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The Dream and the Status Quo

Kuroki Yuji (Tokyo National College of Technology)

“Are you satisfied with your daily life?”

In the future, I want to say “YES!” with confidence to this question. I don’t know when I can achieve it. 10 years from now? 20 years from now? Tomorrow? Or is it impossible until I die?

I think that this is a very important question for my life and for everyone’s life. So, today, in this speech, I want to talk about the two most important parts of the answer to this question. The first part is that we must have a concrete dream for the future. The second part is that we should be satisfied with the status quo.

So, why am I asking this question? Because I’m feeling unsatisfied with my own daily life. I’ve been studying uninteresting subjects, every day, every day, every day… But, I think now it is unavoidable. In Sweden’s junior high school textbooks it is written that “You are under the age of 18, so you are legally a minor. That means that you don’t have the right to freely determine your way of life.” Yes I am. I’m a minor. I have been supported and guarded by my family. So it’s presumptuous that I want live as I like.

So, I want to focus on the future. In the future, when I leave my parents, how can I get the life that I hope for? And what should I do to get it?

I must dream. I think having a dream is one of the answers to this question. “Have a dream and make efforts,” I often hear this kind of saying. But unfortunately, I don’t have any dream now. You might be thinking like this “You entered a Kosen, not a normal high school. So didn’t you have any plans or ideas?” Yes. Indeed, I did at first. I entered a Kosen because I wanted to join a specific company. When I read the employment information webpage for that company, I saw the word “Kosen” for the first time. The company was aggressively targeting Kosen graduates. Since I was just a junior high school student, I simply thought that, “I can join this company if I graduate from the school called Kosen!” However, in the summer of the first grade at Tokyo Kosen, I lost interest in joining that company. And as a result, I lost my dream. However, I don’t regret entering Tokyo Kosen. Rather I want to praise myself for taking this action when I was a junior high school student.

But certainly, I feel insecure in this situation where I don’t have a dream. By living without a concrete dream, I am worried about what kind of future is waiting for me. I think it’s a boring future. I don’t want to look away from this sense of crisis of not having a dream, and I’ll keep searching for something that I want to do. We can’t find anything without looking. And we can’t get anything without wishing.

Well, I’ve said that “I want to be satisfied with my own daily life.” However, I need to think carefully about this idea. Human greed is never satisfied and what I want will not come true in some cases. So, if I want to get all that I want, won’t that idea cause me distress? There is an idiom “Know you have enough.” I understand that means that if I am satisfied with the status quo, I can become happy. And there are the words of the Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “To make life happy, you must love the trivialities of every day.” Both are nice sayings, and they are my favorite sayings. So, when we feel distress from our endless greed, we can remember these sayings.

But I have always wondered about this. To love the trivialities of every day and to be satisfied with our own daily lives, won’t that hinder our success in this society? Isn’t being unsatisfied with the status quo, precisely the reason we attempt to achieve success? But, the attitude of loving the trivialities of every day and being satisfied with our own daily lives seems wonderful to me. Also, the attitude of attempting to achieve success because of being unsatisfied with the status quo seems true to me. Can these two ideas exist at the same time? I think so. We should do both at the same time. Do you remember what I said at the beginning of my speech? Yes. That’s right! “We must have a concrete dream.” As we love the trivialities of every day and feel happy from that, we also keep following our own dreams without giving up, in order to get more satisfactory lives. Greater satisfaction waits there. I think the attitude of always searching will change our lives into what we want.

“Are you satisfied with your daily life?”

In the future, I WILL say “YES!” with confidence to this question.