Because, idiots!

Everywhere on Facebook!

I have a problem. Fine – I have about a gazillion problems. But right now I am going to talk about just one and that is the image I have put up here.

I fall in the classic twenties age-group where life is moving ahead at the rate of ten “wheeeeeees” per second. That can roughly translate into getting married, moving overseas for a jazzy job and going on exotic holidays. Oh and clicking 19345967 photographs of the said holidays! (I am up for mine next month – more on that later). So there are a lot of “whees” going around or at least that’s what Facebook likes to tell me. They are paired with those Buzzfeed/HuffPost/Blah blah articles of “579380 things to do before you settle down” and “843823 rare places to see before you turn 30”.

The line was crossed when this image started trending. It is one thing to show-off your lovely travel and trotting lifestyle with edited photographs and unrelated captions, but it turns insulting when you put this up. You just made having babies and giving birth to new life into a trivial activity! You just made a couple who are learning the ropes of parenthood into a pair of lifeless bodies! You just made those magical nine months into a boring everyday task! I don’t know how many people really focused on the first part before mindlessly uploading and sharing this picture. Maybe the travelling part of it appealed so much, they just overlooked the secondary message. It made me feel really sick – why use comparison to highlight your travel bug? How are these two even related!

Is “settling down” really so bad to our generation that we have started pulling it down like this? Is it so “old-fashioned” and “boring” that getting married before 24 is suddenly a social crime? Is “living and learning” equal to “single and bohemian”? Last time I checked, it is possible to get married and have babies (not necessarily in that order) and yet lead a great life. We want to break free and fly but now it seems that freedom has grown some chains of its own! Because if I don’t abide by certain definitions of freedom and liberty, I have not really made it.

Let us take a reality check. First, not all of us have the means and time to do so much country hopping when even commuting within city is  cumbersome. Second, not all of us like travelling so much that we will be off every month to some odd place – adventure lurks in our backyard in the form of pesky monkeys. Third, not all of us care about where in seven hells you have traveled unless you are getting something for us. The irony is that a majority of those who put this up are so lazy that they can barely cross the street let alone cross the border.

Wanderlust is pervasive. It does not matter if you do it solo or you do it with a caravan of seventeen noisy children. Travelling is fun but then so is raising a family. You can have both – at the same time too. Just think before you post.

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Thoughts? I know I did some massive generalization and there are still many of us with substantial gray matter – Yay for us!