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Very tempted to give you an instrumental track list that goes with these articles like a breeze, so here you go:

1/ Gul by Mehtab Ali Niazi
2/ Lasya By Anoushka Shankar
3/ Flight by Anoushka Shankar
4/ Mountain title track by Gorillaz <3
5/ Clean by Noah Floersch (not an instrumental, sorry!)
6/ “The Endless Summer” theme song by the Sandals
7/ Stoked by The Beach Boys
8/ Lotus Flower by Peder B Helland
9/ Yeh Pal by Prateek Kuhad (not instrumental again)

1. How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson
   
   I think Henrik is the person I suggest to people if they’re new to Substack, don’t see the appeal of it, and go ‘Oh yeah, I just see it’s a bunch of amateur writers writing themselves away’. Yes, I agree. But, I think to see the greatness and rawness in those amateur writers, one needs to read Henrik, for he teaches how to devour writing, sit with the simplicity and enjoy the process of both doing and consuming it. I think I’ve come across every piece that he has ever written, and in this particular piece, he maps out how exactly writing worked for him all through his pieces, what kind of emergence it brought in him, and how ‘good thinking’ is the primary principle of good writing among all others.
   

2. The Colors Of Her Coat - by Scott Alexander

   
   I have to admit, I have made attempts to best explain the appeal of this piece in words, paint a picture of it’s arc and how Scott connects seemingly different pieces of the puzzle to convey his cultural stance — but I have miserably failed. However, let me try again. Scott blocks and tackles his ideologies on how 1/ Him as an individual and 2/ we as a society, have been reacting to mass-ification of the rarity through examples:
   1/ Natural Ultramarine dye to synthetic dyes
   2/ Ghiblification of the Internet and hence undermining art.
   
   If this is not explanatory enough, might I interest you in a snippet of this piece, which I think best describes it’s blurb?

   Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?

3. Mental Disorders Are the New Personality Types - Aditya Chauhan

   
   Aditya is one of the fine culture writers on substack. He skips the surface and delves deep into specific arguments, whatever his problem of the day may be. This particular piece, as the name suggests, is a very reflective problem of our society and easily one of the best examples of modern-day stereotypes. I’ll spare you the joy of reading through his quirkiness and making your own inferences. If you end up liking it, thank me (of course!) and also read: All we need is (platonic) love by Aditya!
   

4. ”The Ezra Pound Problem” - Overweening Generalist
   
   I’ve been a subscriber of the overweening generalist since day 1 on Substack. I’ll keep it short because this piece is the best narration of the ‘should we separate art from the artists?’ discourse that I have ever come across. If this is a question that bothers you daily as well, look no further because he streamlines the confusion that you wallow in. Quick blurb: He takes the example of an amazing American poet, Ezra Pound, who also happened to be the most vocal fascist of the time. The author tries several arguments to legitimise the greyness involved in loving him as a poet versus disregarding his work because of his political inclinations.

5. Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots - Mark Manson
   
   As harsh as the title sounds, it’s a piece that everyone (even conscious consumers) should read so that they don’t get sucked into the psychosis of intellectualism and display a sense of oblivion to the practicalities of living lives. He explains with the example of a professor, Malcolm Caldwell, whom he calls an intellectual idiot for believing the world models more than allowing himself to smell the realities. The story can be debatable, but the larger point of the essay, which is that an intellectual who’s complacent with being mathematically right needn’t always be so realistic if he doesn’t make attempts to soak in the Roman ways of today’s Rome.
   

6. Good conversations have emergent properties - Starting from Nix:
   
   I admire the author’s creativity in terms of how she coins terms for something so nuanced and not observable at all, but when observed, makes a lot of positive changes in the way we look at things, or interpersonal relationships in this case. She talks about how we could tackle blockages and sinkholes in conversations and increase the chances of turning them into an emergent conversation. I suggest reading the whole piece (It’s a short one) and speculating on your own relationships in the life that’s been the most emergent. It’s a very fun activity i promise.

Out of the 6 of them, only a couple of them are from the brilliant small writers. If any of you have more of these growing authors’ pieces for me to read that fall into these themes, I would love to check them out.

If you wish to check out other similar recommendations from previously here they are:

In other news, writing this on a Wednesday morning that’s not so usual for a lot of reasons. So, as I try to soak up all the different emotions of a heavy day and move to read a lighter article, I hope to meet you in spirits as I bring along more words to the becoming. It’s a promise to myself that I’ll try to write more consciously and structurally. As my words keep maturing— write more, observe more, share more, and most importantly, read more intently and consciously.

Happy reading!!

15th May, Friday, 11:01 PM//

Imagine this: the purple blinds are drawn down, the lights are dim enough to conceal the frustration gathered from the events of the day but not enough to look around the room and call it dark, a lone candle lit, among many, with a citrous-vanilla scent that screams ‘i’m the antidote to your rising cortisol levels’ and clothes, that I promised myself I’ll cleanup, scattered everywhere, just like my ideas and the thoughts. Brace yourself, for you’re about to enter a territory inside my head which you might or might not be able to fathom.

Smart women know when exactly their demons are waking up—four specific triggers, sometimes mutually reinforcing, do the deed in my case: 1/ spilled condiments on the floor, 2/ smelly room with unwashed cloths everywhere, 3/ heavy junk craving anytime after dinner, 4/ empty head staring at the screen for over 15.1 minutes. I’ll tell you what’s worse? These are passive demons. neither heavy enough to trigger a full-blown breakdown, nor light enough to let me cry and sleep. Somewhere in the grey, as grey as your political opinions or the synergy between the emotions can get.

Okay, you know what? i’m done dealing with the emotional mutiny. Let me make something. I’m obsessed with art anyway. Drawing papers just like i like them, check. my clear water bowl that’s full to the brim, check. chuckles. My water bottle is full to the brim as well. And so is my cup, for today. okay, what am I making? sigh, what am I even making? I can’t even write for 15 minutes straight. snap snap snap out. I want to make colourful art today. something fresh, new, bright and reflective of me. I should be like yep, that’s art, that’s me. I should use grey. grey is pretty. Frowned flowers are grey. Wait, is grey actually pretty? I mean, there are prettier colours. i guess so. but grey is a culmination of all the colours, so it’s pretty, I hope. The colours to choose are too cognitively demanding. Let me dream. i dream. I am dream.

Apparently i am also someone who can dream and actually manifest it into reality. That’s a pretty sick power to have. that’s the first good thought i’ve had in some really long hours. One seaside visit is all i need to shove that salt out of my hair (and the negativity out of my head) then inhale the newness and discomfort of the new life. Because there are multiple windows which show me so many scenarios, so many alt-realities, flashes, memories in colours and i need to stop looking. I need to have nowhere to look. I’m too full to the brim. I need an empty theatre where I can think. But chances are I might lose a few hair strands at that as well because emptiness is also haunting. Terribly haunting.

When I look in the mirror, I see a few things: my younger self, unfinished cups, old battered books, and flowers, rather petals and dreams. Perhaps you see that as well? I’m so curious. Maybe I am the lens, and I can change colours. I can tell myself things and choose the hard things over the easy ones, like I have done it before. Oh, what a cinema, what a fucking facade? Or maybe it’s the most realistic thing ever? I cannot fucking make up my mind. Guess the show must go on because apparently time is an illusion and there are a googolian versions of this happening simultaneously. Oh, that’s a long sentence. Nope, that’s a short one for me. I’ve never been able to choose between long and short sentences. In the same way, I’ve never been able to choose between pani puri and dal rice, or between me and others, or between liking him and not. I sometimes know, but i most times don’t. Oh, I’ve never been able to choose between mountains and beaches either, but i don’t make those decisions anymore. I let the universe make it for me. and it does. or sometimes other people do, people who I call my friends. and this is one of the times when i like that we’re social beings. i may not like taking help so much I’m always up and ready for some cognitive outsourcing. freeing up the clutter on that head you see. i’ll love you if you choose a place for us to eat because I eat anything and nothing. Mostly, I don’t care. I hope it gives you joy to choose, though.

When i’m trying to catch my breath like right now, I also like to imagine plants in my shower, and me crouching as tightly as I can to hide myself from the world. since i’ve exhausted my body's water now, I let the shower run on. flows and flows and flows to fill up the floors. That would be so beautiful and yet so cruelling. But I think the wetness would be helping. But, the show must go on. all the versions of it with all its timestamps and all the chaos and the messiness captured all in one film. The post credits, if it were a person, would shy away from being on screen because what would it credit and why? i cannot bear to confirm the amount of colourlessness in grey. Yet, it’s all grey. After all, that is all there is in the film.

I mean imagine a vast grey field with colourful pixelated dancers in the middle of a spin. Are you reminded of our galaxy? Please tell me you’re reminded of our galaxy. that’s the kind of greyness i can sacrifice my sleep for. The grand, loud, dreamy kind. that swallows reality up in a gulp and reminds you of the grander scheme of things or the vanities that won’t matter. Or else the unconscious stream of thoughts are just ghostly spirits moving around with no agency for action. Dead thoughts. My thoughts dont wanna be dead just yet. They wish they could attend a physics lecture, share the intellectual curiosity with a pinch of insanity on the side because nobody understands quantum mechanics anyway, but it would make more sense than to sit on these stupid episodes.

But hey, one way or the other we do share a sense of relatability because you tell me that everything that spans the length and breadth of the universe doesn’t know of its messiness? its unsorted garbage mess, in cries, loneliness, wars, deaths, grief, blood and it’s chills. you are a victim as well my dear, sandwiched and in the cusp of the self and the society. we don’t like it. I know, none of us like it but like we have a choice? choice, funny word. swirls, circles, revelation, damn! We’re all a painting.

Because fuck the system, i’m an outlier, i’m cutting strings. branching out of that painting, no more hiding the insanity. for as long as it takes. It’s a bumpy, greasy, and honestly a fun ride.

I’d surely fall short of words to thank you if you’ve read the whole thing. or even just the smallest snippet of it. here, take a hug because if you’ve read on, that would mean you could relate to it on a certain small, tiny, level as well. I wrote (or should I say scribbled) the whole thing in about 20 minutes and it probably shows. I’ve intentionally left it unedited, because that’s my way of asking myself and you, my dear reader to let our thought threads take their own course sometimes. sure, it’s ugly, messy, wobbly, insensible, but it’s a fucking fantasy, it’s art. it’s descriptions are for the beholder to decide.

Ps: Before my newsletter title was ‘In the becoming’, it was called ‘the inside head’. And nothing more than this piece could be fitting for this ex-newsletter title.

Bye,
Div.

