Hello, Dear Existential Crisis

Once upon a time when I was young, I took pride in my inability to cope up with the QLC that I knew I was going through. I just did not know how to live through it. There were confusing thoughts and emotions. So much so that I even boasted about it in parties.

But thankfully this was way back in 2009 when it was still in vogue and people would ask what was QLC and you'd get 15 minutes seconds of fame. But then like any trend wave, everyone I know seems to be riding onto it now and everyone is seemingly clambering through it.

Like a real trend setter and "early adopter" I thus needed to move on. And thus, now I have a new muse. My suffering from Existential Crisis.

Every morning before I set out to seize the day (hello Mr. Cliche), I lie in bed and try to focus my old eyes onto the ceiling and think about purpose of life and the reason why I am here. Despite concentration that can put a yogi to shame, I cant seem to find the reason, purpose or meaning of life. Not all life mind you, but my life. Saurabh Garg's life. Everyone else around me seems to have figured out things. Some people are happy playing the cog in a giant wheel, some are happy in the rat race, some are content with being just a number in large payrolls at giant corporations. Hell, I am not even a number. But then I cant think for the entire day, the AC bill would be huge that way. So I am forced to move out from my bed and find answers to my perennial  problem.

And like any other thinking human, I am trying to drive the blues away by indulging into various experiments (and projects). Thankfully, I am so much of a scatter brain with attention span of few nano-seconds, I have been able to hop on to multiple projects easily. While I continue to explore more, the notable experiments have been

• re-reading English, August (everytime I read it, it gives me a new perspective on life, so much so that I believe that it must be made a mandatory reading for anyone older than 18)
• discovery of interesting music (now a days my favorite song is this song called Harvest Moon by Neil Young, here is a cover by Pearl Jam)
• watching interesting films (amongst all the films I saw, notable is Eat Pray Love. Do watch it. It can change your life. It may change mine as well. Time shall tell. It did give me my current favorite song)
• learning to write code (I started with Python, moved onto PHP and now enjoying working with CSS. I use Coursera and CodeAcademy. These tools are amazing. Do try them out. And I think I would end up as a front end guy rather than complex behind the scene code)
• writing (the blog and Nidhi Kapoor Story) 
• playing lots and lots of tourneys of online poker (for play money of course and losing miserably at all those)
• toying with multiple business ideas (been toying since I was 10 and yet havent been able to close on any)
• watching a lot of TED talks for inspiration (but inspiration for what?)
• and finally evaluating myself on the goals that I had set for myself when 2013 began (there are more on my Evernote and at the half way mark, I seem to be failing on every count).

Of these I am very kicked about the code bit. If you know me, you would know about Kunal (linkedIn) and my exploits with C when we were in college. And there is no reason why I cant get good at code again. Just that I am on the wrong side of age and common sense says that I need to work on things that I can delegate, rather than getting involved into. But then I know I am scatterbrain and I would move on. Lets when the fatigue sets in.

And most disappointed about my mid year review and my inability to stick to medium term goals (6 mo). Thankfully there is time and I can still take corrective actions. 

On an unrelated note, since I have been spending a lot of time on TED, here is a screenshot of a slide from this TED talk on flow.

This slide is apt here because this slide demonstrates the reason of my existential issues. I think my problem is that I am in the Apathy and Boredom zone of the chart. To be able to find meaning and other such things, I need to move right and up. Ideally I would want to reach the Flow zone but even a shift to Anxiety would do. The question that I cant seem to find an answer to, is how do I move to the Flow bit.

Any clues?