I have often wondered about what it is about people that keeps them driven in life despite the misgivings and tortures time throws at them throughout their lives. Since childhood I’ve heard, read and understood that every person on this planet has a struggle of his/her own. It is impossible for us as outsiders to know what’s going on in a person’s life or mind for that matter. Some people share their lives with friends but even then, it’s hard for someone else to completely understand how or why you lead your life the way you do. Still, as human beings, we can never stop trying to make others understand, to walk a mile in our shoes.
Sometimes, it’s not understanding that we crave for but to just have a person be there to listen to us unburden ourselves. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that there is someone who you could share with even if you don’t actually do. It is conversations like these that I have with the one person who I call a good friend (my “best friend” now for all intents and purposes) on almost a regular basis. Sure, we goof off most of the time with all the sarcasm that he unleashes on me when he’s frustrated and we have also had our share of differences but at the most crucial times, this friendship does come through and might I add, for both of us. That is probably what makes us good friends even when we are miles away and in different time zones altogether! The fact that we have very similar family backgrounds and a more or less similar thought process (except his love for toilet humor) adds to the camaraderie.
Today, was a particularly interesting conversation. It was about this so called drive to do better. But before I go into the conversation here’s a little background. He and I graduated from Engineering together and joined Infosys almost at the same time. But he was so bored with his first assignment that he quit a year into his first job to focus on his MBA. He stayed at home and studied for the MBA entrance tests and after a year, his efforts sort of paid off when he had to choose between two MBA schools, Wellingkar in Mumbai (his home) and Great Lakes in Chennai (his original home). He wasn’t particularly keen on either but that’s all he managed to crack. He finally chose Great lakes with a very heavy heart as I clearly remember. He hated being away from home and he had every intention to come back after 2 years.
His 2 year MBA stint was very different from his undergraduate experience. Here he was a prominent member of class, not at all like the image he had during our engineering days. He was a member of the student council during the second year and that was a source of constant amusement for me whenever we spoke, the first year when he criticized the council and the second year when he narrated his antics being in the council! Ultimately reality did hit. At the end of first year, placements for internships were a mess and he didn’t manage to get one from the campus and he had to ask around for help and finally his father managed to get him a job through his connections. At the end of second year, he had just one job offer. The only thing going for him at the time was that the job was in Mumbai, his home. He would stay with family. It was a low paying job and he had no choice but to accept it. He started working, with reluctance, at this firm and regularly complains, to this day, that the work he does isn’t what an MBA should be doing at all. He says he’s tried looking for other jobs and nothing has worked out so far. To add to it, he has had a couple of failed relationships and in both of them, from all that I have heard, he tried very hard to make things work. They were emotionally draining and that coupled with an unfulfilling career has always been a pain point in his life.
Generally, he’s quite jovial and takes cover of dark humor to get by his everyday mundane life. Though rarely, he does burst out and needs to calm down to bring perspective back to his life. Being just 26 years old, people would think we were drama queens and that life has so many struggles ahead and we were making an issue out of nothing! But for us, issues like these seem like mountains that we just don’t know how to cross. This brings me to our conversation today. One of his colleagues just quit and joined another company with an almost 80% salary hike. Though happy for his friend, this news reminded him of the rut he’s stuck in and naturally, brought his spirits down. He said he felt sad at his state. I was quick to remind him that he was not alone. There were many people who I knew and felt didn’t deserve what they had and many people who I felt did, never even got an opportunity. I added that I have always felt that life is not fair. His immediate response was that he had lost faith in fairness long ago. Sensing the overall helplessness, I tried to bring in the positives like the fact that in a couple of weeks he would be setting off on a vacation to Thailand on his own expense that too! I reminded him that not everyone could do that just yet. What he said next was surprising though. He said that just the fact that he can go off for a vacation doesn’t ease the guilt he’s going through at the thought spending so much at a time. But on the hind sight, it wasn’t all that surprising. I am dying to go on a foreign vacation and I am pretty sure, when I actually do, more than the enjoyment, the guilt of having spent so much will eat me up.
