ESCAPE THE MATRIX!

TEXT: JONI MATTILA

PICTURES: PIXABAY

You had a long day at school. You woke up at 6.30 am, drank a cup of coffee, brushed your teeth and rushed to school. Your final lecture for the day ended around four o’clock, and by now you were already a bit late for your tennis reservation with your friends. After the tennis you finally headed back home. You did some regular chores, and then while washing the dishes, you remembered one of the deadlines you had due today at 23:59. Thank god it was only a tiny exercise for your English course, so you opened up your laptop and got it done. Around 9 pm you finally had the free-time you desired, but you felt extremely exhausted. “Why is every day like this?”, you thought to yourself. All you could do with the energy you had left, was to watch some Netflix.

Now you lay on your bed scrolling endlessly through TikTok. You are constantly fed with this “escape the matrix” type of content. All you see are people in their early 20s on yachts, drinking Bollinger and driving luxurious fast cars. The message on every single one of these videos is the same: “Escape the matrix and you will be happy”. After watching dozens of these videos and wondering how on earth are my algorithms showing me these videos, you feel miserable and failed. “Why do I have to live like this, if everyone else is living like that?” You close TikTok, set an alarm for 6.45 and head to sleep, so you could feel even a bit more energetic tomorrow.

Social media has brought the world close to us. So close in fact, that you can see content from anyone and from anywhere in the world whenever you want. Do you want to see some pictures from Bali? Sure, open up Instagram and search that place. Want to know what your not-so-close friends are doing right now? Sure, open up Snapchat and watch their stories. You have the whole information of mankind in your right pocket, and you can search almost everything anytime, and get the information you are looking for. While this is, of course, tremendously making our lives easier and less complicated, there are some downsides to this as well. You are constantly bombarded with these holiday pictures and people living their best lives, so you unconsciously start to compare yourself and your life to everyone else in your social media apps.

Happiness is a subjective feeling. What makes you feel happy will not necessarily make someone else feel happy and vice versa. This is exactly why it is important to focus on your own goals and visualize where you want to be, let’s say, in five years. The key to accomplishing those goals is to stay determined to achieve them, and compare yourself to only yourself. Content you see on social media is only the tip of the iceberg of the lives people are living. Why would they post themselves while doing nothing or feeling exhausted?

It is said that happiness is built on top of the feeling of security, both physically and emotionally. Of course, a financial feeling of security is part of it as well. You need to determine yourself what does the feeling of security mean to you. Physical feeling of safety may be determined as being healthy and having a roof over your head. An emotional feeling of safety is secured by the people important to you, for instance family and friends. Having people to talk to and spend time with are vital parts of mental well-being. A financial feeling of security is a much more subjective feeling, but as you see these “escape the matrix and drive a lamborghini” type of videos, you really have to determine what does this feeling of security mean to you? Are you feeling financially secure by having ten fast cars in your garage and a boat, or is it something else? Is it, perhaps, knowing that you have enough money and are making enough money to not to worry about sudden expenses. Can you for example manage on your own if you lose all your sources of income for the next three months. While these fast cars are cool and surely nice to own, do they make you genuinely happy, or is the feeling of happiness coming from the fact that you get along well?

As you are reading this text from the magazine for Business Students, it is more than likely that you will earn well after the school, as the median salary for the economists in 2021 was

5240 euros a month (study conducted by Suomen Ekonomit in 2022). Looking at the overall median salary of a Finnish employee being 2875 euros a month in 2021 (study conducted by the Statistical Office of Finland) it can be seen that the salary you are going to receive later years after the school is going to outperform the overall median salary in Finland. This should be more than enough to secure you the feeling of financial security.

Are you living in a matrix? Does daily chores and routines mean that you are stuck in a miserable matrix that you should escape? Probably not. But does this so-called “escaping the matrix” mean that you have to be a drop-off entrepreneur making millions a year, or does it mean to go towards your own goals and live the life the way you want to? This is a subjective matter, and there is no correct answer to this question. The most important thing is to determine what happiness means to you, and go towards that. Make daily decisions that get you towards your goals and make yourself accountable for your actions. At the end of the day, you make yourself happy and thus no one else can bring the feeling of happiness to you. The only person you should compare yourself to is the version of you from yesterday, and make sure that tomorrow’s version of yourself will be proud of the actions you take today.