Do you wake up every morning with zero will and still hope you are not late to catch your morning bus/train? Every evening on your way back home, do you think even for once that if only you didn’t have to go through this same rat race the next day? It’s Wednesday afternoon and you are already thinking about the weekend and how you could just sleep off those two days of freedom? If your answer to any or all of those questions is yes, then I am very sorry to say that you are living ‘a slow life in the fast lane’.

Now you might think, ‘What does that exactly mean?’ If you are from Mumbai or have ever been to Mumbai, you would understand exactly what I mean. Any given day in Mumbai, take any railway station of your choice, you would see thousands of people rushing to their lives and still deep within they feel like reaching nowhere. That’s exactly what I mean by slow life in the fast lane.

I am pretty sure every second person reading this post would actually relate to this to some extent. And this I feel is a very common problem among millennials these days. But have you ever thought, our parents never had these problems, they never went through depression, they never had a mid-life crisis to an extent that they took year gaps from jobs and they never felt the need to change jobs every two years or quit jobs to follow their passion? They were happy enough to stick to one job for almost the entirety of their life, follow the same routine daily for 30+ years and still not get tired of it. So in around 20 years’ time where did it all go wrong? How did the current generation become so restless and incompetent? The previous generation did not have depression and panic attacks frequently, they were not slaves of counseling and therapy unlike the current generation coming up struggling with life. Yes, I said struggling because that is what it is, we are struggling with our lives, not living it.

There is no one particular reason to pinpoint for what went wrong in the last 30 years. The reason like the problem itself is pretty complex. I, with this blog, would touch and talk about various such reasons and aspects related to it, and also various other things related to and ignored by the current generation of millennials. Coming back to the topic, the reasons as I said, are complex, multi-dimensional to put it more appropriately. But at the core of it all, I believe, is our lack of communication. We humans, who are the only ones with the ability of speech and communication, to be honest, suck at the very same. Remember the last time you had a wholehearted conversation with your friend face to face? Or the time you spoke for hours to someone without once checking your phone the whole time? Or the time you actually had a talk about how you actually ‘feel’? Oh yes, I said the dreaded f-word. It’s time we millennials (especially men) stopped acting weird about their feelings and start talking about it. You are humans, feeling something is the most natural thing to happen to you. And talking about things happening in your life and how you feel about it to people in your life is the least you could do for yourself.

I know it would be difficult to start with all this all of a sudden, so let’s start with a smaller task. Next time you meet a friend, ask him genuinely ask him how he is doing? How are things in life? And for a change be genuinely interested in what he has to say. And trust me he would hesitate. But when he reciprocates the gesture, speak your heart out. And then see him slowly opening up too.