Western Self-Help Was Not Written for Indians

I was watching this video called Am I cursed to be alone forever?, and the creator was telling his personal story. And something came to mind, and this is it: I believe all this productivity, self-help, "live life to the fullest" stuff is really a Western concept. And all, or most, of the content we consume is Western content. Top it off with social media, where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, and it truly feels like we are either falling behind or just so unfortunate that we would never be able to live the life we see on our screens.

But let's get into specifics to understand. Take something like: "I am always alone in my room." Okay, so what's the solution? "Well, you should put active effort into going out and living your life, going to these so-called 'Third Places' where you can meet new, like-minded people." The advice is sound, and it surely makes sense. Previously, people used to go to libraries, pubs, and events, that's how they met people. So one might think, well, what's wrong here?

Well, I live in India, and I work for my corporate overlords, who are based in the West, by the way, who make me work late. So I am working 12–14 hours, and by the end of it, it's already dinner time, I am tired, and I go to sleep. Where is the "living" here? When am I supposed to go hang out at these so-called Third Places?

Again, "If you are tired of the corporate grind, work on a side hustle, see if it scales, and then leave the job." Sound advice. But again, I am working on my job till I sleep. When am I supposed to work on a side hustle?

Well, now one might say, "You have weekends." But now I am expected to manage my household chores, work on my side hustle, work on my social life, and hey, don't forget, "You should take a good rest, do some R&R on the weekends so you're fresh on Monday." But I am so tired from 70, 80, 90 hours of work on weekdays that I now have no energy left for any of these things. So what do I do? Well, I rest, I watch Netflix, and I build up anxiety on Sunday evening, only to go and repeat everything starting Monday.

Why is this? Well, we are made slaves by the corporates in India, designed not to have a "life," to constantly lock into the job. Why? Because they know you are desperate for this job. You've got bills to pay, you've got EMIs to pay for that house you just bought, the fancy SUV you just got, and the old parents you are taking care of. So the question for them becomes, how much can I squeeze this person, for how long, and how cheaply? They will extract everything from you till you become numb, till you become desensitized, till you stop resisting and asking questions, till the eventual reality hits you, and you give up on life entirely. And then what? Well, fuck you, if you are a dead soul, you get fired, and there are 3,000 or 4,000 more souls and lives I can ruin and suck the juice out of. It has truly become a Master–Slave society, and we are all the slaves in this. And rising up to that nobility almost feels impossible. And I have been seeing this, the whites, as a consequence of their imperialism, have looted so much and sucked so much like vampires that they don't even need to send their armies anymore. They built their wealth on our backs centuries ago, and now we line up at LinkedIn to work for their companies, billing them in dollars they originally accumulated by extracting from us. Is the Indian corporate squeezing me? It is the middleman. It takes the dollar contract, pays me in rupees, and pockets the spread. The wealth still flows up. The hierarchy did not end in 1947; it just got rebranded as "global services." You may not realize it, but they have already become the Masters, and we are competing with each other to serve them more cheaply.

So you might ask, even if all this is true, what's the solution? Well, philosophically, as Nietzsche says, we need to strive to become Nobility. And by that I mean what he meant, not aristocrats, not the rich, but people who create their own values instead of inheriting them from their parents, their caste, their society, their bosses. Free spirits, people who refuse the herd morality that tells them what a "good life" is supposed to look like, and decide for themselves. But then how can we do it?

Well, this is just my theory, I have not yet applied it, but to become truly independent, and I am totally talking in the Indian sense here, first: question everything. Live in that discomfort. Suffer. And analyze, are you living to your authentic self? The answer is most likely no. So then we need to live unusually. And what I mean is, we need to leave behind all the morals and societal expectations, and in a sense, do the opposite of what people tell you. They say work in IT, fuck it, I say go work as a barista in a cafe. Now, in no way am I saying a barista is a lower job, but there is a sense in India that it is. There's a shame associated with it if you are in the middle or upper class of society. Go work on a bee farm. Go work as a shepherd. Go work on marine coral conservation. They say live with family, go stay alone. Go for that inter-caste, inter-religion marriage. Go to Bali and work in a bar. You see, somewhere along the way, we and our society have put on these invisible shackles. And we are too fearful of throwing them off, because there is shame, embarrassment, and disownment associated with it. There is a lot of hurt you will cause to others. But really, then the answer would no longer be "no" to living authentically.

But then, let's ground this even more. What about those bills, EMIs, the house and the cars? Well, the question is, do you actually need those? Like, really. How much can you minimize, to save up that money and set yourself free of those shackles that have been holding you back, those responsibilities that have been holding you back? And how fast can you unfuck yourself?

And here is the part I have to be honest about. I know how this sounds, and before you close the tab, let me get there before you do. I am writing this from inside the trap, not from a beach in Goa. I do not have the answer. I have a question. And I notice the irony too, because the escape route I just described, quit the job, minimize, go work at a cafe, go to Bali, is structurally pretty close to the same Tim Ferriss lifestyle-design content I started this post by criticizing. So maybe the real problem isn't that Western self-help is wrong. Maybe the problem is that even its escape routes are gated by the same privilege its original advice assumes. A barista in Bangalore makes 15-20k a month, roughly what a single dinner costs in the Western cities where these productivity gurus film their videos. Can you actually live on that with your EMIs, your parents, your sister's wedding next year, and the medical insurance for the family? Probably not. So what we are really fighting is not just the corporate, but the entire web of obligations that makes the corporate the only viable answer. And cutting that web is the hardest part, and the part nobody, including me, has a clean solution for.

And to be honest, even I don't know what an Indian-focused productivity or self-help approach might look like. I just know it cannot look like this: the Dolomites, Sicily, a year of backpacking through Europe, a beach in Bali. These are not aspirations; these are advertisements. Someone else's life, sold to us as the only life worth wanting. And we consume it for hours every day on social media, getting more anxious, more depressed, more convinced our own life is the wrong one, while the actual life in front of us, the parents who need us, the cousins, the city we are from, the language we think in, just sits there as a problem to be escaped instead of a place to be lived. We are so caught up in our corporates, in our responsibilities, especially the emotional responsibilities, that we have gone numb to our own challenges, living the same life on repeat, missing out on the crucial days of our lives.

And maybe that is the only question worth asking, not how do I escape, but how do I live here, in this body, in this country, in this family, in this 14-hour day, without going numb. I don't have the answer. But I am pretty sure nobody on YouTube does either.