Are We a Depressed Generation?
The millennial struggle.
For the past week, I have been mulling over this thought. Are we, the millennials, a grossly sad and depressed generation? There is so much hullabaloo around mental health issues. Powerful and famous personalities, whom you don’t expect to be unhappy, are speaking on depression and their own personal struggle. I am not here to therapize anyone or even extol on the mental health awareness drives in action.
I want to ask my millennial companions are we an inherently depressed generation? I think we are craving to be happy yet we want to drown ourselves in sadness. I don’t see why books like Ikigai (The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life) should be among the World’s Bestsellers. The market is flooded with Self-Help Books, books on how to be happy. As a corollary, we must be really sad for these books to sell like hot cakes.
Do we prefer to absorb a moment or capture it in our smartphones? Don’t we all feel anxious when the number of likes on our IG uploads isn’t close to what we expected? Does it give us happiness when the number of likes surpasses our expectations? But should it give us happiness in the first place? We are victims of tech and social media addiction.
We are a generation that has experienced the floppy disk in action! We know how much patience it used to take to type out a sentence on Word for Windows 1.0. But, in today’s times, we are in an incessant rush to no-where. We have once enjoyed the sweet fruit of our long toiled labour in our childhood days but now all that satisfies us is instant gratification on social media. Does it even last?
Does the media and the press deliberately feed us on negative aspects of the news? Is it a TRP garnering stunt or are we not capable of assimilating anything positive.
Loneliness is another concern that our generation has to deal with. Are we forging the right kind of bonds? We have hundreds of friends on our social media accounts but how many friends do we have really? To whom can we really share our deepest darkest secrets? To how many people can we express our emotions without feeling judged? Or should the number of people matter at all. Are we truly close to our family, our spouses or have we just given up on those relationships as well. Do we really address the lacunae in our relationships or drown ourselves in work only to realize how farther away we have pushed ourselves.
Most of us would be out of schools and working by now, but we are still stuck in the perpetual “Rat Race”. Don’t we get perturbed when our batch-mate receives a better hike, or a highly coveted promotion, a house, an international posting — this just never stops. Isn’t all this contributing to our unhappiness in subconscious ways. We are always hungry for more. Does it mean we are a dissatisfied people. Does it mean, maybe achieving contentment, may assuage our low-spirits. Or we will never know when we should be content, for we will always be hungry. It is a vicious cycle. A pattern that feeds on our melancholy. Perhaps the ‘omnipresent’ capitalism and consumerism is to be blamed for the constant urge to have more, be more, show more to the world.
We are in a conundrum — we are sandwiched between the trials and tribulations of adulting and wanting to revisit our carefree, not-so anxious pre-adult days. Maybe we learn to forge our own happy paths eventually. Maybe, one day, we arise to the awakening that this cycle needs to be broken. And then maybe, we graduate to a circle of happiness, success, love and laughter — on our individual terms.
