{"id":2078,"date":"2016-05-07T11:34:19","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T06:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/like-father-unlike-son-want-nothing-like-parents-millennials-boomers\/"},"modified":"2016-05-07T11:34:19","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T06:04:19","slug":"like-father-unlike-son-want-nothing-like-parents-millennials-boomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2078","title":{"rendered":"Like Father, Unlike Son: Why We Want to Be Nothing Like Our Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span>he last time I thought I wanted to be like my <\/p>father<\/span><\/a> was when I saw the respect he received at his workplace. Suddenly, every part of me wanted to end up in a suit working for a higher-up, thinking about sales, products, a variety of brands, and earn some respect. Little did I know, that that same na\u00efve 13-year-old, would grow to hate everything about that life exactly eight years later. <\/span>\n\nHere I am, at 21, ungrateful, selfish, and full of profound knowledge about the world being full of shit. And I am not alone. Out there, on the humid <\/span>streets<\/span><\/a> of Mumbai and inside clubs, drinking, smoking, failing, lies a wasteland of people, trying to find themselves in the mouths of strangers, bottomless glasses of alcohol, and developing a rebellious persona of living in the moment. We\u2019re hatefully termed \u201cmillennials\u201d. And we own it. <\/span>\n\nThis indecisive lot gets by with their \u201cChill out man\u201d and \u201cFuck it bro\u201d attitudes. We have low-paying <\/span>jobs<\/span><\/a>, most of us anyway, and we range between wanting to be filmmakers, writers, poets, comedians, travellers, dancers, and artists. Nobody wants to be in insurance. We actively choose only those lives that are difficult to attain without pure fucking talent and we have no doubt that we are any less talented than <\/span>Hemingway<\/span><\/a> or Scorsese.<\/span>\n\nHow did we get there? Once upon a time we used to be that 13-year-old who wanted to go to office in a suit. It took all of our teenage years to break from the linear thinking of the world and the <\/span>dreams<\/span><\/a> of our parents. The world came later, only after each parent had been convinced or rebelled against, in more than one way. <\/span>\n\nOur parents were born at a time when finding your path or chasing your dream wasn\u2019t particularly on the priority list. The important thing was to get a job, buy a house, and survive until you had to retire. It was profoundly simple. There was no existential angst because there was simply no time for it. \u00a0<\/span>\n\nWe all grew up in these households of hardworking fathers and thread-worn mothers. They got up every morning like clockwork and took on the day with all its mundane tasks and trudged home at night to their small houses and simple meals and got up to do it all over again the next day. We bore witness to their lives, the evaporated dreams they once had, their 20- year-old self that lay imprisoned with the horror of not having even tried to believe in that dream. Somewhere between sprouting our first <\/span>pimple<\/span><\/a> to driving our first car, we went from respecting them for their choices to deciding that that wouldn\u2019t be the life we would be living. By the time we had our first <\/span>beer<\/span><\/a>, we wanted something else, something big. We would chase our dreams, as though our lives depended on it. <\/span>\n

Our parents were born at a time when finding your path or chasing your dream wasn\u2019t particularly on the priority list.<\/blockquote>\nAnd thus we set off on a wayward path to redemption. There we were, under the same roof, studying, bunking classes, chasing the dream, job-hopping, drinking beer, lots of it, and occasionally indulging in <\/span>recreational drugs<\/span><\/a> with the hope of having a fit of inspiration. All of this, just to \u201cfind ourselves\u201d at the right time, so we don\u2019t end up as photocopies of our dear parents. <\/span>\n\nThankfully, most of our parents could afford to let us chase our dreams. All those years of trudging to work and sleeping without dreams had resulted in this \u2013 our freedom. And so we got to be free in all the ways our parents couldn\u2019t be. We got the licence to not care about how much money we made, about what our elders or the rest of the fucking world had to say about us. We had to believe in the universe, in karma, in the power of giving, and believing in how third time\u2019s the charm. We had to live in our own world, to embrace the fresh new hell that had been waiting for us. <\/span>\n\nAnd fresh hell it was. Some of us had to go through severe periods of distress from wanting to become something only great people had become, while others… well, they were drowning in a pool of <\/span>hashtags<\/span><\/a>, moods, and feels, only to be distracted one night at a time. <\/span>\n\nTogether, a generation of assholes in the making, by-products of a lifestyle obsession, caught in a perpetual downward spiral, only to become our unfulfilled selves at the end of it.<\/span>\n\nMy father, in his suited job, is now fulfilled. He speaks lesser about the dream he left behind, I think he still hopes that I don\u2019t have to. I don\u2019t know what to do with that hope. I haven\u2019t found what I\u2019m looking for, but clearly I cannot afford to stop looking. Maybe the coming years won\u2019t be increasingly cold, and we can all get by with flying\u00a0colours.<\/span>\n\nOr I can at least hope to be less of an asshole. <\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We millennials bore witness to the lives of our parents and the evaporated dreams they once had. Somewhere between sprouting our first pimple to driving our first car, we went from respecting them for their choices to deciding that that would not be the life we would be living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":2079,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[439],"tags":[4163,480,18,2400,4164,4165,1245,4166,4167,4168],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-family","tag-boomers","tag-drugs","tag-family","tag-generation-gap","tag-identity","tag-jobs","tag-millennials","tag-redemption","tag-wanderlust","tag-youth"],"yoast_head":"\nLike Father, Unlike Son: Why We Want to Be Nothing Like Our Parents<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We millennials bore witness to the lives of our parents and the evaporated dreams they once had. 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