I came up with this word ‘Existential Crisis” sometime back. Yeah I know you would be saying this exist since long and stuff but the point is it never mattered earlier. But recently I have heard so many people talking about. So what exactly this new word to describe one’s condition on a particular time of their life means? Like can we dare to ask our parents if they ever have gone through Existential Crisis? I guess if we ask them they will say “Hamare zamane main ye sab nai hota tha”. They had to work hard even to make one call or to travel from city to city. Most of them would not have been able to afford flights. So the question comes to me is whether existential crisis is real or is it just overthinking?
Let’s just ask the smartest thing on the world Google. (Fun Fact: When I tried to find should I refer Google as He or She, the Google had one search result saying ‘women’ because it does not allow you to complete the question :p) Anyways coming back to our important question what is Existential Crisis and as per google search “An existential crisis occurs when a person often wonders if life has any inherent meaning or purpose” Oh this was pretty simple or is it not?
I came across this guy he is an engineer. He worked for almost 4 years in a large company and he on usual day never hated his job. But he wanted to do something of his own. So he left the job and started his consultancy with some unique idea. His dream at that time was to make it giant company, get huge investment, have busy life and be as successful as one can imagine. He worked really hard during this time. While the things did not went his way, he decided to get back to a job, a well paid job. But here’s the twist when he was working for his dream he realised that even if he would have been successful he would have not been really happy. While he was in initial career focusing on money and becoming this big entrepreneur now he has realised may be that’s not going to give him that kick he wanted.
So he is not sure now what is that he wants in his life. As it is mentioned in the definition he is not sure about the purpose of his life. Is the purpose of his life is to be successful? Is it to have happy life with family? or is it about helping others have a better life? When you talk to him he seems to be so messed up with so many talks that it becomes very difficult to get him out of that conversation.
But after understanding this, I asked similar question to few people. What I realised is most of the people are not aware of what they want from their life. They are struggling to find solution to their current issues and it never allowed them to think about this. But the quarantine period did allow them and I feel many are now questioning themselves of what they are doing since last few years and where are they heading in life. So what’s the difference between them and the one who is facing so called existential crisis n a regular bsis. The biggest difference I found was of the over thinking about it.
Here’s a thought. In last decade we are hearing these words called YOLO, FOMO, JOMO. Somewhere the reason is that we as a human being are becoming more and more lonely. While today’s need is social distancing but we have been getting distanced from the real world of happiness since sometime now. People are easy to find and easy to forget with click of a button and sometimes with just left and right swipe. The life of a person is being determined based on how their social media profile looks like. Somewhere existential crisis is also reason of this technology, comparing the life with others and most important feeling entitlement. I feel the current generation feels too much entitiled to things and when they don’t get it they start questioning their purpose of life and where they are heading.
The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
― Søren Kierkegaard
There was another blog which I had written long back with title “The pursuit of..“. The blog talks about finding what we want to pursue in our life which will lead to that happiness. While the answer to existential crisis is finding that one thing what makes you happy the most important thing is to keep trying. There is no way you can find the right thing till the time you explore it. My favourite example to quote here is of Boman Irani. He started acting career in 30s. Till then he was doing photography and was also running his shop. I feel what people need to do is to relax a little bit, don’t be very serious about losing couple of years in doing something which eventually is not you calling. But the one thing he or she must do is KEEP EXPLORING.
It’s a privilege to live in a constant existential crisis. It basically means everything is taken care of and the only thing left to worry about is the condition of your soul. — C. Bromont
Dharmin Shah 