“There would be no issues in them”, I thought.

Then he told me about how insecure he feels when his girlfriend meets someone, he knows she has no intention to make him feel this. In fact, she always made him feel secure. Despite that he felt the same. Not once, not twice, again and again.

I related to him to the core. I have been in a relationship where I was insecure. So much that the other person and myself had frustrating days. The days which spent by not talking, feeling agitated, and furious about the situation. I know that it was coming from me.

And I felt this same insecurity about money. Growing up, everyone around me were well-established. But we had financial problems in our home. I had that financial insecurity since I was 10.

I have noticed this multiple times in the people I talk with, my friends, classmates, family and strangers. Everyone has an insecurity of something, if they are rich they are insecure about their family, if they have family they are insecure about money, if they have both they are insecure about their looks, and so on.

Insecurity seems a normal thing because it is common. But we ignore the reality hiding behind it. It affects your mental, physical and primarily social health. Your relationships get ruined, your days are wasted, you isolate yourself, just so you don’t feel it. You feel running from it will make it go away, and the opposite happens.

Many of us have accepted it as a flaw. “That’s how I am”, “Insecure”. Well, I don’t believe this. So, I started digging in it to help you become secure in your own skin.

What insecurity actually is?

A word thrown away from the people at you as you lack something. “You are insecure” means you are fragile, you are incapable, the way men use it against each other, as if feeling something makes you less.

Social media made it even better, if someone is insecure, abandon them.

“We don’t want an insecure guy. I want someone secure, who lets me do anything.”

Imagine you are sitting in a room, already feeling behind, left-out, under-confident and insecure about his existence, watching this video thinking—nobody will accept me, damaging his self-esteem.

That brings me to the Sociometer theory by Mark Leary which argues something very interesting about self-esteem.

Self-esteem isn’t a fixed trait inside you, it is a “sociometer” which monitors how much value you are getting from the people around you. The reason behind it is kind of obvious. Our ancestor’s survival depended on maintaining high-quality social bonds, so the self-esteem system is about how much social value you get rather than standalone trait. It is to warn you that your standing in a group setting is dropping, so you can act on it.

This is exactly what happens when you see a very shy person in your group making a joke after being silent for an hour. It is their self-esteem kicking in, telling them that nobody is taking you serious.

Biologically, the amygdala, brain’s threat detection center, responds faster to negative and threatening cues than positive ones. As psychologist Rick Hanson describes it, roughly two-thirds of the amygdala’s neurons are devoted to detecting negativity and fast forwarding it into long-term memory. This asymmetry is shaped by evolution because back then missing a real threat was costlier (i.e. death) than a false alarm. It also explains why our brain focuses on the negative things people said to us rather than the compliments we receive.

Naomi Eisenberger’s fMRI studies unveil something more interesting. She had people play a virtual ball-tossing game and then get excluded. What happened next wasn’t surprising, the same region that lights up during physical pain, the anterior cingulate cortex, became more active during social exclusion, and its activity tracked directly with how much distress people reported.

Social insecurity isn’t a metaphorical wound. It runs through the same alarm system as a broken bone.

Being excluded is almost equivalent to a broken bone. And when this happens in childhood, when you don't even know what a brain is, it's detrimental.

It’s rooted in your childhood.

Childhood is where things first go wrong, and if not there, then somewhere between 16 and 21, when you're old enough to feel everything but not fully equipped to understand any of it.

There are several theories explaining this. Let’s go through them one by one.

Bowlby’s attachment theory says that the relationship you have with your caregiver in early childhood becomes a mental template, a working model, for every relationship you’ll have afterward.

It isn’t conscious, you don’t decide this, but the blueprint gets built before you even have the words for it. If that early relationship felt unpredictable, or conditional, or absent, your brain files that away as what relationships are. And then you spend years wondering why closeness feels unsafe.

Researchers have since confirmed this isn’t just theory. Insecure attachment in infancy reliably predicts attachment difficulties in adulthood, especially when childhood involved trauma or inconsistent caregiving.

Carl Rogers adds another layer. When a parent only gives love and approval conditionally, meaning when you perform, behave, or comply, the child quietly learns that they are only acceptable when they meet certain standards. That gap between who you actually are and who you feel you need to be in order to be loved, that’s where a lot of adult insecurity lives.

A 2023 meta-analysis backed this up with real numbers, conditional parental regard predicted higher contingent self-esteem, more depression, and less closeness to the parent across dozens of samples.

Jeffrey Young’s schema therapy gives a name to the specific belief this produces. He calls it the defectiveness schema, a deep, quiet sense that you are fundamentally flawed and that if people really saw you, they’d leave.

It almost always travels alongside an abandonment schema, so the two beliefs feed each other. “I’m unlovable” becomes “I’ll be left,” and that loop runs in the background of almost every relationship.

Underneath all of this is a biological reality. Psychologists call it toxic stress, which is essentially chronic stress in childhood with no buffer, no supportive adult, no relief, and unlike normal stress which passes, this kind actually changes the brain's physical structure.

It reduces the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotion over time, and enlarges the amygdala, the part that detects threats, during the years when the brain is most plastic. The insecurity isn’t just psychological. It gets physically built into the brain by the environment a child grows up in.

And then there’s rejection sensitivity, a model by Downey and Feldman that explains what this looks like day to day. When a child’s needs are repeatedly rejected, they start expecting rejection everywhere. They become hypervigilant, reading every small signal from other people as potential abandonment.

It’s why someone assumes a delayed text reply means the other person is angry. It’s not irrational, it’s a childhood alarm system that never got turned off.

