It is not a question of time. Time never changes anything — it only gives the appearance of change; deep down things remain the same. Time only changes covers, clothes, but never the real essence. It changes the personality but the personality is not you. Your essence remains untouched by time. The essence changes only by a kind of absolute decision. It is a question of decision. If one decides, the change immediately happens. Because it is you who have decided to be identified with the personality, with the old name, with the old problems — misery, anger, sadness, and all that. It is you in the beginning who have decided to remain identified with all this continuity. It is you who can immediately break the cooperation.
And this I call a real drop-out. Dropping out of the society does not help, because the society has penetrated you so deeply. Your personality is a given thing from the society. One can have long hair, one can have orange clothes, one can become a hippie, one can become anything, but the society has penetrated one very very deeply. You have been drinking it from the first day, you have been made by it; you are a structure created by it. How can you drop it? Where are you going to drop it? It will follow you like your shadow.
So deep down if you look into the hippie you will find the same man, the straight man. Nothing has happened — just on the surface new paint, a new whitewash, and sooner or later the hippie again becomes the straight man. Suddenly after thirty he disappears. You don't find old hippies. Where do they go? It comes like a phase — underneath the same river flows. Sooner or later they go back to their old pattern.
Sannyas has to be a real break away. And all that is needed is your decisiveness — not a reaction against anything but a loving surrender to the new.
OSHO