Recently I’ve been thinking about my failure to make someone happy. If you really, really love someone and you both try your absolute hardest and the relationship still crashes and burns, what hope is there for anyone or anything?

I often say love is Not Enough, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier when you have to let someone go. Personally I take great comfort in finding a Learning Lesson. In fact, my cheerful analysis of relationship catastrophes was what first gained me notoriety on Twitter. One such takeaway was: You need an unshakeable faith that the other person is always doing their best. This what allows you to forgive them when they fall short, to meet them where they are at without resentment. This is essential to keeping your relationship in good repair, to maintaining lifelong respect and affection.

I have said before everyone is trying their best. This is true in an existential, subjective sense but some people’s best is undeniably…..better. They’re more aware of their own thoughts and patterns, of the second and third order effects of what they do. More capable of actually changing based on that awareness, of self-regulation, of acting and thinking with intention. I’ve heard people allude to this vague quality in many ways. Live player vs NPC. High vs low sentience. Levels of consciousness.

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For example, one man complains endlessly about something but take no action to change it. The complaining provides an outlet, it feels good in the moment, people seem to nod in sympathy. Another man notices complaining is annoying when others do it but can’t help doing it anyway. Or maybe he successfully resists the urge but the self-pitying litany continues in his mind. Yet another man recognizes the inherent contradiction between dissatisfaction and non-action. If you’re not taking steps to change something, either you don’t actually care enough or it’s impossible to fix. Either way, being unhappy about it is pointless, so he habitually laughs at and brushes off his own irritation and self-pity.

When I say to have a successful relationship with someone you need an unshakeable faith that they are always doing their best, what that really means is 1) they are acting in good faith 2) they are “aware” to the same degree you are.

I thought I had found my person, truly, because I felt deep in my bones that if I was born with his brain, his experiences, and his limitations, I would have navigated them exactly the same way and come to all the same conclusions. There was nothing obvious to me that was not also obvious to him. It felt that we had to tools to bridge any gap, that I would be proud to die in his arms.

Things fell apart along a component I didn’t even think of. The arc of a person’s life is defined by their:

• awareness (seeing the pattern)

• regulation (interrupting/ reshaping the pattern)

• containment (holding tension without reacting)

If you have bad self-regulation you’re low containment by default, but containment has this additional component of what you believe healthy relationships SHOULD look like. What types of pain rightfully demand action? What types should be endured stoically?

The thing is, people have vastly different tolerances for different kinds of pain, and if you have really low tolerance for particular type of pain you may believe it’s unusually evil to inflict on someone, irrespective how how good you are at regulating it.

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Season 2 of Avatar the Last Airbender opens with Aang searching for earthbending master. The movements and philosophy of earthbending prioritize strength and endurance, and predictably a lot of so-called masters simply brute force their attacks and defenses. As Aang says wryly, “Bumi told me to find someone who waits and listens to the earth. That guy’s just listening to his muscles.”

I was thinking about this after doing really really badly on a coding interview. The experience left me reeling because 1) I normally do well on technical rounds 2) I truly had no idea how I could have prepared better. No specific skill or concept was lacking but somehow I managed to hopelessly mix myself up.

Here’s how I usually solve problems: I quickly reason 25-75% of the way through the solution and start implementing, testing and iterating as I go. Usually my intuition is good, but this time it wasn’t. The mistake only became obvious when the interview was almost over, as I ran the code with supreme confidence. As you can imagine I did not finish the exercise, nor did I come across as particularly polished or competent.

Luckily I have friends who are good at perceiving my weaknesses. One of them heard my woes and provided me with a set of problems that all tripped me up in exactly the same way. At the end he looked at me with great disappointment and said, “Divya, I wouldn’t hire you either.”

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I lie naked on a great slab of marble and prepare to die. The stone table glows with its own heat, even in a room filled with steam. Morning sun slants down from high windows and glints off ornate basins and jugs of beaten copper.

I lay limply and close my eyes. When I am dead I will be washed like this. A final ghusl, a shroud, and eternal rest. Or perhaps, as punishment, I will simply be tossed in a ditch with the pigs.

There was an icon my father showed me once, carried all the way a faraway land where enchanted worms spin silk from the leaves of trees. I remember him telling me in the heart of everything lies a seed of its opposite. Long ago I was told the same by a holy man, a dervish. If he were alive I would have gifted this to him, but now I keep it in his honor.

If my father were alive he would tell me to refuse the Sultan without fear. There is eternal reward, he would have said, in martyrdom. But I was quiet when they stripped me bare, took me away from the other women, brought me to be inspected and questioned by the Valide Hatun, perfumed me and bejeweled me and left me in the Sultan’s bed.

Have you ever laid with a man?

No, I replied. By then I knew the man I once loved had only ever been a boy after all. He had been a laughing, careless youth, with clever playful hands and endless dreams of glory. When the Sultan’s armies came he was among the first to die.

It was a lie, yet it had an inkling of truth. The Sultan could crush my throat with his bare hands and yet in the throes of passion he is at my mercy. With a slight clenching of my thighs I could leave him spent but unsatisfied. And yet I wrap my arms around his back, I place my foot on his thigh, with my hips I draw out his fleeting pleasure till he is breathless. Afterwards I lay, stained by his sweat, as he presses damp, grateful kisses on my shoulder. By morning he is always gone.

I feel no love for this man and yet I cannot find it in myself to deny him this sweetness; I am every inch a woman and weak. But I will not give him a son.

Last night I dreamt of a handsome young boy with flashing eyes, striding like a god through the battered doors of a great church. A haggard, blood-stained soldier is wildly hammering at the floors. The boy asks what he is doing. For the faith, your Excellency! The boy cuts him down with one stroke of his blade, then turns and addresses the rest. Be satisfied with your looting and raping. The buildings of the city belong to me.

The maid gently unravels my hair, letting it fall in limp waves around my shoulders. Softly steaming water is poured on top of my head and flows down in rivers over my skin.

This girl is a slave, but like a child I listen to her murmured commands. She is short and sturdy, with skin the color of wheat chaff, a round face, strange slanted eyes, and black hair damp from endless steam. She turns my head, spreads my legs, bid me to lie down and move my limbs and sit up.

Where does her mind wander as she whips soap into mounds of rose-scented foam, massages it expertly into my skin, polishes every inch of me with fragrant red clay? What does she wish for and fear?

As a woman she knows where to be firm, where gentle. She scrubs my back and legs and arms like she’s scouring a pot. Her fingers slip delicately over my breasts and wrists and thighs, on the bruises and bite marks the Sultan leaves greedily as he feasts. Her hands are as efficient and careful as my mother’s, back when I was small enough to be soaped down in a bucket.

In another, happier world I might have worked alongside her, been her friend. There is honor in what she does, in cleansing and purification. I would massage scented oils onto tired feet, bring blood back into weary limbs, lovingly comb the tangles out of hair. Instead my womb grows a weapon. A weapon that may have my father’s nose, my mother’s eyes. I can feel him stirring as he sleeps and grows stronger.

When she is done she helps me stand. I am rose-red and dizzy from the heat; she somehow is not. She tenderly holds my face and wipes water from around my eyes. Beautiful, she murmurs. You are beautiful.

I smile. Beside her is a dull blade used to scrape away calluses. If I grabbed it and drove it into my stomach, I would bleed out blissfully in this pure place. Soon after she would be put to death. Instead I let her wrap me in a towel and escort me to my bed.

