Poeple and their differences: A whole lot of pain and wonder.

People are different. Everyone is. We are taught that to be one of the indisputable and inscrutable facts of our current generation, right? Almost every new baby born into the Gen-Z generation knows about that fact and we tend to focus on the well-being of our bodies using this very statement as one of the most basically recognised benchmarks.

Everyone in my generation seems to have their stuff figured out a lot better than our older, more hard-worked parent generations. They had it hard to begin with. They worked their arses off to do things as simple as get a Rs. 10 notes in their economy. In comparison to how our parents lived, we have lived a life of luxury magnitudes above that of the richest landlord of the time our parents were the age of building dreams in the clouds and having the mind as vast as oceans. Things were NOT easy for them. Nor are they for us. It’s just; the form in which the challenges have started to appear are a lot more sophisticated and subtle as compared to back then. If we now have nice commodities and easy accessibility at the tip of our fingertips, it got traded for intense competition and a life where the most reputable jobs are considered to be sub-human now. Unemployment has never reared it’s ugly mug higher than ever before until the advent of the 2020’s. People are getting in and out of jobs as quick as people going to take a loo in the lavatory. Things have changed, and we don’t know what that change entails for us in the foreseeable future.

Let’s go back to the time when a Rs. 10 note was as priced as a 10,000 Rs. And landlords having the basic income upwards of 10 lacs were considered as rich as the Ambani’s and Adani’s of the modern society (not that they were not modern, but the rate at which industrialization and technology have progressed makes it look like the 1970’s and 80’s in India were archaic times.). back then, mental health wasn’t a thing, and my opinion on that is a VERY mixed one.

Sure, mental health is a relatively new concept, but I believe we might have overdone it with this one a bit too much now. I mean, every single person you see now might have ADHD, OCD, PDA, MMNOS type of autism, or even any form of autism. Those who actually do struggle with it can go for help, for sure. They need it. In fact, they should get it. Anyone who has had obvious struggles with these things in the past, or in the present, must get some form of therapeutic help. It works, I am not denying that. Of course it does. You have a support system whose very job is to be of as much help to you as possible and help you get relief from your inner demons or traumatic experiences.

Now, this is where the tricky problem starts to get seen through the cracks. We still don’t know how to determine if someone ACTUALLY has a certain mentally challenging ailment or not. I mean, the overly obvious cases are very easy to diagnose, but what about ones who slip through the cracks? What about them? If they are not showing the symptoms outwardly, does that mean they are absolved of the challenges which they face on a day-to-day basis?

I would say: the answer is a complicated one in my opinion. People need help at some point of time or the other. Trauma, no matter how much you brush it off as a new-century concept, is pretty much a real thing. People suffer form it worldwide. People become so-called “monsters”, “in-human beings”, “devil-born”, “spawn of Satan” because of it. Though psychopathy can also play a part in that. At least that too is an obvious one at times. People can do just about anything when you break them beyond the stress point. You just got to push a little here and there, and tug at the right strings; the personal ones.

Now, that’s a different thing that the personal stuff has started to revolve a lot more around material things. But that still doesn’t change much in the recent times. We are beings borne out of thousands, even millions, of years of evolution. The ancestral instincts honed in us are a result of our ancestors trying their best to keep themselves alive for the creation of the next generation. Due to always having to survive against the apex predators of the prehistoric times (mind you, our ancestors did NOT have a nice time in the nice, green nature we so badly crave these days. To not divert from the topic, which I have an insane amount of tendency to do, the point of this entire conversation was: we have had some very basic instincts imbued in us, courtesy of evolution (I am talking about it as a process in this instance, not as the phenomenon). We cannot simply go away from them, or try to understand them, because they, in fact, are not so easy to understand. We are carbon organisms which just so happened to have developed a brain good enough to hold this thing we call consciousness.

Consciousness is also a pretty… ambiguous thing, as in, we have had no idea ever since we are aware of it, about it’s true nature, it’s exact purpose, or even why it came into existence, and why only in humans? Is what we think only unique to us? Are the structures we build only limited to the human species as a whole? Or are there others? Other organisms, animals which also possess somewhat similar beliefs, or have similar practices to ours? Scientists have documented a few of these instances, and some have even come to the conclusions I have come to in this short span of a paragraph. But, as is the case with many experiments and observations, these are merely speculative at the moment. Nothing mostly definitive has come out of it as of now.

That brings me to another rather tricky topic I have always pondered over in my free time, of which I seem to have a lot these days, and you know what they say , “an empty mind is the devil’s den” pr something along those lines (honestly, I have never believe in this, but my parents do, so I got to follow it for now, and I have the tendency to not believe anything unless I have experienced it first-hand.)

We humans have created a reality of our own, with all the new concepts of which only we are in knowledge of.

What do I mean by this? Money, Law, Finance.

These kinds of things.

If you ever try to look at what the outside world is like, you will find that these don’t exist outside the world of human buildings, institutions and homes. We created these for our own convenience. Yes, you saw it right. I wrote “created for our own convenience”.  We wanted life to be easy, so we decided that to obtain items which others have, but we don’t, we would create the barter system, the most primitive and the first-ever form of trade ever created by humans. Now, I don’t know which of the ancient civilizations created this, maybe even the prehistoric ones. Anyway, what we humans ended up creating is known as a ‘inter-subjective reality’. It’s the equivalent of the united states declaring soccer instead of football, while ignoring the entire world. Well, the states do have some interesting things up their star-striped sleeves…

But that’s a topic for some other day. Well, I have written about a lot of things in this one article of sorts. Can’t make space for more, or it will take literal ages for the ideas to finally make it to the hall of pages.

Anyway, good night, and see you on the flip side.