To fathom the story, we have to go to 2024. I was in my second year of college. I had a childhood friend, I had known her since kindergarten. We shared our every thought with each other. One day, her dad had to transfer to another town from our place. So she had to go. It was sad at first, but we had mobile phones, so it was not an issue. One day she said she loved this boy, and I was like, “Whoa, really? I forgot you are a woman too...”

A few months passed, and one day she proposed to him at her college during a festival and got accepted. She called me in the evening, and she said, “Ani, you know what? I proposed to him, and he accepted.” I was so happy for her.

And as this went on, I simply started to move away because she had her boyfriend now, why should I intervene between them? We were talking as usual, but the distance started to get farther. One day she completely stopped replying. I waited, thinking, “Maybe she had some work, maybe she went out with her boyfriend.” Now three days passed, no replies. I was worried and called her. She did not pick up.

I was sitting in my chair in my room casually. As the next day came, I called her, and her boyfriend picked up and said, “Bro, I understand she is your childhood friend, but do not call her anymore.” His words came unbidden, and I was not ready for that. My heart started to beat faster, my stomach felt heavy, and I had no question ready. I paused for a few seconds, and I said, “Ok bro, I will not call her anymore,” and I hung up. I could not understand anything at that moment. I did not know what to ask him. Maybe I should have asked only one question: “Why?”

I had a friendship breakdown, and it ached. I could not talk with any other classmates or friends. As three days passed, I was sitting in my college not talking to anyone, looking at my phone and deleting everything, photos, videos, contacts, everything. I could not move from it for a month.

When you try to push a feeling away, your body does not calm down. Instead, it always stays on high alert. When you try to suppress an emotion, it raises your heart rate and stress response even when your face looks calm on the outside. You are just hiding the ache, while your body pays for it internally. In my situation, I deleted her photos, her contact details, everything, to forget about what she had done to me. I thought it would make me forget about her, help me move on from the aching, but instead I thought of her more often when I tried to remove her from my thoughts. The part of me where I could be myself, saying anything that came to mind without filters, teasing her, speaking for hours without getting judged. That part of me ached the most.

What I did was I judged myself, saying I am not that weak, when someone asked if I was okay. I did not fully realize that at that time. I am the kind of person who does not care what others think of me, but this time, it was harder to shake. “Our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them, while their wise man does not even feel them,” Seneca once wrote. Looking back, I clearly see that telling myself I was not a weak hearted person only made me hide it more, talk about it less, and feel more alone in an ache I was already carrying.

I started calling her less, texting her less. I told myself it was because I did not want to intervene in that relationship, because she had a boyfriend now. I had already started to prepare to move on from losing the piece of me that years of friendship had built. Maybe it is more true than I want to admit: I felt the distance, but I was the one who chose it. I told myself that she gave me the heartbreak, even though I was the one who chose first, and only called it heartbreak after.

One day I was scrolling through Instagram. I do not know why I stopped scrolling, but I came across a man talking about negative feelings. He said, “We are trying to kill negative feelings like breakdowns, anxiety, lust, completely, but the thing is, every time you try to make it disappear from your mind, it appears in your mind. If I say do not think of an elephant, what do you think? An elephant. So how your mind works is, you should not suppress it. You should accept it as yours.” As I listened to this, I thought, how should I do this? I think this will work. I researched it, and I learned.

So I used to believe that I should kill a negative emotion. Now I think I have to live with it as mine. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life,” Susan David once said.

You avoid the feeling by scrolling, eyes fixed on the screen, unmoving, for hours, late at night, not knowing why.

There is no complete solution for this. But what helped me was a book: The Power of Subconscious Mind, by Joseph Murphy. The feelings we had, have, and will have are all connected in our subconscious mind. So what I did was accept that the part of me which was with her is now gone, and I told myself I will discover that part of me with someone else someday. Not just once. I did it for several days, and that helped me clear my mind.

After hearing this on Instagram, I crossed the threshold I had built myself, unblocked her ID, saw her childhood photos, and sat with those moments, keeping myself company. I looked at photos, smiled, took breaths as I drank coffee, and the scene faded away to the present.

