A rant of the mentally well?

I grew up with a brother who had a perspective on reality which was not considered “normal”. A brilliant mind who mastered chess and did complex math algorithms at age 10, he never understood the progression through the time ordered stages of life that we take for granted - employment, parenthood, retirement and maybe, for some, renunciation. He turned these concepts on their head and decided he would, after his education, pursue renunciation first, much to the family’s dismay. So much potential gone to waste was the refrain on everyone’s lips. When he took off on his spiritual jaunts, locked himself in his room meditating for hours, starved himself for days on end, refused to take up a job, post his Masters in Engineering, and decided he just wanted to seek that elusive state of Nirvana, I struggled with one persistent thought “Why could he not be normal like everyone else? Why did he embarrass me so much being so off kilter? Why could he not have gone to Harvard or MIT and done something that people would rave about, so I could associate with him with pride rather than shame?” In those days he prodded and challenged me on life decisions that I made to please my parents. As I reflect back, I did everything I could to make it up to them, to ease their disappointment in him. My brother’s spiritual quest turned out to be a ten year detour since he folded under the weight of society and has since stumbled through life along the beaten path. Happily he has two beautiful and brilliant kids and an adoring wife. Yesterday, many years since my early adulthood exchanges with my brother, I had an encounter with another young man who is mirroring my brother’s actions. The key difference here is that, there is an official diagnosis of mental illness, because he has lived in the West and because he is much more intense in his pursuit. My reaction to this young man is very different. Having gone through the perfunctory stages of life and having done everything by the “normal” person’s book, I question my sanity now. Is there something this young person so single-minded in his quest for effortless, spontaneous and holistic existence, know that I am missing? What do we really “achieve” or how do we actually “progress” when our lives are so compartmentalized with work and life, ordered by our calendars and punctuated with the ever elusive leisure that we work towards, never really being present in what we do? But most important of all, I spent the night thinking about how we will actually, with our need for normalcy, break down anyone who threatens our predictable and well-ordered existence just because we do not have the collective will for social structures that accommodate difference. We label them, drug them into stupor and break their fragile psyches and then convince ourselves that we treated them for their malady. What a tragedy!