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Have you played with clay pieces as a child? One that can beautifully adapt itself to moulds, form new colours by fusing two different ones, and turn into incredible art forms and sculptures, that served as the best source of entertainment, etched a sense of achievement in that child, and now spews a scent of nostalgia. Now, just close your eyes for a second and picture your personality be clay-ey - adaptable, cute, colourful, ever-changing, innovative and…. stiff. Yes, stiff.

Clay bodies must have a correct stiffness in order to optimize the forming process. Great effort is expended in the body mixing departments of factories to produce a product of standard stiffness and plasticity. [Source]

It’s funny how even a material known for its malleability also needs to carry stiffness and remember its original form underneath.

Constraints coated with insecurity

In an attempt to build that rigid base on top of which I can build my creative castle, I have time and again resorted to making constraints out of insecurity. I used to tell myself I didn’t like taking pictures for one. Somewhere beneath the facade that said ‘oh, I like to be in the present, you see, I’m just not the kind to take pictures,’ there also rested an insecurity that worried about how I didn’t look good. That self-doubt wouldn’t share face time with me as much as the ‘logical narrative’ would, and so my delusional self was operating normally until I asked myself a ‘why’ on a late night.

As someone who’s been a long-time member of this psychosis, I have considerable years of experience struggling with control and conservatism, where I restrict myself from doing something because I’ve profiled myself as a person who does not do that/ does things a certain way. This is all the more worrisome because, if you’re restricting yourself, it’s also likely that the self-set judgements extend to the people close by. By constraining yourself, you’re also limiting the people around you. Anything that’s to do with setting a discipline that constricts you more than enabling you, a job that gives you mental health issues more than paying your rent, a diet that leaves you unhappy more than healthy - needs to see out of the aesthetically conservative room.

Stylistic choices: a list

You wanna build stiffness, not a base out of an aluminium container that needs a foundry to melt itself every time you wanna change as a person. You don’t wanna fuse your moral, religious, and intellectual learnings in a set and call it your aesthetic constraints. It just needs to be easy.

It needs to be a skill.md for yourself that lists the smallest, most consistent nuances of yourself: your colors, shapes, decors, sounds, and habits, and anything that births from these. (forgive me for the AI metaphor)

It needs to represent you, your character, and all the things that you enjoy. It needs to enable you, reduce your decision fatigue, make your life easy, and genuinely be so malleable that you don’t bite yourself to change it. It should speak for your style, as Steph Ango puts it. It should be weird. Be you.

Here’s a constraint list I made for myself because I was bored at a work event, and I thought I could do magic with a pen and paper:

I spoke to a couple of my friends after I made this list, and the variety of aesthetic choices that people have genuinely amused me. They were about the choice of people, clothes, electronic devices, work ethics, fonts, perfumes, movie choices, and even their preferred choice of drink and cookie during a celebration.

Aesthetic constraints are a transmutable set of choices that can manifest themselves across places, people, and regardless of your mood. Nobody’s gonna kill (let’s call this friend J) J if he’s gonna stop drinking beer with a mango-pineapple cookie on the side after his running PBs, but it would still be etched in history that he was an aesthetic weirdo.

Here are some aesthetic constraints I’ve found across the internet:

1/ Nikola Tesla was so obsessed with numbers 3, 6 and 9 that he only stayed in hotel rooms with room numbers divisible by 3.
2/ Murakami wakes up at 4 AM and writes for 5 to 6 hours and then runs 10k every day to charge his writing brain up.
3/ A Kalamkari textile print is washed exactly 20 times before the print is sundried.
4/ Warli painting, an Indian traditional tribal folk art, only has red and white colours in its paintings.
5/ Paithani sarees from Maharashtra enforce a motif constraint: the peacock must appear in the pallu: the trailing part of a sari.

6/ Serena Williams’s pre- serve ritual is to bounce the ball exactly 5 times.

This list is inspired by Steph Ango's own list of style constraints.

Is it just me, or is it an amazing conversation to have with friends and just people in general to get to know them through their aesthetic constraints? The weirder the list gets, the more things you have to talk about. I think it’s a super fun experiment, I’m off to try it.

Alright, that’s my time now. I’ve wanted to write about this for a long while now. To be precise, from the 12th of February as says my draft. I’ve been trying to accommodate so many new things in life and that naturally coagulates with my old habits and thought processes. So, until I meet you in the upcoming (newer and far more interesting) episodes of our living fantasy — eat healthy, talk to your friends and mom, take cold showers, and don’t forget to make an aesthetic constraint list for yourself!

Bye

.

2. would I be living differently if I were being watched by someone I love constanly? would we call it being performative?

3. science fiction needs to be studied more and more, just so that we understand the importance of how mental health can destroy the primitive blocks of someone even as trained as an astronaut over time.

4. how interesting would it be to see an evolved form of our right thumb ( many many generations later) as opposed to our left thumb with all the scrolling we put it through?

Now and then, on these mornings when i think i’m (finally) alone with my thoughts, devoid of the crowded interruptions, my love-hate relationship with the fixation on originality silently scratches an itch, and does a really good job in creeping me out with ‘Are these thoughts really mine? Or did I just pick them up from somewhere?’

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Every few conversations that follow brandishing about the insanity of existence, hopping overpriced bars, and the long nights of catch-ups that were overdue, jump cuts to ‘hmmm, what do you think about separating art from the artists? Do you think free will exists?’ — except, we know it in our bones that we’re never to know because we’re sipping 30 seconds of snippets from The Truman Show for coffee, gobbling podcasts on making 100K MRR for a heavy afternoon meal and we’re adding a pinch of recent war developments across the middle east to the hot warm milk in the night to put us to sleep.

Amidst this content ocean, if we’re able to have a very, very small original idea, that just might not be original at all because… boom, you might just be repurposing some content seen somewhere, drawn somewhere, or heard somewhere and be passing it off as yours— Unconsciously!

amnesia corroded, but subtle

In the creative field like writing, art, music, poetry atleast ideas are exchanged everywhere. You’ve seen P Diddy’s “Ill be missing you” famously sampling The police’s “every breath you take” to end up losing all its copyrights. There’s Helen keller’s Frost King, which was the biggest plagiarism dispute of the time, when it was later revealed that she had heard a similar story when she was a child and simply forgot the source of her idea, believing it was her own original. While legal disputes can’t spare unconscious plagiarism like this, in our social structure today, it’s far more nuanced with every sense of our body attuned to getting influenced.

I was a cryptomnesiac when,

1/ i didn’t realise my writing was quietly shaped by the book authors, journalists, and authentic Substack writers whose writing I admired and wanted mine to be like.

2/ i looked past the fact that my reading lists are seeded by the abundance of quality readers and writers i have around me whose recoms never stop coming around.

3/ i didn’t wanna admit that I’ve gotten to work on myself with that rigour and vigour, because of someone I had the chance to know very dearly.

So, you think you’re original?

We’re all cryptomnesiacs— we’re all making remixes, remakes, and spinoffs of ideas that we’ve gathered, starting from our tattered, battered bookshelves, music from childhood that taught us love and life, to even from the latest Spider-Man movie or the obligatory shop talk with your childhood mate. The irony, though, is that we’ll only be a bigger one if we tend to deny it. By denying it, we’re stripping away that layer of awareness that we’re operating from and choosing to take an entitled stand on the creations we make and truly end up believing that we are original.

Okay, that confidence works amazingly well, albeit the words of Mark Twain might disagree with you.

There’s is no such thing as new idea. all ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from millions of outside sources.

So, there it goes— not being original was never the problem. It’s always been wanting to believe that you have to and want to. And that is nothing but a pseudo-intellectual fixation for someone who needs to validate their intelligence.

What’s past step zero?

By that, one could say that I’ve been a pseudo-intellectual (guilty!). But it’s also a truly liberating experience to know that I’m not going to view the fear of ‘un-originality’ as demons trying to strangle me to death anymore. Because they were less about the idea and more about the proof of wanting to be distinct. Shaking that feeling, I could see those influences, the content pieces, the conversations, the friendly banters, and those experiences — as numbers waiting for some brain computing power and whatever they produce, would be authentic enough if not original in its truest sense.

If I have to pick up my book tomorrow morning and continue writing about the cognitive lacking behind being directionally challenged, my brain could still be a thief— but it shall also gladly embrace the normalcy and unoriginality that comes with it. (I hope!)

Thanks a lot for making it to the end(side eye to everyone who just scrolled past sections to the end). Through what’s been a busy week, I’ve thrust ideas on this piece, for none of them exist in the final version of the post. Such is the mess in writing, such is the torment in vomiting words. For now, until I meet you in the upcoming versions of the living fantasies in the becoming — pray for the needed, stay hydrated, and most importantly, don’t beat yourself up.

Good night!

Digression, but we all love a good set of songs to aid our overthinking better. As part of sharing my culture, here’s a set of Tamil songs that might inspire you in ways you didn’t think of.

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Speaking of the problem i previously admitted to, i have a rush of ideas all the time. They are all tied together, in a messy little knot influenced by everything I see and hear from my beautifully tinted lenses. But these ideas rarely see the light of day because this black box we call our brains has a structurally difficult way of comprehending simple things, factoring in inputs that are insanely irrelevant and (sometimes) counterintuitive to the act of creating art. In between this stirring for flow, scrambling for originality, and echoing the slow hum of self-doubt and ‘is this what you call your best work?’, I’ve come to notice that I could pick and name three mutually reinforcing issues that stand in my structural thinking process.

1. I have a complex way of thinking, as do most of us. Every time I see a young group of college kids completely on their phones, scrolling and texting, completely ignorant of each other’s presence, i’m on a stroll with emotions ranging from nostalgia, sadness, awareness, future dystopia, I could go on. But that is not the point. This situation, devoid of context, is not always comprehensible for others. So, when I try to be as communicative as possible with whatever I’ve got to say, I have to make a very difficult choice between getting really verbose because I can and losing some necessary (or metaphoric XD) context to keep it tight and minimal.

2. I find myself scrambling for originality more often than not. Because I, like every writer, for the longest time deemed her thoughts to be really original and full of main character energy, only to get to a point where I realised i could not possibly credit all the sources that have consciously or unconsciously influenced this thought.
   I think the greatest American writer, Mark Twain, says this better than I.

   There is no such thing as a new idea.

   How anti-climactic, huh? But seriously, feeling original is a huge myth I used to give in to, which does nothing better than satiate the ego of a pseudo-intellectual (more on this in another post, because your girl’s got her words, she can’t hold it in). Of course, there are still episodes I run into where I look at a wonderful piece of writing, event idea, product, concept or any art and go ‘Why haven’t I thought of this before?’ Here, i’m trying to work on more of keeping these thoughts strictly as part of those episodes and not letting them slide outside of those guilty-thinking hours.

