I have been thinking about a rather uncomfortable idea. We fought colonialism to win our freedom. But what if, somewhere along the way, we began surrendering that freedom all over again? What if…. this was happening as I write?
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explored how colonialism leaves behind something far more enduring than the physical presence of the coloniser. It seeps into the mind. It changes how people see themselves, what they aspire to, and what they come to accept as normal. The coloniser may leave. The colonisation does not.
I wonder whether we are witnessing a new version of this today. Except that this time, there is no foreign flag to pull down. No imperial army to drive away. We are doing it to ourselves. We have willingly entered a world where almost everything has a price, and increasingly, a value is assigned to everything. Our time. Our attention. Our relationships. Even our dreams.
I look at myself; I look at my friends and acquaintances. We measure success by the size of our bank balance, the value of our investments, the houses we own and the lifestyle we can display. We work longer, consume more and keep running, often without stopping to ask what exactly we are running towards. Somewhere in this race, life itself becomes an entry into a balance sheet.
Our health, our years, our quality of life — everything gets quietly converted into economic value. The hours we surrender become somebody else’s profit. Our anxieties feed markets. Our attention becomes a commodity. And the wealth created by millions of such small surrenders accumulates, disproportionately, in the hands of a few. The irony is that the balance sheet records the wealth we create, but not the life we spend creating it. It will record our assets when we are gone. It will not record the conversations we postponed, the sunsets we missed, the friendships we neglected or the years we cannot get back. It will not even note our passing.
I am not arguing against wealth, ambition or enterprise. They matter. Money can provide freedom, dignity and choices. But there is a difference between using money to live well and organising our entire lives around making more of it. Perhaps the real question is not how much wealth we accumulate, but how much of our lives we are willing to exchange for it.
Colonialism once took away our freedom without asking our permission. Today, we may be surrendering it voluntarily, one working day, one unfulfilled promise, one postponed pleasure at a time. And the most disturbing part? We have begun to call this freedom.
Perhaps the last act of liberation is not to overthrow another ruler, but to recognise the one we have installed within ourselves.
In musing….. Shakti Ghosal
