We may not realize this but a great portion of our decisions, especially career choices is influenced by opinions of others around us.
A child usually isn’t affected by any external opinions, he/she doesn’t care what others think or say. As the child grows he/she starts considering other opinions when they make a decision. Eventually, it becomes a part of them and literally every decision they make gets influenced by other opinions and they can’t really help it.
Now, it has it’s positive and negative aspects.
I’ll discuss a serious negative aspect today because I’m kind of a negative person (Just kidding, I just like touching the dark topics 💀).
How the Careers Get Ruined
So, let’s take career advice as an example.
You seek career advice thinking it is beneficial because it gives you an idea about what’s going on around you, in a way it is correct but most of the people are not so sure about who they really are.
So as a result, instead of prioritizing their personal choices, they end up prioritizing other strong and lavish driving forces like money and status.
When people aren’t sure about what they want to do with their life and when they don’t have a clear vision they end up choosing an irrelevant career. What this does is it creates impassionate workers who don’t really like what they do but they still defend it for the rest of their life because of their pride!
The Trend of Medicine in Pakistan
As you already know by now, I live in Pakistan so all the aspects I’ll discuss will be about Pakistan but I think many of these aspects are applicable to other similar countries like India and Bangladesh.
I’ve closely observed the doctors in my country because my family members were hospitalized and even I get sick very often. What I’ll discuss below will be based on my personal experiences and observations and it can be argued (I’m more than happy to have a positive discussion in the comment section).
Here in my country medicine has been trending for a while now. There are several factors of its popularity including money, status and comfort that comes with it. Medicine is not that easy as it sounds but talking about other career opportunities in Pakistan it’s the most lavish one. Doesn’t matter how hard it is to be a doctor, at some point in life almost every student dreams of becoming a doctor and if they don’t, sometimes their parents force them to.
Many parents spend a huge amount of resources to make their children doctors. They think it’s some kind of investment and when their children become what they want them to be, it will all pay off.
They never realize that it’s not a business or something like that. Like, innovation, creativity and satisfaction never work this way.
Many of the students who aim to become doctors even say that it’s their passion but I think most of them just get influenced by the trends.
Apart from spending resources many of the parents don’t even give their child any other choice. You may not know about this but Pakistani parents have this very strong way of getting their children to do something.
They really know how to give guilt trips. Like, it’s very often in Pakistan for a parent to say “We groomed you, fed you, took care of you, are you gonna disobey us now?”. To me, it’s complete bullshit because it wasn’t the child’s choice to come into this world and depend on his/her parents.
And, parents get to plan the baby so in a way, it's their responsibility to take care of the baby until he/she is mature enough to be on their own.
Most of the parents fail to do proper parenting but still keep asserting what they’ve done for their children.
Now let’s talk about how the above aspects have affected medicine in Pakistan over a couple of decades.
Doctors in Pakistan are most of the times ruthless here. But this is only applicable when they’re working in the public government hospitals. Somehow all this ruthlessness changes into sweetness when doctors sit in their personal clinics.
It’s all about money. You invest money in a child, make him go against his personal choices, eventually, he becomes a doctor then his only aim will be to earn money, not serving humanity out of personal choice. They treat their patients as customers and they want them to come back again and again.
In their personal clinics, they do check and examine patients properly but they never want their patients to stop revisiting their clinic. What they do is that they keep changing the medicine product(medical purpose stays the same) and keep making the patient revisit their clinic again and again. Eventually, the patient gets severe disorders because of the side effects excessive doses of medicines and sometimes even die because of it. I think it’s inhumane to treat patients like this.
I’ve literally seen doctors shouting at family members of nearly dead patients in Govt. hospitals(that’s how so-called free health care work in Pakistan though).
Conclusion
We unintentionally take many big life decisions because of the opinions that revolve around us. We need to start putting our personal preferences over the opinions of others to make the world a better place. We can, in fact, improve ourselves by opinions of others but none of our decisions should completely be influenced by the opinion of others.
No one should be pushed into some career they don’t want to pursue. Every parent should get to know their children and help them understanding who they are instead of forcing themselves to do something that they’re not capable of or don’t want to do.
I know that every country is miserable in its own ways, we all know it. Me having the guts to take a problem specifically related to my country as an example doesn’t mean I’m trying to disrespect my country. I may write about other international problems later but I had to start from the national ones first.
One more thing, earlier this year, I had a discussion with a mate about how the education system is messed up and he kept defending the education system saying no one can be a doctor without education system, I admit that but I wanna point out the kind of doctors current education system is producing.