3. I’m utterly never convinced with anything that I come up with. And hence, in an attempt to legitimise it, I ruin it with citations and a bunch of other research materials that I had stockpiled while sitting with that idea for a week. Now, my point gets across without having to be questioned, sure, but it also gets really diluted. This is quite an insidious trap because not only do I subtly fall back on the internet to support every one of my perspectives, but I also doubt that self-trust (for the 1000th time now?)

One could over simplify the solution to these problems labeliing this as an insecurity and asking us to deal with it on different levels, but broken down, 1/ translating complex thinking 2/ making peace with influenced thoughts 3/ trusting one’s own writing without having to bank heavily on citations, which dilute the ideas - are all complex problems that do not hold a standard help-guide in our creator community (or, atleast I don’t think so).

What was born as the product of a 15-minute sprint writing session now feels like an act of ripping a piece of my newly made amateur art for a room of strangers to get a sense of the colours and judge it. But that’s not the point anyway. If I’m meeting some of you in the complex ideologies of the becoming (writing, in this case), then that’s enough. Here, my weekend is ending, and so is a part of me that strives for perfection. Let me hit publish and chase the next possible line to ruminate on :)

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I’ve talked about autotelicity as the most sustainable means of flow state in the age of our hustle culture before. It’s still the root of this piece, except we’re going beyond the theory to explore the romantic sense of drive and intrinsic relationships.

Ambition: the riskiest spectacle there is.

When was the last time you started ambitiously doing something new: a habit, a venture, or a relationship and didn’t feel that slight dissonance between ‘why am I doing this’ and ‘Is this the right thing?’ that our societal demons like comparisons, vanity metrics, or the fear of performance could safely capitalise on to creep you out in the middle of the night?

Yes, I thought so. And, it’s quite a healthy dissonance because that means there’s a little bit of awareness left in you, and neither are your emotions nor your analytical ambitiousness driving anything in autopilot.

‘Plato and Aristole were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justification for oppression. They served Tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind ( a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they seperated matter from thought; they divorced the earth from the heavens- Divisions that were to dominate the western thinking for more than twenty centuries.’

- Carl Sagan, in his book Cosmos.

In our social dynamic today, which is designed on thriving in repurposed blueprints, it’s very easy to get muddled up in the ideas that require minimal thinking, or in the ambition that is driven by controlled forms of collective thinking: pressure to prove worth, getting over someone, peer pressure, and avoiding failure. With such a goal post, even when you make it to the big leagues, you’d be left wondering what the sweetness of success is like and be scheduling a session with a therapist to talk about what went wrong before you know it. This post beautifully graphs out the lack of right ambition as an inverted U curve that does not sustain for a time longer than days, months or countable years before plunging.

But lucky for us, we can bridge this dissonance before it’s too late as well.

The marriage

Have you ever tried to explain something deeply personal, only to be interrupted halfway through with logic, statistics, or advice? You stop talking after a while. you give up because you’re being overriden and you’re not heard. This dynamic might survive a few conversations but might eventually create distance. That can be a little risky in a marriage, certainly so when the two voices belong to you.

The heart is the emotional voice of your body, the natural child that makes life alive, that rebels, loves, slurps passion for breakfast and spews hatred at dinner and carries that generational artefact of the body or what we call: The instinct. Our brain, on the other hand, is the adult, the logical thinker, the meta-analyst that comes up with solutions, the dad who imposes curfews and makes a rational choice as to whether you can eat your third cup of chocolate ice cream today or not. And for a happy marriage, this team needs to work together.

Problems that need fixing

This synergy is much like an actual marriage. It’s perpetual, full of problems. I think as readers, you should be able to sort yourself into one of the two buckets now: emotionally dominant or logically dominant. Because bridging this insability is what takes a perpetual effort.

Logical ideas have a more empirical chance of being right. But, ideas that emerge from your gut have a remarkable chance of being right for you. It’s quite imperative to have a good hold of judgement to toggle between giving the baton to the brain or the heart. And quite ironically, it comes from breaking your internal relationship into pieces. Your mental health breakdowns, heartbreaks, and the worst career failures bring the best out of this judgment. At first it starts with spiralling downwards: mutual blame, that’s translated into self hatred, loathing, and sometimes even loss of will to live. Your brain finds reasons from the past to believe your gut fails. You are in such internal turbulence that no external scaffold can help you.

This is the fork between the right and wrong kind of ambition. The right kind causes you to realise an epiphany that it’s not the end of the world. and when you start trusting yourself, to give your heart and gut another chance, a small harmony is established.

And this synergy works both ways. When you post the video you said you’ll post, when you finish that book you said you’ll finish by Sunday, when you take the leap of faith to break the relationship that was holding you back, or when you draw that boundary you said you would, your brain trusts you even more. You’d see a subtle shift in how your brain starts to give more space to failures, to yourself, and the people around you. This is where you feed that energy in with trophies, collected medals, and vanity numbers to lift the trust a little bit. But the ambition itself rests on a small, subtle ember: you proving to yourself you could do it.

Insanity and peace can coexist

With time, and a lot of failing and learning (emphasis on the failing), when your gut starts making risky or irreversible decisions for life, like moving to a different country, choosing the love of your life, or making a toaster from scratch, your brain doesn’t demand much logic, actually not at all, no matter how nonsensical and atrocious the ideas might be. Because you make your instinct work with the right ambition.

Below is a snippet of the above-referenced PDF: The Toaster project by Thomas Thwaites, where he decided to make a toaster, completely from scratch- from mining the metals to assembling the wires to making them work. This was a revolutionary design project in 2008, not because of the value it added but for it’s intent to make a modern machinary the uncommon way.

so, the goal is always to get to a point where you could do anything that wouldn’t make a lick of sense to anyone but you, and your brain would trust you with all its memory because there’s earned proof.

And, in the middle of my internal turbulence that day, when I looked at my 10th km with this lens, it didn’t look so far anymore. It was just a couple of light posts and a shared checklist away.

Hi, new and old readers, thank you so much for reading this far. It truly means a lot. What i thought would be a light piece went on to have me relive some of the deepest feelings. Thank god, for it’s night already - I’ve truly exhausted my romantic energy for today. With my Pentonix pen and a heavy heart, let me go on to take care of the next items in my list, and till we get to dissect more complexities in the becoming- finish your book, scream your heart out from a rooftop, cry to death with a crocodile plushie, have some oranges, and give your risk-taking instinct some serious space.

Good night :)

1/ Metrification of intelligence

2/ The shift in yardsticks

3/ Boxing the neurodivergent intelligence

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Metrification of intelligence

While the definition of intelligence has been widely debated among researchers and scholars throughout the 20th century, the abbreviation “IQ” was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, which he developed as the standard scoring method for intelligence tests. These IQ tests, as a precursor to framing intelligence, include a wide variety of item content to test:

• holding complex problem-solving in working memory

• slow, solitary reasoning

• recall-based mastery

• knowledge acquisition and general knowledge

These traits were adaptive in information-scarce environments. They were also the traits IQ tests, schools, and bureaucracies were built to detect. In fact, these IQ tests were put into effect during World War I, when the army needed a way to evaluate and assign recruits to appropriate tasks.

Cognition is a very unique human concept, and also why we tie it so deeply to intelligence. Yet we have outsourced cognition before, just in smaller ways. Memory was outsourced to writing, spatial reasoning to geographical maps and planning to institutions.

Plato, who wrote everything about the Socrates we know, (ironically) complained that we would get less intelligent when we invented writing, and he was so wrong in the same way we are about outsourcing cognition to technology. What’s different now is speed and scale, and (hopefully) not the underlying notion. (Note: outsourcing our cognition in this context is only to amplify agency and not replace accountability)

The shift in yardsticks:

To be fair to the claim, decline in cognition, hiding under performance, and constant stimulation are all very real problems of our generation. Because certain traditionally valued traits appear to be weakening, we are concluding that intelligence itself is disappearing. Albeit, we should be treating this decline as a contextual shift rather than an objective loss.

In this information era (as opposed to the industrial era), how intelligence is measured in real-world systems (engineering, startups, logistics, science teams) is completely different from what was required and why it was required back then. The virtue in question today rests more on the agency, more on how we can add value and not how good a resource we can be:

• agentic research capabilities (the speed at which we can find the answer, verify it, and apply it)

• pattern recognition (cross-industry correlation, how we can learn cybersecurity techniques from Marvel movies?)

• figure-it-outability (Can we operate when the instructions run out?)

• social calibration and empathy (ability to get across messages without being offensive)

• cognitive filter (the ability/judgement to distinguish signal from the noise)

Core cognitive skills like memory and computation are often treated as superior because they’re difficult to fake. While agency, judgment, and orchestration can be learnt- they’re all acquired traits and hence copyable, fakeable, and can be tuned for performance. That’s why the cognitive filter and sheer self-belief become huge anchors of intelligence today.

Boxing the neurodivergent intelligence

Readers, let me remind you, IQ tests and standardised metrics have a dark history. They were often designed by specific groups to prove that they were the smart ones. So, when George Mack talks about a 10-year-old kid running a six-figure business but can't do long division, can we call him dumb? Or are we just enforcing an outdated hierarchy?

The typical intelligence rewarded neurotypical brains (linear, focus-heavy, rote) that were built for standardised parts of the economy. But, today’s economy requires problem solvers, people who can differ, who can ask questions, who can express opinions convincingly enough. Labelling this generation as distracted or dumb is a form of discrimination against different cognitive styles of working. Which is exactly what a number like IQ does. Boxing intelligence into a single number or a single skill is in itself skewed because it ignores creativity, empathy, resilience, and curiosity- things that actually make us human- TODAY.

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Storytelling, both as a profession and a founder skill, has been making rounds on the internet lately albeit it’s existed since the inception of institutions through marketing, movies, government and majorly: culture.

1. The great American dream: sold the story of a life of glamour and rich for the exchange of ‘white-collar’ labour.

2. Steve Jobs’ story of the thinnest macbook shaped the computer revolution and made us buy into the idea of laptops.

3. The characters Data in ‘Star Trek’, HAL 9000 in ‘2001- space odessey’, and TARS in Interstellar were all stellar thought stories that gave us the hope of supercomputers and AI long before it manifested itself into the applications industry.

These top-down narratives of innovations have always sold us all along, and with a greater crowd moving towards better access and communication, there’s more noise than stories, and there’s more intentionally sneaky selling than storytelling.
Yesterday (in 2022), when ChatGPT launched, it was supposed to help us. Today, 3 years later, we’re in a post-human movement where we’re being urged to overcome our limitations with it, evolve with it or be left behind, race fast to adopt it to catch hold of the AI renaissance’s pace. It’s all getting quite out of hand before we can grasp the intention with which we are leading. Every trend moves through before we can pause and ask questions. This inturn makes the human brain insanely vulnerable and gullible because we think everyone else understands, but do they?

