We are plagued with zombies all around us. Those living with deep and serious mental depressions, with a very intense war going on inside them. They are neither equipped to handle it nor do they have any support system to help them take through these times. They are living one day at a time and yet seem very much reluctant to take the issues head on.
While it is completely true that joblessness is a much bigger plague of our times with a large chunk of youth of our time just lost in the world searching for a job to earn a decent livelihood. Their complete life currently revolves around landing that job, leaving very little time for something like a personal life. But here in this article, I am talking about the remaining small minority, mainly upper class/caste, who the current system has been much more favourable in giving a comfortable livelihood with good purchasing power and standard of living. One would have expected this class of youth to be living their dream lives, enjoying to the fullest, use the opportunity to the best of their ability. And yet what we see is this set of youth are completely muddled with depressions with no sense of direction or purpose.
For them, everything seems like a grave responsibility with little or no chance of failure. Every moment is intense. Every failure seems like the end of the world. Combine this deep fear of failure with an even stronger sense of freedom, we have individuals who feel suffocated with any sense of association and all relationships become a responsibility in due course of time. Any association either with ideology or with an individual only leads to them being always aware to maintain their individuality and yet they seem to have spend least amount of time understanding themselves. With hardly any purpose in life of their own, their ideology or commitment for anything just seems to be adopted from someone and is so shallow that they are hardly able to explain or convince anyone of their position.
Having been babysit by their parents throughout their childhood, this group never had to face any difficult situations in their life with everything planned out for them by their parents. Now as adults, the lack of understanding of oneself with lack of any association or lack of any strong ideology makes them completely indecisive. They regularly allow others to take hard decision for them. This choice of outsourcing of decisions to someone else, either in form of God, or tradition, or what seems to be cool at the time in the society again leads them often to situations completely unprepared for the repercussions of their decisions.
We can see this play out in many ways in their lives. One of the central issues faced by this group is the brittle relationships they have with their partners. Being completely ill-prepared for taking decisions, any uncomfortable situation seems like a crisis like situation, always questioning their relationship and ready to quit. This in turn leads to added fear for any future relationships and being overtly cautious in getting emotionally involved with someone.
Another major issue this group faces is constant struggle to find their career direction and that work life balance. Having difficult relationship in personal life, they constantly look to get themselves involved completely into their work. They depend on work to provide them the kind of satisfaction and comfort that a personal relationship would give. This in turn causes them to burn out soon even in their work. There is constant complain of not being recognized for the effort and at same time complain about everyone in team not contributing as aggressively as themselves. This causes constrained relationships in workplace too.
All this makes them to look for opportunities to get away from the current society they are in, hoping that they might get more freedom and be better understood by societies abroad. While this matches the escapist attitude already discussed, the group again soon finds them out of place in any new society too. The lack of association with new society is combined with memories back home making their life again unstable with respect to the future.
Overall, it is important to recognize the issues that we face currently as individuals and as a community and take some initial steps towards recognizing and solving this plague. Firstly, we should definitely need to communicate more, not in smileys but in big passages. It is important to convey our thoughts in clear words and encourage discussions as a community. Secondly, it is time we put our minds to work on difficult issues. As a society and as an individual, we need to ask some tough questions to ourselves, recognize issues plaguing the society and address them head on. It might be questions related to career, questions related to personal choices, questions about the uncertain future. It is time we address these issues ourselves, understand the repercussions, identify solutions and work towards implementing them. Thirdly, it is time we accept failure as part of life. The cost of failure should not be grave and as a society, we need to be more forgiving for failures and encourage open discussions of various experiments and its results.
P.S. This article is work in progress. I am giving words to thoughts that I have based on discussions with many close friends and colleagues in last few months. As author, I am aware that the article might have my biases in-grained in it in many of the conclusions. Please do point it out to me.
I am also sharing below the various phrases, sentences that I had initially captured while writing this article.
Phrases: false sense of individualness, cheating themselves without understanding themselves, their needs, their future, lack of direction, purpose
outsourcing decision making, ignoring difficult questions that one needs to ask themselves,
fake sense of authority and stability over life which is completely a sham
no support system built, no sense of commitment,
brittle relationships, false sense of association, fear of association,
giving birth as responsibility, taking care of parents as responsibility, taking care of themselves as responsibility,
freedom with no meaning, empty ideology, fake ego, fake sense of proudness
constant fear, constant insecurity, lack of confidence
career as escape route, direction set by others, decisions made by others
without understanding their current society they live in, they feel there is heaven in some society abroad or in some hidden valley up in the mountains
grass is greener on other side
ignorant about their own surroundings and sufferings of people, every problem seems to overwhelm them
anger towards marginalized, otherization, hate towards other culture/class
(Lack of decision making, lack of direction, lack of ideology, lack of association) -> (Mistrust, fear)-> (brittle relationship, false sense of individuality) -> (ready to quit, depressions, fear to take any initiative, lack of persistence, escapist)
