This article made me reflect on something that’s only remained in the corner of my mind.
The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.
They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they’ve identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But time and time and time again, the student left in America has squarely faced and expressed truths our politicians and all the eminent and eloquent voices of moderation in the press, in all of their supposed wisdom and good sense, have been unable or unwilling to see. Straining against an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth, it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it.
There’s a certain kind of purpose that used to come from following causes that I liked and contributing to fighting for those causes in my own little ways.
Not the “fight clunky enterprise software” kind of cause, but more the “what is wrong in the world for people and how can things be made better for them?” kind of cause. I remember going to Pride marches, protests against certain laws in India and so many more things. The younger version of me found charity: water and other organizations generally doing good things inspirational.
Not that I was a big time protestor or activist or anything – but reading, having conversations with others, writing about people and organizations rebelling to turn the world into a more equal place made me feel so much more connected to the world in general.
I’m sure it played out this way for many others, too. I remember friends who worked for Teach for India to pay it forward. I remember Facebook groups that mobilized people towards things that were truly meaningful.
As we get older though, the number of times we go beyond our limited circles to play a role in things that matter to the world becomes extremely limited. Our time is taken over by life, work and for many folks – their kids.
Even for the folks who have the time to afford, a growing lack of motivation is a bigger cause in making us stray from things that truly matter. This lack of motivation stems from a good number of reasons.
As younger people, many of us overestimated how much our own choices and acts influence the world. Adulting has made us realize that the sheer amount of effort required to change something in the world is just too much, unless you already have a lot of power. This lowers our drive to fight for things beyond our immediate circle.
As we grow older, more of us also fully accept that life is unfair, getting more in terms with the reality of how our own lives played out. Therefore, we end up having lesser anger to fuel a desire to change things for good, for ourselves and others.
The presence of pain in our lives also serves a regular reminder about other people’s pains. As adults, we create bubbles and routines surrounding ourselves with comforts. In this world, it becomes a lot more easy to shrug off problems that we don’t experience first hand. Working at a coffee shop at 11 am or discussing ideas feels good, over travelling 30 minutes to participate in a protest which won’t really lead to immediate and tangible outcomes.
Tell me if I didn’t make sense.
Shankar is thinking 