Dear Mr. Teenage Dirtbag,

Due to some unknown reason, I actually sat down and decided to read through your post. Maybe I wanted to feel fuller and happier and more content in having read even a wee little bit more. Maybe I was feeling sad, and was itching to do anything, anything, to get out of that zone. Or most probably, I was just plain bored, and took up the great task of reading your post.

And you’ve had the most profound effect.

Your interpretation of what’s around you, your diagnosis of the problems you feel, your need to still exist does indeed fascinate me. First, I would like to understand your true argument. Then I’ll try and make peace with it.

1. You prove a point that we human beings always enter this world of pity and pain, since we cry the moment we’re born. Medically, there are some answers. Try here or even here. Trying to dumb things down, its essentially one of the most important ways a baby communicates to others. The mind is stimulated with new sights, sounds, senses never received before. Controlling one’s reaction is slightly more difficult than just receiving stimuli.

My point: Whether they were born in hell, in a dungeon, or fluffy white clouds in heaven, babies would cry too.

2. You also talk of peer pressure, competition, and parent’s expectations. True, you cant deny it, but thats pretty much how nature and evolution planned it out. An interesting read, out here. Anyways, it boils down to this – you should be happy that the human race has developed socially to actually have pity on the lower-rung (which should have died). You should also be happy that by enforcing a systematic plan of learning over generations and generations, we are building a stronger and smarter breed of humans. Even if, originally, you were not really cut out to survive more than 5 years of your life.

My point: The drop-rate/dead-rate amongst humans is significantly lower as compared to other animals. We’ve evolved.

3. You also talk of failure as the main reason for man’s “unhappiness”. You reasoned that failure arises from the anomaly that only one man wins a race amongst 10. True, but the remaining 9 generally go and win other races. Life doesn’t define only one end to win. Life doesn’t specify only one job description that can be truly attributed to a “winner.” It’s full of parallel opportunities, of parallel expression and of parallel sensation. Many people have different opinions over different goals in life. You should too.

My point: Laugh at Wall Street all you want, investment banking is THE worst job as of now!

To summarize, I feel that you need a little bit of Software Engineering in your life. By this I mean-

1. Dont club everything and anything and call it “Life.” Break it down to smaller, and easily handlable modules.
2. Follow a simple waterfall cycle for each of these modules – feasibility study, design, code, test, and finally maintain. [no seriously im not kidding]
3. Write a book about it! And call yourself Rajib Mall.

Once again, I would like to thank you very much, for giving me a great stimuli that I just itched me to respond!

Regards,

Me.