The Converse Theorem

The theory goes like this: you got to school; you get into university or land yourself with a job; you advance to a higher paying level, or you don’t. You keep working and earn enough money to take care of the 2.4 children you’ll produce and the taxes and mortgage and maybe a family trip every year or two. One day you’ll retire and do all the things that you truly wanted to do, but were out of line with The Theory, thereafter, all the “special parts” of you will somehow move on as the body that carried you through life is buried in a moderately fancy box 6 feet under.

This is a solid theory. It has been tried and tested through the ages, showing varying degrees of success, with just a few drawbacks. Firstly, happiness and content has more often than not been pushed passed second place on the list of important things to take care of. Secondly, many bite the dust before they get to enjoy the sweet fruits of their life’s labour, or that labour was simply not enough. This shows that by setting their desires aside to work in order to grasp those desires later on, they did not truly live.

The purpose of having a Theory is to help people to decide what to do with all the time they have been given with their lives. Success of The Theory comes when a person is shown to have lived. The idea that one should work up to living for the majority of one’s time and then still may not succeed, seems like too much of a risk to me. This is why I’m proposing an alternative; a compromise with reality and real life, if you will. This will be known as The Converse Theorem.

The Converse Theorem is the plan to live life – also known as acting on one’s true desires – whenever the opportunity makes itself apparent, and not only at a late stage and all at once. It is based off of the acknowledgement of time and a clear view of it in retrospect of one’s important desires. Education and work are both still respectively ideals and necessary, yet the chronological order in which they occur in The Theory is not a necessity. Mixing of necessity and desire simultaneously or one after the other is therefore the basis of The Converse Theorem.

An example of how The Converse Theorem could work is this: one works and then travels, and then studies and then works, or does all three all at once. One could work in a field of interest for a while before working in another field of interest. In this way, desires and necessities are met simultaneously earlier on in life, and can be experienced for a longer, stretched out period of time, where all of it combined contributes to one’s growth as a human being.

The Theory arose at a time where people searched for stability and a set plan, after times of the exact opposite, such as WWII. This set plan was set up along with the white picket fences, powerfully stereotypical and usually sexist advertising, and considerably smaller population with considerably higher job security. These are not the ‘things’ that the people, young and old, of today seek out.  Many people find themselves stuck in the pit that they manage to tread for themselves by walking over the same ground for years and years in the same job, in the same house, in the same country, surrounded by the same people; and as any trapped animal would, they become frantically frightened, pitifully panicked, or just straight up depressed; or at least daunted by the idea that this is the future set out for them, not knowing that there is an acceptable alternative to this. Not knowing that there is another way to move forward, where one can tread one’s own path different to the accepted norm, is a dangerous ignorance of opportunity in a world brimming with newly discovered paths every day. We need to be brave enough to explore them. If something works, why discount it?  The world today cannot afford to any longer.