Subscribe now

What's the negative feeling you're still carrying with someone? Leave it in the comments, I read every one.

I looked down at my phone as the feeling hit my heart and looked at myself in the black screen of my phone. Again, I looked at her the distance had become less. She was tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling at a child near her. I looked at her, smiled to myself, and looked at my phone.

I did not scroll, thinking to myself, should I go talk to her? Should I say she is beautiful? Is it okay if I talk to her? Will she think of me as a creep? Do I love her? Will I make her mine? Will I lead my life with her? Is this love at first sight? Too many questions in milliseconds.

She walked past me, I stared at her without noticing. She turned to me, she looked for a second of eye contact, and I turned away. My stomach felt weird and heavy, so heavy. I wanted to talk to her, but I could not. As I got up and went to talk to her, a train horn sounded from far away, and the people near me said, “Hey, the train has arrived, come on all“, I stopped there. She was at a reachable distance, I wanted to talk, but I stepped back and turned in the opposite direction. I did not want to leave her, but as the train came, I reasoned with myself, the train's arrival as an excuse not to go talk to her. I left as the train came, went and sat and searched for her from inside the train in that crowd. I did not see her, then the train left. As the train went, suddenly I had a view of her, sitting and talking to someone near her, and the train moved.

I fell into a reverie, replaying it. I was thinking about her the whole day until night. I tried to find her on Instagram. I searched, only to find nothing. I was regretting my choices. I could have left my train and come later, I could have talked to her. The worst thing she could have said was no.

ahhhhhhh…. it is so wistful when I think about that situation right now.

I do not know whether it is a coincidence or not, I came across a quote this week saying,

“Beauty admired but not spoken is a sin.”

I think I have committed a sin.

Now why did I find her attractive? There were many people in the railway station, but my eye was drawn to her alone. Why? She had a perfect face that I had sculpted within my heart for years. Her eyes, her nose, her lips, her curly hair. I said to myself, “What a beautiful girl!“ We all have different perspectives on how we see the world and what we are attracted to.

If I actually walk up to her and talk to her, this is what I say. First of all, I am flustered and nervous as fuck. As I walk to her, tapping my phone under my palm and casually standing next to her, I wait until she sees me. But she never turns. I turn to her side, admiring her. I start with a “Hey, Hi!!! 😁👋“. She tucks her hair behind her ears as she looks at me, saying, “Hi!“. I extend my hand to give her a handshake, saying, “I am Anirudh, and you are?“, as she tells me her name, I say to her, “ I just wanted to say you are really gorgeous in this red saree of yours, and it really suits you,” and give a warm smile. Cut… cut…. cut… I do not have the imagination strength after this. As I am writing this, I am embarrassed 🫣. But what if this had happened? This is why I should have taken the shot. Now I regret my whole decision.

I love to read about human psychology and art. As I was regretting my decision, a question popped into my head asking, “What is the psychology behind regretting a decision I made?“, As I searched… searched… searched… on the internet to find out about a psychologist. Thomas Gilovich. His research shows we regret our actions more, the embarrassing thing said, the risk that flopped. But when people look back over months and years, the pattern reverses completely. Action regret fades with time, while inaction regret, the thing never said, never tried, never risked, grows heavier the longer it sits.

And this thing really hit me to the bottom of my heart, making me long for that feeling that I slipped out of my hands. I am struggling to move my way out, and I am thinking, if I move on, will I forget her? This feeling will always live through my life as a regret and also as art, art of admiring her beauty from far away.

When was the last time you wanted to compliment someone but chose not to, and why?

Let's imagine we have ideas pouring out one day, and we start to paint or draw on paper. Have you seen your face when you are doing what you enjoy? That concentration. You are so concentrated that time goes by very fast around you, and you do not even notice until our parents call us for dinner or when we are hungry, losing ourselves. And it gives us a happiness that nothing else can give, the creative thoughts pouring onto paper make us feel very proud and ask ourselves after finishing, "Did I make this?", and give a kiss to ourselves and say, "I am the one, ha!". The satisfaction is visceral. You feel it before you think it. And we just think about this all day happily. It does not matter if you paint, write, cook, design, or speak. The feeling is the same. Scientists have a name for what just happened to you.

