Screw Urban Naxals, we are all ticking time bombs anyway

Daniel Sukumar
Sep 8, 2018 · 5 min read

Now that I have your attention let’s talk about depression in the times of capitalism.

Chris Rock in one of his specials said “only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally,” whereas “a man is only loved under the condition that he provide something.” I don’t particularly agree to the statement because everyone is loved for something, even a dog is loved under the condition that it is cute. If dogs were loved unconditionally we wouldn’t have street dogs or breeders. Coming to the part of men, the statement remains true, however, the market for working women in the matrimonial arena has increased many folds in the recent years. Now, families look for women who can also work to contribute to the family.

The pressure to be a productive member of the society is at most times too much to take. Also, the definition of being a productive member of a society usually means you work in some place that people can recognise, pay off your taxes while you die making the top 1% more richer. In a country like India, arts is not even respected as a job. No one believes that you can do jokes, poetry, paintings, theatre for a living. This has resulted in a huge mental health crisis that is not going to get solved any time sooner.

This is only going to get worse with automation taking over 70% of the jobs in the future. One out of four jobs from IT and IT servicing industry are going to vanish due to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. India ranks 133rd out of 156 on the happiness index, even Pakistan is doing better than us (ooooooh! anti-national). The last 2016 survey of 200 000 professionals found that 46% of them were under serious stress. The work life balance in India is so bad that foreign investors find India as a perfect farm of human resource. This is jut some of the stats I could look up. All of this is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

So now the question is how to we defeat Capitalism and take over the means of production? LOL, just kidding, you can’t do it the top 1% owns your government too, you can’t do shit. So let us look into things that we can do to reduce the impact of capitalism on our mental health.

1. Do nothing

Most of us have become so used to working 9 hour shifts while wadding through 2 hours traffic everyday that we don not know what to do on a three day weekend. Most of my co-workers either drink till they pass out or be frustrated and wait to go back to work (alcoholism alert!!!). We have to learn to do nothing, we have to learn to be at our homes for a week, do nothing and be content with ourselves. True happiness is when you can be happy with yourself. This is in most times the road to self-discovery, this is how we confront ourselves and explore the dark corners. Understanding yourself might be the only way we can look forward to leading a content life in the unforeseeable future of capitalism.

2. Do something else

I remember my grandpa asking me about what I would do if no company in the world will recruit me? Can I like fix a bicycle tire? Can I iron a shirt properly? Can I cook a disk from scratch? We need to have a skill set that has got nothing to do with your work.

It is not always true that we will have skillsets that can bring in more cash than our day jobs (we all hope we do) but to have some skill set is worth a lot more than that. Find that talent that your school teacher told you about, find that voice, that direction that passion for something that made our childhood beautiful. It gives you a means of diverting the stress away, your brain releases happy hormones overtime you create something new. This will give you a new direction to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

3. Don’t cash those leaves, take them

There is this sense of being punctual to work that every employer seems to celebrate these days. These days punctual is not just associated with coming to work on time but also someone who doesn’t take leaves. Employees take pride in the fact that they haven’t taken a single leave in months or even years sometimes and employers sometimes reward the same too. Leaves are given for a reason, take them. Take a Wednesday off, go for a swim in an empty pool, go for a movie (tickets are cheaper on the weekdays), go treat yourself for a nice lunch, take your girlfriend for a mid-week date. Trust me, no matter how much your company pays you for the day you didn’t take off, it is still not worth missing out on a lot of the things like mentioned.

4. Take a break

Apart from leaves, try to take a long break, maybe for a couple of weeks or even for a month. If incase you are going to join a new job, try to sneak in those long breaks. Go visit all your relatives, take that trip to Leh, go be with your parents, try finishing that book you always wanted to write, do that photo essay series you had in your mind forever, try to set up that small business that you wanted to do par-time. I know that long leaves are too much of a luxury that most can’t afford but planning ahead can make that come true, even in terms of finance.

5. Know you are worth more

The first step to financial planning, as said by most people I’ve consulted, is to determine how much you are worth, which is a summation of everything you own or invested. This is the most depressing thing one can do because wealth is never something that seems enough. Imagine you are going to go tomorrow to work and get the salary you wished for, now to thin of it no matter how much that salary is going to be, there is going to be expenditure for it. For the most middle-class this will always be the noose around their necks till they die. So place your self-worth some place where these capitalists can’t hurt, place it within all the love your friends and family give you, place it in your ability to create something, place it in your creativity. This in the long term will help you in your self-worth and self-love.

Even as I write this, I am constantly struggling to do the things on this list, I am writing this as a remainder to myself for the years to come. I know many young people, married men with loving wife and kids who have killed themselves because of the pressure of losing a job, because of the constant blaming of this society that tells us that “you are not a contributing member”, just because we can’t find a place or be happy about ourselves in their capitalistic world. Place your mental health above everything and please know that there is nothing wrong in getting help. If at any point this becomes unbearable or too much to fight alone always visit a professional and seek help.

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