Life..a race?

I am Listening to Van Halen’s Right Now. I seems that the song was written with an inspirational motive, and it does inspire, be the synth heavy intro or the cracking Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, or the off beat progression before the guitar solo, they’d all give any music enthusiast a rush. The year 2010 has pretty been good to me till now. All the running around for the last couple of years, seems to be paying off, or is it too early to speak about. There were times during my work life in this city where I pondered over  very basic questions such as:  why do we exist, why do we compete, why do we have to keep running in order to keep up with the other “racers”, why is peer pressure getting to us, why do we keep drawing comparisons and most of all, why can’t we be satisfied?

3 Idiots - The recent hit

Watching Aamir’s three idiots at Vizag with my college buddies was a wonderful experience, I did enjoy the movie quite a lot, but then there was a lesson to be learnt, a hard fact, something that not only engineers of our time but other professions also have to deal with. Was I a part of  the herd, yes..was I motivated enough, yes. But was I sure as to what I wanted to get is what I actually did, umm..Now there’s a doubt. I was going through Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, usually taught as an HR ideology, this theory assumes that “Esteem: the need for achievement, respect by others and self-esteem” comes after the other human needs such as “Physiological: Food, water, sleep etc”, “Safety: security, employment, resources etc” and “Love/Belonging: friendship, family etc”. Well, if that should really be the case, then why is that for some people the esteem factor plays a larger role, why is it that in such cases you find people missing out on basic physiological needs such as “food, sleep”, as work takes control  of a greater chunk of the person’s time as compared to “family, friends” and that old feeling of Safety from a heath perspective.

Is that a possible criterion for satisfying one’s “esteem”, is that the path that the greats and the runners follow or is it just a  compromise that we make and are missing out on the good things in  life in this process?