On Celebration, Work, and Living

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question (Q): Sir, why do people celebrate festivals and are always desperately looking for holidays and vacations?

Acharya Prashant (AP): It is very necessary for an insecure and terrified mind to keep looking towards the future. So, some special day must always be there, a week or a month ahead. The new year goes, then you can look forward to Baisakhi. Then Valentine’s day, then Holi, then your birthday, and so on.

This cycle helps us maintain the illusion that something great is going to come. In fact, this gives you nothing except its continuation till death.

The mind is fed up with its daily boring routine, fettered, and frustrating life. But it has no faith or courage to break away from this life.

So, despite hating its limitations, the mind continues with a limited life.

When you work six days a week in a meaningless job, that just makes you a machine. Then you desperately need to party on Saturday night and Sunday. So, entertainment and parties and weekends and other ‘special days’ are needed. These entertainments ‘help’ us tolerate the torture of the entire week. So, in a way, it is because of these celebrations that we continue to tolerate hell.

The more frustrated and bored and suppressed the mind will be,

the more will be its need to party.

Q: Sir, I understand that a frustrated mind will need to party. But if a person is working in any organization or firm then it is obvious that he has to follow certain rules and regulations set by the organization.

And so he will definitely get bored by doing the same work again and again. The person continues to perform that work because that is a part of his living/earning. How can he manage to stop doing that work? He cannot get the opportunity to do different types of work every day.

AP: Look at the people around. Look at them going to their jobs at 9 a.m. Look at their faces when they return in the night. Look at how people pick jobs, and how students think of placements. Why does that man continue to work there? Why do most of us work? Why do people work at all?