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Author’s Note:

I am writing this in Istanbul, over tea and olives and honey. Today the Bosphorus was whipped to a frenzy by strong winds. I could almost see wooden boats fighting their way down it, laden with silk and spices. This city was once Constantinople, the bedrock of Christianity, the seat from which it spread as an institution all over Europe.

Upon the eve of a crucial battle, the Roman Emperor Constantine dreamt of a flaming cross, under which was written the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (in this sign thou shalt conquer). Upon victory, he dutifully made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Constantine’s conversion was more strategic than it seems on first glance. The Roman faith, lacking any real shared ideology or sense of identity, did not have the power to unite his people. Christianity was still very much a religion of martyrs and underdogs, but it was organized, passionate, and had a strong network throughout the empire. Plus, getting baptized erased all your previous sins; Constantine conveniently chose to get baptized right before he died. One wonders his famous dream was only ever a useful fiction.

Hundreds of years later, the boy who would put an end to the Byzantine Empire once and for all was born to Sultan Murad and one of his concubines, Hüma Hatun. He was educated by the greatest teachers of his time, including Akshamsaddin, a legendary saint and scholar.

I have a fascination with history’s polymaths. Akshamsaddin was a Sunni theologian, poet, and mystic, but also an expert on medicine. He postulated the existence of the microbe in his work Maddat ul-Hayat (The Material of Life) about two centuries prior to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery through the microscope.

It is incorrect to assume that diseases appear one by one in humans. Disease infects by spreading from one person to another. This infection occurs through seeds that are so small they cannot be seen but are alive.

Young, audacious, brilliant Mehmed ascended to the throne when he was only twelve years old. He would grow into a ruler of striking contradictions: ruthless yet restrained, a destroyer who wept at destruction (he teared up at the sight of Constantinople in the wake of his army’s pillaging), a conqueror spellbound by beauty. When one of his soldiers started tearing down the great Hagia Sofia cathedral, Mehmed killed him in rage.

Like the mythical Troy, Constantinople was thought to be divinely protected and impenetrable. It was surrounded by water on three sides and the famous Theodosian walls on the fourth. Mehmed was the first to ever take it from the Byzantines and it has remained under Muslim rule ever since.

All these centuries later, Sultan Mehmed is still a hero in Turkey for having dealt such a powerful blow for Islam. There’s a spectacular statue of him flying through an arch on horseback, and locals still frequent his tomb. I saw a guard telling a woman off for spending too much time in it. My friend explained it was okay and common to pray for Mehmed, but you had to be careful not to make it seem like you were praying to him. Which goes to show: even in a secular state, the dominant religion influences culture and norms of decency in ways you’d never think of.

This story imagines Hüma Hatun witnessing the man her son would become. The funny part is, Hüma herself was almost certainly Christian by birth, likely stolen from Serbia before ending up one of Sultan Murad’s concubines.

What little is known of Hüma Hatun reminded me immediately of the figure of Leda in Yeats’s Leda and the Swan: both figures bound to history through an unequal, intimate act whose consequences far outstripped their consent. The title of this story is an homage to that brutal, sensual, farsighted poem.

Leda was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan and consequently gave birth to the half-divine Helen, the legendary beauty who launched a thousand ships in the direction of Troy. There, too, the fall of an impenetrable city and the birth of a new civilization began in the violation of an helpless girl.

The last two lines have always haunted me; in the pattern of great romantic poetry, the meaning is more musical than literal. Did Leda absorb some of the god’s power and prophecy amidst her suffering? In life you can try to avoid pain, or you can accept is as inevitable and aim to gain empathy, insight and humility from it, emerge stronger and free of bitterness.

I feel Istanbul understands such dilemmas. It has been Christian and Muslim, imperial and wounded, conquered and restrained. Its very stones remember that that in the heart of everything lies a seed of its opposite.

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If you met me at fifteen, you never would have guessed I was a binge eater. I was slim, I was on my school’s gymnastics team, and moreover I was a health nut. The food I crammed unrelentingly down my throat was fresh, home cooked, and organic. Frankly I didn’t even clock it as a problem. I’m hungry, I told myself, I need nutritious food.

Nothing is easier to be in denial about than a coping mechanism. I was using mental patterns familiar to alcoholics and hoarders and those people whose obesity is so staggering they get their own T.V. show.

Researchers like Kent Berridge distinguish between wanting and liking: we can crave things we don’t enjoy and continue pursuing them even when they don’t bring relief. Incentive salience is the process by which the brain tags something as necessary to pursue.

When I’m overwhelmed I get this feeling in my chest, something like a panicked bird beating itself against a cage. In my early teens eating became an outlet for that restless energy. I didn’t like stuffing myself mindlessly, I didn’t enjoy the stupor that came afterwards, but the urge to eat was overwhelming.

I started intermittent fasting for the health benefits, but there was an unexpected benefit to tracking my calories and timing all my meals: I had to sit with whatever feeling was making me want to eat. It became very obvious that it wasn’t really hunger that was driving the impulse; I had to sit with and parse the feeling. It took totally stripping away my coping mechanism for me to even realize it was a coping mechanism.

Of course, abstaining from food is not inherently an elevating practice. The same action, originating from different places, can have very different effects: the anorexic seeks escape in not eating the same way a binge eater seeks escape in eating too much. There are many ways to be gluttonous in this world, some more obvious than others.

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There’s a lovely Sufi story by Farid ud-Din Attar called The Conference of the Birds. All the birds of the world gather yearning for a king, the Simurgh, a great being who will lead them to paradise. The birds set off in a great fleet, but to reach the Simurgh they must endure the intense discomfort of Seven Valleys, each representing a spiritual pitfall. Only thirty birds are left at the end, and it is revealed that they themselves are the Simurgh, that they have won clarity through patience and endurance.

Attar writes:

You cannot reach truth by filling the void.

I fell into the same pattern of “filling the void” years later, this time with shopping. I told myself that consuming endless reviews and product comparisons made me a smart shopper. Funnily enough, I kept discovering I more things I “needed.” I’d watch some youtuber with gleaming hair sing praises of her kitchenware as she assembled a salad, and I felt if I also had a gorgeous set of wooden spoons and a charmingly salad bowl I’d make more salads, lose weight, and feel as fresh and light and serene as she seemed in her beautifully filmed and edited video.

Marketers are great at convincing you that you can purchase transformations, but nothing you buy is going to change who you are.

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Once upon a time, on a little rocky islet in the middle of a vast river, there lived a scorpion. Every day a frog asked the scorpion to cross the river with him. Get on my back, my beloved, and we can live together in peace and plenty on the other bank.

Alas, I am a scorpion, she smiled sadly, and it is my nature to sting.

Why would you sting me? The frog asked blankly.

I don’t know! My tail moves on its own regardless of my feelings.

I cannot imagine such an itch said the frog thoughtfully When I am hungry, I eat. When I am hot I swim. I do not understand having the urge to do something that brings you only unhappiness.

I wish I were like you whispered the scorpion.

A frog asked the scorpion to cross the river. Get on my back, beloved, and we can live together in peace and plenty on the other bank.

Alas, I am a scorpion, she smiled sadly, and it is my nature to sting. Because I love you I tell you the entire truth as I know it, even if you may hate me as a result.

I love you even more for your courage the frog said approvingly. Many in your position would lie.

