The Shrinking Universe
Reinvent yourself
VIJAY NAGASWAMI
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Don’t wait for a crisis to make changes in your life and personality.
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Self-reinvention is not a particularly recent phenomenon; people have been doing it for ages. Unfortunately, more often than not, they have been doing it usually in the throes of crises, most commonly of the mid-life variety. Or in the contemporary age of pink slips, downsizing and downscaling, only when things around start melting down. When one feels completely ‘burnt-out’ in one’s career, one’s marriage, one’s very life itself, or when one has had a completely unexpected mid-life bypass surgery, one goes through a ‘mid-life crisis’ and attempts to make major lifestyle changes in order to enhance the quality of a hitherto well-abused life. And sometimes these lifestyle changes assume the proportions of a fairly major overhaul and the new lifestyle often has little resemblance to the original frenetic one.
But if truth be told, and one should not mind the truth being told every now and again, we do not need to wait to be ravaged by a crisis to engage in this apparently complex, but actually straightforward, process of self-reinvention. We can do this by simply incorporating the process of periodic self-reinvention into our lives and use it as an effective tool of personal growth and development.
Social spaces
Since we are highly socialised beings, our sense of self exists in the context of a few social spaces. The first of these is the self space or ‘I’ space, in which we pay attention to our emotional, intellectual and biological needs. The way we define this space will determine whether we put our own needs on the back-burner and ‘martyr’ ourselves for others around us or whether we create a universe that is centred around us alone or whether we are located somewhere between these two extremes. Second is the marital space, where we engage in possibly the most important relationship of our lives and learn to give of ourselves and take from our partners in a spirit of mutuality whether enforced on us by law, tradition or commonsense. The third is the primary family space, where we see ourselves as providers, protectors and nurturers of those whom we think of as constituting our primary family — our children, our parents or whoever else. Fourthly we exist in the secondary family space, where we engage with our extended families and our close friends for emotional, social and recreational well-being. Next is the work space where we relate with co-workers, superiors and subordinates in an attempt to enhance our self esteem, intellect and our skills, thereby pursuing excellence in our chosen disciplines, in the process buying ourselves a decent quality of material life. And last is the community space, in which we attempt to give back to society and community some of what we have been fortunate enough to obtain during the course of our lives, either through charity, social activism or volunteerism.
Enhance quality of life
The smart thing to do is to invest your emotions and energies across these spaces in a manner that enhances the quality of your life than detracts from it. The first thing you are expected to do when you approach a personal wealth manager, is to provide a detailed idea of your financial goals as well as your comfort or discomfort with risky investments. Following this your wealth manager will give you an idea how to spread your investments — in equity, in mutual funds, in debt instruments, in real estate, in commodities, in futures and so forth. What you might consider doing is to apply a similar approach to your emotional investments.
At different stages of your life, different social spaces will require different levels of investment of your emotional energy and if you approach this with as much of smartness as you do your financial investments, your rewards though intangible, will be incalculable (as a bonus, they are relatively immune from ‘market fluctuations’). For instance, during the early stages of your career, your work space will require large emotional investments and will, in return, provide you economic security though little emotional security. When you get married, your marital space will require a fairly large tranche of emotional investment to securitise your emotional future. Unless you provide for this, you might well find your boss telling you to pull up your tattered socks, or an irate spouse growing irater by the day, or parents who wish you never got married and so on. As you reach mid-career, you might find that the boss seems to prefer the young chaps who change their jobs every two years and offers them better financial deals than ever came your way, and you realise you have over-invested in the work space. And so on...
Take fresh stock
Every time you experience a mini-crisis in your life or feel the need to ask yourself, ‘Is this what I want from my life?’, is a good occasion to take fresh stock of your emotional investment spread and see what kind of re-distribution is required. Every time you do this successfully, you reinvent yourself. And the better you get at anticipating your emotional investment needs, the less likely are you to suffer from burn-outs or mid-life crises. As you learn to do this effectively you will realise that with advancing age, the spread of your emotional investment changes. During childhood you invest mostly in your primary family space, as a young adult in the work and marriage spaces, later in the primary and secondary family spaces and from mid-life onwards, you might consider investing more in your self space and your community space. Remember there is no ideal investing pattern; there is only a stage-appropriate pattern of investment that is concordant with your own personal goals and the needs of your immediate emotional environment.
Unfortunately today, since many urban Indians invest the bulk of their emotions in the work space , they tend to periodically reinvent themselves only in this space, which I suppose is better than not reinventing themselves at all. As long as you make sure that the new career option you choose is congruent with your sense of self, and you have made appropriate investments in your marital and family spaces, you can make the switch with comfort. And who knows, a software professional could well become an environmental activist, an accountant an entrepreneur, an advertising professional a travel writer and maybe even a psychiatrist a novelist?
The writer is a psychiatrist and author of The 24x7 Marriage. He can be contacted at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com
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