Let’s be honest: our potential knows no bounds when it comes to what we can or cannot achieve. It is we who inflict limitations and barriers on our capabilities and feed ourselves with negative opinions and self-worth. However, it’s quite normal to feel down or dejected in the face of adversity or failure. As humans, we are living factories where our emotions and feelings are constantly processed inside us. And just as any factory needs regular maintenance, we too need constant checks on our health, specifically mental health, to live a balanced life.
While it is true that we can achieve anything we want, the hustle mentality has done great damage to our communities. Rahul Maharaj, a renowned mental health speaker and host of the show, ‘Your Life Experiences With Rah,’ says that for some reason, we are always expected to do something.
“In this digitized world, our minds have also adopted some unfounded expectations – people expect from us not to feel broken or sad or tedious, and always be on our toes, doing something cheerfully, just like we expect from machines. Who likes a broken washing machine or oven, and who would work on a slow computer? It would leave everyone frustrated!” says Rahul.
“Similarly, humans are often meted out the same treatment when they’re broke, sad, tired, overwhelmed – the world just doesn’t like them that way, breathing, resting – even though it is the most vital element of our human life,” he further added.
Rahul believes that this ‘hustle mentality’ is threatening the collective mental health of our society. The toxic attitudes where crying or weeping are considered signs of weakness, and stress and depression are treated as stigmas, are leading us to a collective doom. It still takes us years to identify traumas because we haven’t created an enabling environment where people can come forward and openly share their inner sufferings
“These stigmas will have to be removed and we will have to create a conducive and considerate environment for all that is immune to passing judgments and treat everyone as an equal partner in the agony we all envelop inside. And then, we have to just LISTEN to every story and after that, learn and decide how human we are,” says Rahul.
Rahul here raises a crucial question – how human we are? Or to make it more specific, what makes us human?
We, humans, are declared social animals by various thinkers and philosophers, meaning that cooperation is at the heart of our survival. It is by interacting with others for our needs and wants that we are able to survive every day. Our interests are intertwined and that way, humanity becomes a chain that every human is a part of. But unfortunately, at some point in our evolution to this time, values like cooperation, interaction, and relationship building lost their meaning when we began to rely too much on technology. We were left to our own devices, literally and figuratively.
As a result, perhaps only one-third of humans today are really enjoying the luxuries of life while the rest lurk in multiple quagmires, mental health being one of the major ones. We, with our own hands, have established a world where only physically and mentally strong individuals are embraced while the rest are tarred as ‘weaklings.’
“I’m here for those weaklings. Because I’ve been a weakling once so I know exactly how it feels. With my show, Your Life Experiences With Rah, I’m on a mission to make ‘weaklings’ realize that they are not alone in this, and that they can and they will get through that darkest point in their lives if they believe in themselves.,” concludes Rahul.
He knows there are many challenges to mental health at present, but Rahul believes with concerted efforts and campaigns like his, they can trump everything and build a healthier, solicitous world that would allow us all to embrace and express our emotions. A world where we can be vulnerable with one another and find strength in it.
