The burnt wings of Icarus

 There are a lot of thoughts in my head. Thoughts, not cohesive enough to form an idea, but voluminous enough for me to not co-exist with them. Moving in and out of the rays of focus, as Brownian motion of dust when the sunlight creeps through the corners of the blinds. 

Maybe it's summertime sadness, maybe it's the lack of a break from life. Our world has become stressful enough to get on anyone's nerves. Perhaps, it is the sign of the times. As middle age fast approaches and youth fades away, the burden of life itself gets heavier. 

I remember reading a poem in school, which compared a human's life journey to that of the river water, starting from the mountains, descending rapidly and with vigour down the hills, like a young bull, only to calm down in its middle life and submit itself to the sea eventually, akin to death. 

Alexander may have wept, for no more lands were left to conquer. There's a silent cry within every millennial, as there are no more downward slopes in sight. The ones in denial, are digging holes in the flat ground, only to momentarily feel the rush of falling. Others are too busy putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head. 

There are some, for whom, acceptance and moving on isn't a problem. However, in present times, the lines between being realistic, and being depressed and in need of therapy, have blurred too much. We live in a world where everyone seems to be living 2 lives - one in the physical world and the other in the digital world. Two lives, entirely different from one another. One, where troubles can't be turned off in Airplane mode. The other where lying, to a certain extent, has no consequences. It can get hard to reconcile them after a while. It begins to feel like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in a Scorcese movie, "The Departed". 

Well, until we finally meet the sea, all of us find our paths through land. Weaving slowly through the flatlands, in our own different ways, for better or for worse. Generations before us did the same I guess, and generations ahead will, in due course, face the same existential dread. The ones before us had priests/other religious figures to talk to, and my generation has therapists. The ones ahead might have an AI bot listen to them. 

Millenials, like with everything else, will be the middle generation. The generation that saw the wings begin to burn, as the soul of Icarus, present in our human society begins to soar too close to the sun. As for me, I'd rather burn my wings a 1000 times than sit on the flatlands. In Samuel Beckett's words, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."