Every creative person around the world knows this state. Where, they go into a concentrated state they forget whatever they are feeling, and drown in the Catharsis mindset, so they can fight any negative emotions and live the happy emotion through art. Scientists have named this the Flow State. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied this for decades. Flow state happens when your skill level matches the challenge perfectly. Your brain quiets the self-conscious part, the part that judges and worries. Cortisol, the stress hormone, drops. You feel calm and focused at the same time. It is one of the most consistently reported sources of deep happiness across the world. But flow state is only the beginning of what art does to you.

I love Creative painting. Not the drawn ones by seeing something, but the ones the artist draws from their mind. Everyone has their own perspective of art. Some like Design, some like poems, some like essays. It is all different perspectives and emotions poured into art. For me, it is painting and drawing. When you see the art you love and made by someone, and that hits the exact emotion you were looking for, it hits harder than any other physical thing could do. You realise that emotions can be sublimated into these kinds of art too. And from there, you start to want that kind of creativity and start thinking. And that is exactly what art has been doing since the beginning of human history.

The oldest ever figurative art found was painted 51,200 years ago in a cave in Indonesia. A pig drawn on a rock wall. Those people had no audience. I think people have been communicating with each other through art and building stories for the next generations. The stories of their adventures, how they led their life, how they felt when they were living in the cave and hunting, etc. Art has never stopped because humans have never stopped needing to make things. Human were expressing their emotions through art, and from there, here we are with modern art. But something is changing now.

We, the 21st century generation, have the easiest and most access to whatever art we are into. But what we are doing is consuming more than any generation in history. We scroll social media to skip the art session we really love for fake dopamine, and regret it at the end of the day. I really think we choose one type of art, then start it, but after a while, we go to some AI chat and ask, “How to improve this within this certain number of days?“, Instead of practicing, we start to worry about the result of our art. By asking AI, we already know the ending of the work, how it would be. So we get satisfied with whatever answer the AI gives and say, “AH, it says it is this difficult, so let’s skip it.“ Because making something is not about the output. It is about what happens to you in the process.

The thing about art or anything you love doing, the first thing you can do is to love the process of what you are doing, not the result. I know the ending is always what makes you happy. But if you want to get more into what you love and do that for years, you must fall in love with the process. It is like rain, first rain will not fill any pond, the more the rain comes, the more the water in ponds, lakes, and rivers gets filled. It applies to any art you love. The world is full of consumers. It is starving for makers. Be artisanal to be authentic in this world.

The emptiness I talked about in the beginning is not that we ran out of ideas, We had not consumed enough to make our own yet. Pick an artist you like, steal his art style, and make some art out of it with your imagination. Pick up whatever you love. Painting, writing, cooking, designing, speaking. Start badly. The first 100 arts will always be bad. When you get the hang of it, that is when you fall in love with the art itself.

What is one thing you have been wanting to make but kept putting off? Start it today. Even if it is bad. Especially if it is bad.

Nothing.

We wait, wait, and wait. After a while, we start to overthink about what we did to them, or we replay scenes in our mind, thinking about the worst case scenarios and agonising in our own world. And the worst part is we do not even know if we did anything wrong.

Why do we feel emotional pain stronger than physical pain? I have heard many people say, “I can withstand a broken bone, but breakups are too painful.” The real reason is the science behind it. The pain of rejection and physical pain both share the same hardware in the brain. In neuroscience, they call it the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC). A seen message with no reply is perfectly inscrutable. It tells you everything and explains nothing. Imagine you touch a hot pan, the distress from the pain travels through the nervous system. The same applies when you feel rejection or get ignored by the ones you love. Studies show we would rather know something terrible than know nothing at all. Uncertainty hurts more than bad news. That is why “seen” with no reply destroys us more than goodbyes ever would. And your brain has a reason for that. A very old one.

