Renting out life!

Every conversation that I’ve ever had with my parents was about how I should work hard so that I can buy the stuff I need and have a comfortable life.

In a world that they lived in, I don’t even doubt that is a wrong thing. However, the times have changed. It was not until recently that I found out that there exists an entire industry that rents out stuff. This means I no longer should work hard enough to buy the stuff, I just have to work hard enough to rent it out some day which, mind you, is way cheaper than buying it.

Turns out, you can rent out anything in the world. From needles to aeroplanes, from beds to people who get into them (TO HELP YOU FIX THE TUBELIGHT ABOVE THE BED), you can rent anything. Astonishingly (and sadly), there exists an industry that rents out relatives for marriages if you don’t have enough people (although a better alternative to that would be to just hang a ‘free food’ board outside your reception and watch half the city become your relative.)

And that, as a concept, is what defines our generation. We want to rent out everything because this entire generation has commitment issues. ‘Why?’ you wonder. Well, most of us have seen our parents and their generation has been the front-runner in holding on to their commitments. Be it jobs they took and held on to it till they became furniture or bad marriages that they refused to get out (because ‘marriage is a holy institution’), they decided something and stuck to it.

And you can’t blame them. They did it because their parents were a generation of people who really didn’t have a lot to hold on to because our country was in troubled times. There were hardly any jobs available, the people you wanted to marry kept dying of diseases or just got killed because they were a woman and they lost friends periodically because of the greatest leveller of the population - riots. And they saw this uncertainty throughout their childhood, which is why when they got to something, they made sure they held on to it.

The current crop, on the other hand, has seen people hold on to things, live in the monotony, enjoy the stability. And growing up in that, most of us have learnt to do the exact opposite. We don’t believe in commitments. From table lamps to partners (Partners? Did I just say partners? Yes, I did. Please refer to tinder), we got to try it out first, invest very little and if the thing really works out, then break the bank to get there. In the words of the computer application win.rar, there’s an indefinite trial period for everything.

 - Bhavneet