Getting out of insecurity

Insecurity is a common psychological phenomenon. 6 out of 7 people in the world, almost 85% of the whole population goes through high level of perceived insecurity. That’s A LOT.

But I won’t leave you without having a solution. Because I know you’ve gone through it or still do, so do I, and so does everyone. That isn’t something you should be ashamed about nor should you be proud.

There is optimism and science behind this which will help you overcome it.

The internal working model isn’t fixed. Research by Roisman and colleagues found that an estimated 20 to 30 percent of adults with insecure childhood attachment go on to develop genuine secure attachment later in life, and on both behavioral measures and brain scans they become almost equivalent from people who were securely attached from birth.

Many neuroscientist have proposed a solution which says that forming a new type of attachment which has less uncertainty and produces more predicted responses to redesign our brain and body-based attachment.

But that always isn’t in our control right?

There’s another approach. Kristin Neff breaks this down into three things, and I want to walk through each one because they’re more practical than they sound.

The first is being kind to yourself instead of judging yourself. Most insecure people, myself included, have a running internal commentary that’s harsher than anything a stranger would say to them. You catch yourself in a mirror and the first thought isn’t neutral. You send a message and spend the next hour analysing whether it came across wrong. That internal voice isn’t honesty, it’s habit, and it can be replaced. Not with delusion, not with “I’m perfect as I am” affirmations, just with the same basic decency you’d extend to a friend who was struggling.

The second is common humanity, which sounds philosophical but is actually just about not disappearing when you feel bad. Every time I felt insecure I withdrew. Stopped replying, avoided rooms, chose the ceiling over people. And every time I came back out, even for something small, a conversation with a stranger, helping someone who looked lost, it was better. Insecurity shrinks when you stop feeding it with isolation.

The third is mindfulness, which isn’t about meditation or apps. It’s just about catching yourself mid-spiral and asking whether what you’re feeling right now is real or whether it’s an old pattern running in a new situation. The person who didn’t text back probably isn’t rejecting you. Your brain just has that script loaded and ready.

Greater self-compassion is consistently linked to less anxiety and depression, an effect that holds even when controlling for self-criticism itself. It’s the direct antidote to internalized conditions of worth, treating yourself the way you’d treat someone you didn’t require to perform for your affection.

Insecurity is a signal calibrated by an old environment, not a permanent verdict on who you are, and because it was built by inputs, rejection, conditional love, chronic stress, it can be rebuilt by different inputs, safe relationships, repeated evidence that you won’t be abandoned, and the basic act of being kind to yourself when nobody else is watching.

My friend on that Tuesday didn’t need to stop loving his girlfriend. He needed to stop running the childhood script in an adult relationship. That gap between the fear and the reality, between what his brain was predicting and what was actually happening, that’s where the work is.

Staying insecure doesn’t only cost you. It costs the people around you who are trying, and not being seen for it.

You were not born this way. You were shaped this way. And what gets shaped can be reshaped.

— Ak

But people who studied the market deeply could see the setup building before September, 2024. They weren’t reading gold’s price before everyone else. They were reading something else: central banks accumulating reserves, real rates sliding, and the dollar weakening, while everyone else was watching the number on the chart. The chart was the event, the news months earlier was the enabler.

I saw this in front of my eyes everyday, kept telling people, “invest in gold” because i didn’t have the money. Nobody listened to me (ofc, I was just a kid for them), the same people regret not listening to me today.

The 105.5% didn’t start in September 2024, it’s just when things became impossible to ignore. Patterns were clear, most people didn’t recognise them.

This isn’t a story of gold.

It's a story about who sees the setup, and who only sees the headline.

Most people see the pattern and don’t act on it, most people don’t see the pattern at all.

Pattern recognition isn't a skill reserved for someone with 20+ years of experience, someone sitting on billions of dollars, or someone working in a field where prediction is the whole job.

Steve Jobs did this when he had nothing. He saw the structural significance of the Xerox demo and noticed that a graphical interface wasn't a research toy, it was "anyone can use a computer, not just engineers" while the room full of Xerox's own people, staring at the same screen, saw a prototype.

It applies everywhere in your life, the deal that fell apart, the hire that didn’t work out, the relationship that ended. Same setup-before-event structure, different domain.

This isn’t quantum physics. It is easier to build this skill than you can imagine.

I've been thinking about why I didn't just write this down years ago when I was telling people about gold. That's the memory I keep coming back to, the fact that nobody needed to believe me if I could've just shown them how to see it themselves. That's why I'm sitting in this chair right now at 9pm, dim yellow light, zero-sugar pepsi on my left, actually writing it down instead of telling it at dinner again. So let's get into it

You might already know what pattern recognition is and I won’t waste much of your time on that.

In simple terms, it is impossible for our brain to remember everything we see. Especially in the information overload era, making your brain remember hundreds of “productive reels” you saw or twenty articles you read is like writing all of the things you’ve noticed since your childhood in one single notebook.

Brain still helps you to do that to some extent, where it saves what you see in inferences.

For example: When you see a chair, you directly say it’s a chair, but your brain hasn’t stored the information as a chair. It has stored it based on patterns.

The two most important types of pattern recognition are bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up is where the raw data is interpreted on the information such as lines, light, edges, shape, etc. Meanwhile, the top-down is where your existing knowledge, emotions, memories shapes the interpretation (the most used one)

The brain doesn't just store what it sees, it stores relationships between things. That's what lets you recognise a chair you've never sat in before, and eventually, a market setup you've never seen before but somehow feel familiar.

So how do you learn this?

