Nykaa Now, the quick commerce version of make up delivery, has me unsettled so much so that I am fearful of using the application to buy all and any skincare and make up. As I mentioned to one of their Instagram handlers, I believe we don’t need to live in a world where skincare or make up is delivered in 30 minutes. It rattles me because, previously researching skincare, buying new products, and treating myself to a new lip product that I absolutely don’t need has been a source of comfort to me. Now, this comfort seems cavalier. I don’t use quick commerce apps a lot because living with my parents has forced me to plan ahead, and their Boomer attitude which frowns upon unnecessary spending have rubbed off on me a little. Good for me, I say. But I know, deep down inside me, that this unsettling has more to do with the change of my own internal make-up rather than external transference of old beliefs.
I pretend to not have the answers modern-day problems because I see the popularity and public embrace of modern living. If so many people want uber-convenient lifestyles, then something must not be right with me? It’s the new way of doing things, they say. I nod and let it go. But I am convinced that we don’t need to live in this manner where instant gratification has taken on a much sinister role that exploits other humans in the guise of convenience. Our time here on Earth is not meant to be distracted away, or dopamaine-d away. The endless pop, colour, and sparkle is taking us far away from our own inner selves so much so that our emotions don’t last long enough. We can always snap them away quickly with a new shiny toy made available to us. All this has recently convinced me of two things: life is hard and life is long. Those people who philosophised about the tedium, the grief, and the wondrous joy of living were all right. In modern day, we only want to pile on joy and its sisters, and block the tedium and grief.
While I think about all this, I have been stuck in an endless loop of doing things that my left brain is proud of. I check off list after list, do task after task, and feel incredibly accomplished about my existence. My house is stocked with groceries (AH), it has been cleaned and dusted every day to perfection, my belongings are in order, my workplace project is ordered and organised, and my car is cleaned and parked properly beneath my window. I also have finished reading Jane Eyre in a coffee shop recently (aesthetic check) and written snail mail to friends and sent them post cards and trinkets. The list of things that I haven’t done involve taking a vacation and some other things that the Internet will have me believe, but I don’t know about it because I am not chronically online these days.
I could easily diagnose myself that I am stuck in a functional freeze what with not writing the rest of my Small Heresies essays, and not creating any more art. But I have had enough of social media telling me what to do with my life, what grief to carry, and what new skincare to buy (literally). I have been doing the things that needed doing, putting one step in front of the other, and I have been content with my days. I like my suburban life, my local idli joint, my weekly vegetable market run, and the work that we do in the office which sometimes doesn’t amount to anything. I have made peace with the fact that not everything adds up or has meaning, but I wonder, earnestly and honestly, if I have some grief around it. For, as I have understood, life has joy, tedium, and grief.
I ask myself: Am I sad that these days I don’t create anything new? Sometimes, the answer to that is — yes. At others, I think of it as hibernation. I’m sincerely not beating myself up anymore about the things I haven’t done creatively. I do recognise, however, the need for more solitude. As I told my ex-gym trainer last week, all I want is sometime in the day for myself, and with my thoughts. I don’t want to feel so crowded as soon as the day starts and choked up until the day ends. Some days, when I return home and park my car, I sit in it for a few mins to decompress. I want an hour a day to daily decompress. I want time for my thoughts to be my own, instead of borrowed or blue. And that’s pretty much it for now.
This morning, I thought that I should start an influencer page, where I record how I use my existing belongings to the fullest instead of buying new ones. I am training myself to reach for my own cupboards for things I may be attracted to online. For e.g., I could show myself reaching for my current bottle of moisturiser and using it as it should be. The entire ethos of the online identity would be to use what one has instead of buying the new thing on that fancy ad. Or I could show how I am finishing my current stash of espresso pouches that I bought a long time ago. Come, drink my existing coffee with me in my burgundy coffee mug, I would say. Or I would take you to the shoe cleaning store with me to bring back my newly cleaned, old white shoes, and then take a walk in my neighbourhood park. See my clean shoes and my 1435 steps along with it. I don’t know if it would be of much interest to anyone, but this is what I am doing now instead of falling into the trap that what I want is online.
Here I want to take a pit stop to say that I acknowledge it is very difficult to create an online identity, having to film every aspect of your lives, and then post on the insufferable algorithms to become relevant. It is not easy to be an influencer.
I’m simply not made to document myself with a camera, but writing is what I know how to do even before I knew that it would be made so easily accessible and then so swiftly irrelevant (news flash: no one reads anything anymore). The changing of focus points in my life have helped me reach this state of acceptance. De-centering my job has helped my mental health in a tremendous way. As someone who builds apps for a living, and these apps are a way of life in society, de-centering my job was difficult, but I am glad to have done it. Like all millennials, I also fell into the trap that if I achieve all the milestones I am expected to achieve, I will be happy in life. But, once again, like all millennials, I realised that the script had flipped, the rules of the game have changed. So, it turns out, that I can decide what I want to do with my time. In a way, it is freeing.
