Being an idealist; Curse or a Gift?

Akif Khan

The peo­ple who are dri­ven by pas­sion always (or may be most fre­quent­ly) end up in alien­ation by soci­ety and in lone­li­ness. I always won­dered why that is so. How come bril­liant minds like schol­ars, Sufis, sci­en­tists, writ­ers, artists and great musi­cians end up in such an agony. Still I found most of them con­tend­ed. It seemed like soci­etal norms did not apply on them. So the agony part was always doubt­ful. I was told that they become nar­cis­sists and hence they lose the bal­ance that social adjust­ment requires. I tried to study the pri­vate lives of these peo­ple. From Aris­to­tle to Rus­sell, Voltaire to Niet­zsche, Ein­stein to Edi­son and Planck, Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Dr. Abdus Salam and Eqbal Ahmed, Muneer Niazi to Michael Jack­son.

I found that they too tried hard to adjust, they want­ed to adjust but some­how they were reject­ed in their pri­vate lives. I was hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with my father last week when he was try­ing to con­vince me to leave the path of intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits, writ­ings and schol­ar­ship after my wife lost her tol­er­ance on me. He quot­ed many exam­ples from his expe­ri­ences of peo­ple who were ide­al­ists, some did not mar­ry whole life, turned com­mu­nists (or were com­mu­nists), became agnos­tics out of their scep­ti­cism and all of them end­ed up in alien­ation and lone­li­ness, and accord­ing to him soli­tary con­fine­ment. He gave an exam­ple of an old com­mu­nist whom my father saw buy­ing bread from a tan­door, sick and des­ti­tute; he nev­er mar­ried his whole life. He was such a hand­some per­son dur­ing his youth that ladies would fall for him every now and then. Still he did not mar­ry and end­ed up in this hor­ri­ble lone­li­ness. It def­i­nite­ly scared me but I was still adamant to know the rea­son of those peo­ple’s con­tent.

Let me put all blame on them, those dri­ven by pas­sion; utopi­ans and ide­al­ists. The psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis of their pri­vate lives revealed that those peo­ple had set some high­est stan­dards, book­ish and utopi­an, for them, which were not accept­able to nor­mal peo­ple. They think that car­ing about the match­ing of cur­tains’ colour schemes did not mat­ter, they would nev­er give impor­tance to gro­ceries nor will they care about util­i­ty bills, they think that every­thing is triv­ial unless hav­ing a high­er cause accord­ing to their ideals. They aban­don the thought of lux­u­ry and com­fort in sim­ple and rou­tine things. They think that this way they can think bet­ter and can advance their ideals. Quite often they do suc­ceed in leav­ing their mark but at the cost of their own pri­vate lives. These peo­ple, dri­ven by pas­sion, would sac­ri­fice their loved ones, their dai­ly lives and their social stand­ings. They end up being mis­fit, abnor­mal and crazy peo­ple. Nar­cis­sists to some, cyn­ics to oth­ers and yet con­tent to them­selves.
It is not that they did not try. They were loved, admired and ide­al­ized by more peo­ple than the ordi­nary folk. But this ide­al­ism, call it a curse or a gift, would prove to be of no ben­e­fit to their own selves. The nor­mal peo­ple who would admire them, love them or even ide­al­ize them, could not bear the very fact that these crazy peo­ple can­not pass ordi­nary life. Their admir­ers for­get that this is the very thing that makes them dif­fer­ent and desir­able, that makes their indi­vid­u­al­i­ty pre­cious and that makes them unfit as nor­mal human beings. Anoth­er agony that they face is that they can­not adjust with the peo­ple of their own kind due to their indi­vid­u­al­i­ty; exam­ple of famous poet Jaun Elia in this regard can be pon­dered upon. Their con­tent comes from the admit­tance of the fact that there is a time in their lives when they have to choose what is impor­tant; their pas­sion, their ide­al­ism or rela­tions and a nor­mal life? All of them chose the for­mer. The con­tent lies in their free­dom to choose at this point.
For many of the nor­mal folks these poor indi­vid­u­als, aban­doned and lone­ly are afflict­ed to agony and pain but in real­i­ty their self­ish­ness in their choice is what makes the same peo­ple admire them. Admire them or aban­don them but you can­not keep them in nor­mal and triv­ial cages of soci­etal stan­dards. Their minds have been set free and they can­not be encaged any longer. Only this way they could make that dif­fer­ence in the world, make it a bet­ter place, if not for their loved ones but for the gen­er­a­tions to come. This very fact is the source of their con­tent­ment. These peo­ple, dri­ven by pas­sion, are abnor­mal folks and they would proud­ly embrace this fact. Even if they fail to make a dif­fer­ence, which they rarely do, they would set exam­ples for oth­er crazy peo­ple. I found the source of their con­tent­ment.

Akif Khan is a social activist and a blog­ger. He tweets at @akifzeb.