example, instead of saying: Oh, the Government is corrupt and a lot of money that we badly need gets stolen, I should say: It is most likely that this year we will lose this much money on corruption, and thus I will be more realistic about the money that will actually be spent on my goal. I will at the same time devote effort and resources to fighting corruption, so that one day the situation improves, but I will not count on this money until it actually stops being stolen.

And this, one has to admit, is an intellectually challenging goal to achieve in itself, and certainly requires a lot of creativity and patience. So, hurdle races will be my new life motto. Refreshing is the new 2009, indeed.