Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?
Interpretation
This quote encourages individuals to question societal norms and pursue their own unique paths.
Aziz Ansari highlights the conventional life script that most people follow, which includes education, career, love, family, and ultimately mortality. He urges us to consider what it means to challenge this norm and explore alternative ways of living, suggesting that fulfillment may lie outside the traditional paths that society lays out for us.
In practice
During a graduation speech to encourage students to forge their own paths.
I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
When we have become free, we need not go mad and throw up society and rush off to die in the forest or the cave; we shall remain where we were but we shall understand the whole thing. The same phenomena will remain but with a new meaning.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
Trade is the best cure for prejudice.
A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.
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