The Quiet Drift

So, here we are back again, quite a long time, huh? Assuming my audience to be mostly in their 20s, let's talk about something we all experience but never talk about, something so crucial, yet easy to overlook. Let's start this blog with a little quiz. What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you read this title? “The Quiet Drift” can be interpreted in many different ways, but mainly it speaks about life's apathy. While growing up, we all had this thought once: how crazy would it be to start earning money and buy all the many things I like and I ever wanted to have? The excitement to earn enough money to afford all the childish needs was too huge to contain within ourselves, and here we are, at present, able to afford all the foolish things we needed (FYI, I still go crazy for Hot Wheels), but the excitement, for some reason, has left.

The life moments, mostly related to things you want to have, for example, your first car, your first job, or maybe just a gaming console you always wanted, sound really exciting at first, and you work really hard to achieve them. The excitement of these very things vanishes once we actually own them. I still remember the day I booked my first bike. Before booking, when I was constantly roaming from one showroom to another in search of my “dream bike,” I had this real euphoria in my head where I had imagined all the scenarios of me riding my bike and traveling places and was sure that the day I’d have my bike delivered, I would be overjoyed, but on the day of delivery, everything felt hollow; the extent of excitement I imagined was not even remotely close to what I was feeling. All that excitement was missing. But why was that? It was my first bike, my first milestone, my first ever big purchase, so why was that excitement missing? I’m sure you all have experienced something similar. We all plan things to buy; we all have something we want to check on our bucket list, but many times, the excitement we imagined for that is missing. This whole phenomenon of lack of excitement is termed as the quiet drift. But why does this happen?

I’m sure everyone has their own theory of why this happens; the most common one is, “This is called growing up, maturing, and getting over materialistic things.” Maybe this is actually one of the reasons, or maybe it isn't? I have had this thought for a very long time now, and thinking about it over and over has brought me to one conclusion: growing up is certainly not the reason for this. 

In my attempt to figure out why this is happening, I tried analyzing this path of going from exhilaration to no excitement at all, and even after giving it many thoughts, I couldn't find anything that might have changed during this journey. I always had this thought process that how can anything change in between the process? I mean the one thing you wished for and worked so hard for—how can you not be excited for that? It was mind-boggling, and I had almost given up, thinking that maybe it is indeed a side effect of growing up, or maybe it’s just what happens eventually with everyone, but then I realized something that I had overlooked every time. Something so simple, but we never acknowledged. Have you guessed it? I’m confident you would not have. To your amazement, it is just a simple fact that at the end of the day, it’s not the thing you have for yourself, but the people around you who cheer for your achievement, who witness you grow and work, and are there at the time you actually own that. In our childhood, even getting a 150-rupee Parker pen from your friend would make you absolutely excited because we had our parents, who would be so happy for us, and our friends, who would go absolutely crazy just because you got a new pen. In simpler terms, it’s not the things that make us happy; it’s being surrounded by people who are there for you to celebrate your precious moment. Today, we are independent, able to afford everything we needed in our childhood, but in this race of chasing our dreams and earning money, we have somehow drifted far away from our friends and family, or maybe it’s just one of the side effects of social media, where people are continuously trying to prove that they are living a better life, and thus ending up in an uncalled race of who has achieved more. This has made everyone’s achievement shallow in their own mind, and therefore losing its joy.

The irony of writing this article is that while I'm trying my best to find answers to why we experience this quiet drift, I’ve slowly started to drift away from the thought itself, along with losing the excitement with which I began. But, according to the laws of the Many-Worlds Interpretation, with every action you take and every decision you make, the universe splits into many versions, each representing a different possible outcome. I hope that in one of those universes, there exists a reality where people don’t experience this quiet drift, and I never needed to write about it in the first place.