Borrowed Life

Do you believe in a world where we are finally allowed to be ourselves? A world where a human being does not have to apologise for the way their soul naturally unfolds? Sometimes I wonder if humanity has spent centuries building invisible cages and then calling them a normal life.

Since the moment I became conscious of this world, life often felt strangely artificial to me. People moved through their days as though they had forgotten how to live true to themselves. And everyone seemed exhausted from pretending everything is okay. Smiling when they were unhappy. Chasing things they never truly desired. Pretending to be the person society told them should be.

The world teaches us very early what is considered love, beauty, success, dreams in social norms. And slowly, without noticing, people begin abandoning themselves in order to belong. The tragedy is not only that society creates impossible standards — it is that after some time, we start worshipping them ourselves. We no longer know where it ends and where our owns begins.

Sometimes I wonder how many of our desires were never truly ours. How much of what we chase was quietly planted into us by culture, comparison, fear, and desperation to be accepted. Perhaps what we call our dream could be sometimes only the fear of being rejected. Perhaps what we call success is often only a socially approved form of belonging.

What makes a soul unique if everyone is taught to move in the same direction?

We are born wildly different, yet society spends years sanding down our edges until we become easier to understand, easier to categorise, easier to control. Difference unsettles people because it reminds them of the parts of themselves they abandoned long ago.

And so, whenever someone chooses another path, the world reacts. Someone always has something to say. Someone always measures your life against an invisible standard of perfection that no human being can ever fully reach. It is strange when you think about it deeply — no one even knows who created these standards, yet millions sacrifice themselves trying to reach them.

I remember how small judgement could make me feel. As though my existence itself required permission. No matter what I did, it never felt enough. Even achievement carried no real warmth. If you succeeded, people said you were simply expected to. If you failed, they made sure you remembered it. Somewhere inside all of this, many people slowly lose the ability to hear their own inner voice.

Perhaps this is why so many of us no longer know what truly makes us happy. Spending their whole lives becoming who they were told to become.

Society often relates success with money, status, beauty, luxury — the large house, expensive car, perfect relationship. And so people spend their entire lives running toward these symbols as though they contain salvation. Yet beneath all this movement, many have never stopped to ask themselves a quieter question:

“What is all of this actually for?”

Money itself is not the problem. Beauty is not the problem. Success is not the problem. The suffering begins when human worth becomes attached to these things. When a person forgets they were already enough before the world started measuring them.

Not every different path is a wrong path. Sometimes what society calls failure is actually freedom in disguise.

What if the purpose of life was never to become identical to one another, but to fully become ourselves?

Maybe true spiritual maturity begins the moment we stop trying to control how another person experiences life. The moment we realise every human being is carrying an invisible universe within themselves — a universe shaped by pain, memory, longing, fear, and hope that we may never fully understand.

Sometimes I wonder how different this world would feel if we stopped judging each other so harshly. If people no longer had to earn the right to exist by proving their value through productivity, appearance, or status. Perhaps people would finally breathe differently. Perhaps there would be less anxiety hidden behind smiling faces. Less shame. Less comparison. Less silent loneliness.

And maybe the greatest question is this:

Can we truly distinguish between what our soul genuinely longs for and what society trained us to desire?

Because sometimes the loudest voice inside us is not our own. It is the echo of the world speaking through us for so long that we mistook it for ourselves.