Societal pressures are one of the worst perks that come with living in a society, and as long as we belong to one, we would face it at one time or the other. Many times, the pressure defers from gender to gender and other times, the pressure can be centered around religion. There is even pressure about age, with society telling you what you can or cannot do before you get to a particular age or after you’re past it.
Wherever you find yourself, whatever it is you’re doing, you’ll surely face pressure. Learning to overcome it is very vital because if we’re not careful, all we’d do is simply succumb and roll with whatever society throws our way. But sadly, when things go sour, that very society would turn you into an outcast.
For me, one of the major pressures I’m feeling right now from society is money! For a society that always condemns fraudulent activities and everything that looks like it, our society sure pays a lot of attention to money, especially in a way that only politicians and fraudsters can keep up with.
As a man, you’re simply expected to have money. You can lack everything else in life, but if you have money, you’re as good as a god. No one will take you seriously if you don’t have money, and it will even be worse if your peers or juniors have more money than you. Now, the problem might not come from your peers or juniors, those might be respectful to you. However, it comes from people who shouldn’t even have a say in the matter. They’ll be the ones always comparing you and asking why you didn’t make more money when others were doing so. It’s just sickening.
And sadly, it’s in every facet of society. In schools, the patron saint of education is Money. And this is funny because lecturers will always be telling us to forget all about money and focus on studying so we can make good grades. Yet, the school keeps increasing the prices of everything. School fees go up every year, the price of textbooks also goes up, and you can’t avoid paying these things or you can as well decide to fail the course.
What about the rent required to live in the school areas? No matter where you turn, there’s this big ass bill waiting for you and if you don’t pay it, then you’ll probably end up in a lot of trouble.
But then, you think this is bad, right? It's worse in some churches. There, they don’t even try to disguise it as being for the people. These days, more than seventy percent of what goes on in these churches is always about money. Now, I know that pastors and priests need to eat and they also need a place to live, but that can’t always be what services are about, can it? Also, there is always a lot of segregation that goes on in churches. It’s just natural, people would always respect the rich more than they respect the poor in the church. And why is this? Because one brings in more money!
During donations, the member who donates $10k gets a louder applause than the member who donates $1k. Then, the member that donates $100k gets even more than the previous two. This means that should a member donate $1 million, everyone could go berserk. After a while, public donations became a way to boost status in the church. People come to make donations with no plans of paying it at all. This is because they know everyone will see them as rich and treat them with that respect. They also know that the church will never reveal the fact that they’re yet to redeem their pledges.
And in our day-to-day lives, money is also a major factor. The rich will always be favored more than the poor because, within us all, we have that tiny need that we could benefit from them. We live in a society where money opens more doors than skill and integrity. How far you’re willing to advance is determined by how much you’re willing to spend. And for that, people are doing anything and everything to get that money. Because they know that without it, there’s nothing much they can do.
This does not excuse the fact that people go into fraud, I’m just saying that the problem of fraud may not be solved simply by tossing every one of them into prison, maybe by having a rethink and realizing that money shouldn’t be the most important factor in a man’s life.
So, how do I cope with this insane pressure? How do I keep my head and not get swallowed by society? Honestly, I simply do what I want. I don’t spend unnecessarily just to “look rich”, I spend only because I have to. I don’t even have enough for me to spend unnecessarily, to begin with. I also don’t try to impress people. I don’t spend to impress, I don’t dress to impress… I simply do things because I want to do them. Life is not hard, it’s the stupid obstacles we place in our paths that make it seem so.
Living a life for yourself is liberating. That way you do whatever you want without thinking about what people will say of you. But when you’re trying to impress everyone, you’ll place yourself in a box, one that you might never be able to get out of. And in the end, it still won’t be enough because society never gets satisfied. Not even when you cut off your head and hand it to them on a platter, there’ll still be complaints that your eyes should have been opened, instead of closed.
Anyway, the only thing we can do now is to move forward and that’s what I’m doing. I’ll keep living my life like I’ve always been doing. On my terms. I’m not in a rush and I’ll keep doing things at my own pace. Hopefully, society will learn a lesson and stop using money to judge me!!!
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