Let’s rewind our clock a bit, when we were child, small
height, very less power, we often used to dream about growing up as soon as we
can. There is always a relative frame of reference, when we were in 2nd
standard we thought that 5th standard students were really big and
huge, they must be pretty intelligent too. When we reached 7th
standard, 5th standard appeared to be stupid infants while 10th
standard students looked like super intelligent and super powerful. Then we
reached, 1st year of college and 10th standard students
appeared like dumb kids worrying over useless issue like board exams while
final year students seemed to have got everything sorted, most of them had jobs
and gf/bf and a well-planned life ahead.
When we reach final year we realize the irony the world is,
we are as clueless about life as we were in 10th standard or 3rd
standard, we still compete with the same bunch of people we were competing
forever, sharma ji ka ladka still tops and yet he doesn’t become Einstein,
Verma ji ka ladka is gold medalist in swimming yet he is worried about job and
future, the charming guitarist also struggle with making a future and we escape
from reality one more time and dream about an age where everything is settled.
25 seems like a milestone, a checkpoint, a year of introspection,
I turned 25 few days back and I am revisiting all the pages of my life to
compare the deviation of real version from the ideal version imagined at
different points of life. It’s quite unfortunate I didn’t become a high flying
hardcore WWE champion with a bad ass entrance music, I also didn’t become the
first cricketer to score a triple century in an one day match and took 10
wickets in the same match, I have not even started my first novel far far away
from the vivid imagination of living a retired life in outskirts of a hill
station living like Ruskin Bond exploring nature and writing about its beauty,
even my most practical and realistic dream of completing B.Tech by 21 from an
IIT and then finishing MBA from an IIM by 23 and becoming a billionaire in the same
year has tossed away. In the real life, I have finished my MBA and will be
joining a job soon. Doesn’t look as fancy as I dreamt in childhood and yet I
know I am living dream of many and I am grateful about it.
Now all microblogging sites are full of clichéd articles
about mid-20s, dilemmas of life, checklist on 25th year, 10 things
to do before turning 30 and stuff and most of them have pretty much similar
content. Our present generation at 25 is often stereotyped as unhappy,
clueless, directionless, struggling and all kind of other negative adjectives.
To some extent it is true also, many of us are indeed directionless. We are
supposed to follow our passion which has lately become another cliché but most
of us don’t know what that passion is and if we know we don’t know how much
practical it is to pursue that passion. A large population went with the flow
of doing engineering because that was what everyone was doing and now half of
them are chasing the next must do goal of M.Tech/MBA/MS while those who have already
done it are wondering whether their life was miserable before or miserable now.
We don’t know our goal is to be happy or to be rich and whether happiness follows money or not. We don’t know we want to spend our weekends with a bunch of friends or enjoying a movie alone eating Maggie. We are confused, that’s a fact because most of us didn’t believe in the iron fist rule of getting educated, searching for a job and then settling down in life. Unlike our previous generations we enjoy a long gap between getting a job and settling down and that is where we wander like lost souls. We fantasize ourselves with the multiple possibilities that exist in our life and the decision paths that could be followed right now and yet when it comes to taking a courageous decision, most of us panic and chicken out. We love and hate our cage of convenience at the same time. It is like the ‘ring of power’, we hate it and yet we can’t afford to lose it though we hate what it has turned us into.
Our generation is also the most masochist one. We are
incredibly hard on ourselves to the extent of cruelty. We have reproached
ourselves for not scoring 90% in boards, we have cursed ourselves on failing to
get admission in our dream college, we feel inferior on gaining weight and
getting bald, we always live a comparative life and thus we are also the most
unsatisfactory bunch. We are always in a hurry to declare ourselves a loser, be it on not getting the job we desired, or getting rejected by the person we liked or even getting less marks in some stupid tests. Many of us start with a job that gives more money than
what our parents are getting towards the end of their working life and yet we
don’t feel happy or in many case not even contended. . There is always scope of
doing more. That’s what all the books say, that’s what all the sports-persons
say, that’s what the message all the inspirational movies give and that is how
we were raised from the beginning. To achieve more, always remain hungry,
always improve and keep fighting and keep moving. We have wonderfully converted
our life into some Japanese anime, we don’t fight physically or with
imaginative monsters we just look for better grades, more money and bigger
jobs.
