#8: Wicked weekends

Nishad Shah
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

“What did you do on the weekend?” comes a question on every Monday morning from some of my colleagues piercing my heart like a dart. Sometimes there’s a good answer, most of the times I find euphemisms for telling that I like sleeping like a sloth on weekends. But what interests me is how ubiquitous the question has become!

Most of my friends (and I) keep complaining that Monday to Friday passes by in a flash, in a single breath. You start Monday morning and end only on Friday night, sloshed, with little remembrance of the week gone by. The pace drops drastically over the weekend, as you sleep in more and vegetate. But you can’t just stay like that over the weekend, because there are ‘weekend pressures’ as well.

The buzzword of our generation is passion. Everything has to have an intense desire behind it, a craving, as the romanticists of our generation tell us to make love with our goals. The idea of a dispassionate life is blasphemy. You work a 9–5 job? “How boring is that!” You didn’t travel on the weekend? “Get a life, bro!”

And that makes me wonder what caused this pervasion of passion. It’s a no-brainer that travelling came from the West, since travelling for soul-searching has inherently been a good part of the Western civilization. Secondly, travelling there is also easier, with better infrastructure and access. It’s a pain in the ass to make spontaneous plans to getaways even from Mumbai, let alone smaller cities of India. And so have other aspects too. Steve Jobs, for one, was the brand ambassador of passion.

I have nothing against passion, in-fact, I would be one of those most attached to it. However, for a lot of people, passion translates into pressure very quickly. Pressure to show it to the world, to achieve fame, to better it in every way possible. Why? Why can’t we just enjoy the travel instead of making it a checklist? Why do I have to aim to be bestseller and not just write an innocuous article? Why add on these pressures to your already steamed life?

Summing up, if you live even your weekends by your goals, you aren’t really enjoying them. As I mentioned earlier, personal aspects of life should be free-flowing to gain the most pleasure out of them. After all, what’s the point of the weekend at the end of which you look back sadly wishing you could have done better!

Just out of college

Tales of a toad thrown in a new lake

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Nishad Shah

Written by

Deft Dilettante. Pseudo-intellectual show-off.

Just out of college

Tales of a toad thrown in a new lake

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