Lost...

I am pretty sure, that all of us, at some point or the other have a discussion… well more of an argument actually… where we vehemently defend our generation from the rather snide perspective of the one preceding us.

Blame it on the ‘generation gap’ as much as you like… but there always seems to be a grain of truth in whatever we say and hear at these conversations….

Be it a discussion on how low waist jeans should be banned… (yeah I know)… or something on the lines of how we all party too much… it tends to amount to a decent intellectual workout that you cant laugh your out of every time….

For me the most recent one was directed at our lack of a goal… and being lost in general.

The talk ended as always with the arrival of dinner at the table… and both parties grudgingly agreeing not to speak of it again… but it got me thinking.

Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to disagree to what my dad had surmised my ‘kind’ to be.

I am lost.

There is no question about it.

I have no clue as to what I want to do… merely a host of things that I do not wish to become. Trust me it’s less than helpful.

And in spite of how much my comrades would disagree… they are all in the same boat as I am.

None of us really know what we want from life.

Sure… we all want to be well-off, we all want creature comforts, we all desire tenderness and affection, we want respect… but these things are not wants… they are the needs of every single product of society.

We are taught from our infancy that these things are what count… things that matter, so it’s no big surprise that we end up needing them… craving them.

And in order to achieve these… we set our selves paths that we feel would be most ideal to get to our goal. Customized routes based on our individual strengths and weaknesses… careers in other words.

And here, we delude ourselves into thinking… that ‘this’ career, is our objective and destination.

Ask even a toddler on the streets what he wants to do in life… and he’ll answer promptly with some kind of home inspired gibberish that he has hardly any idea how to become. A few years down the line, his ‘dream’ will simmer down to something at least a bit nearer reality… but shall still fail to address the basic question itself.

It would still be easier to accept if they had just answered ‘I want to live like a king’. At least they would have come closer to isolating and identifying their own desires… but what with the teachings of society, whispered to us since when we were in our cribs… that answer would be immoral, selfish and what not.

You might think that perhaps, desiring to be well off is in itself a ‘want’. But it isn’t.

All of us need to do well… in some way or the other, because society (again) has taught us that there is no alternative.

Without being on a secure financial footing, we shall have neither respect… nor the comfort that that we would perceive as a reward for our efforts… nor even the ability to support our loved ones.

Similarly the chain works in any and all directions.

For example… a lack of respect among our colleagues would stand in the way of our success in our careers, and hamper our home lives as well.

So… that and these are all things we need not by choice but instead by compulsion.

Being confused with my own reasoning… I decided to go and ask dad himself… admitting defeat for once… in search of enlightenment in a way… or something to that effect.

But his answer to my query about what guys in his time had wanted… brought me right back to square one.

I am not exactly sure if he was kidding or not… but if people in his generation had mostly wanted to become ‘gentlemen’… well you got to be joking!

Moving with the primary assumption that he wasn’t attempting to impart another corny lesson to his son… a lost cause by all accounts, his peers were just as lost as we are.

It might sound very romantic… that they all wanted to be men for others, solid at heart and all that rot… but what it translates to is… they wanted to be respected and loved….

This, as we already have established is one of our needs… not one of our wants.

Conclusion…?

We have always been lost... and our generation is no different. It seems so hard to actually isolate what we truly want, that it is perhaps a question best left unasked.

From the age when we dwelt in caves… thinking that all we wanted was to be alive the next day….

It was just another of our needs that masqueraded for a while as something we wanted.

Even today… when we fail to meet the social prerequisites that have been set up for us, we cease to exist after a fashion

We shift our circles if we do not have money… we quit our jobs if we are at odds with our co-workers, we get divorced if we fail to maintain a happy household.

We become a different person with different… or at least lesser needs when we can’t cope.

And all the while… we are still lost about what it is that we want.