We are so much in need of motivation, we instantaneously
share the blogs and articles of “It’s ok to feel lost in mid 20s” and stuff, a
little empathy is all we seek because we feel that most people wouldn’t
understand us. Indeed, it’s tough to explain to your parents why are you
unhappy even with a 7 digit salary or to explain to your uncle who is doing the
same thing from last 30 years that you don’t feel motivated to go to work as
you find no meaning in it. 25 is the age when not being in a relation make you
incompetent and inferior in some way. When ‘liking’ the pic of someone
flaunting their biceps in gym or someone enjoying a drink in Goa makes you sad.
When you are supposed to act in a mature way everywhere while you want to jump
on Mickey Mouse in a fair.
May be everything we feel, hear, share is something that
was common to all generation, we just have better and fancier platform to share
them. May be all generations want to rebel from their previous conventions and
yet all are trapped to them. May be the gossips and rants are transferred to
whatsapp and facebook from pan addas and barber shops. These questions always
ponder me, are we the most complaining and unsatisfied generation or our misery
has been publicized much?
I get a weird feeling when I think about the fact that Nadal
had already achieved a career grand slam before turning 25, Sachin was already a living legend, Miley Cyrus
has already earned millions, people much younger than me are achieving accolades
far superior than what I can imagine with my conventional life and yet I know I
have my own set of achievements. I appeared in some of the toughest competitive
exams; cracked a few, screwed a few; I competed with some of the brilliant
minds of the country to get a good college and I also competed with the
selected lot again to get a job. I have already travelled a lot of country and
many more places are on the list. I have tasted some of the finest cuisine and
I will taste more. So far, Bhutan is the only foreign country I have been, but
still an achievement, isn’t it? I didn’t write any novel, yet I am managing my
blog for more than 7 years.
I think the origin of most of our pain lies in the ‘larger
than life’ life we all imagined for us in our youth. Guess, life doesn’t work
that way. Your life don’t change much even if you get a great job or an average
job. There are always problems, worries, anxieties you have to fight. May be
all those who look very happy in their Facebook profile are also fighting with
the same, social media is the biggest scam everyone put to appear happy. I have
seen people most unhappy once they achieve the biggest goal of their life, then
they feel purposeless. May be the crux of the life was all about celebrating
the small success, be it losing 5 KG weight, making that cake eatable for the
first time in life, travelling in a local train for the first time, writing the
story you always want to and get it published, finally summoning the courage to
ask that girl out, get rejected, and denounce our attachment with the materialistic
world with friends later that night.
May be all of us can’t be the superhero we thought we would
become and save the world, or the billionaire that owns 100 cars, maybe we won’t
get a girlfriend like Emma Watson or a boyfriend like Ryan Gosling, we won’t
have a private Jet. May be life was never supposed to be a fairy tale, it would
always be this harsh and illogical, some people will betray us, we would lose
things we consider the most important for our survival, we would abandon many
of our dreams, we have to change the path many times due to things not in our
control, we will fail and we will fail more, we will succeed and yet we won’t
feel happy.
The bottom line is, life is as dramatic or as boring as we
perceive it to be, let us continue on the path we have created and then get
drifted again from it, met new people, lose old people, go to new places, we
are just 25, we are still young, we are too inexperienced to proclaim our
success and too immature to understand we have failed. However let us never
ever abandon things that make us happy no matter how busy or helpless we
become. Sing that song, practice that dance, write that story, run that
marathon, finish that painting and then do it again. Do not get stuck, soon you
will turn 50 and like all the clichéd article says you will definitely regret
what you didn’t do when you were 25.
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