The prisoners’ coordination dilemma:
Let me explain what I mean with this with a simple mathematical riddle.

The premise: There’s a prison which can’t house a particular 100 prisoners. So they’re given a task, upon whose completion, they can walk free or, upon failure, all of them lose their lives. We’ve got a room full of boxes numbered 1-100 that contain the slips of prisons: 1 through 100 randomly. (The above picture would give you an idea - box2→39, box4→ 72) A prisoner gets to open 50 of them, and if he happens to find his number, he comes out of the room. If all the 100 prisoners happen to win this collectively, they’re all free to go, and the mission is a success. Or they die, and it’s a failure. Note: They could only strategise before the first person goes in, and no communication is allowed during the process.

The probability of every prisoner finding his slip is 1/2. That would be multiplied 100 times for the mission to be completed by all 100 prisoners. So, the probability of them practically winning this for the prisoners is zero. (or this number here)

This here is a pretty sketchy situation because, if you were in there, you’re walking into a certain death situation. As humans, we’re all problem solvers. There’s no chance that a troop of 100 doesn’t come up with an algorihm to win this. I’m not gonna go deep into the solution here, but leave you to the fact that there is an algorithm which, when followed, the chances of them winning significantly increase. ( All you curious minds who can’t get past without finding the solution can check out the video linked above) When I say significantly, it increases from 0% to a whopping 31%.

The survivorship bias

That’s great, but this also means there is a 69% percent chance of them failing. which is a good practical possibility because it’s a good amount over 50%. When we get the solution presented, though, in the midst of a bleak chance of winning, any probability more than zero feels good enough. I’m not really talking about the prisoners here. I can apply this problem to the reality of techno supremacy. We don’t fully understand the system, but there’s a method, a model, a prompt, a tool, so it must be better than standing still. This can be seen as a classic survivorship bias, mostly because failure is psychologically uninhabitable. And this gets translated into a serious conundrum in the thick of hope and lack of understanding.

1. The rhetoric of being left behind:
   Companies are desperate to use AI in them, even if the pipeline doesn’t allow it. The product evaluators are urged to look for AI during POCs because apparantly automation= cost cutting. Conglomerates like Anthropic and Tesla are shoving AI down our throats by psychological means of anthropomorphism: by marketing Claude as our ‘friend’ and Tesla Optimus as our ‘medical assistant’ and a ‘babysitter’. These services are obviously cheaper and easier to deal with if they’re as sharp as a machine. We can’t help but wonder if we’d be making a ‘smart’ choice by replacing them for humans. Some of us are worried about our jobs, and some of us about where we are heading, but well within the survivorship bias, nonetheless.

2. AI adoption panic:
   With building products and personal projects having become so easy, new advancements come in every day, and there are 1000 different products in the market that do the same ‘HR management’ or ‘meetings transcription’. Not only does choice paralysis affect this adoption, but the security concerns regarding these are a huge blur. How could teenagers using chatgpt have possibly known that it could leak all personal chats to Google to find it in it’s search results? However, a lot of people talking about these concerns has significantly resulted in likely outcomes like GPT-5 being less human or sentient than GPT 4, and Anthropic shipping new enforcements to reduce unhealthy dependences with users who seem overly attached.

3. As a source of excitement:

   As lightly as I might like to put it, AI is interesting. What do you mean I can build my own calendar to mark my friends’ birthdays? And, with so many realms of what AI can do unexplored, how can we slow down now? I don’t think in any other times of our lifetime we’ll be able to sit on the edge of scared and insanely excited about seeing a bunch of bots rambling about consciousness and empathy and be calling themselves a species of their own. yes, we see the impending danger and how we’re doomed but it’s also what we call ‘content’ however brain-rotted or sloppy. Having said that, the attention it garners is signifcantly high with major AI advancements hogging X.com every two weeks. We’re drawn more into a sense of complexity bias, and end up getting fatigued by hearing about AI everywhere.

   

All things said and done, there might be only a bleak chance of collective winning here. As it turns out, a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable, so we’re all going down when this bubble bursts. Though we’ve seen an element of delusional bullish behaviour transcend from the IT elites to the common masses about AI, we very lightly need to take them, considering the unparalleled levels of survivorship bias they’re coming from with all their businesses at stake.

Have questions on the future become rhetoric?

The tone here is not to hang on to the failure of 69% and be pessimistic about winning. But, the question ‘what can I do now’ consuits no better answer than learning every day, questioning everything and treading through this landscape with a very healthy amount of scepticism. Because as we navigate through this dilemma, whos actually at risk are the ones who’s absorbing these narratives without context and who don’t even know there is a choice or a bias at play: our parents, teenagers, people who don’t have a ‘city-exposure’, your gig workers, contract labours, caregivers, service workers, and the entire community whose first encounter with AI is surveillance, not empowerment. So, let’s put our own oxygen masks on now before helping others!

thank you for reading this folks! There’s so much happening around us on the internet and I’ve always been quite inspired and tempted to write about it. I couldn’t start with a topic better than juggling between our human emotions towards AI and the necessary to be stoic and rational to some measurements with what transpires around. Let me know if you liked this, for I shall drop more of time into them.Until I meet you with another thought story- rest well, move more, have your banana shakes and multi vitamins and summon ChatGPT more consciously. Thankyou again ;)

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1. The stable marriage problem by

   
   This is the single most profound and insightful article on writing itself that i found (or got recommended) recently. Ajeya Cotra takes a very simple algorithm, an interesting one at that, explains it and draws parallels between this technical solution and the possible social interpretations of this problem. To look at sociology with a math brain is insane.

2. Tracing the Techno-Supremacy Doctrine by Héctor Pérez-Urbina

   Technno supremacy doctrine (Tsd) - authoritative narratives that preach that technology has an answer to all modern problems, to influence the masses. This independent reasearcher along with introducing this concept, explains a novel algorithm which designs metrics and assesses articles and thought pieces (The subjects being IT elites) on the scale of how blindly techno-optimistic they are. This paper gave me a scary sense of unawareness in the light of rocket-paced AI advancements and how we’re at the cusp of an influence greater than ever. Reading this would be a little complicated as modern dating for context (;p), but be sure to give it a glance at least.

3. When is it better to think without words? by

   As someone who thinks about thinking a lot, I’ve never thought about the importance of modality in thinking much. Henkrik here talks about the dimensionality reduction that’s required for any thought to be broken down to words, and it gives me so much room to understand why thoughts overwhelm and words ground. A sweet little reminder of how thoughts behind the thoughts work, something if you are a writer, might go back to from time to time.

4. The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
   
   I generally wouldn’t give out book recommendations like such and this infact is not one. But if we were to catch the insights in this book, look at it from the perspective of a high funtioning agentic adult, or a ceo and extend it to our daily projects, work and how we view corporate as a whole, it would be a winner read.

5. Animal liberation by Peter Singer -Chapter 1
   On recommendation again, I spent a very good hour of my last week skimming through this chapter that talks about the lack of morality and ethics of a human relationship with any non-human, animal. This covers the themes of morality of social boundaries purely from the context of animal rights and takes examples of moral arguments on gender to prove its point. However, in retrospect, we can gather a lot of generic ideas on how morality is subjective and quite an imaginary line for a societal structure as well.

6. Terminology Used in the AI Discourse by Rainer Rehak

   A research paper that dives deep into the language of ai, and expresses concerns on anthropomorphism that corporates these days express. This is, from a societal standpoint, very counterintuitive to how we approach human interactions. It takes the showcase of daily lingos that AI terminologies these days include - like behaviour, brain and neurons, which are very human-specific and hence end up dismissing the human intricacies and vulnerabilities the words come with. Similar pieces that take the same narrative and talk about the influence we’re subjected to -

   1. AI friends too cheap to meter by : Themes of adopting AI as humans in our lives and the effects of the same.

   2. AI Is A Slavery Fetish by : How corporates are tapping into human psychology to sell us the narrative of AI bots as ‘slaves’ - something we could exercise control over and own before the product itself.

With that, ends my rambling about the brain-picky pieces of content that tinker with our abilities to question better. While I indulge myself in some of Gail Honeyman’s delicacy for the night, you make sure to carry the new-year spirit on to the next month, drink your water and share your recommendations as well. That’s my time. bye.

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1. The mental fire alarms can ring and it’s normal
   Adult friendships, when they’re no longer bound by school, in the race to make a life, money, and hustle, have a weird way of booming. All the issues resurface, and it’s trial and error all over again, almost like learning a new skill, or, like tasting sushi for the first time. You don’t know what they taste like, or you forgot. You’d rather have your comfort meal because it takes extra effort to describe how ‘the new’ feels. But all it takes to get past this taste testing is dabbling, failing, and learning. Post which, inevitably, you become good at judgment and end up landing really good eggs. Metaphorically. Thankfully.

2. Adult friendships aren’t meet-cutes (but become a series of sitcoms later) The best friendships have a way of finding you in the middle of a full-blown storm (somehow like this). Or in the moments when life doesn’t matter as much. They’re certainly not as romantic as the friendships that’s made in the benches of your first year of college. Connections stem from past traumatic friendships, relationships, struggles to talk about mental health to each other, and toggles in the wave of understanding among each other or the group. It transforms into a sitcom with enough time, when you start joking about each other’s embarrassments, making small gestures and trading cringe inappropriate jokes and reach the intimacy of late-night conversations and 4 am radios.

3. friendship metrics become futile
   I used to think it required being in constant touch with each other to be good friends, or celebrating each other’s birthdays on rooftops, or long debriefs over tropical pina coladas to keep in touch. But, along the way, you realise they quickly go out of scale. A home-made pasta with store-bought sula over ‘About time’ hits more home, or grooving the new year’s eve to the most mainstream-brainrot songs ever beats the most raved-about party in town. Or the most basic of meals - soup, roti and sabzi after a long day of mishaps magically becomes the best meal of your lifetime. This mundane smashes those metrics and puts them in a bin you haven’t realised you’ve lost. The math stops mathing and that’s when you know it’s working.

   

4. shared intellectualism (and memories):

   You fight for the silliest of things like the shotgun seat, and yet every banter turned debate is an intellectual dessert. YouTube algorithms are fine but spending all night on a workday covering everything across themes of space, theology, and politics becomes far more stimulating. Books are amazing, but sluggishly homebodied in the comfort of Italian couches and talking about ‘the meaning of life’ or about ‘making it in life’ passes the real-life bechdel test with flying colours which becomes far more serotonin inducing. This shared intellectualism is a brain hug so intense that a machine cannot possibly replace.

