When I was a teenager, all adults would tell me how important it was for me to do well in my studies and get into a good college. I was a good student so I was expected to “achieve my full potential” by getting a good job (engineer or doctor). After that it was expected of me to get married to a “good girl” and raise kids and send them to good schools and help them realize their full potential.

They said, “You’ll have the rest of your life to enjoy, but right now you need to work hard and set your life up.“

This puts a lot of pressure on a young person. Of course, back then, I didn’t think of it as pressure. I never felt that I was under pressure. Mostly because my personality was such that I wasn’t too eager to please everyone. I wanted to do things in my own way.

But looking back at it now, I was under tremendous pressure. I just didn’t realize it because it had been there all my life. Like a horseshoe crab who doesn’t feel the pressure of the entire ocean above him.

I did end up becoming an engineer, but in an act of small rebellion, I chose marine engineering, instead of computer science, which everyone wanted me to choose. Then I rebelled further. After 4 years of sailing, I quit my high paying job to pursue my passion of writing. I didn’t know this, but I was putting a lot of pressure on myself, even more so than society had put on me.

My family was mostly supportive. At least, they were trying their best to be supportive. But unknowingly, they continued with the pressures in indirect ways. Birthdays became very stressful for me because all the relatives would call and ask me how old I was and then jokingly inquire when I was getting married. Even some of my friends would tease me about it.

Most of the people who said these things were not particularly happy in their own marriages. So I don’t understand why almost everyone feels the need to pressure others into getting married. Maybe it’s just one of those things that you say when you don’t have anything else to say. A kind of small talk. Ask about the weather, ask what’s new, and if they are unmarried, ask when they’re getting married.

After I quit sailing, I put a lot of pressure on myself to become a successful author. I had dared to quit my job and pursue my passion and now it was time to work super hard and achieve success. I had to start working as a freelance ghostwriter to support myself but that meant I had even less time to write my own novels. When I couldn’t work hard, I got depressed.

What is wrong with me, I would think, that I can’t work hard even when I am doing what I love?

This started my journey into depression which eventually ended with me becoming a philosopher and developing my current philosophy. But when I was depressed, I stopped working as a freelancer and stopped writing my own novels as well. I was literally crushing myself into the ground with all the pressure I was putting on myself. The indirect, unintentional pressure from others also continued.

Two incidents really broke my heart. One was when my mother asked me if I wanted my parents to open a shop for me or they could buy me a taxi so I could become a taxi driver. The other was when my best friend was also pressuring me to get a job and I asked her if I should become a food delivery driver and she said yes. These incidents broke my heart not because of the kind of jobs they wanted me to get, but because they didn’t understand what was wrong with me.

Yes, I could have taken up any of these jobs or applied for a better paying job or even gone back to sailing. But I knew that this was not going to solve my problem at all. I would remain depressed. The only thing that would change would be the outward appearance.

If I had a job and I was earning money, others would not think of me as such a big loser. I would be a functioning depressive, like so many others in our times. I would use the same coping mechanisms of alcohol, cigarettes, entertainment, food, shopping and maybe even drugs. What broke my heart was that the people I loved the most wanted me to appear functional, but seemed to not care if the actual reason for my depression ever got resolved.

I’m not blaming them though. In their defense, they were just suggesting what made the most sense to them. Maybe they thought that if I re-entered society, I would get busy, I would meet people at my job, maybe I would even get married and have kids. And then you’re fully locked into the illusory maya of the human world. You can be depressed from within but you keep up pretenses and isn’t that what everyone else is doing?

These are some of the ways in which society, our loved ones, and we ourselves put immense pressure on ourselves to live a certain way. No wonder that most adults take very shallow breaths most of the time. This imaginary pressure can have the same effect as physical pressure on our body.

The cure lies in nihilism.

All this pressure is fake. It’s not real. We make it up. None of it matters, in the bigger picture. We can do our best and succeed. We can do our best and fail. We can do our least and fail. We can give up trying. It doesn’t matter what we choose because in the end we will all die and it will have been all for nothing.

You might object and say, it matters how you raise your kids and what kind of life you leave for them. But you can’t control any of that.

How many rich people have bratty kids? You might think, well the point is to raise a good human being, but you can’t control that either. There is no perfect way to parent.

If you apply all your time and energy into being the perfect parent and your child never feels angry or frustrated at you; if you preempt all of their needs so they never have to struggle; then you’re probably going to end up raising a monster who’s never been told ‘no’ and has no idea how to overcome disappointments and failures.

Sometimes children of abusive parents can go on to achieve a lot and children of harmless parents can turn out to be psychopaths. There are too many variables involved to have any kind of control over how your kids turn out.

You might think that leaving a legacy is what matters. But no legacy can last forever. Eventually everyone will be forgotten, or misremembered. Either way it doesn’t matter to you after you’re dead.

To be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to leave a legacy or you shouldn’t bother with trying to raise good kids or leave them with a good life. What I’m saying is that it’s not worth putting so much pressure on yourself. Nothing is worth it.

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Photo by Shunya Koide on Unsplash