When you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose...

At about this time last year, my elder son quit his very well-paying job as a senior executive in a multi-national: he had had enough of the El Dorado mirage sold by the IIMs and IITs. He had been working 14-hour days non-stop for 16 years, paying Rs 65,000 a month for a flat in Gurgaon where he just went to sleep, lunched and dined exclusively on Zomato and Food Panda, could never find the time to relax in our Purani Koti retreat near Shimla, his liver was beginning to get pickled in Blender's Pride.

In short, he was on the verge of a burnout, maybe a couple of puffs away from being stubbed out like a cigarette.

One day, he saw the light, ignored Mr Narayan Murthy's exhortation to work 70-hour weeks, regarding with justified suspicion Ms Sitharaman's pious advice to fight work pressure through "inner strength by reaching out to God". His decision to ignore her too was made easier, he told me later, by the possibility that by 'God' she meant Mr Modi, and since he himself "worked" 18 hours, reaching out to him would be futile (as Kangana Ranaut has recently discovered). 

So one fine foggy morning in Gurgaon, he pinged his boss that he was quitting (that's how they do the hiring, firing and resigning these days, no "Dear sir, it is with profound regret that ..." letters as in our days), packed his suitcase and pooch in his car, and joined us in Purani Koti.

He now lives off his savings, work-from-home consultancy projects, articles on the auto world, and revdis from my pension whenever the state government periodically emerges from bankruptcy and doles it out to me. He now has the time to indulge in his passion for photography and gardening, and is currently trying to grow bananas and peepul trees at 7,000 feet in an area which gets three feet of snow every winter!

I'm personally sceptical of that last bit, but who knows — after all, they laughed at Satyanand Stokes when he brought apple plants from the USA, didn't they? And today Himachal is an apple state. If my son succeeds, we may yet be a banana republic soon.

Welcome to the world of 'slow living', the latest concept that is catching on with Gen X (or Gen Z) across the world. More and more of them are just chucking the rat race with its slave-driving, toxic work culture and sweat shop values, which just last month took the lives of Anna Sebastian Perayil in Pune and Sadaf Fatima in Lucknow.

These bright youngsters prefer to return back to nature, renewing relationships with family and friends, and doing what they WANT to do — not what neo-capitalism, voodoo economics and the Sanjiv Sanyals of the world expect them to do.

Slow living is the next best thing to a government job, where you can effectively retire the day you join and nobody will even notice, even as pay commissions keep hiking your salary and pension with predictable regularity. He has my full support: it is this generation which can perhaps save our once blue planet, since my generation has completely abdicated its responsibility. 

This choice of lifestyle, however, is not all fun and games: it requires the making of responsible choices — in consumption, expenditure, manner of living — since one's income levels drop substantially. It forces one to make an inventory of the important things in life and discard the redundant, superfluous and the wasteful materialism inherent in the "keeping up with the Junejas" South Delhi mentality. It goes hand-in-hand with another trend being increasingly embraced by planet conscious Gen X — minimalism.

Minimalism is simply "living with less" by decluttering one's physical spaces, reducing unnecessary consumption, seeking quality over quantity, travelling less, curation of possessions to have only the essentials, focusing on personal values rather than reacting to competitive pressures.

This is what slow living is in essence, and I am now witnessing more and more youngsters consciously opting for this lifestyle and minimalist framework. Just to cite examples of how this works: there is the "sniff test" for clothes — do your clothes need to be washed so frequently, consuming more water, soap, power?

Sniff the clothes for malodorous smells — this will probably tell you that you could wear them for another couple of days before consigning them to the washing machine. (A single washing machine discharges 480 kg of green house gases every year).

Then there's the 'one in, one out' principle: don't keep adding to your possessions unnecessarily — buy an item only as a replacement, not as an addition, discard the first before buying the second.

'Tiny living' is another idea that is gaining traction — small homes (why do you need five bedrooms when it's just you and your wife and maybe one kid?), away from the congestion and pollution of metros, off-grid as regards power and water, self-sufficient with solar and rainwater harvesting.

A minimalist lifestyle is good for mother Earth too — the culture of over-consumption, so assiduously promoted by economists, governments and big corporates, has led to the depletion of natural resources and ravaging of forests, rivers, lakes and mountains. Reducing this demand for goods and products and minimising possessions lowers the strain on the natural environment, reduces waste, cuts down on carbon emissions.

It is a far more sustainable model of life than the blind GDP growth-driven models being foisted on us; in fact, I would go further and say it is the ONLY lifestyle choice which can save us and the planet from another extinction.

And here's the final, clinching argument which has eluded us but has been instinctively grasped by the younger generation — you are happier as a person when you have minimised your needs. This has been scientifically captured now in a concept which is known as the Easterlin Paradox. This states that happiness does not increase with more money. Happiness is directly proportionate to money up to a certain point, but once your basic needs are met, more money does not mean more happiness.

After this point. happiness is defined not by money, but by meaning of life, purpose, relationships, contribution to society. (The reader is probably reminded here of Maslow's theory of Hierarchy of Needs). In fact, without the latter components, after that point, more money means more worries, tensions, fears and even depression. Bob Dylan put it in a much simpler, easy-to-understand language six decades ago when he sang: 'When you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose...'

I'm glad our sons and daughters are beginning to hear this music.

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and the author of Disappearing Democracy: Dismantling of a Nation and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com