In search for Life

Hi all,
It seems as though with hectic schedules, in our continuous search for something we miss on most of the things, at-least I feel so. It was all fine until I got up this morning and started wondering what is the entire fuzz about weekends. I just realized how things had changed dramatically from my childhood times to now.
Like myself, people who were born in the late 80s till early 90s called as Generation Y or Millenials would be able to related to that very much.
Most of the Ys would have come from a conservative and secure economic background and we have been told and brought up in such a way that we belong to a very special story.
I meet lot of people of the Gen Y who belong to the fair end of spectrum in Gen Y and realize one thing in common, that we in this bracket of people are kind of unhappy.

So why is this unhappiness ?

Gen Y are people who are currently in 20s now and the people I speak about are the people who have just started their careers or just built the foundation for the same and have a long way to go still.

We have a job, but still unhappy ?
One thing which I realized overtime is this, we always continuously look for whats next and that has to be there as thats how the world we live in has evolved.
We look for new things to make our lives better, we strive to work hard to make our family live better.
As one of my favorite dialogue in a sparingly known Tamil Movie Moodar Koodam goes,

Aayirathla Sambadikravanuku Nooru   Silaraya Terium,
Latchathla Sambadikravanuku Airam    Silaraya Terium,
Kodila       Sambadikravanuku Latcham Silaraya Terium

( For a guy earning in Thousands, hundreds will look small,
  For a guy earning in Lakhs, thousands will look small,
  For a guy earning in Crores, Lakhs will look small )

For a person without job, job will look great,
For a person with a small job, a big job will look great etc.

But coming back, the point is that irrespective of whatever current state of life we are , the general feel is a bit unhappy. May be 'unhappy' is a bigger word here, can be repaced with 'not happy'.

So what is 'Happy' ?

Happiness in simple words can be put as a state of mind, where you feel you are comfortable very much and you have achieved your goals which you have in mind.


On drilling down a bit, we can realize that our mind makes us feel happy and not happy and it has got nothing to do with what others say/feel about us.
It is just a state of mind and nobody but you should be controlling that. It is easier said than done.

If we have to give a logical reason to this,
    Happiness = Reality - (Dreams or Expectation).

Depending on the value on the right hand side, our state of mind changes completely and hence happy and Not Happy.

We all know reality and how it turns out and Murphy's Law :).

So whats it with expectations, that's where the point of how we were brought up comes into the scene!

We have been brought up by people who belong to Gen X and grandparents belonging to the previous generation.
Their idea of life was to build a secure life.
Grandparents would have toiled very hard to get our parents a safe life, as they were the generation who witnessed the freedom struggles, famines etc.
Our parents grew up post independence, when our country was learning ( it is still learning ) to make its mark on the world post all the world wars.
So Grandparents would have naturally brought up our parents to build a life which has 2 fundamental things : food security, economic security.
So how was it done : By making on fundamental thumb rule, grass will turn green when one works hard over years.
For our parents , most likely the dreams of life would have been very limited and with all economic prosperity coming in the 80s their reality turned out a bit better.
So they kind of get the Happy feel, as they would have build a safe and secure career and they would have realized not all among them would have got the same.


So we were brought up in that period where they were getting a optimistic feeling and hence we too got that thinking that we will be part of a special story in life, and we can be whatever we dream of and what was just lawn for our parents, had become a garden for us !

Hence, those in early Gen Y have the 'American Dream' while now there is an inclination to 'My Dream'.
Irrespective of the dream, there is one thing which is common along all people in Gen Y, which is 'special story'.
So what is this special story.
Special story is any story beating the normal story.

That is the common thought now, with abundant information about other peer people in social networks and with ease of access to information what was earlier very tough has now turned out to be the usual.

In search of the 'special story', though actually the story is special, we do not realize that it is actually a special one because of the dream levels of other people which we come to know via social networking.

Because of this, the equation always results in a negative value and hence the common feel of 'Not Happy'.

Cos, we are speaking about Gen Y , Google plays a major role here I have just put a graph depicting the same from NGram Viewer.

NGram for Happiness

NGram for Career

 

 

 

 

 

 

So this is the current situation number of times we encounter the word 'Career' is much higher that the number of times we encounter the word 'Happiness'.

Google Search Trends also depicts the same.

This is the issue being in Gen Y, and God knows what is in store for Gen Z who are growing up , a very special story may be which aspires for a plantation may be with fruits or we may be back in search for a lawn !

As they say, idle brain is a devils workshop, this is what my early morning idle brain came up with :)

Bye till next,