Yes, said the scorpion, but you wouldn’t.

Yes, said the frog, and they sat together and watched the sunset.

I don’t mind a few stings, the frog said breezily, and smiled to hide his fear.

The scorpion clambered on his back and squeezed her eyes shut, holding herself rigid and taking deep breaths, willing her tail to behave. Her tail, obeying its ancestral instinct, stung again and again.

The frog, not wishing to grieve her, bore it in silence. Finally he could take it no longer and howled. You selfish incompetent creature! You’re killing me!

The scorpion, horrified by her destructiveness, threw herself into the water. The frog pulled her again on his back.

Let me go, the scorpion moaned.

No, the frog said grimly. Severely weakened, he was forced to turn around. They’d barely reached the scorpion’s island again when he fell motionless on the rocks. The scorpion lay beside him all night and cleaned his wounds with her tears. In the morning he rose, dead-eyed, and wordlessly slipped away.

Every day a frog asked a scorpion to cross the river with him.

You know better than anyone, she said miserably, that it is my nature to sting.

You are brilliant. If anyone could change, it would be you the frog said adoringly.

Why do you travel so far to see her when she won’t even refrain from stinging you? asked the other frogs scornfully.

The frog said nothing and remembered the first time he saw the scorpion smile, and how his vision went white with pleasure. What a cruel trick of nature, he thought bitterly, to give such radiant happiness to a person who cannot be relied on.

Some days the frog did not come. The scorpion would sit on the rock all day gazing across the water, thinking of his wry remarks and the crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he grinned.

It is for the best, she thought. All I do is hurt him. I shouldn’t encourage him coming here.

But when the frog’s head poked above the water she could not help dancing for joy.

My love, I missed you so much!

And the frog would smile an exhausted smile.

….and it is my nature to sting.

It does not matter what our instincts are, the frog said impatiently, only our decisions.

….and it is my nature to sting.

I know, the frog said kindly, it is all right. You are still my favorite creature in the world.

The scorpion sat down happily beside him and they enjoyed the long warm afternoon. Sunlight sparkled on the gentle river. From somewhere across the water drifted the scent of jasmine.

….and it is my nature to sting.

You take me for granted the frog said flatly. But I guess a certain kind of person never knows what they have until they lose it.

I have never loved anyone the way I love you said the scorpion quietly.

Your words say one thing, your actions another said the frog, and slipped off into the waves.

I swim a mile every day to see you, the frog said passionately, I’m half the size I once was. I’m happy to do all the work in taking you over. All you have to do is not sting!

I’m sorry, whispered the scorpion.

…All you have to do is not sting!

I told you from the start: there is no happy ending for creatures as different as us the scorpion said, finally sick of being the villain. You choose to come here anyway. Don’t blame me.

I just don’t want to lose you the frog said sadly.

Me either said the scorpion, and settled wearily on the sand.

…All you have to do is not sting!

Another scorpion would be at home here on my island. Another scorpion would not be hurt by my venom. Why is the fault mine for stinging and not yours for being thin skinned?

The frog’s voice shook with abject misery. I wish we had never met. They looked at each other, eyes wet, and embraced.

The other scorpions gathered around and said It is not fair of him to blame you for his disappointment. You could not help being born a scorpion.

I know, sniffed the scorpion. Sometimes he makes me wish I were never born. But I would rather be scolded by him than petted by anyone else.

I cannot imagine such an itch said the frog thoughtfully When I am hungry, I eat. When I am hot I swim. I do not understand having the urge to do something that brings you only unhappiness.

Well, why do you visit me? the scorpion asked tenderly and pointedly.

The frog said nothing, but sighed and moved closer.

Rain drenched the world for days and days. The frog asked the scorpion to cross the river. Winter is coming and this river will flood. There is no more time. Get on my back, my beloved, or we will be parted forever.

The scorpion wept. Alas, I am a-

The frog became angry. If you truly loved me, you’d control your stinger. You would come with me, and live, and not leave me alone.

The scorpion shook with sobs. That I cannot promise.

Then you don’t really love me at all, do you? spat the frog, and sank bitterly beneath the waves.

…There is no more time. Get on my back, my beloved, or we will be parted forever.

The scorpion wept. Because I love you I tell you the truth about my nature. There is nothing more I can do.

The frog looked her in the eye. There is always something you can do. But in this supposed act of loving honesty, you’re just giving yourself permission to do nothing. If this really mattered to you, you would find a way.

The scorpion shook with sobs. The frog sat beside her, heart aching, as the churning waves crept ever higher.

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Author’s Note:

The original tale of the scorpion and frog is a simple fable. A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asks a passing frog to help him cross a river.

The good-natured frog is wary of the scorpion but reasons that the scorpion cannot sting him without also dying, so he can safely perform this act of kindness.

In the middle of the river the scorpion does, indeed, sting. With his dying gasp the frog asks furiously you fool, why would you kill us both? The scorpion replies: to sting is my nature.

It has always been my favorite fable because it captures a lot about being human: the kindness and sincerity and self-betrayal.

Years ago I stumbled upon an old tumblr post that riffed on it, and I was captivated. Last night this came tumbling into my brain and I stayed up all night writing and choking up.

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“Women in the teahouses were the ones who made or broke your reputation. If you alienated them, you were finished.”

— Mineko Kawasaki (Geisha, a Life)

Apparently I am a bully. At least, a girl I knew recently seemed to think so. It started almost as soon as we met, when she came to a party I was hosting. At some point in that night I must have stumbled into her (I can be very clumsy!) but Said Girl got it in her head I shoved her intentionally and would not believe anyone who told her otherwise. It only got worse from there.

If a man doesn’t like you he stops talking to you or punches you in the face. If a girl doesn’t like you she makes other people not like you. I think the second one is actually much more dangerous.

Women are the first regulators of reputation, the first to enforce the sanctions of the group. Ostracism begins with them.

— René Girard (Violence and the Sacred)

I’ve had plenty of misunderstandings with people, but before this everyone I interacted with believed I had good intentions. Someone thinking I was deliberately trying to hurt them was a totally new experience.

How do you convince someone you’re acting in good faith? Buying Said Girl her favorite matcha did not work, nor asking her to hang out 1-1, nor inviting her to cozy gatherings with my other girlfriends, nor helping her move furniture, nor any other act of service or favor I could think of.

Every conversation we had was polite and friendly, but I would keep learning reason after reason she hated me through the gossip mill. Mistakes I didn’t even know I was making were interpreted as acts of active malice. In hindsight I could mostly understand where she was coming from, but it drove me crazy that I only ever learned that something bothered her through the grapevine.

It was very tempting for me to dismiss this as a one-off encounter with an unreasonable and childish person. But I am a big fan of radical accountability, and also I believe what makes a human mind incomprehensible to another human mind is simply ego.

People seek reasons to justify their instinctive reactions. Your relationship with someone is defined by whether they *want* to like you more than what you actually do. In fact, they will forgive any number of sins when you make them feel secure and understood.

I could retreat into a stubborn shell and complain all day that she wasn’t being rational, but nobody, including me, is perfectly rational. “People skills” is just deftly navigating the currents of irrationality. What I had essentially failed in doing was making this girl feel like I was on her side.

There are general first principles to making people unfairly biased in your favor, and there is etiquette particular to girls. Not to all girls or only to girls, obviously, or I wouldn’t have had to write this autistic-ass essay, but to female social structures, which have their particular norms and methods of warfare.

