What an existential crisis looks like?

This is as basic yet as numbing as it gets

Thousands of people get up every day. Look out in the sky, sun in their eyes, ready to chase their dreams, wanting to do something special, to change the world in their own tiny little way, to solve the problems of this world, big or small, to live.
By the time it’s 2 in the afternoon, those dreams are less about changing the world and more about paying that pending bill and worrying about next month’s EMI.

You feel like those people except you are not. You don’t have any dreams to chase in the first place and you are probably not even financially burdened You are well supported either by a well paying but uninteresting job or by someone who will take care of the bills even if you can’t. It’s the worst. There’s no passion. There’s no responsibility. You’re just there, getting up every morning wondering, ok I have about 15 hours today, what am I supposed to do with them now. Desperately seeking for something that can make atleast 2 out those 15 hours — meaningful. Constructive. Something that can be the anthem of your life.

What is the anthem of your life?

You feel stuck. There is a burning desire to do something but you don’t know what. I mean how random is it; you could be absolutely ready to do something honest with your life, ready to be more obsessed with it, you may want to put in all your energy and effort like you’re Rocky Balboa’s 8th son and yet, that thing itself escapes you.

There’s no peace in anything. Watching TV, watching movies, listening to music, everything is accompanied by this unrest, the kind you would feel when you look at the dark green-black waters. Like this moment, this minute, now, that you are wasting doing these otherwise ordinary things, could well be used to do something much, much more meaningful. It’s like being in a forest. Every step is through a mesh of fallen branches and slippery rocks, you can barely walk without feeling like you are about to fall, any minute now. There is unreal beauty all around you in the form of wild flowers, fruits, greenery and yet all of it is just at that appropriate distance from you where it all feels within reach but only, it’s not.

You wait, you wait everyday, for it to pass. You try things, new things, everyday, in the hope that something will stick. One of these things will be the key to this cage you are trapped in. You hope, you hope against all dread that’s filling you, against all the questions burning inside of you — “Will I always be less than ordinary?” “Is this it? Is this all that there is to my life?” “Will I always be aimless, directionless?” “Why do I make everything so much about myself?” “How are other people so happy? So content in their meagre lives. Why can’t I be like that?”

Eventually it goes. It does. But you do not always come out to shining brightness. Most of the times, you go back to ordinary. You go back to meagre. But this meagre is not the same. This time it is accompanied with ‘atleast’ the knowledge that

if you struggle, if you struggle hard enough, if you never get complacent, you will have transcended meagre and ordinary, right there, in that thought itself.