This generation

Do people work harder now than ever? Everyone is always busy.

Often enough, I see people of this generation getting alienated from the rest of the world. Too busy with work, they say. They have a small select group of friends, which they are sometimes too busy to meet, or no true ones at all but for those they drink and party with.

They no longer have steady partners that they are committed to marrying, but those they seek for time-affordable companionship. If he is your boyfriend, he may be so because he is afraid of being lonely. If she is with you, it is because there are pockets of time in between work, and she needs some intimacy. Thankfully, she likes your company, and you do hers. Otherwise, work always, comes first. Without a doubt.

If I'm lonely and I have no man, I will bury myself in my work. It doesn't matter, I can focus on building up my career.

This is my success. My career. It defines my sense of achievement, recognition, and self-worth.

Because of this truth that permeates across the values of many of my contemporaries, the nagging result is that, setbacks at work often slight them even if they don't know it. They take it harder than ever, harder than my parents' 'live and let live' generation.

To our parents, work is a means of survival. Not about passion, or glory, or success. To them, as long as it puts food on the table and gives comfort to their family, it is good work enough.

To us, we would give our heart and soul into our success which somehow gets defined by our work. We bring work home, work late every other day, work on weekends and holidays, read trade journals and other know-how literature etc.

Because I have built up my knowledge in my professional empire, it becomes my largest storehouse of treasure. And if anything comes to threaten this rule and reign of mine, it makes me weaker. My heart gets somewhat splintered by failures and acts against me that are of no reason.

And, people who own these empires, intermittently they get depressed. Their confidence gets shaken sometimes, or their life comes full circle to no meaning. They feel, that they rather not bother to change the world, and decide to act like they can't and just heck it.

This empire can be destructive. In times like these, people get jaded with life. Like a loose cog lost during the spin. And so, isolation, alienation and loneliness, they creep in.

That's why, time-affordable intimacy is so happening, so now. I like your company, so I invite you to my place. It's just coffee. Anything else we'll just have to take it from there. I like you but I can't commit, I'm not sure. I like your companionship, let's do a little travelling aka sexy getaway together, and then I'll see you again when we are both free. If we get together, it isn't really love as we knew it. It is just alienation trying to get its act together through the antidote of loneliness - intimacy.

It is all selfish and irresponsible. But it will have to do, until we get everything in balance, and realise that we may not have to place everything into our career. Because moth and rust will destroy; it is people that will remain, and will always be worth investing in.

In the meantime, all this alienation, will just have to be tolerated. It breaks me and my heart to see this in me and my peers. But we are all lonely and it sometimes becomes inevitable that we find addictions to soothe our loneliness. Almost everyone I know is addicted to something - smokes, drinks, sex, work, games, partying. All these things are no longer pleasurable indulgences in themselves, but items that balance all that negation within our lives. It has become a phenomenon of this generation.