This essay is a compilation of my clumsy notes on how to make women feel irrationally good about you, presented as a list of techniques and first principles.

If you’re naturally similar to a girl and you like each other right away, you’ll probably execute a lot of these techniques unconsciously. However, in life you often you have to get along with people you’re nothing like, and intentionally checking off these boxes will make it much smoother. I couldn’t avoid Said Girl, for example, because she dating someone in our friend group. She’d often refuse to show up to social occasions if I was present, which made getting together extremely complicated.

Also, if you’re male-brained, neurodivergent, or poorly socialized, the mechanisms of female social groups can be very confusing, and I think an analytical breakdown will help.

Contrary to the title (it was catchy, sorry!) a lot of this advice is applicable to men as well.

how women wage war

“The secret government of girls is ruthless… exile is their favorite tool.”

— Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

Most women are extremely good natured if they feel safe around you. The problem is that there are many many ways to make a girl feel unsafe. To avoiding threatening another girl by accident, you have to understand how it’s done on purpose: the mechanisms by which a malicious woman tears another woman down.

I stumbled across this video on female bullying that I thought was interesting and accurate. Female aggression is *extremely* different from male aggression.

The biggest difference is how much retaliation is a deterrent. If a guy is angry enough, he will throw a punch even if it means likely getting punched back. Women are much more deterred by the possibility of retaliation, meaning they tend to choose attacks that they can’t be held accountable for.

Sometimes this means being sweet as pie to your face but saying nasty things about you behind your back. Even when it’s right in front of your eyes, it goes something like this:

1. Girl finds extremely subtle way to make you feel out of place, unlikable, or humiliated. Usually the literal words she uses are fine, but subtle shifts in tone and eye contact make it obvious to everyone she doesn’t think much of you. Or she makes “jokes” that could be funny and nice if someone else said them, but here and now and from her, are downright cruel. The people around you, of course, don’t have the context to see this, and assume you’re both just really good friends who joke around like this habitually.

2. There is enough plausible deniability that if you try to call her out you sound paranoid. In fact often you wonder if you’re crazy for noticing and caring.

3. The effect is amplified because, like orcas, malicious women work in highly efficient groups. After all, reality is just a social consenus, and they use their superior numbers to shape the reality of any social situation you are trapped in with them. Any remark you make becomes ridiculous if enough people sneer. Any cruel joke becomes acceptable if enough people treat it as funny. No attempt to stand up for yourself has dignity if enough people laugh.

When the entire architecture of an attack is based on it plausibly being not an attack, you can understand why some women are so sensitive to subtle signals.

K pointed out to me that the way I behaved was (from Said Girl’s point of view) indeed how a bully would behave. All my attempts befriend her were just clever ways to make 1) her feel crazy and 2) me look Friendly and Innocent in the eyes of other people. Me saying the words “I like you, we should hang out more!” were of course not sincere, because a bully might also say that, wickedness glinting in her eyes, as she actively plotted against you.

Female social signaling is so subtle that it’s hard to tell if you’re being malicious or simply clueless. Many women will assume the worst, especially if they’ve had bad experiences before, and that is very sad for both for you. Firstly, you’ve both lost out on a potentially beautiful friendship. Secondly, it’s really awful to have the gossip mill leveraged against you.

Gossiping is fun, a great way to bond, and a vital mechanism for protecting social groups from bad actors, but whether you’re innocent or not it’s almost impossible to recover from a damaged reputation.

The thing is, she doesn’t get along with other women is a genuine red flag. Some women really are too immature, self-centered, and competitive to maintain a friendship between equals. They say girls are too dramatic and end up surrounded by men who are willing to endlessly appease them in hopes of a romantic promotion. I was really hesitant to write this essay because it could be interpreted as me saying women are worse people, which they aren’t. The unique difficulties (and benefits!) of female friendship come from different incentives and communication systems.

The only thing I could have done was not make her feel bad in the first place. I learned the hard way that you cannot just opt of out social power dynamics. There is *always* a social conspiracy, or more accurately the threat of one, and you have to make it obvious that you are conspiring with her, not against her.

Luckily, signs of allegiance are just as subtle as signs of hostility, and just as easy to hack:

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I’m writing this because I’m bad at relationships. If I was good, I would spend my evenings happily cuddled up with my fiancee instead of analyzing love. I think being intensely curious about other’s people’s experiences and mulling over your own does help, though, because you start to notice patterns in the stupid things people do.

My thesis on the loneliness epidemic is: I think everyone should be using matchmakers. I think it should be a common profession or side hustle. Right now matchmaking seems reserved for men who are too rich, too picky, or too famous to date the normal way. And as far as I can tell, those matchmakers function like premium dating app algorithms. You tell them what you want - a list of features - and they scout out girls for you.

I have a very specific vision of what matchmaking should be though, and it’s quite different from the services I see available today. So, here’s what’s broken about matchmaking, and by extension, about modern love.

vibesmatch not featurematch

She’s athletic and so is he. They’re both dog people. They both like playing video games. They both grew up in Minnesota. They’re both extraverted and high openness and Christian. They’re perfect for each other!

It doesn’t work like this in real life, I’m afraid. The dynamic between two people cannot be broken down as a sum of their various parts.

I’m not saying these things don’t help. Having shared context and preferences makes the partnership between two people a lot easier. But it does not create love.

No one I have ever been deeply enamored with is someone I would have swiped on in an app. Even if you had described them to me, I would have probably passed.

But I met these people at a beautiful point in my life where I felt like I had all the time in the world. Free of the pressure to pick something perfect and permanent, I gave those relationships a shot. I found myself being able to appreciate the artistry of cocktails. I found myself watching movies about sushi making, exploring fish markets in Korea. With an ease I never would have expected, they expanded my palette for life. What I truly believed were incompatibilities fostered growth and aliveness.

And there were so many layers to these people that I never could have predicted. I could have not predicted what made us similar, what made us connect, nor could I have explained it to anyone.

Ironically the person I was most suited to on paper — our cultures, personalities, favorite cuisine, even our Big 5 scores — was my least fulfilling relationship by far. And I picked him because on paper it seemed perfect. I spent five years with him because all my rational faculties told me we were a perfect match. And sure it was comfortable and affectionate and easy, but lacking in any genuine love or desire.

The mistake I made at the start of my relationship was is having too much confidence in what I wanted. In my quest for the Perfect Husband I had a list of features I was looking for, much like I was shopping for a microwave.

I think most of us have lists like this, and these lists make it way harder to find love.

My list made it harder for me to listen to my own instincts. What I thought I wanted turned out to be not what I actually wanted, or needed.

But that could just be me. Maybe I’m uniquely bad at predicting what I like.

Regardless, people aren’t stable collections of traits. They’re more like textures that shift constantly depending on mood, perceived audience, how they want to feel, how stable and secure their lives are at the moment.

Unfortunately most services to help you find love — whether it’s apps or matchmakers — depend on the feature list. They have a database of people, filter by some criteria, and show you the top k.

Enlightened matchmaking is less like matching a list of requirements and more like predicting which image someone would like better. Left or right?

A/B tests like this are how Midjourney develops a sense of what “style” a user prefers, and I have to say it works fantastically. Much better than asking the user to list out what they do or do not like in pictures.

