Dear Sir, As I am Insane...

Modern language, Internal combustion engines, Man on the moon, the Green revolution, Computers, Internet Web 3.0, Startups, and now blockchain & NFTs: All of these marvels of technological/civilizational progress amount to nothing in comparison to what we have achieved in our societies across countries. The nullification of senses and the pedestalization of sanity.

In our educational institutes, hospitals, offices, and even homes we are all trapped in a race for betterment. Better degrees, salaries, home appliances, cars, houses, future, and self. Which from an evolutionary perspective is understandable? While life itself is meaningless, it doesn’t make sense to waste time staring off into space and pondering about the heat death of the universe. Therefore, it is only logical to choose a local and applicable sense of purpose, pursue it, and have an impact of sort, like a crab’s footprint on the seashore between waves.

But what doesn’t make sense is this, almost all of us are at the precipice of breaking down. It is empirically proven that money does jackshit to improve the mental health of an individual. It is also well known that we are all deeply messed up, all of us, and that our lives are interconnected in more ways than it ever was. On an average day, an average individual interacts with ~10X more individuals than a person who lived in the 1980s did(thanks to technology). However, this doesn’t translate into meaningful interactions. Most of it is standard office jargon-filled fluff, many of it - transactional “Ji’s” and “Anna’s” and “Bro’s”, Some of it are customer complaints and refund related, very few, almost zero of them are meaningful and heartfelt one on one interactions that carry any amount of meaning/learning.

The inevitable endpoint of this sequence of events and this pattern of life is that we will end up with a populace/world that will do two things :

1. Make it its mission to focus on increasingly transactional interactions (because transactional is easier- tech-driven, shorter, faster, quicker..etc)

2. Teach people how to infer value from transactional interactions (eg. “It's okay if you are alone when you are 40, just use our dating service and talk to our AI for only INR 500 for 1 hour”

Of course, am not here to predict the future of tech or even the world, in classical me style I wanted to lament about the state of current affairs

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We utilize placeholders that are supposed to convey meaning and ignore the actual meal of the meaning

We start our conversations with “How's it going?” but we don’t care about the answer nor are we keen on any observations.

We are broken about the unexpected death in our family, but we expect our subordinates/colleagues to quickly recover from their losses We obsess about our bank balances and our investments not because it’s a stable pathway to the future, but more as a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) instrument.

Our relationships are superficial and transactional while our Instagram’s are ethereal and deep. We compensate for depth with vacations, and we compensate for closeness with broadcast

We ignore the books lying in our bookshelves while we like/bookmark countless Twitter threads as social status signaling

What does this all mean?

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What does this all mean?

It means that we are increasingly living in a bubble inside a shell trying to be more hollow.

Maybe it's time to be more honest.

Maybe the next time you feel that throat-clenching anxiety with tears threatening to march its way outside, maybe it's your body signaling you a need for a genuine experience. Instead of the passive Pseudo societal BS, we all go through.

Maybe the next time it feels impossible to get your day started with insecurity having you bent over, maybe it's your brain telling you to embrace the Piece of Shit that you are and do something about it.

Maybe the next time you feel insane because of a small thing like a broken switch, a punctured tyre, or an annoying fly. Maybe it’s the most appropriate reaction. Sometimes insanity is the right response to things

Go insane. Set aside time for insane. You have been composed for so long. Where did it get you?

The insane thing about the above-italiziced line is that every single person who reads it regardless of our wealth, nationality, privilege, gender, or caste will relate to it.

And by insane I don’t mean “Run naked on the street” Insane. I mean do the purposeful Insane.

If you are a single working mother who wakes up at the crack of dawn and manages your kid and work every day- Take an off day, drop the kid off at a friend's house and go to a movie theatre and catch a matinee show or go to the beach.

If you are a Middle-aged rich boss of many with wealth and power beyond measure who still doesn’t feel anything, take a day off and go to the spot where your childhood Ex-girlfriend dumped you.

We are all temporary flickers on a momentary flame. Life is too short to be filled with compressed angst and repressed rage. Relieve it. Let it go.

In addition to having sick days , maybe companies should have Insane days as leave days too.

Maybe next time we should have days In which our leave application emails should start like:

“Dear sir

As I am Insane today….

“