5. You become the same person sometimes:

   Adult friendships held long enough, start mimicking each other’s personality, start having cloning effects. You start looking alike, talking alike, walking alike, start having the same type of coffee and liking the same amount of salt in your food. (don’t be alarmed if the taste in men don’t seem to converge, that would be normal). A person that you’ve shared a special sense of contrast with, you never thought you’d get along with and has in most times made you wonder how antithetical two people can be often makes the most perfect friendships.

6. Weather settles and adulting hits:

   these relationships undoubtedly take a lot of coming together, compromise and showing up to find interests and settle. Once it does, neither do you get a contract to sign, nor does life throw a manual to tell you how it’s gonna be when it gets tried and tested inevitably in the play of life. From having shared a lot of classes, meals, memories, been through each other’s breakups, met each other’s parents, having caught each other in mistakes, you go to do all of it over video calls or sparingly meet, juggling between the brutal vanities of early adulthood. Some friendships travel the series of storms to get to the shore, but some get irretrievably lost in this vast sea. (lost, but beautifully nonetheless).

   

   ---

   Thank you for reading this, as always. What started as a whim now stands as a gratitude journal for the hands I hold, hugs I love, the laughs I adore and the memories I remember. Nonetheless, it was fun drawing some observations on the platonic museum, that is, friendships, on this late evening. Until I meet you with another complex ideologue from the becoming- call your friends, write them letters, and don’t leave goodbyes be goodbyes.
   
   Goodbye ;)

   Thanks for reading In the becoming! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hi readers, been a minute there! Before you start to read ahead, imagine a cozy room, lights on, and a fancy glass of brown liquor in hand to perfectly go with Lemon Drop by Raynes, which would be the rightful track owner of this piece. I recommend playing the song on loop incase it takes you more than 3:40 minutes to read.

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Of late, i’ve come to draw a lot of parallels between working a day job, schools and institutions. Both put you in a box, limit your agency and have you skanking the days to the picks and wants of life. Sure, it’s really comfortable and also has that brain stimulation just enough to keep you afloat. Bills to pay, the taxes to do and the commute to take keep us busy. The perks come to getting enough money to do fancy dinners and hop cafes, enough time to take up new hobbies, and enough friends to brandish about the joy and insanity of existing.

In this elaborate juggle struggle filled with meetings, eating, sleeping, hobbies and habits i often find myself holding my hand out to the void, hoping my inner spark from the previous decade would catch me, to give a long huggable epiphany. I instead grind the week and slack the weekends, and those wall posters that say ‘seize the day’ in bold warm letters just sit there collecting dust. The cynic in me (and the content algorithm that I know i signed up for) tells me everything around me is designed to limit me, trap me and have me mistake obedience for maturity.

Why is there so much resistance around breaking out? around making bad choices? around failing in public? Actually, don’t answer it. Because these expressions of how choices are perceived are largely just noise. it deserves the same 'ignore treatment’ that your best friend’s reels on ‘hot new speak-easy spots in the city to visit this year’ receive. Agh, that scratches an itch there.

I was watching the dead poet’s soceity earlier today, and I realised, I don’t think about Neil as much as I think about his father. The voice that insists there’s only one sensible way to live, that safety is the same as goodness. It sounds a lot like my own, on tired days. To realise that, puts my hand back on that thermostat- because I cannot let my inner Neil die.

If you had met the Divya from last year, she would have loved to talk in length about how she’s insanely fucking scared of living incomplete lives without purpose and would go back to her imaginary world of books where she could take on sob stories with what she called a ‘realistic mindset’. yeah, she died this year. Don’t get me wrong, she still loves them contemprary pieces that get her tears rolling, just that she realises she’s not in a matrix. not in spaces bound by walls. She does not concern herself with terms that box her beliefs, people who limit her abilities and is actively trying to break out of spaces that conform itself to the optics.

Actually, you see, escaping the lukewarm doesn’t have to be glamorous at all, like quitting a job or taking up acting. It just needs to be a big enough threshold to trigger a perpetual effort and fight to keep our inner Neil away from the vicious ways of his dad, which are our fears, lack of agency, procrastination, and all the societal norms personified. Because, no one’s gonna care if you keep posting your content, if you take the solo trip that you want, or host that new year party with your best friends, if you don’t get married at the right age or if you start working on your venture in small steps.

You’re probably made for temperatures way colder than you realise, but how will you know?

I think it’s time to fiddle with them a little bit. My younger self, that aspired to chase the great- I owe it to you.

Thank you so much for reading this! with the ‘emotions of becoming’ turning into inexplicable, complicated sentiments every day, this is the author’s little effort to share her deepest feelings. This piece was written sparingly during some tight evening hours (between 4 PM and 11 PM to be precise) and now that she’s done, she’ll get back to her regular hours of spiralling. Till she meets you in the upcoming episodes of her living fantasy, take a good check on your temperatures, get those resolutions in order and make sure to stick to them this time.

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I’ll be honest, I was not very keen on reading the book until one of my friends posted about it on her Instagram. But incidentally, the events from this whole week leading up to today for me, has pressed on the digestion of this love-hate relationship i have with the internet which was also something the blurb of her book had promised. And that’s how I (respectfully) snatched the book from this friend and gave in to my temptation to pull a sprint on this one.

For anyone worried about spoilers, this has none, and her prose is also not something that I can write about and spoil. The book is essentially an internet etymology covering different ranges of the internet modulations under her 8 different essays. While I cannot classify the book with any adjectives, as a good /informative /intelligent /comforting collectively i can go by subjective opinions, essay on essay. But let me first talk about the favourite things about the book that span across the essays:

1. The amazing set of links and research citations each page bores which led me on happy rabbit holes of my own, away from the said topic in the book. That would be very riachops core, but it genuinely got me stuck through the first 30 pages for the first 2 hours, because the lore in her citations would be so interesting I’d not wanna come back to the book. It might have been a little counterproductive for the flow of the book, but see, digression over flow any day :)

2. All of her essays start and end in full circle, with the same notion/ tone/ concept. That’s particularly notable for me because my style of writing silently shakes hands and resonates with it.

   ---

   Now, we hop on to the essay by essay plot: First of all, i love that she chose to call them essays and not chapters because that instantly makes it more open to discussions!
   

1. The becoming of age - Starts with a nice memory lane of the early internet days along with anecdotal references of how she got introduced to the internet. Web 1.0 and 2.0 lore, the difference in internet ages in different parts of the world and the culture contributing to it are some log lines on this essay. She also dives into this social experiment called the Robert Cave experiment, with which she draws parallels of the network effect, competitiveness and the edge the internet puts us through.

2. It’s complicated - This essay is a complex mosaic of her feelings on her early ideas of love and how the internet has, and continues to mess with it by bringing trends, notions and superficial ideas which largely discount the naivety, raw and slow sense of it. With the analogy of a panoptic prison which bears perspectives of both being constantly monitored and the compulsion of surveillance, she poses a compelling, relatable, and reality check to what love was and is.

3. What’s in my bag- This would be my second least favourite of the essays. This one deals with hyper consumerism and the cascading cultural effects like debt traps it introduces the younger generation to. While this is a phenomenon that I see play out all around in my life, I think i’m quite aware of the capitalistic, instant gratification trap that comes in forms and disguises. The collective capitalistic trap we’ve fallen into might not be something every indivudual can act on but one’s own disposable income is something everyone can be careful about. Parts of this essay would highly resonate with you if you’re a impulsive spender who’s chasing brands and looks, but I didn’t find myself participating extensively in this part of the internet at least and hence couldn’t resonate much.

4. Eternal sunshine - Have you thought about the memory of the dead in a deeper sense? while the manipulation that can be done with the data of the dead is a topic for another day, the very fact that our memory lives on the internet through the thick and thin of our lives is quite scary. Our reddit activity, twitter( now X) posts, Instagram- consciously or unconsciously, the footprint we’ve left beats the capacity of our memory. On top of that, the internet never forgets our mistakes. Packed with a little bit of lore from Ria’s life, this is a take on the cancel culture and the life sentence that every mistake on the internet comes with.

5. Ask me anything - I think this is an essay that gave me a sense of how different the internet was growing up within different parts of India. I don’t know if it‘s because I didnt grow up in a city as cosmopolitan as Delhi, I found myself unfamiliar with major social media spaces like ask.fm, which she extensively talks about in this essay. so the cultural relatability intended in this one was deeply missed for me. The lore of this space, the drama, and some of her stories of how she rose to fame also house this essay, which I’m not gonna deny, is vv spicy.

6. Fifteen seconds - If you cannot guess the essence of this essay yet, it’s about how the 15 minutes of fame became 15 seconds among us Gen Zs bombarded with content. Lol. It digs deep into the diminishing attention spans of our culture and talks more about the specific advantages of this in the creator economy. She also goes into the frameworks of attention economy, where she draws parallels between the appetite for consumption of goods and content. I think that’s a nice way to study one-self if you don’t have an audience to judge where one can spend their time on. (which, in my opinion, is the currency of creation). she additionally asks questions like , ‘What does fame mean today?’ and this is a lore that I’m gonna leave you to explore when you get to reading the book.

   

7. Post knowledge - One of my favourite essays in the book. In her words, this essay houses the core of ‘what is the zenith of thinking well?’. While the world is debating whether the Genzs know too much, or too little, or they’re delusional, she contemplates the very stress on knowledge in the traditional recall sense. With information being completely open source, what is more valued in today’s economy if not for recall knowledge? The knowledge that is thinking. She goes into a small lore of her quizzing days to give the readers the sense of how thinking alone can surmount the power of knowing. I think as a 20-something highly ambitious individual, who puts herself down a lot for going into something with a lack of information, I take a lot away from this.

   Some resources from this piece that are quite notable for me:

   1. The new generation of online culture curators

   2. Is Google making us stupid?

8. Coming of age - A fair warning, I might have been very sleepy getting into this essay, but this one’s my least favourite of the lot. It’s about the influence of internet in Bollywood (Or the lack of thereof). With excerpts from several movies and scenes, she tries to detail the misinterpretations of the internet realities in Bollywood. She talks about exceptions like the movie ‘The eight grade’. As someone who never takes movie recoms seriously, it’s a bit ironic I’m intrigued to watch this one after I checked its synopsis. Other than that, one anti-movie buff to another, this was quite a flat piece.

   
   That brings me to the end of this very verbose review of ‘Never Logged Out’. If a book can be brain-picky and thoughtful in the awful hours of the night [ 4:57 AM is the exact time in question] then it means it’s a fairly good book. Give it a shot.

