Monotony

It’s a Wednesday evening and I’ve just gotten off work. Work isn’t really work. It’s just a day filled with extreme procrastination and sitting and staring at a computer screen pretending that it means anything. It might seem like an easy task but once you start pretending to be doing something, it gets tough keeping that facade on. I shut my laptop to focus my energies from doing nothing to doing nothing.

Turns out, that doing nothing can get exhausting too, especially every week, from 9 am to 5 pm. Now this doing nothing isn’t just sitting idle. It involves so much peripheral trash that it makes you think, what am I doing with my time? When I can’t answer that question well or when I know the real answer, I distract my mind to find solace in the fact that I still get paid a decent amount to get booze and some nice food once in a while, but that’s about it.

The clock strikes 5, I push my chair with all the force my feet can muster and get up from the depressing table I have been occupying for 8 hours a day for the past couple of months. Well, now it’s “me time”, so guess what, now I am in control of what I have to do and that feels more daunting. Working from Home felt like a boon but pretty quickly and swiftly has fallen down upon me. Again the mind works in a mysterious way to appease itself that it could be worse.

I unlock my phone and go to my friend whom I have grown closest to during this time, Twitter. Twitter is made for lonely and bored individuals like me who are looking for some cheap entertainment at the cost of others so they can once again mount their high horse and go back to feeling better. Honestly, Twitter is great, with all the stupidity and the, wait, yeah just the stupidity it’s a great past time when your friends are busy with their exams or are away at their university, it keeps me company like how fish keep you company as a pet but they don’t add any value in your life as pets. That’s the best analogy I could think of.

After gossiping with Twitter, I move to Instagram, the sassier and more arrogant friend of mine who is an ultra-perfectionist. It gets a bit annoying but once you spend a considerable amount of time with someone, you accept their flaws as your own and learn to live with it, that is what our relationship is. One jpg after another is pointless information I didn’t know I needed and then one of the jpgs is of an adorable dog or cat doing something cute which I obviously lack in my life, so that void is filled and the brain obliges by releasing some dopamine.

Your closest and best friends are social media algorithms who know you in and out. From your kinks to your armour chinks, they know everything and how can any other human ever match that, they can’t right? I have two extremely close friends who are really nosy and at times outrightly impertinent, but hey, they know me the best, can’t run away from that.

They take up a chunk of my evening, and when I realize it’s been too long, it’s dark outside and eventually time for dinner. A small window for an evening walk is somehow created where I see horrible things like the trees, birds, and other humans and feel horrible sensations like the gentle breeze hitting my face and petting the stray cats who refuse to leave my society because someone keeps feeding them. Before I know it, I’m back home in front of the TV, with a plate on the table eating what my sweet mother took a lot of pain to cook up.

After a few episodes of watching my favourite sitcom at the moment, Malcolm in the Middle, I am again pushed back to the reality of the next day. I say to myself, “No Shantanu, you will be more productive tomorrow and not be this time-wasting prick”. The righteous version of me rifles through my desk to find a piece of paper and writes down “Things to Accomplish” on it. It’s always a long unrealistic list that a person can’t complete in a day, but we aim high in this household.

After feeling better about it, that I will start something tomorrow I crash into bed. After 6 hours of sleep, I wake up sleep-deprived with an acute headache banging my inner left forehead, telling me, “Aaj nahi Shantanu, kalse karenege” and the cycle continues.