Here's what actually works

Perceptual Learning

Most of what you learn in one subject only makes sense when you see it break the rules of another

You cannot find patterns while only studying one subject over and over again. You need to expose yourself to a varied subjects with fast feedback rather than deep diving in one subject. So the brain learns which features matter and which are noise.

For example: stock markets and psychology seem polar opposite subjects if you have surface level knowledge. But if you’ve deep dived enough, you must know that markets without psychology cannot be understood.

To learn this use interleaved practice.

Instead of studying category A in one long block, then B, then C, mix them (A→C→B→A→C→A→B).

Read science fiction and magical realism in the same week. One builds rigid systems. The other dissolves them. Your brain starts noticing the difference between structure and decoration everywhere after that.

This forces constant comparison, which is what strips away reliance on surface features and exposes the deeper distinguishing structure.

Learn through Analogy

When you are seeing something, for every new problem actively ask what you’ve seen before with similar underlying structure with it. Then compare the two side-by-side focused on causality, flows, incentives, and bottlenecks rather than industry, terminology, or surface details.

The people who use better analogies are the ones who have deep understanding of the subject. Instead, the people with surface level knowledge focus more on jargons.

For example: a battery and a water reservoir share nothing similar visually, but structurally both have the same underlying structure of storing a resource and releasing it to supply another system.

That relational skeleton is actual analogy and not surface level resemblance.

Most people compare things by what they look like, useful analogy compares how things work underneath. That's the difference between saying 'these two things are similar' and actually understanding why they behave the same way in different situations.

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Build scripts for your own field

Pattern recognition is used in medical industry a lot, to predict what the patient is feeling. They probably remember thousands of symptoms and their diagnosis at the same time.

They have made their own scripts for recognising it so fast, that when you tell your doctor the symptoms you have, they usually know almost immediately.

They structure this in 3 parts:

1. Enabling Conditions (age, sex, occupation, family history, environment, risk exposure),

2. Fault (the actual underlying biological malfunction), and

3. Consequences (the symptoms and signs you'd expect to observe).

Clues automatically activate a script, letting them predict fast without replaying the mechanism consciously.

You can create the same script for your own field of finance, business, law, or whatever domain you are trying to compress.

The main structure remains the same:
Enabling conditions → Underlying Mechanism → Observable consequences.

Validate before trusting it

There's one thing worth saying before we go further

Pattern recognition is a real skill for knowing what's coming. But it has a failure mode, and it's worth knowing before you trust your own instincts too much.

Which is the failure mode of pattern-recognition.

Where you see meaningful connections in things that are actually unrelated such as gambling fallacies, conspiracy theories, misread statistics, magical thinking (every time I wear this shirt, my team wins)

This happens due to predictive coding.

Because our brain doesn’t passively consume things, it constantly predicts what it expects and sometimes prediction overtakes information like betting on a horse which has a broken leg.

So instead of data → interpretations. Expectation → Information and data is forcefully fitted in.

Patterns you imagine as real get reinforced through emotional experience. In fact, dysregulated pattern processing might play a role in certain neurological and psychiatric conditions. So completely focusing on your instincts disguised as pattern recognition can turn into a losing game.

Run whatever pattern you've spotted through these questions before you trust it

• What else could explain this?

• What evidence would prove me wrong?

• What am I assuming?

• What would I change my mind about?

At the end, patterns recognised without validating them are just illusions.

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We recognise patterns everyday, even when you are reading this you have recognised most of my words trying to predict what might come next. Sometimes your guesses were right, sometimes they were wrong. We don’t do it consciously, but we can. Not the usual things, but the things that actually matter like your relationship, your investments, or your business.

Pattern-recognition is a logical skill not an emotional one. Bring emotions in and you are the one who faces the loss. Because that’s not recognising patterns anymore, that’s speculation.

The people who saw gold coming in 2024 weren't smarter. They just didn't confuse the feeling of seeing a pattern with the pattern itself.

— Ak

Two types. Two different systems. Same wound underneath.

Today we close the series with the last two. And I’ll be honest, one of them is the hardest to see clearly because it looks like love, and the other one is what I am genuinely trying to become.

The Narcissistic Couple

This one is sneaky because from the outside it looks like loyalty.

A friend of my sister’s, older than us by a few years, was with someone for a long time. And from the outside it always looked like the real thing, the kind of relationship people point to and say, see, that’s what it looks like when someone actually stays.

He had spent years building a stable life. Good income, comfortable home, the kind of setup that made sense on paper. And somewhere in all of that he had quietly parked something he actually wanted to do, a direction that didn’t pay well, that didn’t make sense to anyone else, but that was his. He told himself he’d get to it eventually. He kept building the comfortable life instead.

When he finally decided to actually go for it, to strip back everything and pursue the thing he had been postponing for years, his partner fell apart. Not because she didn’t love him. But because everything she had built her sense of security around, the lifestyle, the stability, the version of him that provided all of it, was suddenly being renegotiated without her consent.

He left anyway. She was devastated.

And then, after some time, he came back. And she let him. Because she still believed in him, or because the history was too heavy to put down, or because walking away from that many years together felt like admitting something she wasn’t ready to admit.

And nothing changed.

That is what a Narcissistic Couple actually looks like. Not two people who are cruel to each other. Two people who love each other just enough to keep each other stuck. They are each other’s mirror, reflecting back a version of themselves that feels safe and familiar, and every time one of them tries to grow into something uncomfortable, the other reflects back the old image and says, but isn’t this enough, aren’t we enough, come back.

The tragedy isn’t that they don’t love each other. It’s that the love has become a ceiling neither of them can see clearly enough to break through.