This then led us to discuss the age old topic of living life vs planning and saving up for retirement that both of us have talked about countless times. We are constantly fighting a battle within ourselves to live our lives in the present versus saving up for future like our parents always did. If we save now, we are killing our dreams of living life with the gusto we have right now and if we spend now, we are jeopardizing our future stability. At least his parents are now beginning to splurge. Mine never even got to. One left before they could even start planning. He agrees too that there’s no point starting to enjoy life at 55 when real life is passing us by, when we have all the energy and the rush to do crazy things. He then added in his characteristic sarcastic way, with the way his career is going, he’s be lucky to get to 55. It made me question him about his aggressiveness to find a job. I was pretty sure he’s not working to look for a job as actively as he should. This is where he admitted that he wasn’t and that was because he was tired of having to struggle. He wanted things to be easy for once. He said he has no drive and that he feels dead inside. I have never known him to talk like this. He was the guy who quit Infosys one year in, without anything in hand, taking a huge risk, just because he was bored. On reminding him of this fact, he said that now he’s older, more aware and warier. It’s surprising how in a matter of 4 years, he’s changed so much that it feels like the weight of the world is on his shoulders.
It was at this point that I tried to remind him of our previous conversations where listening to me talk he had said I’m going down a dark hole that I would never be able to get out of if I didn’t turn things around and maybe I should even go talk to a shrink. I told him that even with all that affecting me, I am still trying to better the situation. I haven’t given up hope. I love my job, and I love the company I work for, but I hate the city and the place. So even though it has not even been 3 months since I joined, I’m still open to other opportunities at better places. How can he give up? I won’t say I have the “drive”. Somehow I have never really passionately felt it. My father once said that in all my years of life, he’s seen that drive and pride in me just once. But it is small pleasures like going on a vacation, buying a new dress or a new shoe, that make me get up and want to go to work and earn money and save. I tried to remind him of a common friend who in no means is better than either of us and yet enjoying life in Sweden on an onsite assignment from the one and only Infosys. This friend is also someone who personally gives me some semblance of a drive, not just because he’s undeserving and yet enjoying life, but also because he had once told me that I am so unlucky that my stars are screwing up his stars just by association and he’s unable to get on with his life. Now that we are no longer attached, he’s sailing through life. This fact alone led me to believe his statement to be true all these years but the anger and pain I felt on hearing that, still burns enough within me to make me want to become independent and a controller of my own fate. I will never ever give another man an opportunity to say that I was the cause of his downfall. That alone, in a very twisted way, drives me to be independent and make my dreams come true on my own. No matter how bad situations get, my need to be independent drives me to get through everything. So in a way, that “drive” still exists in me. No matter how hard someone or life itself may try to pin me down, I won’t let them. That’s my drive. How can he give up so easily!
This is where he moved to dark humor. His response was that if only he wasn’t so critical of suicide…he would have loved a heroic death. The examples he gave just made me roll my eyes and then we automatically transitioned into alternate career options like writing, again a common interest we share. I suggested he go the Chetan Bhagat way, but with classier writing of course! He asked for suggestions on the genre he could try. I suggested crime, humor, politics as a few. On saying that, I realized that the three arent mutually exclusive anymore so there was his opportunity! He calmly replied with one of his attempts at humor that I don’t normally quite understand – essentially he should write a Batman comic book where the Joker becomes the President (Batman is our favorite superhero cartoon, though I believe in his opinion, Joker is the real hero) and that was more or less the end of our conversation as it was his bed time!
It’s hard to say where one gets his/her drive to live life from. Many people have strong and pure motivations. Others make do with twisted, double ended motivations and then there are those who are living life aimlessly, going wherever life takes them, however life takes them and that itself is their motivation, that life will take them somewhere or the other! But can one really live life without something that’s making them hold on? Maybe that’s why suicide is so rampant these days! There’s simply a lack of drive. Drive is dying and we are just watching it slip into oblivion.
Musings of a confused nut! 