   ---

   hello readers, thank you so much if you’ve even just scrolled to the end of this to see the subscribe button- just know that it means a lot. While many of you in Substack and otherwise continue to inspire me, getting past the inertia of ‘is this good enough to show my beautiful readers and my future self?’ is something i’m constantly trying to overcome. so, until she gets back at these demons that are fighting her on this, hold tight - for there is a lot to uncover in the lulls (yes, lulls) of our thought culture. Meanwhile, eat your breakfast, finish that book and maybe log out for a bit see the light of the world.
   

I’ve actually been writing for as long as I can remember. Poems about seasons, flowers, my mom and how I hated animals, in my younger years for my school magazine. Journals to tackle loneliness in my middle school years which mostly complain about the unresolved conflicts with friends and their mothers. And essays for contests and competitions outside school in my high school years which was when i kind of realised i had a flair for writing. I let it slip though. I didn’t really care about being able to write okay or anything. And then, bam! adulting came about. Handling uncertainties, conflict, anxiety, heartbreaks, and other baggages that life has us harbour- has demanded several experiments from me, which I, like any good student, have silently adhered to. Talking to my friends about it, consciously avoiding it, wallowing in social media as a distraction, drinking my days away with it, living in it, crying over it, therapy, I’ve tried it all. But out of all of it, I carried my dependence on journalling and writing with me rather unconsciously throughout. There’s just been a need for it. never understood why.

Never bothered to dig deep into it cuz it’s just journalling. But, during one particularly weird phase of life several months ago, one day, I stumbled upon freewrite, an app developed by Farza (Through substack i think, but my memory is fuzzy). It’s a plain board on your Mac that lets you write yourself away for 15 minutes straight, uninterrupted. You can think of it as a podomodoro writing sprint but just mini. and all of it gets stored locally (!). Sounds cool, right? I mean, sure, there’s nothing revolutionary about this app, but the plain black screen was lucrative enough for me to give it a try, give it an entry. so i did one day. The next day. the day after that. and then it kept happening. I kept having things to say for 15 minutes straight every day. I cried sometimes, I vented about my work, my lack of sleep and my lack of creativity. I talked about the books i never talk to anyone about, i talked about the reasons why i should and should not pursue a line of thinking. I talked about my deepest intrusive thoughts and also therapized myself. It just kept happening. i could write uninterrupted for 15 minutes into the black void screen without any question of judgment, criticism or thinking too much. So, for around three months now, I haven’t stopped writing on my freewrite. Some days I do twice because sometimes I just need to sit with my black screen and fill it in on all my problems. no one to question my virtues, no one to cut me off. Just me and the screen.

The best part is, i never felt anything romantic about the feeling of writing every day. Essentially, i’m just threading sentences together, there’s no art, no intended expressions, no topics, no research and certainly nothing productive. it started as a funny little talking space. To my surprise, sprint writing is one of the reasons why I don’t wait for words to come out of me these days. I sit in on my screen, and there’s this innate mental wiring that I need to fill them with words. They’re fascinating some days and plain shit on other days. That’s fine.

What Farza developed as a passion project is out here, being a first responder to some people. That ought to say something about serendipity.

Here, thank you for reading this one. This note is part of my pause and reflect exercise during my sprinting, since I did not have a lot of words to share during my 15 minutes today. Nevertheless, sit tight and manifest a cosy weather for yourself, and maybe write a letter or two for your loved ones meanwhile. My coffee is cold, I’ve gotta go.

How self-confronting is existing in the intersection of too chill and too much chalance?

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Let me admit: I’m too perfect to be imperfect, and I’m terrified about it. You see, I’m the kind that squints her eyes at the first glance when the group has brought up a topic she’s unaware of. She cannot bear to miss things in her to-dos and hurts a lot to turn down a hangout. She’s too serious to pass up on a beggar without them fazing her, and cannot in a million years go DNF-ing a book. It’s none of that carefree, free-spirited, boundless energy that I seemingly give out. I possess too much chalance for my own good. As if I was served a platter of irony for dinner every day growing up, I’m also embarrassingly imperfect to be even in the vicinity of perfect. I google words with simple meanings like vanity, veracity and indignent to check if I have them right. I get too caught up in a missed pickleball shot to go about playing the game normally. I use words in a sentence without the full grasp of it’s meaning because I just like the phonetics of it. I don't tidy up my room often because it takes too much time to do it ‘perfectly’ and I don’t dress well on days I should particularly be making a good impression at work (There’s one too many, maybe I should make a list).

And if you’re also a Miranda Priestly to your own Andrea, racing perfectionism to your grave, or beating yourself up for not trying enough, then, let me give you a drumroll, a virtual hug and a grand welcome into our ironical try-hards club.

Because guess what, you’re being hard on trying than being a try-hard.

Now that you’re in this elite group, grab your martini- don’t give it that splash of lemon just yet, because girl, we need to talk.

Why are we try-hards?

We want something really bad, and we chase after it like a dog. Some of us need more time to carry out tasks that others can do so effortlessly, and with every step of it, we always try to do a better job. Our standards keep soaring high (rightfully so) and we try to catch up, panting and gasping for breath if need be. We could have ‘fixed’ that relationship with him, couldve done a better job at work or couldve made a stronger coffee. We fail at our own hands more than anyone else’s and we pick ourselves up better than anyone can. (Hello, what do you mean you can ask for help?) We are what we hold our standards to.

And they, are pretty fucking high. yes, our effort and emotional investment might be too much for the level of play, but alteast trying hard is better than hardly trying.

So, what is the irony?

Here, i’ve come to the point- Our generation is basically allergic to earnestness. We might glorify old money aesthetic and nonchalance but not vulnerability, hard effort and trying and failing. And this societally internalised shame on ‘trying too hard’ slips very easily into becoming negative feelings like self-loathing, embarrassment, ‘aura loss’ and cringe. Spare me for referencing the overused meme of the internet in 2025 but I’ve got to tell you, this is the midwit trap of the chalance system.

I myself am a victim of this phenomenon and I’m trying to side myself more into the right side of the chart where I proudly hold myself to how i want things so badly because who even on the internet decided it’s not cool? Running a pace that i know i genuinely will be disappointed with, writing myself away every week to a reader crowd that would fit in a Maruti Suzuki, starting new tasks at 5:47 instead of having to wait till 6, closing the useless tabs even if i havent scanned all the information on it thoroughly - are all metrics through which I see my aerobic endurance towards chasing my dreams improving (forgive me for the running metaphor xD)

the crack in the ceramic bowl

Hey tryhards, let me tell you this: our standards are higher than the world view standards, and we don’t even realise it because we’re caught up in our bubble. The cracks in the ceramic bowls can sometimes be part of the craft. While you’re questioning the beauty of it, you’re also missing out on the character and the nuances these cracks would bring. All that fragility that we’ve locked up inside ourselves with three top-tier locks from the gates of Buckingham Palace needs to see the world, too. Let’s not be anymore motherly about it.

And, let me be real, this is no easy job. I understand concepts of embracing imperfections. I have tried to write about it and ask people about it, and make a funny sense of myself. and all these shenanigans later, it turns out there’s no winning over it. If you’re a woman, you’d understand when I say understanding our period cycles doesn’t make it any better, but only makes it more bearable. Yes, there might be some days when we want to embrace our imperfections, but we’d go on operating like a goddamn Swiss watch. Embrace that too.

For there’s no way out of this irony but acceptance. Innit?

so, the next time one of you tells me you like what i write, i’m gonna hold my breath and let myself say thank you in the most genuine sense and give you another article to read if you’re really interested.

Readers, now’s the time to gather all your broken glasses, dust your old tattered, battered books off of that shelf, collect all your child your pictures, your embarrassing little diaries and scrapbooks. While you’re waiting for the upcoming episodes of our little fantasy, might as well do some grounding- we need to remember the love we were capable of giving to ourselves and all the talent we had in our previous decades.

This essay, like every other one, is based on something that I face, and hence the ideas on the content hogged and clogged my brain during several hours of last week. I could not get around to breaking this complex, higher-dimensional ideologue for the longest time, but they’ve cleaned up pretty okay now, I think. Thank you guys, for reading this, and let’s all raise a toast to taking care of ourselves better, eating on time, sleeping on time, celebrating that chalance and being imperfect to the limits.

bye, Div

This one’s straight from the hot, stabbing pain in my legs. I’m quickly jotting stuff down to log so I don’t let the contents evaporate, again! Istg I wrote an entire novel around running 24k when I was doing the first 10 odd kms, and yet, here I am, starting afresh, with absolutely no memory of any of it.

I’ve been running for 7 months now, and milestones haven’t hit big on me at any point in time. There’s always a better pace I can take on, could always run more and could always start earlier. Running gets you drugged in many ways, but overworking my body without any self-appreciation tops the list for me. And that’s why this is a serious note to my future self, that scrolls past my low-baller self-esteem, to tell her that she has cracked stuff that she thought was impossible at some point.

I wrap up my birthday in a mosaic of cakes, books, letters and heartfelt wishes, but I’m deadly nervous for the run that I’ve taken up on the day following it. I don’t remember how I came to want to run 24 km without having done anything more than 16.5 km previously, but I remember thinking I could surely do a challenge.

The night is too old

Now, place where I come from, you won’t see a lot of runners at an ungodly early morning when it’s not a race day. Naturally, when I start to run, there’s no one except for garbage trucks and nocturnal dogs giving me company. It’s almost so dark that my NRC recorded it as a night run. But thanks to my playlist, this was the easiest 10 km I’ve had. The grooving and vibing hit so much better than a rave with no one looking. With whatever energy i had from the previous night’s carb load and the electrolytes this morning, the start wasn’t only decent but was beastly when I ran comfortably for over an hour straight. This might be an easy feat for some of you, but it’s the most I’ve been able to do ever. After a brief stretch at a 10, that hunger so voracious to cross the 12 km mark as quickly as possible, comfortably beat my lack of sleep from the previous night to the finish line.

A quick health check- all good, my energy looks good, music slaps, and the weather with its drizzling little charm is screaming ‘run baby run, you got this’. With this eutopian running platter, I run another 2 km, and my friends join me for the rest of the 9 odd kms I’ve got. Now, as a cherry on top, I’ve got cheerleaders who share the same high for my last few remaining kms.

You know these books that’s got these too good to be true tropes? us stupid wishful thinkers always know what the plot twists are like, but we pretend like we didn’t see it coming. Likewise, despite having drawn out a very elaborate checklist on the things to do the night before the run, I missed out on switching my phone charger on. (Yes, I track with my phone and watch. And hello? mistakes happen)

Now, I’m at 15, with my toes already bruised with blisters and a phone with 15 per cent charge. After a little bit of running without music (um, mixing things up, you see) I submit to begging my dad to bring me the charger. Thankfully, i wasn’t running very far away from my home, so his disapproval for long-distance running didn’t fully materialise into a full-blown speech when he reached.