Thousands of years ago, humans lived in tribes. If your tribe rejected you... no food, no protection, no shelter. We were much less likely to survive. So evolution trained our brain to react to exclusion. Today, getting left on chat is not life threatening. But your brain does not fully understand the difference. It still reacts as if “Being rejected could be dangerous.” So our brain treats belonging as a basic need. That is why being ignored or rejected feels deeply painful. It hurts our self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. But here is the thing. Most of the time, the silence is not about you at all.

Have you experienced someone going quiet on you for no reason, and the first thing that comes to your mind is, What did I do? Did I do something wrong? We do not think rationally about what happened. After some time, they themselves come and talk to us. We are like, “What is this? Sometimes they are like this, and sometimes they are like that. I do not understand.” And yet we forget this every single time.

Here is the thing most of us get wrong. All human beings have different perspectives on everything. Everyone we know has their own story of life too. There might be people who are special to you among the people we know. And they actually do not have to pay attention to us all the time. But we want them to. As we know, it is what belonging means.

I had a friend. This is his story about how he completely misunderstood the situation 😅. He was talking to a girl, his close friend. They always hit each other, tease each other; they were basically how friends are. Now one day, the girl’s phone had broken. She had no phone. He did not know this. He sent messages but got no reply. He thought she was ignoring him on purpose. He waited, started overthinking, and began talking like a pessimist. I was like, “Shut up, dude. She will reply. You do not know her situation.” He did not listen. Then, on the fifth day, she replied saying her phone had broken, so she could not reply. She had bought a new phone now, so no problem. As he showed the text to me, I side-eyed him for a second and looked at my phone, saying, “Idiot freaked out for nothing.”

We all have someone special, a friend, a lover, parents, anyone. When they are with us, we do not value them. When they start ignoring us or stop talking to us, that is when it hits hard. I know it feels very hard and painful. All humans in the world have different worlds, and their worlds have different perspectives too. We humans are very selfish. We want all the attention from the people we love. But what we do not know is that they may have some problems, they may be having a good time alone, or maybe they are with their loved ones. We all assume wrong. If someone ignores you, WAIT. Do not be a solipsist. Ask them what happened. Talk to them. If they do not want to, then leave the problem. No more talking or thinking about it. The thing is, we cannot make the thinking go away, so make yourself engage in some other work. Because their silence was never your story to write.

We judge people because we see through our own lens. If we could see, even once, through their lens, we would be surprised by how they really are. We do not really know what people are until they tell us. Meet the silence with equanimity. Do not wait for them to explain. Just ask, “Everything okay?” That will give you the whole answer instead of leaving you trapped in misattribution.

When was the last time you assumed the worst about someone’s silence? What would have changed if you had just asked?

We always want everything we see that is impressive. We do not really know what we actually want. If we see a guitarist we want to become one. If we see an artist we want that. A rich life, we want that. A small house in the centre of a forest, we want that. We do not actually love the thing. We love the idea of the thing we want. We love the yearning for it. Nobody told us why.

Scientists say our brain has two systems. One is the wanting system and another is the enjoying system. Dopamine fires during pursuit. Not during possession. Five years ago the phone you have right now was a miracle. Now it is normal. Why? Once you get the thing you want, dopamine moves to the next thing. Dopamine rewards the chase not the catch. This applies to everything. Objects. People. Sensations. The satisfaction is ephemeral. The wanting is permanent. So the chase always feels better than the having. This is not just about phones. Philosophers knew this thousands of years before scientists proved it.

Take me for example. I am a portrait artist, not in practice. I genuinely want to improve my drawing skills. But when I see a better artist with a different type of art, I want that too. This type of wanting was mentioned by a philosopher named René Girard.

“We desire according to the desire of the other.”

— René Girard

Meaning we actually do not know what we really want. We want what other people want. We see someone else desire something and suddenly we desire it too.

Next, when we see a house in the middle of a forest, people living there peacefully, or seeing a big house with so many rooms like a palace, being rich, we want that. This type of wanting was mentioned by a philosopher named Epicurus.

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not."

