Roots? Or Chains?

Just started reading this book called Gift in Green by Sarah Joseph. (Guess that is the Malayali in me.) Anyhow, in the very beginning of the book is an incident of a young fellow leaving behind his "water tribe" to try and make it big in the city. Someone that the entire tribe hence treats as a deserter, as someone who forgot his roots, or as someone, in the book's language, 'who is too lazy to work with his own body' and till his own land. 

What is with our culture and these self imposed roots? In fact the word roots feels so very accurate to describe these rules because though we all love our roots, they are also the ones that seem to keep us rooted to century old beliefs and a social system that is evidently not working. Everywhere you look, everyone you know is torn between these "should be done (though I don't like it)" vs "want to do (though there is nothing morally wrong with it)". Why?

Leaving your tribe/trade to make better money and better your situation, how can that be forgetting ones roots and being lazy? Not deciding to marry and instead adopting a homeless child and bringing her up like a princess, how? Or, deciding to not live with someone because they don't make you happy is a crime over trying to be happy yourself so that your kids also get the best mother from you is also going against your culture, even selfishness.

Why is this society so submerged in it's own guilt, limitations, cowardliness? Why is the society out to prove that finding your own betterment and wanting to be happy is a crime. And let me tell you, they can give you very very convincing reasons for the same. 

I don't have these answers. I don't think I can change much about this outlook. But my simple, possibly foolish, plausible explanation for this is jealousy. The very abundant belief that 'if I don't have it and I took the easy way of continuing to do something I don't like because I don't have the guts to break out of it, no one else should. And if they do, it is because they have no morals.' We are all chained down in our head. We are all afraid to break "customs" and "culture". These are good, the reasons we are not animals. However, if they become chains for us even when we want to better ourselves (and not actually go back to being animals) then these are only excuses. Excuses made by weak minds for not doing. Excuses made my weak minds for not letting it be done.