Self-sufficiency – The Key to a Dignified Life

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Everybody would like to lead a happy, fulfilling, and dignified life and strive towards making it possible. But this can become a reality only when all the members in a family understand the value of self-sufficiency and attain it. With self-sufficiency, we can attain dignity and completeness.

A conservative meaning of self-sufficiency would mean earning enough to provide for the family’s necessities and comforts. But the fact is that self- sufficiency is much more than this. One becomes truly self-sufficient when they are self-sufficient in their relationships, when their happiness is not dependent on the external world.

Let us understand this with an example. There lived a newly married couple. The wife took good care of the house, but she found it difficult to manage dealing with the people in the neighborhood and at the marketplace. She depended on her husband for most things. The husband loved her and took great care of her. He helped her with everything that she couldn’t handle. As a result, the wife couldn’t learn new things and became even more dependent on her husband. Their life was smooth initially, but as time passed, the husband started controlling her. He wouldn’t allow his wife to do anything, stating she was incapable of handling things. The wife was losing her confidence.

As days passed, the husband faced more work responsibilities, and his workload increased. Now he started blaming his wife that she was good for nothing. He compared her with other working women who managed their household and office responsibilities as well. In this way, a relationship where both should have shared an equal status changed. The husband assumed superiority and the wife started feeling increasingly inferior; their relationship was strained.

This story brings to light an important aspect of self-sufficiency. Further, after few years, they had a baby boy. As a result of their strained relationship, the wife found solace in raising this child. She loved him so much that she would even feed him when he was a high-school student. She would also complete his homework on his behalf. As a result, the boy became dependent on his mother for every trivial thing, and the same story repeated.

As the boy grew, he depended on his mother for every decision. The mother started controlling him. As time passed, the mother got irritated when the boy turned to her for decisions. She compared him with other independent children of his age. She was worried by her son’s dependency and wondered how he would lead his life in her absence. She shared her worries with her friend too. In the husband-wife relationship, she felt inferior, but in her relationship with her son, she had done just what her husband had done to her.

This is how people make others dependent on them, taking it as their loving care. Helping your near ones in every small thing hampers their development. They do not learn what they could have otherwise learned. When one depends on others, the other person controls them, and eventually, they lose their self-respect and confidence.

In the above story, the wife was dependent on the husband and the boy on his mother. But if we look at it from another perspective, we would find that the one who considers himself to be self-sufficient wants to control others because he is constantly worried about their well-being. He burdens himself by shouldering their responsibility and is physically and mentally stressed. Shouldering others’ responsibility, on the other hand, boosts their ego. They keep bragging, “They just cannot proceed without my help.”

In a relationship where both need each other’s cooperation, we most often find that one is dependent on the other. Hence people keep trying to control others or get controlled by others and never question the purpose of their existence or their learnings in life. The main purpose of growing in life gets side-lined, and their thinking is limited to one individual. The one who controls never cooperates to make the other independent. Instead, he makes them dependent and blocks all possibilities of development.

Many people just cannot proceed with their work without taking somebody’s advice. Dependent people want others to choose the color of their shirt or the hairstyle that would suit them. Such people are dependent on others even though they earn a lot of money. If one cannot decide without taking others’ advice, then he is dependent on others. Some never feel successful until others appreciate them. Such people, too, are dependent on others. Some people are overly attached to their gadgets. They feel the power when their device is in their hands. This is extreme dependency.

In short, if you are dependent on other people or things at the cost of relinquishing your control, then you are not self-sufficient. It’s a different thing to cooperate or be inter-dependent, but if one feels handicapped without others, they are dependent.

If both want to be happy, experience fulfillment and live a dignified life, they need to be self-sufficient. Self- sufficiency brings completeness to a relationship and makes it healthy.

People should take care and cooperate, but never make others dependent. They should help in each other’s development. Only then will their life and the lives of their loved ones become dignified.