22.09.2026
When I was a young man, the focus was on getting settled in life. So I studied hard. I did 6 ‘A’ Levels and got the best results in sixth form. I went to a top university, the London School of Economics, in the hardest subject to get into, Law. I graduated in the top 10% of the year. I volunteered in the law courts, I wrote in the university newspaper. I worked in Pizza Hut. I had work experience as well as education. I worked really hard.
All I wanted was to get settled. Get a good stable and satisfying job. Raise a family and children. Have my own house.
Flash forward in time. I am almost forty four years old and I am still not settled in life. Everything is up in the air. How did I cope all of these years, twenty six years, in an unsettled life?
The main thing is that I did not blame myself. I blamed other people. And I was justified. Not only had I worked harder than everyone else, but I was naturally intelligent and I could do anything. The fact that I could not get the work I wanted was not because I did anything wrong. I passed the interviews. And even when I did so, they would put me on the reserve list. You would ask for feedback and they would say that you did not do anything wrong. I knew I was being discriminated against.
Without the work, there was also no love. This was the world that I was in.
And the loneliness? I coped by learning. Learning and learning and learning. Because after all, you would always have books. You would always find fulfilment in learning and reading. I had the capacity for complete loneliness with my books. This what got me through five degrees including a PhD.
What created this resilience then? It was ego first. The ego of knowing how great I was. I never lost the sense of my own value. The brilliance of my mind. When I was faced with disappointment after disappointment, when I saw those that were not as talented as me getting ahead, I depended on my ego, self-belief and self-valuation to get me through things. And then, it was the love of learning which would nurture and nourish, when the world is cold, hostile and stupid.
My parents supported me. In my culture, this is my right. But still, it was them that supported me.
So even though I have been unsettled throughout my whole adult life, still I have survived and prospered. I live in a beautiful home which is because of my hard work. I have a brilliant and erudite mind and can enjoy my own company because I have invested in learning. I have been working in jobs that I find a lot of fun for the past few years. And I have the grace to accept that I can only control my own performance and that I cannot change the injustice, immorality and the unfairness of this world.
That’s right. I still blame everyone else and not myself. I see myself as a victim and them as the oppressors. And I have never given up hope. I might have lived my whole adult life in an unsettled way but I still look forward to being settled one day. I give myself the same advice that I give to everyone else that is struggling: Faust got to heaven because he strove for it. Like Goethe, I am a genius. And I accept the words and the lesson of a genius. We are fellow spirits, although his early disappointments in love which influenced his work were adequately compensated because he found a relationship later in life. Goethe’s philosophy is my philosophy. This is the philosophy of the unsettled.
