I decided to come back to India a while ago so I can be with my parents as they age. I happily came back without any pressure and was looking forward to starting new adventures in India. I did lots of things with varied successes and failures and was happy and at peace in general with the outcomes.
However, after ten years of this, I suddenly went through a huge regret cycle (maybe due to burnout (or spiritual awakening :-) ?). A couple of things that bothered me constantly are/were
- Asymmetry of reward/effort cycles. Some people are so lucky and money effortlessly flows to them.
- In India, it seemed you need to be cutthroat toxic personality to be considered founder material.
- No one seems to walk the talk. And the talks were quite manipulative and grandstanding.
- I considered myself skillwise higher but reward wise not so much.
- I lost motivation for doing great things. I wanted to be that lucky $#%6 who did nothing and got a lot of rewards.
- Many people I used to respect turned out to be self-centered and intellectually corrupt people.
- People happily praise the good work, without actually doing anything about the reward part. One can only survive if you are a proverbial bottomless giver.
It felt like I knowingly put myself through struggled for no reason. These and I am sure many other things gnawed at me. In the regret-filled struggles of waking up at 3 AM with dread in the pit of the stomach, I tried to make sense of how I ended up where I am (from always feeling top of the world to feeling worthless and a failure). (All the intellectualized philosophies such as Geetha fell by the wayside obviously)
A couple of small voices in my head kept reminding me that I am looking at this all wrong. Small but persistent voices reminded me how few people who stayed back in the US had huge regrets about not being there when their parents needed the most. One of my friends told me I am really lucky to be with my parents and yet do all that I am doing. (She lost her mother in a freak heart-attack inside a train). Another said he lost his mother to jaundice which is immensely curable but was untreated.
Then the pandemic hit and I saw many old folks suffering from no access to technologies and their children of course are in the US. Bangalore is littered with households of older couples whose children have settled abroad. It is a complicated situation. Parents themselves encourage their kids to go abroad even though they themselves do not want to go. There are lucky ones too who happily inhabit both worlds.
Anyhow one day my father randomly told me that, since you came back our life expectancy has grown ten years. I was taken aback a bit but shook my head and attributed it to the emotional nature of my father. But whenever I suffered this also came back as a small voice.
The reason all these small voices are ignored is there is huge and twisted noise on the media about rich and successful people. If you are in the startup circles these noises are amplified and those folks become heroes to be emulated at all costs. Many of them in reality are insufferable souls who are very toxic to people around them. However, that aspect is either ignored or buried and the money becomes the catch-all value.
Thankfully in my case the small voices slowly and surely became audible and I reconciled with my own definition of success and I am at peace now. However, I am fully aware of the nonsense surrounding this need to be successful (even by all definitions) is the poison that holds one from truly enjoying life. That work is still in progress…