I think people are actually quite good at instinctively sussing out vibe. It’s not hard, when you know two people, to guess whether or not they would get along.

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When you write online you get a lot of messages from strangers, and these days I don’t respond to most of them. A tip: if you’re hoping to start a conversation with someone you have never met, sending the word “Hi” is not enough. Make it obvious where a convo with you would go. Make it easy for them to think of what to say back.

I respond to people who are coherent, specific, and get to the point. Sometimes we’ll even grab coffee. Before my first such coffee with T, his friends warned him to be very careful meeting me. I was highly amused when I learned this; I’m not used to inspiring nervousness in men well over six feet tall.

T’s friends actually had an excellent point: content creation is a business, first and foremost, and people have more incentive to lie than to tell the truth. Online personas are often entirely fictional. The couple whose cutesy videos rake in million of views actually broke up years ago. The money guru has been mired in debt for years. The tech influencer whose internship tip videos consistently go viral never actually worked in tech. The intellectual hasn’t actually read the books she recommends with so much fervor.

Perhaps none of the ideas that drew him to me were actually mine; perhaps I hired someone to write for me and I was just in it for the attention. Being well known, even in a small corner of the internet, gives you power. If I took offense for some absurd reason, I could say whatever I wanted about him and thousands of people would believe me.

T went on to say: “The thing that gave me pause is that you write with such conviction. But you’re 23. How do you feel qualified to be giving advice and charging so much money for it?”

I know a lot of people would agree with him, even if few are bold enough to say it to me directly. The answer isn’t easy, because it’s not a simple justification. It was actually a series of breakthroughs that took a long time to arrive at, that changed my life and 10x-ed my potential. I’m going to fire them off here in bullet points.

From what I’ve seen, every writer, every content creator - any kind of entrepreneur, in fact - has to reach these conclusions eventually to be successful:

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I recently read an great guide on not feeling lost anymore by Yacine Mahdid. He’s successful at two things I’ve thought about doing a lot, which is 1) growing on Youtube 2) making machine learning videos.

Effectively, he says you should put aside a few days to sit alone (say, in a wafflehouse) and get in touch with what you really want, then reverse engineer what you should be doing yearly, monthly, and weekly from there. I think this is actually very good advice, but it’s not enough for me.

The problem is that I can never settle on what my priorities actually are. I read a great essay and decide I must have my novel out by 30. I visit my uncle’s ranch and think wistfully of a quiet life growing roses. I visit SF and all I want is to be extremely cracked and well-connected and live in a plant-filled loft.

I’m easily inspired and easily distracted. Maybe high openness also makes you indecisive. Decisions in life are rarely apple vs wormy apple; they’re more like apple vs orange, and what I’m craving depends on my mood.

There's only a couple areas in life where I’m horribly narrow minded, and they’re the only ones that always feel simple. I will always want my living space to be impeccably neat and organized. The aesthetic upgrade will always be worth it.

Seneca wrote: "If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” It’s frustrating recognizing my problem but not knowing how to fix it.

K is sympathetic but doesn’t quite get it. He’s always known exactly what he wants; all he has to worry about is finding the right approach. He moves towards his goals like a stone sinking cleanly through water.

The missing piece to complete Yacine’s Wafflehouse Protocol came from the very underrated Kyle Junlong:

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There’s a show I really like called the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, from the same writers who did Gilmore Girls. The characters are all impeccably dressed and silver-tongued, but more importantly Amy and Dan Palladino capture something few writers seem to even notice: how every personality is a double-edged sword, how leaning into your strengths also amplifies your weaknesses.

In their shows there are no real protagonists or antagonists; everyone is sometimes admirable, sometimes infuriating. Like in real life these polarizing reactions often come from the same thing. What makes you shine in one context humiliates you in another.

For example, Rory is careful, rule-abiding, and diligent. She wins accolade after accolade in school and university, only to flounder in adulthood. Some fans complain that the writers “ruined Rory.” Others see her in themselves, a gifted child who went nowhere.

The thing is, people who thrive in structure tend to be lost without it, just like people who compulsively carve their own path - like Rory’s mother Lorelai - tend find structure suffocating, fighting against it to the point of self-destruction.

Lorelai gets pregnant at sixteen, drops out of high school, and runs away from home. From all this chaos she builds a life she loves and can rightfully be proud of. Rory navigates early life easily, but you can see her identity begin to fracture when the path forward is no longer clear.

This is all made worse by the fact that her family is ridiculously entitled on her behalf. They fall into the trap many doting parents fall into; seeing their child as a distillation of themselves, a redemption of their mistakes.

Anyone who implies Rory is not perfect is attacking not only her, but the potential of their own bloodline. One of the best things you can do as a parent is make sure your child has humility, but I can only imagine how hard that is. I’ve never loved someone so much I thought they deserved everything.

Ten years later the Palladinos brought the same nuance to the character of Midge, with even more glamour and charm. Midge Maisel is beautiful, quick-witted, resourceful, and fearless. Life as an Upper West Side socialite kept her brashness and biting tongue in line, but standup comedy gives her pretext to lean into her natural tendencies completely. They become a compulsion that wins her fame and fortune and dissolves many of her personal relationships in the process.

Sometimes you hate Midge. Sometimes you hate Lorelai. Sometimes you hate Rory. Sometimes I hate myself.

There’s a term in poker called “running hot.” It’s when you hit a string of good luck, win hand after hand, and get reckless. Last night I doubled my money at a poker game and then lost everything in one rash hand.

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This morning my aunt walked into my bedroom and asked me “Divya, do you think you might have depression? One day you’re so happy, the next day you seem so sad and tired…”

I was half-asleep and extremely groggy; I’d spent all night reading a Swedish detective novel called Dark Music by David Lagercrantz. Reading a novel cover to cover is a luxury. Like so many forms of decadence it slides easily into hedonism, as a way to run away from your existential dread. I croaked, “Of course. This is how I’ve always been,” and fell back asleep.

Depression is actually the wrong term. There’s a lovely word my friend taught me that describes my mental landscape perfectly: cyclothymia. Apparently it’s called the artist’s affliction because so many artists have it.

I think it’s foolish to put labels on yourself. What feels like a reassuring sense of identity can quickly turn into a box. I especially disapprove when identity is formed around suffering or trauma, because that seems like a great way to make it even harder to finally be happy.

Identity is not formed in isolation; you learn who you are by discovering what you can do in the world, what you’re needed for. Your sense of self comes from the people around you. Society is so fragmented that addictions to astrology and MBTI and Buzzfeed-quiz-style introspection have become common: people label themselves into oblivion in a hapless quest for a tribe.

But it’s nice to find a word that exactly describes a pattern you’ve seen or an experience you’ve had. It’s intellectually satisfying (like a puzzle piece clicking into place) and also makes you feel less alone. The very existence of the word is evidence that other people notice what you notice.

In hindsight my aunt’s question was an extremely strange thing to ask someone first thing in the morning. I think she was alarmed about me, enough to be thinking about it as she fell asleep. She’d seen me oscillate between bubbly energy and utter misery multiple times in the last three days. Years ago we heard about someone’s daughter committing suicide, and as I came down for breakfast she kissed me on the head in an uncharacteristic act of affection. It was me she was imagining spread over train tracks, not her own children, and in that moment I realized she loved me more than she misunderstood me.

She doesn’t need to worry: I’ve gotten very good over time at being consistently happy, but frankly the past few weeks have been an unusually bad time.

