Indian Millennials: The Seekers
This article was written in 2018
Indian millennials are newly bitten by the #wanderlust bug. It started with their phone screens and has now spread to their phone covers, T-shirts, notebooks, keychains and other kitsch stuff. Geography teachers from back in the day would kill to garner such popularity for world maps.
Travel trends in India point towards the desire for escape, especially from jobs, that overworked millennials are thirstily seeking. Bollywood and Instagram obviously add to the drama by creating delicious portraits of the traveller that everyone wants to devour and also become.
The rise in travel aspirations tells an interesting story, if one looks beyond the facade of Instagram: it begins with a latent desire for exploration, which comes from years of being moulded into templates. The average middle class millennial grew up believing in the myth that formal education is the gateway to some kind of heaven, where you will be sorted because you have scored well in your exams and made your parents proud. But formal education is, above everything, formulaic and competitive. It requires you to chase one benchmark after another, all in the hope of an outcome to show for it.
Exploration is the opposite of this process. There are no benchmarks and no expectation of a lucrative outcome. It is liberating in ways that the average millennial has only experienced while pulling off a late night stint right under her parents’ nose. It gives room for making mistakes and discovering more about oneself in the process. It is a lesson in life, one that most formal education omits.
Millennials experience the desire to explore most emphatically when they encounter real adulthood. Part of their coming of age is lessons learnt in the school of life, aka experiences, to understand their own selves and find out if who they are is who they want(ed) to be. Very often, the two versions of the self are very far apart. And then begins the search. It starts with a change in career paths — the most legitimate expression of self — and slowly leads to an investigation of self expression ranging from the most public (such as fashion) to the most private (such as sexual orientation, religion).
Given that the possibility of who they can be is limitless in the age of self- expression, this phase of discovery becomes a perpetual search for the best self — one that has purpose, talent and an image to show the world. It’s meant to be liberating, as this is the time when the millennials leave the safety net, often migrating from their home town to work or study and eventually starting a different life.
To add to the limitlessness, there is no hurry to “settle down”, as is evident in the practice of delaying marriage and kids. The millennials only chase benchmarks of their own making, so none of the older milestones (read: ghar, gaadi, bangla) are high on the priority list. What’s up there instead, is a set of markers of personal success. Success could be creating a YouTube channel, gathering a million followers, finding a job in one’s dream company, travelling to three countries in a year and so on. It’s not a list of things that make one successful, it’s experiences and purpose that really determine one’s worth.
A remarkable shift in the nature of responsibility emerges here. With a plethora of avenues to explore, the onus is on the millennials to make something of it. Once they have rejected the traditional norms of success, they can no longer blame the system, only themselves. Then, their search for self and purpose also becomes their primary responsibility. They are, most of all, answerable to themselves and their peers who are exposed to the same opportunities. They end up competing for purpose — a person who has found her purpose is essentially out of the race, even if temporarily (purpose can change).
For this search of purpose, travelling has become a sort of gateway. It’s not that every other millennial is travelling to find themselves, it’s more like most millennials are trying to push the boundaries of who they can be, and travelling has become the most accessible (and glamorous) way of exploring one’s possibilities. Not all of them come back transformed from their travels, but all of them get to feel lost, experience uninterrupted freedom and the utter possibility of doing/being anything under the sun.
The real journey of the seekers is far more chaotic and uncertain. They have new benchmarks, but those tend to be highly subjective and circumstantial — many a times vulnerable to factors beyond their control. In the absence of solid traditional benchmarks, there is a gaping divide between expectation and reality — millennials reach for the stars when they start out, expecting to be the best version of themselves, but on the way they often have to grapple with the responsibility and toil involved in creating and adhering to their own benchmarks.
The new pillars of a successful identity roughly involve financial independence (the means is not as important), a purpose-fulfilling mechanism (be it a job or a side hustle) and experiences one can tell stories about. These benchmarks are inviting but tall nonetheless, and most of all they involve the creation and expression of individual agency with self assurance as well as patience. Those who reach these benchmarks get to live the story that others like to tell, through accessible experiences like travelling.
But if every journey of personal success is unique and every benchmark sacrosanct, can the search really end? Traditional templates exist to provide a sense of completion, which is crucial feedback for the effort one puts in. In contrast, undefined, unconventional paths require newer sources of feedback and validation — often located in the ever transient digital world. Yet even in straying from templates, one cannot deny the need to belong and be accepted in society at large. While millennials venture into the unknown, they keep a tight grip on the known, often fulfilling the mandatories (like a job worthy education) before really beginning to explore. The mandatories act as anchors that guide them along whatever path they choose.
Indian millennials are a generation of seekers venturing into the unexplored waters of self actualisation. Their motivations are founded in unprecedented exposure to the world of possibilities, and their search for meaning and purpose is a process of realising the potential they have inherited or built using the tools available to them. It is a potentially endless process, as there can only be more tools to play with in the future, but in limitlessness there is a heavy price to pay — of not belonging anywhere. In creating a unique identity lies fulfilment, but it is in being accepted for who you really are that true meaning is found.
