Did I Say Adulthood Sucks?

Last evening I came across this statement ‘To be an adult is to be alone’! Wasn’t that wonderful? Some sharp edge to this reality of adulthood and loneliness! This quote set my thought process in an overdrive mode. My whole life flashed in front of my eyes and I was not at all amused at discovering the sad truth. When we are kids, the whole world seems a playground to us. There is never hesitancy in making new friends, saying what we want and expressing our innermost desires. As we step onto doors of adulthood the rules of the game change drastically.

To put across my point I will give you an example. I spent my childhood shuffling across different towns. In hindsight, that helped me a lot in my future years because I never felt any issues in moving to a new city, leaving the old one and just carrying the wonderful memories. There were few cases when my neighbor or some other guy in school approached me for playing cricket or badminton or just saying ‘mujhse dosti karoge’! this happened with me so many times. Now circa, 2009! How many times I will find new people doing this thing to me or even me approaching a stranger and just saying ‘can we be friends?’ that is sure to cause some weird glance and not-so-friendly reactions. The innocence and naturality factor takes a backseat and instead, a mask starts occupying your entire persona.

I will list few reasons of why adulthood sucks big time.

• Kids are cute, no? Well, almost always! My experience tells me senior persons coming to me and saying he is so cute, no matter whether I really looked so or not! While you are an adult you got to have something real big to compensate for your lack of cute element. You must have money or successful (professionally or materialistically). God forbid, if you are neither cute not successful! I will reserve my comment in such cases.
• When you are a kid you can always hate girls whereas in adulthood…Period!  
• Remember saying some silly and stupid comments in your childhood? And how people around you used to react? Aah, he is so cute or ‘dil ka kitna saaf bacha hai’! but don’t even think of making same mistakes once you are past the stage of puberty. Afterwards, whatever you will say will be scrutinized properly. To your utter dismay you will find you no longer enjoy any margin for such stupidity. Your off-the-cuff remarks will be emphatically noticed and you will be reminded of that in your future endeavors!
• When you are a kid, you have this free license of approaching new people and make friends for life. But you are not supposed to have same approach during the later stages of your life. Then it’s more about, power equation or who blinks first. You will also have to make sure that you don’t appear too desperate. People will also try to smell if there is there some sort of ulterior motives behind your initiative?
• When you are a kid, your truth-speaking ability will be really appreciated. You will be lauded as a future of our country and such similar sobriquets. But do the same after 18 and well, what a fool!
• When you are a kid, its normal to cheat once a while in games. But never really in real life. But in adulthood, you better play by the rules of the world and be prepared for games of ‘different’ kind.
• As a child, you are entitled to ask many stupid questions as you can. No one will ever shout at you with exclamation marks such as, what? You don’t know? Are you nuts? Try doing same now and well, did I find you ripped? Hell, yeah! You may also become the primary menu for our dinner party.
• Remember finding you disliking people and even admitting it? You must have done several times. It’s my sincere suggestion to make this distinction line between like and dislike totally blurred. If you don’t I might be prompted to say, ‘he is so childish!’
• When you are a child you can always go back to your pop and mom crying but don’t even think of doing this now. Why? Well, come on, you must be man/woman enough!
• Finally, ‘stress’ might be a alien concept for you in the childhood. Things have changed now. Now, ‘relaxation’ is more alien. 

Image Courtesy toonlet.com