25 You’re not owed anything!

Many of us go through life with the sense of being cheated of our due. Especially with the post-modern post-everything self-oriented consumption-centric life mode copied from the New World, more and more people in hitherto sheltered cultures and societies are also falling prey to this syndrome. We grow old with the conviction that a lot of debts are owed us. We grow mad with frustration totting up all these amounts receivable (with compounded interest and service charges) and gnashing our teeth at how well off we would be but for these bad accounts …

We do so much for our children, but would you even have imagined the depths of their ingratitude… they don’t listen to our advice, but go off and do what they want! And when things don’t work out, they come right back… if a fairy godmother were to come this moment and give three wishes…

Really? You should be so lucky… What about the debt you owe all those generations that have brought you here? What about those ancestors who braved it through disasters and deprivations, and brought us through the eye of the needle, so to speak? When we start totting up the balance sheets, they are mightily weighed against us. We are merely returning a minute part of that accumulated balance when we do something for the next generation. There is nothing owed to us! The same thing applies to any service we render to our own parents, except that the argument is strengthened many fold because we should know better, and because we owe a direct debt of gratitude to them just like we expect our children to realize their debt to us.

When my own father was passing through his last days in the hospital, the doctor attending him observed and remarked that children who get the job of cleaning up their fathers at the end are indeed lucky, because there is no other way they can ever repay the debt of life… perhaps this is a sentiment characteristic of eastern cultures, but I think it is there in the traditions of all human societies.

 If you spot an inconsistency here, it is because the feeling of indebtedness has to be one-sided: the parents  should not expect their  children to feel in debt, but equally the children should not ignore their indebtedness to all the cohorts of their progenitors.

 That was just one example. If the same attitude of not being owed permeates  other spheres of one’s life, all the better. Does your boss owe it to you to give a leg up? Does your junior have to pick up after you and cover for you, or is it a big favor if he does? Does your spouse have to plan your entertainments and file your papers? Who owes you the daily shopping so that you can eat? Is society at fault because you get addicted? Is the television responsible for your sleep deficit? And so on.

Each one of us is occupying space and consuming resources on this planet that we have neither produced nor earned . The world, my dear Sir, and Madam, does not owe us a living.