And nothing changes.

That is the Narcissistic Couple. Not two people who hate each other. Two people who love each other just enough to keep each other stuck. They are each other’s mirror, reflecting back a version of themselves that feels safe and familiar, and every time one of them tries to grow into something uncomfortable, the other reflects back the old image and says, but isn’t this enough, aren’t we enough, come back.

The tragedy isn’t that they don’t love each other. It’s that the love has become a ceiling neither of them can see clearly enough to break through.

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The Healthy Narcissist

Okay, this one I have to be careful with because it is easy to write this type as some enlightened guru who has figured out life and that is not what it is at all.

The Healthy Narcissist still has the wound. Still has the need. Still wants to be seen and recognised and validated, because they are human and that is what humans need. The difference is what they do with that energy.

Instead of controlling the room or performing for it, instead of finding someone to mirror them back forever, they point that energy outward. They became genuinely interested in the people around them, not as an audience, not as mirrors, but as people. And that interest, that real curiosity about what someone else needs and how they’re feeling and what they’re capable of, turns out to be the most powerful thing a person can develop.

I’ll tell you when I understood this.

There was a college event I was part of organising. And at some point the internal team stopped focusing on the event and started focusing on each other, who wasn’t pulling their weight, whose idea got credit, whose fault it was that something wasn’t ready. The kind of spiral that kills a team quietly from the inside while everyone is still technically showing up.

And I remember making a choice, not a dramatic one, just a quiet internal shift, to stop caring about any of that and focus only on one thing: what does this event need to actually work for the people who are going to be there. Not for me. Not for my role in it. For them.

And when I started operating from that place, something shifted in the room. Not because I said anything inspiring. Just because the energy changed. People can feel when someone is no longer playing for themselves.

That is what the Healthy Narcissist does. They use the same awareness, the same reading of people and rooms that every type on this spectrum has, but instead of extracting from it, they put it in service of something beyond themselves. Growing with people, not just around them.

I am not fully there. I want to be honest about that. But I know what it feels like in the moments when I get close, and it feels completely different from the moments when I am performing or controlling or just trying to be seen.

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What all four types have in common

Every single person in this series, the Controller, the Theatrical, the Couple, the Healthy one, started in the same place.

A childhood that didn’t make them feel enough. A need for validation that never got properly met. A self-image built to protect against a world that felt indifferent.

The difference was never the wound. It was what they decided to do with it, consciously or not.

And here is the thing about awareness, which is the only point I’ve been trying to make across all three parts of this. Awareness leads to change. It doesn’t guarantee it, it doesn’t make it easy, but it is the only door that opens it. The people who stay stuck, who keep controlling, keep performing, keep pulling each other back into the same patterns, they are not bad people. They are just afraid. Afraid of what changes if they actually look at themselves clearly. Afraid of what they’d have to do differently.

So they don’t look.

You read three weeks of this. That means you looked.

What you do with it, is yours.

— Ak

The question was never whether you are a narcissist. We settled that. The question is which kind.

This week, we go inside the first two.

The Controller

Every group has one and if you think your group doesn’t, congratulations, it’s probably you.

The one who plans every trip, every outing, every dinner reservation, who has already mentally assigned everyone their roles before the plan is even out of his mouth. And when something goes off script, when someone cancels last minute or the restaurant is closed or the cab is late, you can feel the energy shift in the room. They get quiet. Or they get sharp. Or they immediately start replanning because sitting with an outcome they didn’t control is genuinely unbearable for them.

You’ve had this friend. Or this manager. Actually let’s talk about managers for a second because this is where it gets interesting.

Most controllers end up in management not because they are the most skilled at the work, but because management is the one place where society hands you a valid reason to control people and calls it leadership. They are not always doing the most. But they are always the most invested in who did what, how it was done, whether it followed the process they designed, and most importantly, whether everyone noticed that it happened under their watch.

Because their self worth doesn’t live in outcomes. It lives in the feeling of, I made that happen. I directed that. Without me, none of this would have worked.

When it works, they feel powerful. When it doesn’t, they collapse inward, doubt everything, rebuild the plan, and quietly decide that someone else is to blame.

Here’s what makes the Controller the hardest type to recognise. They look like the most responsible person in the room. They look like they care the most. And in a way, they do care. Just not about the thing they say they care about.

They care about not losing the only thing that has ever made them feel worth something, the illusion that they are in control of what happens around them.

The Theatrical

My cousin, who I mentioned last week, (if you still haven’t read the last piece yet, read it here) the one who defends herself to the death at every family gathering, she is a Theatrical.

She may not know it. Or maybe somewhere deep down she does and just can’t let herself look at it directly. That’s the thing about this type, the performance protects itself. The show must go on, especially from the performer.

For her, everything becomes a story worth telling. Every achievement gets an announcement. Every struggle becomes a narrative with her at the center of it, doing her best against impossible odds. Every room she walks into, somehow, eventually, the conversation finds its way back to her. Not through aggression or obvious attention seeking, it’s much smoother than that. It’s through the right stories, the right amount of modesty that doesn’t actually hide anything, the right level of vulnerability that still somehow always makes her look good.

And here’s the thing, in the beginning the Theatrical is the most magnetic person you’ve ever met. They are fun. They are engaging. They remember details about you and bring them up at the right time. Something always seems to be happening around them.

Until you notice the pattern.

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Every story is a little more dramatic than it needed to be. Every situation, no matter how it started, finds its way back to them. The attention doesn’t just feel good to them, it feels necessary, like oxygen, like proof that they are real and present and worth something.

