Sometimes I wonder, then I wonder, and then I wonder a little more and all of a sudden I realize that, “Why do I need to wonder so much?” Wondering is a good thing. It instigates our creativity to come up with novel ideas and concepts. We wonder about everything starting from: “Why living beings die?” to “Why won’t she like me back?” We like being independent, or in simple terms we like to seem independent and we try to use up all the knowledge that we have inside our complex brains to justify our own explanation of these wonders. The question is how did this knowledge that is inside our brains came to be inside our brains in the very first place. Maybe some of this knowledge we inherited from our parents through genes; some we got through reading and watching but as it turns out most of it is achieved through experiences. Experiences can range from casual encounters and conversations with people we meet on a daily basis to being in an airplane crash.

Let us talk about the major part of the brain which deals with reasoning, memory and most of decision making: the frontal cortex. The frontal cortex is the last to develop in humans, since it is molded through experiences and becomes fully developed towards the end of adolescence. It therefore brings us to the conclusion that the period before adolescence matters a lot as to how the life will be in adulthood and old age. In a place like India brimming with overpopulation, with families having more than two children, parents generally don’t care much about the childhood. The mothers only care up till the point when their children are ready to walk and no more require their breasts for feeding. Once the child is able to walk and drink milk by the bottle, the parents shift their attention towards the creation of another child or towards sending the child off to school.

In the Economical terms the scarcity of a particular thing can increase it demand and therefore its value. The child starts to suffer neglect at his home and once he is sent off to school the same thing persists. Being neglected is not as bad as you might thing but how we define this negligence is what changes it all. Let us think about the kid of a hunter-gatherer. All he had to care about was staying alive. He didn’t have to care about if some other kid in some other pack had much more odds of staying alive than he had. He would have cared if he was told so by his mother and peers to think like that. The mother’s work was mainly to stick together with the alpha so that she and her child could be fed and protected. She didn’t care if there were other women who were under the safety of the alpha or if the amount of safety that she was receiving was lesser or more than the amount of safety that any other woman in the pack was receiving. The hunter-gatherer society didn’t allow for large groups and therefore it was necessary to remain in harmony with each other for there was no concept of individuality or independence. During that time you wouldn’t see a woman walking straight up to the lion so that she could be eaten alive just because the alpha had given a little more attention to some other woman in the pack. The life span was generally small and people wanted to maximize their life span and that meant sticking together with each other. There wasn’t surplus of time for the women to sit back and make interpretations of the incidents that happened to her in the last few days, or last few years.

I keep on coming back to mothers because in the initial growing years the child is exposed majorly to the mother only. The child can sense the voice of its mother but not of its father. The way in which the mother thinks goes a long way in determining how the child will think. Any mother with issues, will lead to a child with issues. In today’s world that will mean a lot of kids with issues. Now, what exactly is “issue”? Let us take the example of a kid who tried to befriend a kid at school and was turned down. A kid needs directions from his parents to make sense of things around him as he grows and therefore the kid comes back to his home after school and tells his mother about what happened and asks her help so that he can make sense of the whole incident. This is what we can call a critical juncture in the kid’s life. There are various explanation that the mother can give depending upon the mindset of the mother. There are two major explanations that any kid is generally : 1) If the mother herself suffers from lack of morale she will tell her kid that he was turned down because he wasn’t good enough, 2) If the mother has the luck of having high morale and self-esteem, she will tell her kid that he was turned down because the other kid wasn’t good enough for him. In both the cases one of the person wasn’t good enough, and the idea of who wasn’t good enough once ingrained in the mind of the kid changes the complete trajectory of his life. The above two cases are the extremes. The idea that you yourself are not good enough will instill a feeling of being below others which eventually leads to a submissive, anti-social personality during later stages in life, on the other hand the idea that no one else is good enough eventually leads to a narcissistic, aggressive personality during later stages in life.

The mother could have chosen a neutral explanation for the kid. She could have explained that, maybe the other kid was not in a good mood or that it was nothing to worry about and that he couldn’t befriend everyone and there are lot of other kids that he could befriend. Parents generally don’t have the time and effort to explain things in neutral terms and they explain most things in the way it was explained to them when they were young. This leads to vicious circle. A group of people living in the same society or neighborhood share ideologies and perspectives. They teach their kids what they know and explain them ‘life’ from their own perspectives. They also send their kids to the same school where they are in the atmosphere in which looms the same ideologies and interpretation of life and incidents. Kids need queues to move forward in life but the queue which they eventually are given leads them in the direction which their parents took when they were young. All of sudden rejection, embarrassments, failures, mishaps, accidents become predominant in their lives and success, acceptance and validation fades away.

Parents try to save their kids from the issues that they suffer from by teaching them what they know. It eventually becomes a paradox. If my knowledge makes me suffer depression and anxiety, the same knowledge won’t help anyone else achieve happiness and satisfaction. This “issue” issue has become an epidemic. Five years old have issues nowadays that even adults didn’t have centuries before. The primary reason for this is exposure. Information is very amazing thing but only as long as we know what to make of it. It is like iron ore. If we don’t know the right way to process the ore and finally get the final refined iron from it the ore is of no use to us, and the worst happens when we try to extract gold from and iron ore. This extraction of gold from an iron ore is what most of us are doing nowadays.

