Lost Individuality

Among many other things, we have developed the habit of grumbling. In fact I should say we have almost perfected it by practicing it for all possible reasons in our and other lives. I have been trying to find one such area which none of us grumble about and I couldn't find it. Any help on the matter will be appreciated. Now since I said "we" I obviously included myself and so this post is not about blaming anybody but rather it is about grumbling about grumbling.

Then, what is wrong with us? Probably nothing but accepting that would end my post here and now and I am not quite ready to do that. Give me a chance , I don't bore you so often anymore!  So I was thinking about it for couple of days (Fine! Make it a couple of hours) and the reason stuck me all of a sudden when I was replying to a mail. And I realized that we keep grumbling about everything because we take the easy way out. That doesn't sound very profound, does it? But it is not that simple. You might think that taking the easy way out means grumbling and not doing anything about it and that sure is part of it but its still incomplete. The thing is that even when we do anything about something, we still take the easy way out.

Now I have great respect for whoever came up with the idea of majority voting and democracy. Obviously there is currently no better way to have a government that solves most of our problems (at least that’s what theory suggests). But when you start applying the 'majority' idea to everything else, it really isn't the best thing to do, certainly not with the current technology expertise and information burst. Look at something as simple as education - our courses are designed what the majority of students prefer, electives  are cancelled if a certain number of students do not subscribe to it, only those companies are called where majority of people want to go. Why have engineering colleges mushroomed in our country -  not because we need a lot of engineers but because majority of people want to become engineers. Some years down the line I am probably going to say the exact same thing about management. It hardly matters what the quality is. It hardly matters what percentage of them go where.

Now that’s not the end of it. Products are designed the same way. For example, why are most product designed for right handers? One can argue talking about mass productions, manufacturing and industrial revolution. But lets face it, that was decades back and we have been through many more revolutions after that. Why do we do it then? Because all of us including our policy makers and those huge corporations that keep talking about how they cater to our 'needs' see us as collective unit, as if we do not exist individually. There are other reasons, majority gives you credibility, number of fb likes, number of comments, the number of hits on a website, number of times a term is googled!

And that is exactly why every one of us follows the herd because that is what is expected from us. And then we complain that we do not think out-of-the-box. Sorry but we are not really appreciated for that. Not that often at least. And by the time we realize that, we are almost habituated to follow the herd. Now that brings me to the first point, why do we grumble? Because everyone else does that.