— Epicurus

Meaning there are two types of desire. Natural ones like food and shelter, easily satisfied. Empty ones like fame and luxury, impossible to satisfy. Most people chase the empty ones their whole life. Empty desires are insatiable by design.

Next, we always want something we cannot attain. For example, an iPhone. I really do not know how many of us can afford that, but we buy it and regret it. This was mentioned by a Stoic named Seneca.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

— Seneca

Meaning the more you crave, the poorer you feel. No matter how much you have. Most of what you want was never yours to begin with.

Andre Agassi, a world number one tennis player, won 8 Grand Slam titles as a professional from 1986 to 2006.

He said, “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”

Jim Carrey, actor and comedian, is a cartoon himself, he turned his facial expression into a billion dollar empire.

He said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

What I see both of them are not chasing fame, I think they want mental peace. While we want what they are right now, rich and fame. Even when the experienced tell us to slow down or control our thought on wanting, we ignore them, and when we experience ourselves, we tell the same to other. It is like saying to a small boy not to go fast on a bicycle. After he falls down he realizes. We always have to learn the hard way. And the wanting never stops.

When we open Instagram or YouTube, we see many creators with many skills, each one has their specialties. When we see some one is having fun in their life, they have a beautiful house, watching movies, going with someone they love and travelling to places freely, everything, we just compare their life to ours and start to think like "If I had those things, I would have been happy(dramatic gasp)", the thing is we really have our own version of it, we still have not figured it out yet. Social media passively makes us comparison and envy prone. Social media sells novelty. Every scroll is a new thing to want. The algorithm is not showing you the world. It is showing you everything you do not have.

A friend of mine, he is assistant professor in a college now. He loves playing PlayStation and PC games. One day he called me asking suggestion to buy a PlayStation 2, as soon as I heard, I was surprised and suggested not to buy. You know what Friends do not listen until they experience it, Even after I said, he bought, he played it for one week, maybe two, now it has been 1 year he did not play or use that even single time, now he wants to sell it. The audacity. This is a pattern known as hedonic adaptation in psychology. It basically means your brain has a happiness set point and no matter what happens, good or bad, you always return to it. You get the thing. You feel good. Then your brain adjusts. And good becomes normal. And normal starts to feel like not enough. So you want the next thing. And the cycle never stops. The want will always come. The question is whether you will let it think for you. Contentment is not the absence of wanting. It is choosing not to be controlled by it.

What is one thing you have right now that you once desperately wanted? Sit with that for a moment before you scroll to the next thing.

The last time you were waiting for food, in a queue, on a bus, how long did you last before reaching for your phone? We GenZ’s are the most distracted generation. We cannot sit with boredom for even 5 to 10 minutes. We want to escape immediately. So we take out our phones, scroll through some reels, or not even reels, just open the phone and close it for no reason. But it was not always like this.

Let us go back 360 years in the past. In 1665, a deadly plague spread across England. Cambridge was shut down. All the students were sent home. One of them was sent back to his family farmhouse with nothing to do. No lectures. No professors. Just the silence and empty fields for months. He was sitting in a garden in a contemplative mood. He watched an apple fall from a tree. He was bored and idle. That quiet moment of observation made him think, "why does it fall down and not sideways?" And in that silence, something extraordinary happened. That question led to 20 years of thinking which became the theory of gravity. His name was Isaac Newton.

What I am basically saying is that during boredom what we think or what we do may have a high impact on life. This man Isaac Newton just saw an apple falling down and discovered something. Maybe we are not delusional when we see something in boredom and “Maybe I could do that.” Most of the time we think and pass the thinking as it goes. Isaac found gravity not because he was a genius, but because he was bored. So what exactly does boredom do to your brain?

My ideas are just random thoughts that I go through in real life. Some ideas maybe stolen because I like to see through others’ perspectives. What they say I live thought in my imaginations to see what have they gone through. Maybe not 100 percent accurate, but I go through the possibilities on my mind so that I can understand theirs too. When we are thinking like that I think our brain is dumping the thoughts out so that it can get free from its space. Then I searched this on Google to understand this and found out that scientists call it the Default Mode Network. As I go more and learn about boredom one researcher proved bored people are more creative. The researcher name is Dr. Sandi Mann. She named that research as “pen and paper study” where participants endured boring tasks like copying or reading numbers from a phone directory. As this goes another research says globally we use our smartphone 4 to 5 hours approximately, to distract ourself from this boredom. But my thought on this, your brain does its best work when you stop working.

