4 Dec
2011
This is my cynical post for the weekend.
Someone pointed out to me yesterday (in jest) that European kids grow up fast as they exhaust all their partying desires by the time they reach adulthood. Then, life's totally different when they get to the 20s and above.
I just thought about it. It makes perfect sense. This is THE reason for the state of global affairs at present.
Allow me to extrapolate the European kids curve to also touch the rest of the Western world (pun intended) and you see where I am slowly treading towards! You see, growing up in India, our image of the kids in Europe and America was that they partied hard and basically had fun all the time. Then, when we arrive in the US for higher studies we see that we weren't wrong at all! All those college students with their impression that university is basically a place to get drunk, have fun, and 'mingle'. The rich-parent-kids were slightly better off than the rest in the terms that they generally chose more lucrative majors (like business, finance, etc.) and used their party time to also include early-age network building, aka the fraternity/sorority ecosystem in the US university space.
These kids had parents who grew up in a similar fashion. The thing now is that when the parents actually stepped out of the cocoon, they realized that the world is a competitive place. You have to not just be good, but considerably better than the rest to succeed. So, they worked hard...harder than they ever had. All that fun and partying was now converting into real hard work, long workdays, and weekends full of business trips. It's brutal.
Allow me to explain further - a lot of these parents started looking at shortcuts to success. Why be better when you could cheat the system? Also allow me to state that by cheating the system, I am not really talking about large scale corruption prevalent in most countries. This is about someone redefining finance as the redistribution of wealth from one living entity to another. Get a job in one of these finance companies and then get wealthy by finding loopholes in the system. This way you don't have to be better - you just work 'hard'. This also meant that passion suddenly had no place in the system. You just went after the money. Those who didn't, had to contend with ever increasing income disparity.
Since they had never worked very hard growing up, these shortcuts were enticing, to say the least. The side effect was that the system slowly got crowded with people who were just good at networking and counting money. And, we can actually see this. Sure, there's a lot of technology companies and growth and what not, but all this is not merely driven by banking money, but it's almost akin to indentured servitude. You believe you're free, but you aren't. And, as my brother-in-law says, it takes more than a generation for this wealth to fully redistribute, leaving us with the status quo in, at least, our lifetimes.
Contrast this with how rest of the world grows up - we see our parents lead considerably humble and balanced lives. The message is always that you work hard NOW to make your future better TOMORROW. We are forced to work hard in our early years, to recognize our true calling (although more often than not, this just happened to me 'money' fields like engineering or medicine), and then build life long careers in that field. The 'real world' is very often an easier place to live in than the academic world. If you don't believe me, just look at the number of Indian kids who end their lives due to stress even before they enter the real world.
Surely, with access to easy money everywhere, all this is changing and trending towards the status in the Western world. For good or for bad, I'll let time tell.
