This has been long due.
I thought this up while I was in conversation with one of my senior colleagues about three or four months ago; maybe longer. I had gone up to his desk and we were discussing life when this train of thought dawned on me. I like to call this baby ‘The Generation Sinusoid’, and I’ll explain whatever the damn I think it is in the next few paragraphs with the help of points A, B, C, D and E.
Just to quickly run you through what this is about, I’ll just say it is about the sinusoidal nature of humans across generations. The sample set of people I will talk about here are people of my age who are privileged enough to have climbed up Maslow’s pyramid of needs and do have love, esteem and self-actualization as things they can afford to worry about. I have not had the opportunity to spend a lot of time around people who are still struggling with the basic physiological and safety needs, so this observation does not encompass them.
I’ll cut the chase and begin to explain myself. Look at point A. Point A is more or less the time around which our parents were born. Before this, we had the era of independence, which meant a lot of things: unstable employment, poor (compared to what we see now) standards of living and social and communal instability. In the 1960s, things started to seem clearer, people could begin to think of education for their kids, people started having steadier incomes. Money was scarce, but it did begin to flow. Markets began to flourish little by little.
Then came point B. Point B is in the 1980s and is probably the time when our parents were young. They were getting their education or had probably just begun with a job. Globalization began to kick in, in the most rudimentary of forms. The professions that came up were very mainstream. Doctors, engineers, teachers, and well, some more doctors and engineers(?). Pardon me if I am missing out on important facts, but this is how the picture looks to me. So well, by the time our parents got married, let’s say in the 1990s, they had struggled their fair share which had now landed them a job in a government office, or in a school or college, or in banks or they had set up a clinic of theirs. Their marriages were a kind which we, as a generation, won’t be able to experience to the fullest. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or bad, but well.
Somewhere between point B and C, you were born. Hurrah! New found existence (which shall only fade into oblivion and nothingness, but well, existence nonetheless).By the time point C comes to picture, we’re about 7-10 year old kids, learning to spell the word ‘millennium’ so we could wish each other at school and write ‘Happy New Millennium’ cards to people. We’re still growing up. We still don’t have much of our own opinions about the kind of people we’d like to be. When someone would ask us ‘Beta, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ we’d say pretty confidently ‘Doctor, Engineer, Astronaut, or Singers’. Now point C might not look like a very important point, but it is. It is important because it is a point of inflection that marked a beginning of shifting of ideals and dreams.
Point D is 2020. Standing very close to point D is the current version of you. Look at how much we’ve changed from point C. We are so much more than doctors and engineers alone. We are copywriters, DJs, radio jockeys, IT consultants, writers, musicians, chefs, event managers, social media marketers, bloggers, poets, models, theater artists, not to forget the amazing world of Start-Ups and so much more that I’m going to fail to mention here. Don’t get me wrong here. Not saying that we didn’t have most of these professions back then, but to be fair, between C and D, the Internet happened. Our ideas and dreams began looking to the internet for taking shape. We’re no longer looking for stability like our parents. We claim to have ‘learnt from them’. We are seeing them lead a life, which we might not like. We have understood the sacrifices they’ve made for us, both personal and professional. We have seen them spend their lives stick to safe, stable and risk-free options. We don’t quite really like that. So we strive to be different. We are okay with changing jobs and cities at our own whim. We are coming to terms with casual sex. We are ready to look at open relationships, because sometimes, that is easier and fits like a jigsaw piece in our puzzle that’s life. We are okay with trail and error; failure and success, more than we ever were. We are questioning the institutions that our parents lived by: not all of us want to get married and have kids, not all of us mind travelling across the country on shoestring budgets, not all of us have fucks to spare for things like security and longevity of investments, products and even all kinds of relationships. We are volunteering as fellows not ending up making a lot of money, but doing what we want to anyway, we’re also diluting the social fabric when we decide to burn out the best years of our life on something so that we can make money, so that we can keep making the choices we want to. In this generation, the standard deviation is large. We can’t be characterized as a single point on the plot. Now happens a significant point in your life somewhere around point D: you get married (or you don’t). A couple of years down the road, you have kids (or you don’t).
By the time we reach point E, we are about in our mid 40s. Let’s say you didn’t have kids, you’ll be still probably be working your asses off somewhere, which is I hope something you like doing. If you have kids, then they’ll probably be in their teens. They’ll begin to equip themselves with the art of making choices. Now they are who you were near point D. They will look at us; these burned out, nascent and unstable people. Your kid will begin to see the flaws of the life you lived. Their affinity to things will shift more towards the more holistic kind of living. They’ll not mind settling for less, because they’ll know what pushing that extra mile did to us, in our hearts and souls. They will see us crave a family and companionship in ways we can not fathom right now. They will turn to choices we didn’t want to make in our youth.
Now this is all a hypothesis. This is all a train of thought. But this is what I see when I see generations coming and going from the face of the earth. I do not have empirical data to back me up. It’s all up there in my mind, which shall too, one day perish like all other biodegradable things.
The Broken Clock 