It’s idleness that’s been getting to me, and being in limbo. I’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for someone else to make an important decision, and in the meantime I have just enough stupid work to do that I can’t immerse myself in a project I actually care about. No human being deals well with this state of affairs but I’m peculiarly unsuited to it.

There’s a poem by Dorothy Parker that describes my gray moods very well: “There’s little in taking and giving / There’s little in water or wine / This living this living this living/ Was never a project of mine.”

I spent a whole afternoon prostrate on the couch, giving one word monotone replies to anything anyone said, my eyes clouded by unshed tears. My uncle tried telling me it would all be all right, that I was smart as a whip and would achieve everything I wanted in the end.

I’ve noticed people do this a lot; when you’re upset they assume there’s a concrete problem they can fix or make you feel less afraid of. I never know how to explain that there’s a lot of joy in fixing problems, in being full of adrenaline and desire and fear.

What’s really unbearable, the only truly unbearable thing, is when you feel like you don’t care about the outcome, like you’ll never be happy again no matter how well things turn out. To this day I don’t have a formula for recovery. It takes divine inspiration, or a happy trick of sunlight glimmering through leaves, to pull me out of it.

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Dear Duped,

You’re right - love depends heavily on trust. However, there’s four separate things to address here: the lying, the porn, the messaging, and the inherent problem of his sexual needs going unfulfilled.

Rest assured: this problem is not unique to him or you. In the past, things were easier to define. Either you met up with someone outside your marriage or you didn’t.

Today, there’s endless ways to gain sexual gratification from someone else, even from an AI bot. Infidelity has many shades of gray. So: to avoid hurting each other, every couple unfortunately has to have an awkward and honest conversation about where to draw the line.

Firstly, there’s a big difference between outright lying and lies of omission, especially in this case. Most people grow up seeing masturbation as a private, personal, and icky thing.

It doesn’t occur to them that they can or should share it, any more than they share the details of their latest visit to the bathroom. I can’t blame him for not volunteering this information, but I would blame him for nor being transparent when it become a topic of discussion.

Was your boyfriend forthright with you when you asked him, or did he keep hiding things for you to uncover?

Honesty is also a two way street: if you react explosively to someone telling you the truth, it’s natural that they end up cagey. You have to encourage honesty by reacting neutrally, even when they’re telling you something you hate to hear. That doesn’t mean being a doormat: you can and should draw your boundaries firmly, but staying calm and empathetic is vital.

Men and women experience sexual desire differently. I can sympathize with why his behavior might seem gross to you, panting like an animal after flesh, the body of someone he barely knows and would never be with.

I think it would easier, and more accurate, for you to think of it like hunger rather than desire. The male sex drive does not pause when the man is not in love or his lover isn’t around. It intensifies until it’s all-absorbing and impossible to ignore.

Porn is like junk food: some people are addicted to it, and that’s bad, but anyone would eat it if they were hungry enough and something more nourishing and fulfilling was not available.

For many women, porn is not appealing because arousal requires a holistic connection. Men are much more visual, so the imagery is often enough to give them release.

Whether you are a man or a woman, it is very, very difficult to want sex more than your partner wants it. Visit the r/deadbedrooms subreddit and you might understand his perspective a bit better. It’s nobody’s fault, but it is a difficult situation that requires compromise on both sides.

The messages are a whole other story, but there is a chance (slim, but bolstered by how well he treats you in other ways) he really did not see it as cheating.

The problem with 24/7, easily available sex work is that it’s a very slippery slope from photos to paying for photos to paying for messages. Would it be cheating to have pay a writer to write you custom erotica? What about paying to chat with a sexy chatbot? Is paid porn different from free porn? What about paid porn versus paying to join a sexy livestream? Does it make a difference if the livestream is group or individual? What if it’s a real girl’s body but with an AI face?

You get the point: when you think about all the options men have today for easy gratification, the line is indeed quite blurry.

I can see why you think it’s cheating; I can also see why he thought it wasn’t, and why it didn’t occur to him to share his private…pleasures with you. Again: this problem is not unique to him. He could be a truly decent guy who was simply delusional about what you’d be fine with.

The only question is this: now that you’re drawn your boundaries, will he respect them? If you catch him lying again, leave and don’t look back. If he does what he said he’ll do, leave the past in the past and count yourself lucky to have an honorable lover.

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Someone in your life being impossible to deal with? Troubles of the heart? Don’t know if you’re crazy or they are? Suffering from a moral dilemma? Issues with your parents, your cranky boss, your cat? Open to having your problem (and potentially, yourself) publicly dissected and philosophized over?

Submit a letter to Dear Divya💌!

My very dear readers, I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Love, Divya.

Dear Brokenhearted,

I’m sorry to hear you were broken up with…twice.

I admire that you’re able to hear his (very blunt and harsh, if you’re quoting him verbatim!) criticism and consider if it might be true, instead of simply stonewalling or lashing out as many in your shoes would do.

It’s clear you look up to your ex very much, and it’s touching you can admit that despite all that’s happened.

Abusive behavior is certainly real. It’s also massively overdiagnosed by well-meaning friends and family. We live in an age of therapyspeak; people now have a plethora of psychiatrist-sounding ways to say don’t be so hard on yourself.

Not every shitty situation is abuse. Some people might define abuse as “exploitation” but all consensual relationships are mutually exploitative. Given the freedom to choose, we don’t keep people in our lives unless we’re getting something out of it, even if that something is not obvious or rational. Many people actively choose to remain in shitty situations: come back to the same person over and over or recreate that dynamic with someone else.

I think it’s silly, downright insulting even, to use the same term for, say, a womanizer and for people who

- take control of their partner’s bank accounts

- smash furniture when they’re angry

- berate and threaten until their partner is too scared and unsure of themselves to leave.

I have a rather specific definition of abuse: the insidious removal of agency.

Do you feel like your freedom is being limited, your safety increasingly at risk, your options pared away, your support system dismantled? Do you feel your ability to enact change in your own life diminishing?

This can be done in many ways, some seemingly innocent, some outright scary. However subtle or subconscious the execution, that is the end effect: isolation, and consequently control. In the end, you put up with whatever they do to you because there is nowhere else to go.

Maybe, looking back, you’ll see he was abusive. Or maybe you’ll see you were abusive to him.

That being said, from what you’ve shared, I think it is….unlikely you were as toxic as he says you were. If you were abusive, odds are he’d want to stay far away after getting out of your clutches, not buy you breakfast and give you a cheery lecture on your failings. I also find that abusive people are usually not open (as you seem to be) to the idea that they are the problem.

The way you describe your ex resembles a certain archetype I’ve become familiar with in the last couple years. Highly intelligent, charismatic, excitingly unpredictable, and completely, euphorically drunk on their own Koolaid.

K calls this archetype “sexy and schizo” and loathes these people as major polluters of the dating pool. It’s accurate.

They bleed confidence and conviction and are naturally unpredictable enough to be effortlessly stimulating and entertaining.

They’re smart enough to achieve, to win approval from the world, to charm your pants off and have you drinking their Koolaid too.

And because of their unpredictability and charisma you can never be quite sure of them, which gives you butterflies up the wazoo.

