| Hijacked Dreams, Borrowed Lives | | How media, marketing, and misplaced ambition are quietly colonising young minds | | Ruchi Chabra
There was a time when young people dreamt of becoming doctors, teachers, farmers, poets—even freedom fighters. Today, most just want to become “influencers.” Not creators, not builders. Just faces on a screen with many followers and no real direction.
You cannot blame them entirely. Open your phone or turn on the TV. You’ll see pretty people touring Europe, eating burgers that don’t decay in a month, living in homes where cushions match curtains and nobody works. It’s all a build-up—curated, polished, and packaged. But the damage it does is very real.
Our youth, highly educated but largely unemployed, are caught in this illusion. They don’t have the means to live such lives, but are made to feel they must. The pressure to match these false standards pushes many towards shortcuts—some harmless, many harmful. A rising number are falling into online scams, not always for greed, but out of frustration. They’re not stealing to get rich. They’re stealing to feel seen.
A generation that lacks patience becomes angry quickly. A generation taught to consume before they can produce becomes anxious. They know how to swipe, scroll, and search, but few know how to sit quietly with a problem and solve it.
Meanwhile, corporations are busy renting out their minds—without permission, without pay. Every ad is a lesson in manipulation. A happy family laughs over burgers your doctor would call poison. A child drinks cola after a match as if that’s the prize. A temple promises salvation, but not safety. A travel ad sells Switzerland, not the trash-strewn roads next door.
Our children are being raised not by parents, teachers, or elders—but by advertisers. And while we debate “screen time” in our living rooms, drug agencies are handing out vapes like candy at the nearest paan shop.
What’s worse is that many of these young people don’t even realize they are being used. They become unpaid brand ambassadors, unpaid content distributors, unpaid foot soldiers for someone else’s profit. All while their own dreams gather dust in the corner.
Let us look at a contrast. In India, researchers recently discovered strains of Exiguobacterium bacteria that nibble on polystyrene plastic in controlled lab environments. Elsewhere in the world—in the Amazon forests, Germany, and Japan—fungi and microbes have been found that can digest certain plastics under specific conditions. Useful, yes, but not magic bullets. These bacteria won’t clean up our landfills overnight. But what we urgently need is something far more pressing—a moral equivalent of these organisms. Something that can slowly break down the plastic dreams sold to our children. Something that can clean the waste of greed, vanity, and restlessness from young minds.
The solution, however, is not in banning phones or punishing the youth. That’s lazy parenting and lazier policy. What we need is to bring back the idea of originality. An original dream is different from a dream sold to you. It comes from your own story, not someone else’s script.
We must start teaching children to spot the difference between real and manufactured ambition. Between something they want, and something they’ve been told to want. Between being rich and being valuable.
We must stop treating resilience like some outdated virtue from another era. It isn’t. In fact, it’s the one skill our children will need most—to stay grounded when everything around them is trying to sweep them off their feet. And, it is more urgent than ever. The child who knows how to fail and try again is more prepared for life than the one who knows how to pose for likes.
In the end, this is not just a crisis of unemployment or online fraud. It is a crisis of identity and consent. Minds are being colonized again—not by foreigners this time, but by algorithms, advertisements, and artificial ambitions.
It is time we took that consent back. Time we helped our youth tell their own stories, not just repeat someone else’s lines. Because a life well-lived isn’t one that looks good on Instagram. It’s one that feels honest in silence.
(The writer is a Principal, DPS Jammu) |
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