You’ve seen this with guys trying to impress someone they like, it is one of the most painful things to watch. The story gets bigger. The achievement becomes slightly more impressive than it was last time. The role they played in some event becomes more central with each retelling. And the person they’re trying to impress slowly loses interest, you can see it happening in real time, while the guy keeps going, completely unaware that the performance is doing the opposite of everything he intends.

That is the Theatrical in action.

They are not exactly lying. They are performing a version of themselves that they genuinely believe deserves the attention they are asking for. The tragedy is they will never find out that the real version would have been enough, because they never stop performing long enough to show it.

What separates these two from each other, and from YOU

The Controller needs to own the situation.

The Theatrical needs to own the room.

One controls what happens. The other controls how they are perceived. But underneath both of them is the same wound, the same thing we talked about last week, the childhood that didn’t make them feel seen, heard, or validated for who they actually were. So they built systems. The Controller built a system around outcomes. The Theatrical built a system around image. And both of those systems work, until they don’t, until the plan fails or the room stops watching, and then the whole thing comes apart.

The difference between them and you is still the same difference we talked about last week.

You noticed.

You read this and recognised someone. Maybe you felt something uncomfortable reading one of these descriptions. Maybe a little more than you want to admit.

That discomfort is not a character flaw. That is awareness. And awareness is the only thing that separates someone who repeats the pattern from someone who eventually breaks it.

Next week, we go inside the last two types.

The Narcissistic Couple, two people who found each other and built a mirror out of their relationship, where instead of challenging each other they just reflect each other’s blind spots back forever.

And the one who actually figured it out.

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Till then, watch the people around you this week. Not with judgment, just with curiosity.

You’ll start seeing it everywhere.

— AK

I was refreshing my page at every 5 mins. 4:05 zero likes. 4:10 zero. 4:15 zero. At 4:16, I looked at myself and said, “did I put enough efforts?”

Now I know, all you are going to say is Ak, likes is just a vanity metric, write for yourself. Remember? ‘Lack of audience is freedom.’

I know all of that.

But we are human beings, we need social recognition. We crave validation. We thrive for attention.

That’s not abnormal. That’s how our species is.

I was feeling all of this, and I stumbled upon a book on my shelf which I wanted to read for months. The book was looking at me, I was looking at it.

It was disappointed in me and so was I. We got a common point and I picked up that book, and it broke my brain. Literally.

Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. I’d been meaning to read it for months. Two chapters in, and I understood why.

The Roots of Narcissism

We, as social creatures, naturally have the ability to connect with people socially through empathy. A tool which if used well, can help us attaining the attention of people, understanding them and predict their actions.

However, this powerful ability to connect is weakened by our instinctive self-absorption.

Our focus and energy turning inwards instead of going outwards can have a corrosive effect on our being.

Imagine the last time someone was talking to you and instead of listening, you were thinking about what you were going to say next. That’s self-absorption, not some character flaw, just your mind doing what minds do.

Is that wrong? Maybe, maybe not.

But is it normal? 100%.

It all starts in childhood and your parents.

When a parent is too self-absorbed to notice the child or the opposite, too involved in every action of the child — both roads lead to the same destination.

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If the child is an extrovert, they develop the habit of talking to anyone, getting attention, and are often seen as the charming one. People predict great things for them. But when that extrovert grows older, they become so dependent on that external validation that they will do anything to keep it coming.

If the child is an introvert, they live in their own world, in their own fantasies, validating themselves from within. But over time, that introvert drifts further from reality and deeper into themselves.

Two different childhoods. Two different behaviours. Same root.

Since childhood we are compared to people. In school to classmates, at work with colleagues, in family with cousins.

We never actually feel seen, heard or validated. Even though that’s all we need.

Everyone is busy in their own lives, figuring out their own shit.

You understand that you cannot be dependent on someone else for the attention. So you find a loophole, you make your own self-image. A better one where you ignore your flaws and mention only the good things about you.

This self-image has one problem. The difference between your reality and this image cannot be too drastic, because if people notice and call that out, you will feel unvalidated again.

Though this self-image helps you validate yourself, especially when someone tries to bring you down or when you are facing depression. We are now completely dependent on our own recognition, our own validation, because we have self-esteem.

Great right? No one needed in your life?

Lol. No.

Narcissism is a Spectrum

Here’s what nobody tells you.

Narcissism isn’t the disease. The unexamined version of it is.

Think about it. Everything you just read above, the self-image, the craving for validation, the childhood wounds, that is not a description of broken people. That is a description of people. All of us.

Robert Greene in Laws of Human Nature argues that we all carry narcissistic energy. The question is never whether you have it. It is whether you have ever actually looked at it honestly.

Psychologists describe narcissism as a spectrum. On one end, someone who cannot advocate for themselves, has no boundaries, lives entirely for others’ approval. They have given themselves away so completely that there is nothing left.

On the other end full clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), no empathy, purely extractive. A person who takes and takes and never once asks what it cost you.

Most of us live somewhere in the middle.

And that middle? That is not a flaw. That is normal.

The word narcissist has been turned into an insult we throw at other people. But the self-image you built, the validation you sought, the attention you craved, that is the spectrum. You are already on it. So am I. So is everyone reading this right now.

The only question worth asking is not whether you are a narcissist.

It is whether you have ever noticed it.

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The Mirror

At 4:16, I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel impatient.

I felt useless.

One post. Zero likes. And somehow my entire sense of effort, of worth, of whether I had done something real, collapsed into a number that hadn’t moved in sixteen minutes.

That’s when I caught myself.

Not with judgment, but with curiosity. Why does this number mean anything to me at all?