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I’m actually fairly confident your ex is somewhat like this for three reasons:

1) You clearly put him on a pedestal, which he enjoys and encourages. He has not treated you like a peer and equal, removing your rose-tinted glasses and putting you both on equal footing, as a healthier and wiser person would do. In fact, he takes the time to ‘helpfully’ hammer in you weren’t good enough for him. He likes the idea of being your one who got away.

2) He randomly jumped out of a moving car. Peak schizo behavior!

3) He’s clearly inconsistent. He breaks up with you, takes you back, breaks up again. One minute you’re too boring to be with, another it was just timing and nobody’s fault. One minute you’re too unhealthy to talk to, another he’s buying you breakfast.

I’m not saying he’s doing this on purpose to manipulate you. Some people really are just wired haphazardly, by nature inconstant, fickle, and changeable. He probably believes everything he says in the moment he says it, and in a different mood feels the opposite.

People who act like this are not necessarily bad people deep down, but they’re also not good people, not when they don’t take care to be predictable for the sake of those around them.

Dear Brokenhearted, to be completely frank, I am exactly like this by nature, and I can tell you that it is very possible to be wired this way and still act with consideration. It takes earnest, earnest effort though, and humility. I can also tell you that if I didn’t try very hard to be considerate and consistent, I’d be a menace.

I know men who are wired like this and rampage unchecked. They can make great friends, but I’d never date one. They seem like the greatest when you’re talking to them, simply too good for any of the girls they’ve come across so far, but with time, and enough exposure to their social circle, you start to see the cracks in the mirror. They’re far from perfect, romantically and otherwise, and actively create a lot of dysfunction.

My point is: you’re well rid of him. I’m not saying you’re perfect, no one ever is, but it takes two to break something. If he was your soulmate, you’d still be together. The relationship is over. Block him. There’s no point to staying in touch. Don’t give him the satisfaction of having you trot at his heels with big yearning eyes like a puppy.

Love, Divya

Someone in your life being impossible to deal with? Troubles of the heart? Don’t know if you’re crazy or they are? Suffering from a moral dilemma? Issues with your parents, your cranky boss, your cat? Open to having your problem (and potentially, yourself) publicly dissected and philosophized over?

Submit a letter to Dear Divya💌!

My very dear readers, I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

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When I was very small I toddled across a fallen bottle of prescription pills and ate a bunch without anyone noticing. If I’d slept that night through I would have died.

This was in Bangalore. An old lady, a friend of my mother’s, stopped by and saw that my feet were strangely pale and rubbing them didn’t make them pink again. She shoved cash in my mother’s hands and told her to get me to the hospital immediately. As they rushed out the door she mentioned she’d understand if my mother never smiled or said hi to her after that night. They weren’t technically supposed to be on speaking terms at all; my dad didn't like my mother getting friendly with the neighbors.

The doctors confirmed I had been poisoned. My circulation had slowed dangerously and my brain was already severely depleted of oxygen. There was a medication they could use, but the hospital didn't have in stock. My mother called my father in tears. He rushed out of work and bought a massive quantity of it, enough for me and a hundred other children. Afterwards he said over and over what a travesty it was that a child might die of such an easily remedied lack.

Raising me was not a difficulty that united my parents. They have a way of fighting that loops back through time like a headache, drudging up every resentment of the many years of their marriage, all the irreparable damage each feels the other inflicted on me, the only project they attempted together and a failed one in many respects.

I was eighteen — I’m surprised, looking back, that I was that old — when I first overheard them reach, after several hours, the subject of who was the blame for Divya having eaten the Pills. It made me queasy, I don’t know why, maybe because neither of them ever brought that incident up, maybe because my dad likened it to a murder.

Sometimes it’s like my brain goes offline for a few seconds, during which I drop things or pick them up or walk into something or trip without realizing it at all. I’m known for being careless, even clumsy. K affectionately jokes that I'm brain damaged.

It might actually be true, though. The doctors didn’t know if I'd ever fully be okay. Apparently I was precocious to an almost unheard of degree before this happened, and then I became more listless, more confused. I'd sometimes clock out in the middle of playing and stare vacantly at nothing for minutes before coming back to myself.

Growing up this was just another addition to the plethora of narratives that made me very bitter and justified me not trying at anything. I felt all my potential had already been wasted, that my parents had squandered it, that I didn't have any of the normalcy or community I saw so many girls around me thrive in. It felt like I spent my evenings trying to block out endless quarreling and figure out why everything I said seemed to rub other kids the wrong way.

In elementary school I was precocious in academics and ingratitude. I said quite astonishing things to my mother for my age, things like, "I wish I didn't have to go to school. I hate you. I wish math didn't exist. I wish I'd never been born."

My mother usually treated me like I could do no wrong, but at times like this she would scold, with surprising frequency and vehemence, to be careful what I wished for, even in thinking. She painted a picture of God sitting up high granting out wishes at random, "So be it! So be it!" I thought that was pretty stupid of God.

One afternoon when I was five I woke up from nap to a warm, perfectly still, perfectly empty house. I ran from room to room screaming for my mother in terror. She had been right, and God had granted me my wish. I ran outside sobbing and spoke to the sky, begging God over and over to give me Amma back. That was how she found me on her way back from the laundromat.

Almost seventeen years later, my mother came to see me, an uninvited, much-begrudged guest. She got turmeric stains on my white couch and confessed that she, too, had once made a wish without thinking, and that wish had almost come true.

One day when I was very small she’d sat thinking about how bright and full of hope her life had been so recently and how it was now. Her dreams of love were ruined forever and her other dreams fettered by so many things: her chilly, absent husband, her tyrannical in-laws, but ultimately by the ever-demanding baby in her arms. I was the reason she couldn't leave, the reason she was tied to this mean-spirited, miserable, controlling family, and she wished I had never been born.

She said I spent the whole day whimpering and fretful, but I was a colicky baby so this was not unusual. My mother told me how exhausted she was, how long she tried to get me to sleep.

After I finally dozed off, she made herself coffee. Her usually deft hands fumbled the cup, and I was woken up by the clanging of metal on cold tile. At her wits’ end with the crying, she summoned the old lady next door for advice. If she hadn’t dropped the cup…

I can still see her face in the dim warm lamplight, the sheer earnestness in her voice, the complete and total reverence for this lesson she was certain God had taught her. She sobbed as she prayed over and over for God to give her child back. You could see, you could really see, how it was never the same for her after.

I guess it was never the same for me, either, but truthfully I’m at peace with all my might-have-beens. I consider myself enormously lucky now, to have the life I've had, the parents I've had. People always protest when I say this, but I know I bear some responsibility too. I was an unnecessarily big complication in a complicated life; if I’d been a gentle, sweet child it would have more meaningful and easy for everyone involved.

It was just hard having any perspective in all those dim, lonely years, where the only happiness and peace I ever found was in solitude, watching leaves drink up the afternoon and whispering stories to lizards sunbathing on the pavement.

These days my parents are tired of fighting about me; they avoid it by staying in different hemispheres. Actually my father was always tired of it, and I suspect that’s why his work always required he live in another city. These days, I guess, he’s also tired of the pretense.

There’s a scene in the shockingly perceptive 90’s coming-of-age cartoon Daria where Daria, eternally difficult, is finally old enough to feel guilty about it. Her parents hasten to clarify that, yes, they fought lot about her, but not because of her. Her maladjustment was a consequence of her unusual brilliance, a tradeoff they were happy to accept, a gift, not a curse, to the family.

I just wish I could convince my parents how happy I am now, how grateful I am for everything.

