Youth-anasia

When one of my dearest friend texted that he feels that life after college is being deteriorated with every passing day, I ran a poll on Twitter that resulted in 70% of the voters admitting that their life after college is actually being degenerating. Post-graduate depression is not a newly introduced phenomena but yesterday when an apparently happy-go-lucky kind of guy tweeted publicly that he is going to commit suicide, it occurred to me that millennials are required to be reminded that they need to update their system’s software.

Do you remember your parents and relatives convincing you how your next academic year after 10^th grade will become easy and negotiating to make you more attentive towards your board exams? And do you remember your academic graph falling like the Sensex of 2007 in your 11^th grade? Of course you don’t want to remember that but the fact is, a major syllabus transition required you to redesign your learning strategies which you couldn’t realise on time and hence the index fall of 2007.

Life after college is no different. The idea that your interests and hobbies are the key ingredients of the personality you posses needs to be rethought. If a student’s college experiences are mostly positive, college provides a cocoon of sorts: a community of friends, teachers and mentors who are mostly readily available to offer support or advice. Graduating symbolizes a leap into ‘adult’ life, leaving back all the ecstatic existence you created back in college, which is a huge transition and if not tackled on time generally leads to an abnormally negative perspective, decreased motivation to get out of bed, a general sense of hopelessness and, occasionally, substance abuse.

Getting out of college actually is the most vulnerable time when a person experiences things like goal-lessness, job with no mental satisfaction, relationship failure, sudden burdening of responsibilities, symptoms of sinking health, and realization of not being the ‘special one’. So, when someone tries negotiating or convincing you by claiming that it’s a wonder ride after your pedagogical life, just know that it’s a trick. But until our colleges and universities that value the mental health of their students, come out with a plan of offering some sort of transition course making them aware of the struggles that may await when the utopian world vanishes the day after graduation, it is for you to understand that you have entered an altogether different phase of life that is susceptible to a decline in magnitude greater than the index fall of 2007.

However trivial it may sound, but it is not unchallenging to admit that one is hit by depression or is confronting a degrading personality because it won’t just sync with the charismatic and dynamic persona one has in his paradisal days of graduation. So, the guy admitting that he is depressed and couldn’t take these changes anymore and wanted to commit suicide, is actually at a head start than those who have hallucinated themselves postponing the inevitable introspection they are going to get hit by.

You know that things aren’t going the way you fancied them to be. All you need to do is, not quit.