You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” -Fight Club.
The lines from one of the stellar movie, Fight Club answers it all.
Movie: FIGHT CLUB
- The First Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club.
Lets start it from the basics. Back in your childhood days, you had a pretty tight schedule: Going to School (Check), Get driven back to home by Dad (Check), have dinner (Check), watch TV (Check), wait, did you ever encounter one of those gore action sequences where the blood spills, guns are pulled, a complete lethal scene, a skirmish memory of it maybe. You look to your dad and ask what is this happening, and he brings his palm to cover your eyes. You still know what you missed, the glances that you managed to steal in between the gaps of those fingers.
- The Second Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club.
Fast Forward few years of your life and you are still having the same television set, and you are watching an ‘Action Flick’, a good guy pulls out the gun and blows it straight away through the head of the bad person and you nod your head in acceptance. The change?? There’s no palm that blocks the view now, maybe this is the time you realize, you are grown up, and its okay to watch someone get beaten up to pulp. The thought that occurs is, the judgmental blocking palm, why did it disappear now? Maybe you realized it was a fight, Good Vs Bad, and you saw the good overcame the bad by bringing it down.
- Third Rule of Fight Club: Someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.
Fast Forward few more years and you are struggling to live up to the expectations of the parents/teachers/relatives. You grab self-improving or self grooming books and try to imitate them. The result is only making you go nuts. The point when you realize, these motivational books and the world full of expectations is too much to take. Time to re-valuate life, re-decide and you choose to drop out of the college, you realize you are a free spirit, you Quit!! Turns out the world hate quitters, maybe when world comes down on you pounding, all you need is just a pat on your back, to tell you its okay.
- Fourth Rule of Fight Club: Only two guys to a fight.
Job keeps the man going, and you without a job are a worthless piece of shit. To crack the job you constantly need to sharpen your skills and try to prove your worth among the rest of 100’s. Its always to be taken into consideration that, who is our competition. If you are competing the person above you, remember there is one above him too, and the chain is exhaustively long. 2 guys fight to win, and you fight the job and your competition is just to win the ‘job’. Fight the job, smack it down and the fight’s over.
- Fifth Rule of Fight Club: Only one fight at a time, fellas.
You realize the fight for the job is done and you have won the battle, but this winning doesn’t bring peace to your mind, its again a zone of war, a constant war between the society and its thoughts and you strive hard to fit yourself into the fair bracket of the society. You seem like a winner from outside, but you are a looser from inside. You had to battle the job and now you need to battle the people inside the job and this battle is not the only one. In the whirlpool of priorities, the lost you sets in a search of the word or maybe a myth called ‘Peace’.
- Sixth Rule of Fight Club: No Shirts, No Shoes.
In the search of the peace you start to juggle many options and try to re-launch yourself in the market. All seems good till the time you see yourself progressing to a point. You crack that job once again and strikes a much fairer deal and starts feeling smooth, and one evening you come back to your apartment to see everything’s blown up to shards. The every bit of that home you arranged to build it, is shattered in a jiffy. The new paper reads the whole 4 years of your struggle drained down into just 3 words, “Faulty Gas Leak”. Sometimes you need such explosions to revive the un-certainty of life and its vicious paths.
- Seventh Rule of Fight Club: Fights will go on as long as they have to.
With the last glance at your burnt apartment and your demolished dream, you look up to the sky to question the almighty and curse your luck. You put back your hands in your coat pockets and start walking down the street. You receive an un-expected phone call. Of all the people who could be calling you right now, is the co-passenger you swapped the business cards with. He invites you for a drink at the nearest bar. You recall how nice he was to you through the metro ride. How his talks seemed to make sense then. He at the drinks, speaks more sense, and you doubt whether he is drunk. Yes, he is, you realize when he breaks the offer before you. He asks you to work for him, he offers you the position you could have never imagined. You are in a fix. On one hand you have to accept his offer and return back to your mundane routine, refurbish the damaged house bit by bit and constantly live under the fear of losing it once again. Or you have that one unfinished dream that made you Quit your college, that which defined you.
- Eighth and the final Rule of Fight Club: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to Fight!!
Now once you are done with rejecting that offer, and surprised to see him obliged. You set yourself to fight the only Fight (your dream) at a Time with the only person in your way, (that’s yourself.)
“Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.” Tyler Durden replies, smiling from eye to eye.
Sometimes, you need the voices inside your head to shut up for good.
The END.
4 Walls to Freedom 