So the other day, my teenage son’s birthday was coming up. Like any overenthusiastic Indian parent, I started plotting which gift would make me look like the coolest dad in the colony.
I casually asked him, “Beta, what do you want for your birthday?”
He looked up from his notebook, pausing for a second as I interrupted his homework and said, “Nothing. I have everything.”
I laughed nervously. Maybe he was distracted. I mean, which teenager says he doesn’t want anything? Are we even talking about the same species here?
A few days later, I tried again, expecting he’d secretly prepared a list—maybe a fancy smartwatch or some headphones I’d pretend to understand.
But again—same answer. “No, Dad. I don’t need anything.”
After the third try, my curiosity got the better of me. “How come? You really don’t want anything? Not even a small thing?”
He shrugged and said, “Dad, I have everything I want. There’s no void to fill.”
And just like that, he flipped my brain upside down.
For a moment, I felt a strange cocktail of relief and confusion. Relief, because maybe I’m not such a terrible father after all. He’s content. He feels complete. That’s worth a few bonus points, right?
But it also made me wonder—what if all of us had that mindset?
Imagine if all your basics were always taken care of. If you could walk into the kirana shop, pick up your Maggi, and walk out—no bill to pay. If your hair got cut automatically when it got too long. If fresh clothes appeared in your cupboard when the old ones wore out.
If you could live without constantly worrying about money or “What next?”
What if all you ever had to focus on was simply being?
Honestly, 90% of our stress is just us trying to fill some imagined void. If you strip everything down to just your real needs—roti, kapda, makaan, maybe a little biryani on weekends—the list is ridiculously short.
Everything else is just a fancy treadmill we willingly jump onto.
I’m not saying I’ve achieved monk-level enlightenment. I’m not even close. If an enlightened yogi is happy with five things, I’ll probably need at least 500. But maybe that’s a start.
Because not wanting something is almost as good as already having it.
Who knew a teenager saying “I don’t need anything” could be the most grown-up wisdom I’d heard all year?
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