I know someone who will never ask that question.

My cousin. She will perform for the family at every gathering, the right stories, the right achievements, the right amount of modesty that doesn’t actually hide anything. And if someone pushes back, even gently, she will defend herself to the death. Not because she’s confident. Because she can’t afford not to be.

She craves validation as much as I do. Maybe more.

The difference isn’t the craving. The difference is that I noticed mine sitting there at 4:16, small and a little embarrassing, and I looked at it honestly.

She never will.

And here’s what Greene’s book made me understand — that gap, between the person who notices and the person who never does, is not a small gap. It is the entire distance between healthy narcissism and the kind that quietly destroys relationships, careers, and people around you.

We are all on this spectrum. The question is not where you started.

It’s whether you are willing to look.

Which brings me to what’s next.

There are four kinds of people on this spectrum. Four distinct patterns, four different ways the same wound expresses itself.

The one who controls everything around them because control feels like safety.

The one who performs constantly because an audience feels like proof they exist.

The couple who found each other and built a mirror out of their relationship.

And the one who figured it out, who turned all of that inward energy into something that actually serves the people around them.

Next week, we go inside the first two.

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Till then, the next time you refresh a page, defend yourself a little too hard, or perform for a room without realising it, don’t scroll past that moment. Sit with it. That discomfort is information.

Where do you belong on the spectrum? We’ll find out next week.

— Ak

(yes, you guessed it right) I was fighting with my girlfriend about something unusual, something which bothered me to the core.

The night went by with the same sourness, silence, and the awkwardness about the situation.

I kept thinking till 3am, doubting every word I said. Did I do something wrong? Should I have not said that?

And somehow ended up apologising to her in the morning with the guilt, with the weird sensation of responsibility for something I didn’t cause.

You might’ve done the same, not once, not twice, but multiple times.

Apologising with guilt. Carrying responsibility for problems you didn’t create.

It took me a while to realise that I wasn't apologising because I was wrong. I was apologising because somewhere in childhood, guilt had become my default response to conflict.

The Diagnosis

I suddenly remembered the moment where I felt the same when my mother expected good grades out of me when i was 10 and I became the kid who studies harder not because they love studying but because they can't bear the look of disappointment on their mother's face.

The kid whose curiosity was never taken seriously, the kid who felt unheard, unseen and unloved.

But at that point, I was not thinking that my parent failed me. Instead I thought, I must have done something wrong.

When a parent makes their love conditional on performance, grades, behaviour, achievement, they are outsourcing their emotional responsibility onto a child who has no framework to reject it. The child absorbs it as truth.

So I dug into it and found a research paper that broke my mind.

According to Marici et al. (2023), parental rejection is a highly traumatic experience for a child, characterised by a lack of parental interest, affection, and emotional support.

Children who experience parental rejection often feel unloved and unwanted, which can lead to both physical and psychological harm.

They further explained that, according to the Acceptance-Rejection Theory, parental rejection negatively affects both the child's psychological and behavioral adjustment.

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The findings showed that adolescents who reported higher levels of parental rejection experienced significantly greater feelings of guilt than those reporting lower rejection

That means, when parents or caregivers consistently fail to provide love, affection, acceptance, and emotional support, children are more likely to perceive parental rejection.

This perceived rejection leads to poorer psychological adjustment and higher levels of guilt, regardless of whether the caregiver is a biological parent or another primary caregiver.

And the worst part? Most people carry that guilt into adulthood completely unexamined. They overwork, over-apologise, over-explain and never once ask where the habit came from.

That’s what I did in my relationship.

That argument with my girlfriend, I wasn't guilty because I was wrong. I was guilty because guilt was the only language I'd learned for conflict. My mother taught me that without knowing she did.

Think about the last time you over-apologised. The last time you felt responsible for someone else's mood. Ask yourself honestly — did you actually do something wrong? Or did you just feel like you had to fix it?

The Solution

Now, most of you might have misunderstood the “my parent failed” part.

The research, the findings, the experience doesn’t lead to blame or resentment towards your parents.

Despite all of this, I love my mom more than ever.

Most of them didn't do this consciously, they were running their own unresolved childhood trauma, insecure attachment patterns, unresolved loss, or chronic stress which influences how they relate to their own children. These experiences may reduce emotional availability and unintentionally shape parenting behaviors that children perceive as rejection.

This can help you understand where your parents come from, but it does not erase the impact they created on you.

So the important question becomes: "Is this guilt an accurate response to something I have done, or is it a belief I learned about myself through early relationships?"

psychological research distinguishes between guilt that follows one's own actions and guilt that develops from adverse childhood experiences. When those feelings originate from repeated rejection rather than personal wrongdoing, healing begins by examining them, understanding their origins, and deciding whether they truly belong to you.

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Let’s look at it practically, you cannot choose the emotional beliefs you learned as a child.

But as an adult, you can examine them. Talk about it. Find people who make you feel safe. Build the relationships that teach you a different language than the one your childhood gave you.

The goal isn't to deny the past, it is to stop allowing it to define who you are today.

“The child who feels responsible for their parent's happiness grows into the adult who feels responsible for everyone's — except their own.”

— Ak

Grey clouds, thunder, everything clogged outside. I’ve always hated rain (until I fell in love). There’s something about being forced to stay still that makes everything you’ve been avoiding suddenly loud.

That day, everything felt wrong at once. Career felt directionless. Family wasn’t good. No matter how hard I pushed, nothing seemed to move. And the thought that kept cycling: why is nobody honest? Why does nothing happen clearly? Why does everyone seem to have two faces?