Each experience in our life is like an iron ore from which pure iron of different forms can be extracted depending upon the process which we utilize. In order to make sense of these experiences we look around for people who have already been through these experiences and whom we trust and our parents re the first thing that comes to our mind as a small kid. Later as we grow older we make new friends and associates and then we ask them for an explanation regarding these experiences. Today with the surge of internet and social media, we have a ready explanation for all the experiences but there is no one to verify the veracity of the explanations and arguments put forward on the internet. We just gobble up this overflowing stream of information and we try to create for ourselves this view of life that we think, might work for us. The more information we are given the more analytically we analyze a particular incident or experience and the more conclusions we reach. It is our tendency to focus more on the uncertain conclusions and then we grip on to this uncertainty and eventually make our lives miserable for ourselves.

Let’s bring two hormones specifically oxytocin and testosterone into picture so that I do not sound like a misogynist on account of the upcoming content. Oxytocin is found in both males and females but they are more dominant in females and that is what makes them more emotional, emphatic, less aggressive and more prone to pondering over issues. Testosterone on the other hand is found more among males and has to do with masculinity, aggression and rational thinking. In simple terms females are more prone to be influenced by emotions and they are better at formation of bonds.

In Indian context specifically most of the women are housewives. Their main job revolves around taking care of the children and performing other necessary household duties. Earlier it would generally take up the whole of their days and there won’t be much time left for them to be idle but now with the nuclear family concept and paid help women are mostly free. The families earlier were large and therefore there wasn’t much time for women to sit back and ruminate, and their exposure to ideas and concepts were very less. The trend has flipped now but there is one consistency still there. If the child in a family is a boy, he has the privilege of going out and playing in the field with his friends, and most of the time is spent outside the house with friends and acquaintances who are generally of the same age group and share a common frame of mind (otherwise they would never had become friends in the very first place), but if it is a girl child, she has to remain mostly at home and her playground is mostly her bedroom, filled with dolls and other make believe items. From a very early age the girls are primed to look for the bigger picture, to think about marriage and family and other cultural needs. The exposure of the girl to her mother and other females in the families is much more and slowly her frame of mind develops to perceive things as her mother does. The girl child stops seeing things for what they are, but they start seeing things for what they can be. They start to weigh in thing and they start analyzing things from a very early age (this analysis is totally different from what analysis would mean from a mathematical point of view). Later on in life when this girl meets a boy she will induce her line of reasoning and perspective of life in that boy and the boy will induce it in someone else and it will slowly become a bio hazard.

In simple words any issue that the mother has will be shared by the daughter also. It can be shared by the son also if the family is very conservative, or the son is very shy and prefers to spend most of his time at home with his mother. The father also plays a very important role in behavior formation but that is generally during later years. These issues can be more enhanced with the frequent exposure to the internet and social media sites. It is not the information that is harmful but the interpretation of the acquired information that makes it go all wrong. Let us take a very vivid example now. A family is having dinner and all of a sudden one of the kid realizes that the amount of food in his plate is lesser than his sibling. He tries not to think about it, since there is nothing to think about, but all of a sudden the sibling (maybe a girl or a boy) points out the fact that there is a little less food in his plate as compared to anyone else and it might be on account of the fact that mom doesn’t love him as much. The kid never had an idea that such a small thing could mean something like this. The idea is planted in his mind. We generally try to look for facts that confirm to an existing belief we have. The kid asks around if it might be possible if his mom didn’t love him enough and there will be thousands of answers confirming this belief. Voila. The kid has now developed what psychologist might call “mother issues”. The kid will grow up beveling that his mother doesn’t love him enough even though that might not be the case. One single misinterpretation of a normal incident can spoil the complete life of an individual.

I remember the time when I was in junior high. I was into video games a lot and I lived life very objectively. I had no issue whatsoever other than the fact that some video games just wouldn’t run on my personal computer but I had learnt to accept the truth and move on. One evening I and my classmate decided to go for a movie. It was an India remake of “A Star Is Born”. After the movie all I could understand from the movie was that making good music takes time and I should learn to play guitar. My classmate had a whole different understanding of the whole movie. Somehow he came to the conclusion that for a relationship (he had a kind of girlfriend) to be going in the right direction, there should be sadness and melancholy and therefore for the next few months he was hell bent on trying to be as melancholic and depressed as possible. Sadness and melancholia is not ingrained inside of us, it needs to be learned externally and it takes a lot of practice to make it perfect.

All the books out there tells us about all these issues of depression and anxiety and all other cognitive problems that we face and they give us much more information about how to get over them. Firstly telling us that things like anxiety and depression exists makes us believe that we can have them and thereby increases our chances of having them. Secondly giving us measures on how to get over it gives us a chance to experience it just for fun sake. It is the first time I feel in human history that being depressed, being stressed and bring drunk and hung-over is a sign of strength. The common idea that comes in our head if we have never suffered from anxiety and other disorders is that our life is very stale or that our life is not filled with experiences. The only way out of this penury and suffering is to change the interpretation of those experiences and we will be down a path of no suffering and never ending happiness.