Scrolling is not always wasted time, we scroll but steal others ideas and implement it to ours. A stolen inspiration of many arts make ours more unique. This is an idea from the author Named Austin Kleon. Maybe we are scrolling to get ideas, but when we are silent we get our own thoughts, ideas and implementations that we could do to make ourself engaged in the implement process. But there is a difference between stealing inspiration and never thinking for yourself, not all the people who take out watch reels are making into starting a inspired implementation. We have replaced silence with scrolling so completely that we never hear our own thoughts anymore. So we are losing our precious time and thought that we should be hearing to make ourself improve our creative and problem solving thinking. And we have been paying the price ever since.

What I heard about Darwin, Tesla and Einstein is that they all have something, where they can be silence so that they can think, take darwin for example he built a gravel path called sandwalk at his home. Walked it every single day for hours. He called it his ‘Thinking path’, his greatest ideas came from this path not his desk. Tesla, he was walking in a park at sunset reciting poetry. Suddenly the idea for AC motor came to him like a flash. He drew it in the dirt with a stick. Einstein, when he was 16 he imagined himself chasing a beam of light. Just daydreaming. That one idle thought became the foundation of the theory of relativity. Your ideas come from the places you tend to be most relaxed. Maybe you get ideas come from contemplatively thinking in bathroom, when you are walking, when you are talking with somebody a sudden idea clicks and writes it down, there will be comfort zone to get ideas first find that. All of them had one thing in common. They protected their emptiness.

Assume this, if you give me 30 minutes of real silence every single day, for first 7 days I would be overthinking on whatever I think at that time. After that maybe I’ll create something to get out of that boredom with no phone. Maybe I’ll discover about what are the skills I want to build and am I doing it, with some thinking as self talk to improve myself in the knowledge by asking different perspective question and answer. I don’t really know what will I discover but I know that I can do something useful because I am silent. When someone is in silence they discover two things one they can discover the pattern of their thinking like they know what are they thinking and which time are they thinking about the thing and why they are thinking. Two they will now know that thinking is useful because they are figuring out themselves. The outcome of the still maybe they even find their purpose, we don’t know what unexpected can happen, suddenly they are successful, we don’t pay price to be a little delusional, so be delusional. But here is the honest truth nobody tells you.

The honest truth nobody tells you about boredom is... Silence is not comfortable for everyone. For some people it hurts first. Many people I know, they don’t have a reason to be stressed, but they are. So if they go into silence the stress, anxiety depression all makes them feel bad, some people get hurt because of it. They run back to their phone because of these situations. There is no real fixed situation, but here is the way I am thinking, always when you have strong negative emotion, don’t think of making them go away, just live with it, because the more you push something the more you remember it. So embrace and live with your emotion don’t chase it away, that emotion is also a part of you, like that is reflection you need to hug and you say ‘Don’t worry I can handle it’. If you handle a strong emotion like this this may help you become aware of the problem and gives you solution in your silence. So always remember boredom is something that comes with your life, live with it, as you live with it you will be able to understand yourself more to create more, be happy more, because of happy you will enjoy the life you have not seen yet.

The next time you feel bored, do not reach for your phone. Just sit with it for five minutes. See what your brain discovers. Then come back and tell me what happened.

Ever since graduation, someone asks us the same question. “When are you getting a real job?” Not a job. But a real one. Like there are only jobs in IT, software, and government service. Respect is conditioned according to the salary slip that impresses society. We are sending 50 to 100 applications every day, spending 4 to 5 hours clicking submit. Getting nothing but refusals. Society thinks this is good enough for our lives. But we are running into a cave like that is the only way to survive, where we don’t even know what lies at the end. Last week, my parents sat down. Three months since graduation. “When are you getting a real job? What are you planning to do for income? Are you just going to sit around the house scrolling your phone?”, as this goes at the other end my friends and people in my circle getting job they don’t like because of EMIs and loan they have taken to get liabilities like Bikes, Cars, Housing loans.. when they can’t even afford it.