All the living I have done points me in a single direction — that we are here to take care of the Earth and take care of each other. Usually, this kind of realisation pushes people to do social work in their communities. They throw away the bough and get to the deep end, as it were. For long, I have also believed in giving back to people, in doing the good work. Now, I believe that all corporations need to stop what they’re doing and get to work to saving the planet and its people. They have the power, the scale, and the reach. That’s why, we simply do not need a 30-minute make-up delivery service. We need recycling of all possible make up containers, living wages, and excellent public healthcare for people who are in this line of work. It breaks my heart to see how many bottles of rose water a woman can go through, and yet almost none of it is recycled by the companies that sell them. This, I believe, is where we need to turn our efforts. We’re going to have to stop doing things the linear way, and start doing them so that it benefits everyone. I hope that in my lifetime I live to see corporations sit up and evolve beyond their greed and pay attention to the waste they’re generating – whether it be physical materials, waste of resources such as land and water, or waste of human intellect by celebrating mediocrity and promoting stupidity. I do know this is a tall order, but now I sit at the sidelines and observe the proceedings. I do not need to rage at the machine, for I know that the machine was made to exhaust me, and that my anger is sacred.
The way capitalism and social media has me squandering my time is what the old guard called a sin. Routinely, I think about death and when God will ask me what I did with my time on Earth, what did I do with my talents? The answer to this question should drive the (rest of) my whole life. Nowhere in any scripture of any faith, or any scientific book does it say that we were put on this Earth to work 9 to 5 and visit the mall on weekends. Imagine the ridiculousness of it all, if this is what the collective of our lives comes down to. Every story of this planet is made up of miracle and wonder, and yet, we humans live as if we have been imprisoned away from the miraculousness of living. We’ve been made to believe that this is the hamster wheel of being alive. This is what scares me now. I, who sets so much store by the machinations of reality, must be such an offense to what’s greater than me out there – be it God or the universe. It could hold me by my shoulders and ask me — did you not think you could be more than this, did you not believe in our signs?
Every time I see people in positions of power making choices that negatively affect the planet and its people (using AI at a large scale is that kind of a choice) I feel sad for them because they’re so narrow minded, and I had fallen into the same trap of myopia. Of thinking that this is the be-all and end-all of my life. That climbing a corporate ladder is what I am made to do. I was living like this and I wouldn’t be surprised if the God that made me looked at me and sighed for what God has given me, and what I had done with it. When I thought about it like this, de-centering my job was very easy. Taking care of my body and mind, of my family, eating well, and practising gratitude came easily to me. Of course, I struggle with all these things from time to time. There are mornings where I skip the gym, or when I eat processed food, or even evenings when I doomscroll away my hours (btw: doom scroll is called so for a reason). But on the whole, I don’t think of my life as a burden to me for longer than I need to. I try not to throw away the small things and reach for newer ones. I try to live within my means; occasionally extending my feet out of the blanket. This is how humans have lived their lives for centuries no matter what shiny tools they’ve had. The most important reconciliation of a human has always been with his own heart. And in the end, that’s what will matter.
Three weeks ago, when my uncle died, and we went to his funeral, I saw his dead body wrapped inside a plain white cloth the way small babies are wrapped. The entire room where his body was placed smelled of camphor leaves and his sons were inconsolable. It was after many years that I had seen a lifeless human, and was reminded what is to become of us in the end. I thought about his daughter, my cousin, who has Down’s Syndrome and she didn’t register what death meant, and how the family would have to explain it to her. It broke my heart, until time passed, and then, a little girl in my society, of only 10 years old passed away last week, and grief was all around the neighbourhood. I didn’t go to her funeral because I was a coward and I didn’t have it in me to see the lifeless body of a young girl and witness the grief of her parents. A few evenings after that, I wrote in a letter to a friend how, despite the horrors of life, the days seem to carry on. It is the damnedest thing in the world, but also true.
The news cycle rinses and repeats grief for us to see on our screens every day, and while I want to be well-informed, I also know that being made to witness so much sadness on an every day basis is a form of oppression. As humans, we want to help people, it is a natural instinct. Being unable to do that for the people going through all kinds of calamities makes us feel inept, helpless and freezes our nervous systems from doing what we can for those near us. Even in our small circles, we can and do show up for people, and that’s enough. After two years of seeing the people in Gaza being murdered and bombed, I saw how my entire body would feel frozen in shock, and it made me want to do something for them, but what could I do? Boycotting brands that support this genocide has reclaimed my sense of being human because it makes me feel every day that I am doing something for them. Similarly, the endless ways in which grief unfolds on our screens, if we do not have a place to channel it, we might feel less human, and therein lies our real resistance.
I know that after all these realisations, my life cannot look the same and in some perceivable form it needs to change. But my journey is inwards and not outwards. I will not be buying into the trope of throwing my life aboard and moving to Bali (although I want to visit Bali). The small things I do for myself, for my mental health, and my own interiority are of importance to me now. I’ve had such a beautiful life, wondrous literature has graced the hallways that I have passed through, and my people have shown me what it means to be generous, creative, and fastidious through pain. This is how it has always been for people who have gone before us, they have had to live life within them and acknowledge the slow passage of time on their bodies and minds. Life is full of joy, tedium, and grief.
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