What are you chasing?

Manohar Kabeer
2 min readApr 13, 2024

--

I am not escaping anymore. But, I am also not chasing.

Earning money versus saving the job are two different mindsets. The same way as survival and excellence are two different outcomes. Passion is a tool. But, it’s not necessary that passion invokes chasing alone. You can be passionately working to escape. And passion masks the escapism.

Chasing in it’s manifestation feels and affects different. In everyday life, when you leave home to reach somewhere, the journey can be full of anticipation or repulsion based on your willingness to reach there. Are you going there because you want to or you are going there because you have to? Was it a yes you said to someone or you couldn’t say no to someone?

On the surface, what appears to be a passionate entrepreneur, can very well be a wounded child. A disappointed home-maker chasing something for respect in a world that undervalues them against a workaholic professional who fears becoming irrelevant if he doesn’t constanly prove their worth via their work. These two archetypes are not driven by the same motives. They don’t necessarily admit or reveal this when asked.

We are in the age of content and personal branding. It doesn’t brand you well if you admit that you are escaping a consequence or escaping a version of you that scares or embarrases you. Projecting the chase attitude, also called the hustlr attitude makes you a desirable archetype. We lie to ourselves often. Some are harmless, some are harmful. This lie that we are susceptible to tell ourselves is a harmful one. When lack of results is unexplained, we as humans succumb to theories borrowed from The Secret, Alchemist, Autobiographies of people who only live one kind of life and have the same kind of story to tell. It is worth introspecting if our journey is obstructed by us alone and if we are our own arch-nemesis. When you chase, you become the protagonist. When you escape, you turn up as antagonist. Of your story.

--

--