A strange, inherited illness where survival is mistaken for success. Where the ceiling of your parents' ambition becomes the floor of your own. It’s not a caste. It’s not a salary bracket. It’s a state of mind - numb, polite, terrified.
You see it in the way we speak to children. “Be careful.” “Don’t dream too big.” “Settle down.” Settle - the word we throw like a medal, even though it sounds like surrender.
Middlity is not born from greed. It is born from trauma. Partition taught our grandparents that land is never really yours. Emergency taught our parents that freedom is a luxury. Every riot, every economic crash, every news bulletin that begins with “violence in...” has taught us one thing - safety is everything. So we overcorrect. We play small. We train our kids to become survivors before they become thinkers.
Our childhoods are textbooks of fear. Don’t talk back to teachers. Don’t question God. Don’t take arts. Don't write about politics. Don’t befriend people who live “there.” Even love is rationed. “We’ll support you, but don’t bring shame.” What they mean is - don’t be different.
This disease shows up in subtle ways. A boy loves painting, but his father says, “What job will you get?” A girl wants to study away from home, but her mother says, “Shaadi ka kya?” We don't kill dreams with knives. We kill them with suggestions.
Look around. So many middle-class homes have the same furniture, same fan, same curtain, same silent resentment. The same sofa where the same son explains to the same father why he’s quitting his job and the same father looks away and says, “Beta, I’ve seen the world. Don’t make the same mistake.”
But what if that mistake is the only door out?
Anthropologically, risk-taking is hardwired into human evolution. The tribes that dared to migrate survived droughts. The ones that stayed safe vanished in the sand. Risk wasn’t rebellion. It was renewal. But somewhere between LPG gas and LIC policies, we became addicted to the known.
Middlity is the performance of okay-ness. It is not joy. It is not purpose. It is not living. It is functioning. Glorified functioning. We clap for it. We frame it. And we forget that slowly, it eats us.
You feel it when you wake up and your heart feels full of water. When you go to your job and smile too much. When your dreams start becoming blurry, like something you saw in someone else's childhood. That’s middlity setting in.
But here’s the medicine. You don’t need to be rich to take a risk. You just need to stop asking for permission to be yourself.
Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, you might fail. Yes, people will talk. But they’re already talking. They always will.
The only way to break the shackles of middlity is to risk being misunderstood. Risk being alone. Risk being alive.
Because the worst prison is the one with a fridge, WiFi, and a broken dream hiding behind the curtain.
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