Now that the charge is no longer a problem, the race leader position is regained, mentally. With that energy shift and a lot of motivation from runners passing by, I pull through a feat of 21 to take the last pitstop at a gym close by. But by this time, I’m full of energy, and my blisters did not dare show up after the whole charger fiasco. Although my knees and ankles hurt, nothing can truly beat the runner’s high, especially at the brink of that finish line.

I quickly call up Renegades from X ambassadors to the save, final stretches done, electrolytes taken, and the sweat is all wiped off to fly the 3 remaining kilometres. A little bit of walking, talking and motivating myself later, I’m at 23.55. A quick tip: friends who hype you up at the face of an empty road and rainy weather are hard to come by, so say those thank yous and give those hugs where they’re due. And, 500 metres later, with nothing less than a celebration, I did complete what I set out to.

And if you’re asking how my legs feel- They’re deeply troubled but pleasantly happy.

Sure, there are many more starting lines to take, but here’s a small reminder that sometimes, it is all in the head. It’s all in the wiring. You know, maybe the universe does have a way of conspiring with you if you want it bad enough. To the future me that’s still sticking around - these goofy little milestones are the real metrics of progress for those delusional tasks that you’d like to take up on. Go ahead and do anything you’ve been wanting to anyway. You’re good with setting goals after all.

The rest of you readers, thanks a lot if you’ve stayed till here to read the footer. It’s my wishful thinking that capturing these adrenaline firealarms turned pleasant memories into a string of texts can help at least a handful of others who have read it. I ideally wanted to leave a detailed checklist of the things that I do before any run day, which might help anyone who’s new and getting into running. I’m afraid I’ve to save it for another post because this post is already as long as a 10 mark essay, and it’s those rare times when I’m sticking out when my eyes beg for some rest. It’s so much fun (and a little daunting) recalling the events of a day as a clean log that would make sense to both you and the later me. For now, I leave with the hope of seeing you in the upcoming episodes of my living fantasy and with a reminder to sleep on time and drink lots and lots of water.

deep and translucent. oxymoron much?

I think so too. I have been spending a sleepless couple of nights trying to make sense of how we bring out different personalities to various vanities of life. As an extension of the same, today, I’m carrying with me the flea bag of thoughts on being isolated in this crowded world, walking the roads of sonder, loneliness, and comfort until I find my sleep calling me. So, hey readers, hold tight and stick with me as I take you along this joy ride to discovering the beauty in the oscillations of losing and bringing back ourselves in the lights of modern juggle.

There are better ways to spend the night, I know, but thoughts caged are thoughts evil- so here we go!

[Edit - despite this flood of thoughts, this insufferable insomniac didn’t end up finishing her draft, but is quite thankful for the timely prompt that triggered several hours of spiralling. Empathise with her; she can’t help it.]

In the drift of modern loneliness

What is it like to be fully transparent? Would I like that? Would you like that? I thought about this for a little while. I decided against it because, in my younger years, i’ve disgustingly craved to be seen, felt and tended to. With adulting and a few life-changing relationships, I realised maybe making copies of myself and inserting them into different templates of life: work, friends, family, dreams would be a better damage control. And this helps rest all the negative emotions, and to stay put, while only letting the necessary parts out. Now that has led me to lose track of myself to become a translucent mosaic of all my copies.

Let me paint you this picture, you’re in a room full of people: a gathering, full of glam and glee. You’re dressed in a soft, satin slip dress, posing with a nice-old can of ginger ale. The desserts here add to the grounding of your mood and the company is simply impeccable, the best of your folks you haven’t met in a while. With those golden chandeliers lit up, you’re there when- the conversations are happening, the board games banter is getting funnier, the beer cans are passed on, stories are shared, laughters are heard and the people find you amusing. But you, keep sitting here waiting for someone to notice that inner rupture. That energy, that’s slowly wearing off because you’re just simply too tired of switching personalities. You’re there, but also not really. You see yourself becoming translucent, vanishing from the vision of the present. The place that you really wanted to be in, your presence itself, is rejecting it. The tears and wails of hope are sealed well within. And here, you leave a copy of yourself. Of someone who is not loud enough to be heard, not quiet enough to disappear.

However flawless this model replication may be, I find myself yearning for my original self at times, at least with the people I love. And between this identity crisis is my anxious attachment style trying to fiddle like a fish left on land. I try to reason with myself as to why it’s difficult for me to spend more time with them. What stops me from going all-out with the people who would happily peel oranges for me? I mean I always was’nt the person of her best behaviour to begin with. yes, I was naive, shallow, inarticulate, not always honest- but i dont identify that as any of that right now. May be, i fear if that’s believable? Or do I just fear the fact that some part of who I was might subconsiously soak into who I am right now, into the versions of me that’s all losing track of itself?

I just don’t want to take my people’s time so much you know. Just to yap about the juxtaposition of my old and new self to talk about one deep little topic- say my relationships, my past mental health issues or, because I’m presently going through a bad time. ( Dear readers, I do see the irony of what i put you through here :p) In the middle of my dialogue with them, I don’t want to be digressing and flipping into the void to engage my brain in extreme computations just to extract the necessary information I might need to divulge. It’s too much work. I’d rather procrastinate opening up because I don’t wanna ruin the moment. I’d rather be a translucent copy of myself for the trade of convenience.

sonder that waters the self

Hello, little world, forgive us all for growing into these beautiful old trees with all that greenery, but we don’t really see each other very much these days. This might sound jarringly ironic with our social networks spread across oceans and continents. With connectivity measured not in the amount of time we spend with each other, but with the number of apps we’re on. If only there was something we could do for each other to cement this inner fracture. Have you wondered?

Back in my second year of college, I was going through issues I could not put a name to. All I could do was shed tears and mourn the loss of a carefree 17-year-old who was losing herself in getting old. This went on for many evenings. After a while, there was this girl who would come sit next to me, on the sitting ledges of our hostel grounds. She would watch me cry, watch the moon with me, and leave without a word when I left. We weren’t friends then. But she made me think over what friendships were about. Words couldn’t pacify me, presence could. Because in silence, there is meaning.

That was 4 years ago. But thankfully, she’s still in my life and as close as anyone could ever get. She didn’t necessarily partake in my sonder. But she surely saw me. Saw through my transparent and original sheets. She chose to tell me these sheets exist all around and I’m not alone- all without words. ( Okay, with words sometimes, let’s not ruin the poetic sense)

I genuinely want to hear your music

I’m complicated than a guitar when it comes to the emotional strings and the range of chords i’m capable of creating. We, humans, hum and produce music in genres of all kind. Omoiyari [思いやり], a Japanese philosophy, talks about this very feeling of caring that is not expressed through words. It talks about the quiet hum of each other’s music that’s only expressed in actions extended without expectations. If you’ve followed me to this part of the piece, dear readers, then you and I share an omoiyari, which I’m very thankful for. And how I’ve craved for all of you to see me long ago, I don’t anymore. Instead, I want to see you.

I want to listen to you talk about your problems, I want to see your ghosts, and I want to see your eyes that gleam with translucency. I want to hear you talk about the people you love and hate and the small things that make you happy. I want to see you be imperfect and make mistakes. I want to listen to you rant about your day. I promise, I’ll suppress my urge to give you logical solutions to tell you how much you‘ve grown, that you’re almost real and opaque, that you’re really strong. Can we take a bus to a one-way destination, have strawberries covered in chocolate and just talk? about skies, moon, flowers, you, me, but just things. one after another. Because I want to hear your music. I crave to see you. all of you.

If you want to listen some of mine, here you go!

Thank you so much for reading thus far. Here’s me elaborating on the little feelings that I’m left with on the jingles and phantoms of life. I hope to fill my words with as much optimism as I can muster, but forgive me if I don’t have it in me some days. If you’re able to see a little bit of worn and torn yourself in here, then hi fren! I hope to find you in the upcoming episodes of our living fantasy. For now, grab your sweaters and a book. Go to bed right away and rest up xx.

Goodnight,

Div.

Some are short, some are deep but surely something that’ll trigger a sense of constructive thinking (I hope?). Nevertheless, I’m sure all of us deserve a break from the monotony of lives to indulge in the monotony of other’s lives and realise the correlations and connections in the root of man-made problems and to do some complex math in the head to intentionally digress from the lulls of life.

You’re welcome in that case.

1. Ishan Tarunesh’s blog on Running out of fuel

   Ishan is a founder based out of Bangalore, and this is an excerpt from one of his personal blogs. While his works range from everything growing up, this one particularly is a thought-anecdotal piece about small everyday efforts that don’t necessarily materialise immediately but require a Herculean effort. With the small but accurate metaphors he’s used to describe these feelings, you’ll just be able to grasp them deeper.

2. Jaime Zavinsky’s letter on Postmortem and Resignation
   You might know Jaime Zavinsky from Netscape. This one was recommended by our CEO at work as an entrepreneurial piece to read. Ironically enough, it largely talks about his resentments during his time at Netscape and how leaving was the only option. In a nutshell, it’s a nice insight into not being able to fathom the psychology of how the world around us works and dealing with that very feeling. If you require a little bit of context to read this one, feel free to use my research for it.

3. Sharif’s blog on moving cities
   Sharif is a guy who doesn’t beat around the bush. An entrepreneur based out of SF, he’s driven straight into just about what the title says. Might change your perspective on your city and your agency. Give it a shot.

4. Paul Graham’s good writing

   To think that, without stumbling across PG’s piece of writing, I would have never started to write, gives nothing short of a chill. I have read so many of PG’s essays and it’s safe to say that good writing is a personal favourite. With this one, like the expert that he is, he elaborates on the truth in writing and how a writing which is honest will eventually be read well!

5. The China Tech Canon by Afra Wang

   This is a recent find, which very beautifully talks about the China Tech Market’s dark forest play and the wave of intrigue caused by it among Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. The article weaves itself around the current technical landscapes of SF and China, the contrast between them and talks about some literary pieces that shape the future entrepreneurial thinking. One of which happens to be the Three-Body Problem, which is one of my favourite books of all time.

6. On Haruki Murakami by Bakesamosa

   Bakesamosa perfectly toggles being funny and serious between his substack notes and posts, respectively and, if you want to break your boring days with frequent chuckles (and sometimes eyerolls), I highly recommend you subscribe to him. While his posts range across themes of books, feelings and pictures, this recommendation is mostly because I happen to love Murakami as an author a lot. To all of my friends who ask me why I like him, other than ‘I’m just weird that way’, a befitting explanation would only be this piece. And for folks like me, this is for you <3

7. A cure for individualism by Aeon

   A published article in Aeon, this piece narrates the cultural shaping of individualism in different parts of the world and details it through the philosophy of Confucius. If you have asian roots, you’ll lowkey feel proud reading this piece on how Chinese, and other asian philosophies largely value collective growth over an irrational level of individualism and the eventual societal shift caused by it.

