Who are The Indoor Generation?

We are the Indoor Generation!

The ‘millennials and genzee-ers’ are the indoor generations. Because it is our generation that has spent more alone time with our gadgets than any other generation in history.

Our generation has quickly adapted to home deliveries, phone-bound news snippets, and high-resolution video games. We are devoid of sunlight, and more dependent on artificial lights, drawn curtains, spray bottle room fresheners, artificial plants that won’t demand attention, air filters, and closed windows.

And it would need a whole lot of shift to find the pleasures in the nature outdoors.

Algorithms dictate our lives

What life of our modern day has done to us is to make us less relevant to reality and more connected to the world of virtual reality. Deepfake and AI-generated true or false stories of wars and politics have far more reach than the simple sunshine of the mornings and the easy breeze of the day. Algorithms dictate our lives to the extent of what we should see, what we should buy and how we should live!

Because we might have some exotic ideas about what can make us happy. May be, something that is rare, costly and is not a part of the ordinary potions of our lives. We have some kind of ideological suspicion about ordinary lives that it has to be bland, passable and dull, so the notion is that happiness can be found only in rarity, or in something expensive, famous or large-scale. ‘Caviar sounds a whole lot more attractive than farm-fetched chicken eggs on our table.’

A Daily Dose of Sunshine

Nicole Mead PhD, a researcher and her team ran a study with 122 participants ‘to complete an experience-sampling study over the course of six days.’ They found that a simple pleasure enables us to make advancements in our daily tasks, especially when life feels challenging and stressful. According to the researchers, the simple pleasures looked like, “Taking a walk in the sun, having a cup of tea with a close friend, or getting green lights all the way to work. What matters is that simple pleasures bring you joy and happiness, unlike temptations which bring torment and inner conflict.” This study found that on days when people enjoyed very few simple pleasures, the petty irritations of everyday life frustrated their goal progress. While on days when people lived a high number of small pleasures, they adhered to their plans and progressed in tasks they wanted to finish on that day.

“Experiencing simple pleasures can buffer the harmful effects of small annoyances for goal progress.”

So here I am with some rebellious anxiousness in my belly, I push to the edges of this changing world to consider myself a human being who can landscape a lot of things within and accept that we are a generation of imperfects, having fears and hardshell beliefs. In the unnatural virtual world of filters and 5G clarity, thank you for giving me permission to knock into your lives and hang around with you through Delights of The Ordinary so we may gape at the real actual world with some awe and wonder and try to seep some daily dose of sunshine.

Hence, in this russet-rustling autumn season when leaves dry up to shed, and trees sleep to rest, we still have a bountiful of sunshine from heaven. Until the winter hits your life, ‘get up early and go out to watch what makes a morning. The faint grey will give way as God pushes the sun towards the horizon, and there will be tints of hues of every shade, that will blend into one perfect light as the full-orbed sun bursts into view. As the light of the day moves forth majestically, flooding the earth and every lowly vale, listen to the music of the heaven’s choir as it sings the majesty of the heavens and the glory of the morning.’

I also hope to wonder from this place that we as a generation will have to make more efforts in the lives of our children to help them move beyond the AI-driven artefacts to more often interact with real people, real soil, real plants, real light and even real food. To let them resonate with art and history. Because reality is diminishing with such captivating artificial intelligence and the world somehow still remains our responsibility. And we ought to have small doses of sunshine so we can tell the sunny tales to our children and grandchildren, inspiring them to find sunshine and happiness wherever they can!

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least
possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,
triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations,
so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

– Thomas A. Clark

So in our lives, perhaps we need to strike off the useless stuff that takes away our time, energy and attention from the inner light that softly kindles us up. To see ourselves soaking in our daily dose of sunshine and dare to imagine that you and me can have a different life…