Ask most people, do they love their job? Most answers will be NO. But here is the real thing. They want a job because of their family situation. Most men and women going for jobs are taking responsibility over their family. To pay loans. To pay EMIs. To live a comfortable life. For some people the job is the main source of life. This is real. But during that time, they are missing the whole point of life. Daily running for their jobs gets tedious after years. They can’t even save some money. They will go to any end to keep this job safe. That is what is making them live.I know someone who wakes up early every day, goes to a job where his team leader yells at him, comes home, goes to the gym, and tells anyone who will listen how much he hates it. Some days frustrated. Some days stressed. Occasionally happy. But always back there the next morning.

As society pushes us to get a real job, with no real choice, we pick a job that gives a stable income. In the first year we might think this will change. That we will get a greater position, more income, and we will be free. There is the plot twist. After a certain age we won't be able to take a gamble because our family lives on what we earn. As the job gives us stability it also gives us complacency and we will not be able to come out of it. According to ADP Research 2025, only 19% of Indian workers are actually engaged in their jobs. The remaining 81% are just surviving.That is because we are afraid. "What happens when I have no money." "Why should I take something else while I have money." These thoughts will come into our mind. That fear alone is enough to make us stuck inside the cave forever.

Nowadays in this vast technological world AI has started to rule every industry. People are seeing AI at work everywhere. So people are getting sick of it and trying to look for things that are authentic. People are loving what is real. They love watching people with strong passion, travelling through other people's journeys to get out of the AI world. There is a creator called Kisthenics, a calisthenics athlete who documents his entire life. Running, swimming, gym, travelling, climbing mountains. He had a job. He left it. Now he is inspiring many people as he goes, because he is living so many people's dream life. He is what we call an authentic creator. It makes people stop and think. Wait is that possible?

There are many passions like art, sports, writing, comedy, cinematography and more. Many people with these passions are doing what they can to make their income out of them. But the rest of the people don't even know that these kinds of jobs exist. They are not properly educated on real world possibilities. They are only told to run in a rat race. Then due to those responsibilities, they never come to what they are really passionate about. Take artists for example, like portrait artists, painters, singers. AI can make pictures, but it cannot replace art done by an authentic artist. Now people are paying dollars to buy handmade artworks. This really surprised me. I thought those were hobbies, but they are making money out of it.

I am doing everything I can to get out of this cave. I have started creating content and learning AI automation, not because it is easy, but as my way out. I would rather spend time figuring out myself than being stuck inside it. I will get out and when I do, you will hear my name.

College ended a month ago. I have a plan, but instead of executing it, I am doomscrolling and reading fiction. Wasting my time.

The only thing keeping me moving is this. I started posting and commenting on X and LinkedIn. Creating posts on YouTube and Instagram. But the thing is, I am scared of people judging me. Even though I am scared I posted my first video on X, Insta and YouTube all at the same time.

Now I have started to write my own story for my life.

Most of my batchmates are doomscrolling. Watching their brains rot. Some applying for jobs daily, some got one.

All want 9-5 jobs. Safe and steady income. Society approval as an identity.

This cycle. Job, home, marriage, kids, school fees, more job, then death.

No savings, no story, just die as a commoner.

The pity feeling for me is the cycle of a common man. Job to death. No stories to tell their children or grandchildren.

I am really angry at this society for pushing 21-year-olds to own homes, bikes and cars which others took years to own. If you don’t have these, you are poor, you are nothing.

And I am terrified that my parents are also pushing me into the same trap they fell.

I want to escape this trap. The trap of society pressure. What I should or should not do. What kind of job I should go to. All the things society wants me to be.

And I will. Someday I will build a forest house in Italy or Spain. Escaping the matrix. Going to any extent to be a lover of learning and earn money through that. So no one tells me what I should do.