8. Some parts of you only emerge for certain people by Maja

   I came across this piece a while ago, when I also happened to be going through a particularly vulnerable phase of life. Maja, as a writer, takes extremely nuanced topics dealing with emotions and breaks them down to first principles in a poetic yet practical tone. She’s got this grip in her writing that makes you nod along through the piece and leaves you yearning to make a mental note of those essentialities, when you run into a thinking loop.

9. Sometimes grass is actually greener by Maja

   Yes, you understand how much I like her. With this one, Maja explores the space of ‘lukewarm mediocracy’ and how it’s much more dangerous than we realise. Through this theme, she talks about the lines of sacrifices, loyalty, dealing with change and several virtues of life that we, young adults, have to carefully choose in different walks of life. Was truly enlightening for me to read.

10. How to live an intellectually rich life by Utsav Mamoria
    This is one piece that I was extremely excited to recommend. It’s about hope, showing up, working in small ways and thriving - largely in the words of philosophy and maths. I’m not sure if I’m doing a good enough job in giving you the blurb of this piece but Utsav is highly enigmatic and full of words that grip - That I read this piece in one go. (Warning: It’s quite a long piece, so I’d ask you to take the time to read the whole thing)

11. The geometrics of in-betweens by Sushmitha

    I just love how Sushmitha writes. She’s funny, candid- her pieces are largely light-hearted and yet deal with nuances of life in such a way that she’s holding your hands as she’s talking to you, with a big sister instinct. (She really means it sometimes.) This particular piece is quite personal and somehow tries to perfectly convey that wavering sense of hustle, among habits and feelings. In other news, even though I wanted to recommend essays for a while now, she’s the one who actually pushed me to do it through one of her posts on essay recoms. Thanks for that Sushi :)

That’s all the recommendations for now. While that took an awful lot of time to put together than I had initially anticipated, I loved doing this. Maybe I should do this regularly.

This world and its people have a general tendency to bracket a lot of thinking, pondering and introspection as overthinking and leave it at that. Battling virtues like commitment, overwhelm, burn out and loneliness to be better at something is buried deep behind stages of self-inflicted stress and pressure.

I’m a woman of many hobbies, and I keep juggling things. Sometimes, the pressure of having to balance friendships, family, goals, along with physical and mental health, does get overwhelming. For one, while making progress in my endeavours, I keep running into a lot of cognitive overload issues (or burnout). However, I have this chronic tendency to get deep inside my issues, dissect them and understand why certain mental health issues spring up. I’m actively trying to learn more about them, talk more about them- understand the triggers and find ways to successfully eliminate them.

The expectation- skill parity:

Growing up in an Indian household, I have high expectations from myself. And most times in life, there are voices- from outside and within that constantly try and push us down and tell us, we’re not good enough. The perfectionist in us magnifies the gap between what we are and what we want to be, until it feels almost unbearable. Right then, no one’s around to tell us ‘no one has it figured out, take it slow’. It’s like the sudden loss of appetite that you feel right after feeling starved for a long time, that sudden dopamine drop when everything comes crashing down and its the world vs you. But, It’s quite essentially the bother of us not meeting the expectations we’ve’ve set for ourselves and the dissappointment that comes with it. We tend to often forget the fact that, this push- when taken constructively is what we call learning, and progress. Yes, the bar gets set higher every time, and we’d also be moving with it. The next time you run into this parity, make sure to reset your expectations more realistically rather than giving up.

The decision paralysis/fatigue

How many times have we just given up on eating out because there’s just too many places to choose from? The problem of plenty is no stranger in personal growth either. For all of you, whose good a hundred different things- this is the classic imposter syndrome that creeps in every now and then. I for one, am good at a handful of things. Which means, I want to hone the skills that I already have, along with learning one new thing that I want to learn as well. Where the problem creeps in is when I’m not able to dedicate enough time to one habit over another. I sit down to read, but I figure I want to write. I plan my day, but I feel tired I want a run. This constant decision fatigue of ‘what now’ is quite annoying to deal with. We don’t wanna be choosing one over the other. We want to be better at everything, parallel. That’s where the fatigue comes from. What’s the solution you ask? Virtues like patience and planning comes to the rescue here. Every overnight success is a 1000 uneventful days. Let that sink in

The halo effect

Ok, this one’s dangerous. Do you ever feel like the grass to greener, looking at a friend who works in apple? The friend who constantly keeps travelling? Or the founder that you idealise getting all the attention? You’re in deep halo my boy. Internet can be a risky place, but, these are fomo and halo illusions that comes in different forms and figures that is unsettling for you because of lack of data. Seldom do we realise that glamour is a lie and the bits of information we get to see is only part of someone’s life. Our brain fills the gaps with wishful thinking and idealisations and hence, arrive at that void feeling. Once you come out of the loop, you realise it aint quite your journey and it aint yours to worry about.

The cognitive overload:

Like I’ve established before, this one, I personally run into quite often. I don’t mean to sound like a mom, but our over consumption of media is defintely a part in most of our problems. For example, I’m pretty sure one comes across at least a significant amount of content that talks about fitness, routine and structures. This can be very misleading for someone who’s getting into a routine considering how one can never templatise decispline and there’s no one-size fits all daily structure that works for everyone. You consume content regarding that and fixate in your head that it’s supposed to be that way. And when it turns out it’s not- the whole trial and error process becomes more difficult, more cognitively demanding, more expectations to meet and requires a lot of mental filtering before materialising irl. So, go ahead and delete that social media platform that’s been doing nothing but pushing you to consume. Talk to people instead- people who’ve inspired you, people who you look up to, and ask them the challenges and roadblocks they’ve run into.

The solution paradox:

Awareness is the first step to any solution. But there are some days when both you and I know doomscrolling is doing no good for any of us. Yet, we still do it. One of the difficult mistakes I’ve made about dealing with personal roadblocks is that I keep thinking I’ll get over these issues once I understand them to the brim, find triggers and devise ways to eliminate them. But sadly, that’s not how it works. Mental health issues do not come in chapters and episodes and end there. They are a perpetual puzzle waiting to be solved over a long, long time. Yes, this puzzle does seem extremely unsolvable at times, that overwhelm, lack of motivation and creativity becomes a part of it and puts us further back. While we can realise that this battle is bilateral, we cannot let the complexity of this puzzle win over our ability to resolve these issues.

I’m no therapist- just a little girl trying to make sense of the in-between. That heavy slumber between being totally fine and falling apart. Maybe we’ll never fully solve the puzzle of our own minds, but we can sit with it better, talk through it, and learn to live alongside it.

If you’re in that space too, reach out. We’re all going through the same things, but we just don’t talk to each other about it.

All at different paces and under different skies.

‘Mornings are supposed to be the fastest time of the day’ mum says. Half her day gets done by 9 in the morning and the rest of the day is just an extension of the few hours after sunrise. Indian parents, I know!

And then there’s me- mornings are the slow, serene, tempest times of the day where I unfalteringly seek solitude and let my mind wander. It’s the thought experiment time of the day. This morning though, all I hear is a the early-risen birds chirping their lives off, lorries catching their best speed at the last hour of their day (Yes, I live on a busy road), with a sky mellow and safely devoid of personality and the plants breathing their best air. The lights shine brighter, the mood feels cleaner and the setting seems hopeful, full of possibilities (well, most mornings). What I’m saying is, there’s nothing special about this time of the day except, it’s proprietary because the world is yet to wake up. and that means a lot of time.

The soul that’s sucked out of jumping on the bandwagon and running behind the same things every day breifly comes back to calm. I ask myself what do I feel? why do I feel and let me feel them.

Chores undone, workouts unfinished, ideas unhoned, books unread and also, thoughts unfiltered. It’s all the same. The flowers, the fresher grass and the morning gleam just make me see more of it- the sense in imperfections, the smaller things we wake up for every day, the rundown of feelings nobody gets to see.

Slow in reprise and calm in the eyes, and the tranquillity that speaks for itself.

Because the morning is yet to wake up. I can rest.

I’m on the internet a lot lately. Unconsciously rather. And this is an honest reflection of what is dangerous and what mistakes I made. This one is particularly for me to revisit than a piece of any kind and so is quite rough.

X, reddit, substack, instagram, LI. You name it. People are trying to be so many things, people are doing, moving, experimenting, failing and learning. Pace and results speak up. Slowing down is rejected by the algorithm. It’s the classic fast culture. by signing up for it, you and I have submitted to that culture. It's not necessarily toxic though. It’s the perception. I been struggling with that lately.

Comparison is a fucking thief of joy:

Every second tweet is about building and failing, someone just raised a series A, someone crossed 10M in ARR, someone is building thier 2nd startup, someone stopped building it, someone is thriving in a community and someone’s just quit MAANG, someone just started building without a MAANG background and freaking making it, someone just landed thier dream job, someone just wrote a book and someone is training for a sub 4 marathon. phew, I need a breather like really. This makes me get overwhelmed daily. Keep thinking to myself, what do I do, and keep asking myself impossible and irrelevant questions that come in the way of my sleep.

But that’s the thing, right, how can I fucking align myself with every freaking stranger on the internet? I cannot. This is madness to be comparing myself with a milestone set for someone else because guess what? It’s not a milestone at all- it’s a course of life for them. They’ve worked for it.

And unless I do, I can never get to a milestone. I can keep comparing myself all along but buck stops with that. I realise it’s only my life’s work that can change my mindset. then I realise only a brain filled with the regret of lack of doing would normalise feeling this way. I don’t wanna be that. This changed it for me.

I don’t want the internet draining me

That being said, it’s a super cool place to connect to peeps with high value mindset. You just know when someone is super consistent, someone is building something you’re curious about. You start with a shoutout and start quietly supporting them. What this does is, create a sense of appreciation for the things around rather than correlating it with what you lack yourself. You tend to say things like - oh this product is a good product market fit, oh I can use this product, oh this is not gonna work out. This sense of usability and consumerism kind of helps us choose or long term. It’s a motivation, a space to talk, connect and grow.

There’s a thin line though. It can be suicidal if you let yourself drown in a pool of comparison. we all have slip ups, today was mine. And when you do hit yours, be easy. Be aware of the fact that it’s your mind playing games on you. It’s an illusion.

Separate yourself from in there. Get away from the internet. Take a walk, listen to music. Because our mind doesn’t always need information it needs rest.

Break the hustle. Take a breather.

[Edit] Honestly, this post feels like my bare thoughts being left just out and about for all of you to stare at - If you’ve made it this far, may be I should thank you for the fact that I pushed past my inertia to post this one. See you in the next one :))