Human aspiration and capacity...

Of all things, human aspiration and capacity are probably the two most elastic. Any person can wish anything, be anything, adapt to anything, and pull through anything. However, how much you make of this matchless gift largely depends on you, your social setting and the company you choose to keep.

For instance, when you live in a community where the richest possession is a 40-inch Wall Mount TV, that gadget becomes your leading craving. To you, you’re dreaming big, but to someone somewhere, you think too small. And it’s not like the person is arrogant or something. The person probably is coming from a place where it wouldn’t be extraordinary to find Samsung’s ‘The Wall’ (146-inch MicroLED TV) in someone’s living room.

It’s like Chairman Mao’s allegory of the frog at the bottom of the well. He said this frog thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If the frog surfaces and sees an entirely different view, like, wow! Everything changes: larger sight, bigger dreams, new motivations and stuff, and here are the likelihoods:

The frog could be one that refuses to let its origin be a limitation. And by going against the odds, it can break out of its sad past, climb up the social ladder and create a new identity for itself. That’s my typa frog right there.

But it can also develop very unrealistic feelings of inadequacy because the new setting seems too superior. In compensation, such a frog gets too aggressive, too thirsty, and too tending to compete to not just belong, but to outshine. So, in time, it becomes narcissistic.

Some frog’s sense of entitlement soon beats the Amazon Rainforest in size, believing that it deserves to be given, unfairness and unreasonableness of its demands and expectation regardless, because it probably spent seven years in medical school (which was a choice). This typa frog is usually ungrateful, because it takes every privilege for an irrevocable entitlement.