Unsettling hunches!

It’s been six weeks of lockdown and everyone is “bored”. To be bored is also a privilege. This could mean we have a lot of exciting things to do in our lives! I wonder if the underprivileged of our built society senses boredom? During this pandemic which came to us like a bomb from the universe, it's either time to step back or move fast once we get a green signal to resume our lives.

It's 6 am, not that I woke up this early but I haven't slept yet. Lying on my bed and looking at a portrait of Marilyn Monroe on the wall staring back at me with an infectious smile. People have set such high standards about everything, mediocracy also has its standards now! Plans to do this and that after the pandemic, ideas on how to re-start life, everything seems so pressurizing. If we see from a deeper perspective, life is always on a repeat, we maintain our daily routines and now we are bored because we are unable to maintain our daily routines? Also, we are getting a taste of how life shouldn't be taken for granted. Is your creativity is at its best while being under lockdown! Or is it sinking to its lowest? I have always fussed about how I want to be away from the familiar, whether it's the city I grew up, the people I have known all my life, thousands of miles away from home in another continent altogether amidst the security of anonymity, that's everything which could make me feel "new" about myself. But why is it so hard? The moment the rat race for life and career stops you want to be living amidst the familiar again, family, home, motherland becomes meaningful. At times moments like this are necessary to realise how mundane and meaningless the structures we have created are. Clients and customers, revenues and profits, stocks and markets, time to look back at such concepts and their denotations. 

I am a born pessimist anyway! Or am I a brutal realist? Maybe both or that in this century the reality and its examination naturally gives me a pessimistic outlook rather than being optimistic about the unknown future. The era of uncertainty has entered in each of our lives. But wasn’t it always this way? Just that we had ample of distractions to avoid the uncertainties. Ughh! Why do I end up diving so deep all the time! I envy people who talk in statistics and facts, maybe they tend to have a calmer mind devoid of apprehensions. My brain is a question-bank to-be-honest. It stores more question than answers but the more I discover answers and meanings the more I turn to nihilism. Is nihilism and self-destruction the same? The quest to be productive and resourceful, isn’t it a capitalist construct? I read in an article recently that most psychopaths are extremely successful in their professional careers because they lack empathy and they are highly manipulative, does it ring a bell? Humans have to turn into a machine to be successful in this rat-race. I am not criticising, but what if I am not meant to succeed in this insane competition to be at the top? Money is important, no argument against it. But why isn’t there an alternative world where money is not important to support people who are falling behind in commoditising their skills to sell in the labour market! Materialistic pleasures cannot be avoided unless we observe asceticism and to find a middle ground is my quest maybe.

Years from now if someone reads this blog, I wonder if the person will take my words as distress coming from a pandemic situation or life in general?