This is the negative self-talk that almost everyone goes through. And some people go through it every single day — especially the people who are kind, honest, clear in their intentions. Because they hold the world to the same standard they hold themselves.

And the world doesn’t return the favour.

That’s when I heard somewhere, three years ago: “Life isn’t black and white. It’s grey.”

I believed it. For a while, it was comforting. It explained everything, the dishonest friend, the manipulative colleague, the parent who meant well but hurt you anyway. “Everyone is complicated.” “Nobody is fully good or bad.” “It’s grey.”

I sat with that idea for three years. Observed it in my own life, in the people around me, in every situation that confused me.

And after all of that, I disagree.

Life isn’t grey.

It’s colourful. And some of those colours are dark.

The Problem With Grey

When you tell yourself everything is grey, you do something quietly dangerous.

You stop making judgments.

Not the harsh, unfair kind — the necessary kind. The kind that tells you this person is safe and that one isn’t. The kind that lets you decide who gets your time, your trust, your energy.

There’s a concept called false balance. It happens when two unequal things are treated as equally valid just to seem fair. We do this with people too.

Someone deceives you — once, twice, consistently. And instead of calling it what it is, you say: “Well, nobody’s perfect. Life is complicated. Maybe they had their reasons.”

That’s not wisdom. That’s avoidance as maturity in disguise.

Researchers have pointed out that situational ethics, the idea that every behaviour has context that explains it can slide into avoiding responsibility altogether, to the point where individuals are absolved of the choices they make. When you apply “everyone is grey” to every person who wrongs you, you’re not being understanding. You’re handing them a free pass and calling it philosophy.

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People Aren’t Complicated. They’re Consistent.

Here’s what three years of observation actually taught me.

Most people aren’t hiding their true nature. They’re showing it, clearly, repeatedly. You’re just choosing not to read it because reading it would require you to act on it.

Psychology has a framework for the people who are naturally dark. It’s called the Dark Triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. What’s interesting isn’t that these people exist. It’s what research found about them: individuals with dark personality traits have a normal ability for empathy, they simply have no inclination to use it.

Read that again.

They can care. They choose not to.

Machiavellianism, in particular, involves manipulation, self-interest, absence of morality, and deceit — a willingness to ruthlessly exploit others to obtain what they want, driven by a genuinely cynical view of the world.

That’s not grey. That’s a colour. A specific one.

And the mistake most honest, well-intentioned people make is spending years trying to find the grey in someone who has shown them, clearly and consistently, exactly who they are.

Why We Still Call It Grey

Because clarity is uncomfortable.

If someone is genuinely dark, manipulative, self-serving, indifferent to how they affect you. Then you have to make a decision about them. You have to create distance, set a boundary, or walk away. And all of that is hard.

But when you consider that everything is grey? Then you don’t have to decide anything. You can keep the friendship. Keep the relationship. Keep the peace. And blame the complexity of human nature when it hurts you again.

Grey is sometimes chosen not because it’s accurate but because it’s easier than the alternative.

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What Colourful Actually Means

Some people are naturally yellow. Warm, generous, honest. Not because life has been easy for them — often it hasn’t. But because that’s how they’re oriented toward the world.

Some people are naturally black. Not evil in a cinematic sense. Just consistently self-serving, consistently dishonest, consistently extractive in every relationship they’re in.

And most people? They’re somewhere in the middle — blue, green, orange. A mix of intentions, some good, some not. Which is context-dependent and complicated.

This isn’t that everyone is either saint or villain. It’s that not everyone is the same shade of complicated and treating them as if they are defaulting to grey as a universal explanation is how you end up repeatedly hurt by people you kept giving the benefit of the doubt.

Learn to read colour.

The yellow people - go closer. Give more. Trust them.

The black ones - you already know. Stop explaining it away.

And the rest? Pay attention. People tell you who they are over time, not in a single moment.

Life isn’t black and white.

But it’s not grey either.

It’s colourful. And the sooner you stop flattening everyone into the same comfortable, non-committal shade the sooner you stop being surprised by people who were never hiding anything to begin with.

— Ak

That Sunday night before the exam, feeling dread because my mother expected good grades when studies didn’t excite me.

Those anxious days and sleepless nights before the football match because my father expected good performance.

The stuttering and the anxiety I felt when I was forced to speak in the public because, apparently my relatives wanted me to speak publicly because one of my cousins the same age as me could do it

And society as it behaves, expected it all at once.

Real hurt wasn’t that I tried to do it all and kept fulfilling their expectations. It was when after doing it all what you get is “Good Job, let’s move on to the next”

Of course, you are going to be performative your whole life when this is what you get in your childhood instead of clinging to your dreams.

The points of expectations keep rising. Every time you achieve something you have been shown a new target to be achieved and foolish us, we keep chasing it.

The Psychology

Expectations are social contracts nobody signed up for yet everybody enforces. This isn’t something new. You might’ve been expecting something from someone all the way along.

The people expecting things from you aren’t villains — they’re just projecting their own un-lived lives onto you

Your father forces you to be a footballer because he wanted to, but he couldn’t.

Your mother expects good grades because she wanted study, but never got to.

Whatever the society expects isn’t something they want you to do, they want someone do it to fulfil their wish, to give them the sense of achievement. That “yes! he did it, because I told him to.” It’s the matter of that “I”

And when you start living on the path they designed for you. You are not living your own life but the life someone else wanted you to live.

There’s a name for this: borrowed identity. You’re living someone else’s script.

Sartre’s Bad Faith

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explained this beautifully. He believed that bad faith happens when we pretend we don’t have freedom or choice.

“I have to become a doctor because my family wants it.”

“I can’t leave this job because this is who I am.”

“I must behave this way because that’s my role.”

In reality, you still have choices.

Bad faith is when you hide behind a role — “the perfect employee,” “the obedient child,” “the responsible friend” instead of admitting that you’re choosing those actions.

And people do this again and again because freedom is scary. If you admit you have choices, you also have to take responsibility for the consequences.

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The Approval Seeking Brain

We, humans have evolved in tribes. Thousands of years ago, if you are rejected by the tribe — you are literally dead.

So our brains developed a strong desire for approval, praise, belonging and acceptance.

When society approves us or praises us, our brain releases dopamine. This is normal.

The problem occurs when you start depending on that dopamine, because of approval. Because our brain my friend, just wants dopamine right, left and centre. And it doesn’t care if it comes from approval, doomscrolling, or workout.

Then our mind starts spiraling in the same direction

“What will people think?”

“Will everyone like this?”

“How do I avoid disappointing anyone?”

Over time, we stop asking:

“What do I actually want?” and “What do I believe is right?”

That’s also called outsourcing your judgements. You let other people decide how you should live.

That’s betrayal of your authentic self.

The Price of Authenticity

Everyone has an image of who they want you to be:

• Parents want one version.

• Friends want another.

• Society wants another.

• Your partner wants another.

These expectations often conflict. It is impossible to satisfy all of them.

So if you choose your own path, somebody will eventually be disappointed.

For example:

• You start a business instead of taking a safe job, you will disappoint your parents.

• You move to another city, you will disappoint your friends.

• You end a relationship that isn’t right for you, you will disappoint your partner.

• You pursue an unusual interest, you will disappoint the society.

Someone in your life will always say:

“I expected something different from you.”

That doesn’t automatically mean you’re wrong.

It simply means you’re being authentic. That means you are being true to yourself in what you want.

The message

Disappointing people doesn’t mean blowing up your life.

You don’t need to quit your job tomorrow, move cities, or have a dramatic confrontation with your parents to prove something. That’s not the point.

The point is simpler and harder at the same time.

Stop performing.

Stop being the version of yourself that exists only to manage other people’s feelings about you. The obedient child. The responsible friend. The safe choice. These are roles, not identities. And the longer you wear them, the more you forget there’s a difference.

Yes, you’ll make wrong decisions. You’ll disappoint people who love you. You’ll second-guess yourself at 2am more times than you can count.

But here’s what changes: when the decision is yours — really yours — the consequences feel different. Not lighter, necessarily. But yours. There’s no one else to blame. No borrowed script to hide behind.

That’s the trade.

You give up the comfort of living inside someone else’s expectations. And in return, you get something most people never find — a life that actually belongs to you.

The people who disappointed everyone they knew are the ones history remembers.

The ones who kept everyone happy are the ones nobody remembers at all.

— Ak

In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch did an experiment to prove how people change their behaviors and opinions just so they can fit in society.

Participants were placed in a group and told they were participating in a vision test. They were asked to look at a card with a “standard line” and then identify which of three other lines on a second card matched its length.

Unknown to the real participant, the rest of the people in the room were actors (confederates) instructed to give unanimous, obviously incorrect answers on certain trials.

When answering alone, participants were accurate 99% of the time. However, when surrounded by the group giving the wrong answer, 75% of participants conformed and gave an incorrect answer at least once. Overall, participants went along with the group’s incorrect majority about 33% of the time.

When Asch interviewed the people after the experiment, he got two primary observations about people changing themselves to fit in:

1. Normative Social Influence: Participants conformed to be liked, accepted, and avoid social rejection. Even when they knew the group was wrong, they altered their behavior to avoid standing out.

2. Informational Social Influence: Participants conformed because they doubted their own judgment. They assumed the group must be better informed or see something they missed.

This clearly proved what Asch wanted to test: how peer pressure influences an individual to conform to a group consensus, even when the group is clearly wrong.

Around You

You see this around you all the time. Especially if you belong to the Asian countries where culture and society are far more important than having your own opinions.

In India specifically, the phrase “society’s opinions matter” is so ingrained in our minds that thinking independently with that thought is challenging. Since childhood you have to fight for choosing what you want to do in your own life, and that’s traumatizing.

That results in deep discomfort in being different or left alone. Imagine being afraid of being alone since your childhood. This is not culture; this is badgering fear of being yourself.

At its extreme, society doesn’t just judge you—it punishes you for choosing differently. People get butchered just because they loved someone; women are harassed just because they chose the career they wanted, and men are called women just because they love what they do.

All of this, and you change yourself. Not because you want to, but because you can feel safe. Changing yourself for the sake of being safe is the most harrowing thing you will experience. And I hope you don’t.

The Irony

Authors and professionals often argue about why you shouldn’t be outspoken, why you should be polite, and how adjusting yourself as per society is the most idealistic thing you can do.

Understanding how to adapt to a situation and how to deal with it is indeed a skill. But suppressing your opinions, laughing at things that you don’t want to, and accepting the decisions made by the society about what you should do just because you can be part of the group or a culture is atrocious.

The Path

Society in its raw form is always going to be a paradox. But that shouldn’t stop you from being who you are.

Hate your job?—Build an exit. Don’t like what you are studying? — start something else. Not finding the right person? — keep exploring.

Sitting idle is worse than failing, but not listening to yourself is the worst.

You are always going to be judged. You need to find the solitude in your belonging. Do what you can respect yourself for, even when no one else understands it.

You don’t need to fit in. You need to stop abandoning yourself.

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