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A lot of people feel scammed.

They were told you should find something you’re passionate about, and that would make you happy. Don’t be like people who chase money! They end up soulless and depressed and superficial. This often means taking impractical but enjoyable coursework in university and working a job that isn’t actually all that interesting after all and also doesn’t pay well.

A lot of people also feel completely lacking in purpose.

They were told money is important, it gives you freedom. Work hard early and then you get to relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Don’t be like people who chase passion! They’re naive shmucks and also broke.

I’m a software engineer, so most people around me are the second type. They don’t worry about money, sure, but they endlessly seek distractions to fill the void, always chasing the Next Great purchase or experience.

So how do you avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of passion vs materialism?

There is a third option. And no, this essay is not about ikagai.

I know very few people who actually derive a sense of real purpose from their work. They are, without exception, the happiest people I know.

Interestingly enough, you would not call them passionate. Their days are methodical, focused, and emotionally even. What they are is obsessed.

Passionate people give up all the time. They get bored, take breaks, pivot. Passion says, "I love doing this." Obsession says, "I need to get better or there is no point in living.”

This isn’t moral judgment, it’s just the nature of passion. No high can last forever.

Obsession is not inherently virtuous. In fact, it often makes you neglect your relationships and end up insufferable to work with. S once told me that multiple people have accused him of being selfish with his time. He admits this is fair. In the past he’s chosen building cool things over money, health, family, and even love.

Despite all the tradeoffs, he’s a ridiculously contented and happy go lucky person, because obsession simplifies your life in a way that makes peace easy. You have just one question on your mind at all times: how do I get better?

There’s a really beautiful movie called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The world’s most exacting food critics concur: Jirō makes sushi so good you wouldn’t imagine it was possible. When I first heard this, I was skeptical: how good can you get at slapping together rice and fish?

This documentary about Jirō Ono is an intimate portrait of greatness. I found it from an unlikely tweet: a successful trader called it “the best trading manual ever made. all the trading books and guides bullshit. just watch jiro dreams of sushi.”

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Jirō uses the same ingredients and tools as everyone else, but his technique has been honed for seventy years. He continually samples every fish delivery and tells his apprentices how to adjust the preparation for that particular specimen. This tuna is dense because it’s on the younger side; marinate it for so many minutes longer.

At one point he talks about one of his innovations: massaging octopus for a full forty-five minutes — no more, no less — to best bring out its flavor. Imagine how much you have to think about and iterate preparing octopus to know that with perfect confidence!

Now imagine how many similar experiments he carried out that yielded no such revelations. You have to go down thousands of useless rabbit holes for the few epiphanies that set you apart as a true master. If you’re attached to being great as vanity project, you’d get discouraged long before you get there. The process itself has to be what fulfills you.

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One critic laid out what makes a truly great chef:

1. Take your work seriously. Hold yourself to a ridiculous standard.

2. Always strive to improve.

3. Be clean and methodical.

4. Be impatient. A poor collaborator. Stubborn as hell.

5. You need to care enormously about what everything related to your craft

This is the shokunin spirit. The Japanese word shokunin loosely translates to "craftsman," but more than that it’s a way of being: monastic, sacred, and lonely.

Jirō was kicked out at nine. His alcoholic father slurred at him, “Work hard because there is no home for you here anymore.” There was no backup plan or guidance or advice, no “If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back.”

Jirō says when you tell children that, they grow up to be failures. He toiled in restaurants to survive and found a religion in it.

His son, Yoshikazu, prepares sushi alongside him. He has been working at the restaurant his whole life. He is over 50 and still called an apprentice. One day he will inherit the restaurant. For decades he was not permitted to make the omelet.

Jirō dislikes vacations and will only close down his restaurant for national holidays. The filmmakers did manage to capture one of his rare visits to his hometown. He and Yoshikazu paid obeisance to the graves of Jirō’s parents. Jirō said, with an only faintly bitter laugh, “I don’t even know why I come here. They never cared for me.”

He resents his parents for the difficulties of his early life and yet credits those difficulties for the heights he reached. I remember discussing this moment with my friends — that Jirō is probably right, and yet many (most) children who were thrown out like him probably lived paycheck to paycheck their whole lives or even just died in the gutter.

Everything about the documentary points to Jirō being a naturally obsessive person. I think he would have ended up great whether his parents kicked him out or not. Maybe it would have taken a few more years, maybe it would have been soba or calligraphy rather than sushi, but he would have gotten there.

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The thing about needing to work to survive, though, is that it keeps you safe from the trap many luckier young people fall into: jumping from thing to thing because they lose interest.

Also, having the luxury to pick and choose, they often mistakenly chase the wrong thing. Freedom, for example, or happiness. The whole point of obsession is that it makes your life smaller in the best possible way. It quiets the mind. It frees you from many desires. It also doesn’t make you happy, exactly, as least not in the way people imagine. Instead, it turns suffering into its own kind of joy.

Paul Graham describes the difference quite well in his essay “A Project of Your Own.”

You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive.

It’s fulfilling because it is simple but not easy. Your only goal is to pursue the thread that tugs you incessantly and build a life that gives it room to breathe. Most unrelated things, many of which would have once bothered you, fade quietly into the background.

I used to permit (and in permitting, encourage) endless drama and needless worry. This was because there was no opportunity cost to being imposed on by petty concerns or people. Now I have no patience for nonsense simply because nonsense interrupts my work. As a result, my boundaries are much firmer and my life is much more peaceful.

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Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and The Wind Rises is the same. In fact, his need to practice his craft is so compelling that, even after sixty years, he leaves no room for younger talent to try their wings and eventually succeed him. His dedication is both the making and the downfall of Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is, on the surface, an inspirational story of another Jirō: Jirō Horikoshi, designer of the Zero fighter plane used in World War II. The real subject is obsession matching Miyazaki’s own: how it animates, isolates, and blissfully consumes you.

Jirō isn’t patriotic, political, or particularly heroic. He just loves airplanes. He loves them the way artists love beauty: helplessly and selfishly. He pours every ounce of himself into designing the perfect aircraft even knowing his creations, drafted into war, are all doomed.

Miyazaki has said repeatedly that The Wind Rises was his most personal film. To him, his movies are like Jirō’s planes. Beautiful tributes to nature, to nonviolence, to the simple wonder of childhood, to the Japan he grew up in, all things the world has no care for preserving.

Like Jirō, he sacrificed ease, relationships, even his health in pursuit of excellence. He reportedly chain-smoked his way through production, drawing every frame by hand, alienating his team with impossible standards, going back on his promise to step back and retire because he couldn’t stay away. It’s a confession as much as it is a tribute.

Not everyone is obsessive by nature. But I honestly believe obsession can be cultivated.

So how do you find your obsession?

• be determined, not obstinate

• work on it as a project of your own, not just within the confines of school and work

• ideally pick a thing you have at least some curiosity about

• ideally pick a thing you where you have some comparative advantage

• learn to see progress itself as success, not external recognition or monetizable results.

• learn to be consistent and don’t get impatient. No one is obsessed when they’re just starting out. It takes time to develop skill and taste and notice things other don’t see.

• surround yourself with other people who love work for its own sake

You also have to be extremely stubborn, virtually impossible to discourage in fact. The path to massaging the octopus is long and painful and full of false turns. But you have to be stubborn in the right way: relentless about showing up, yes, but also relentlessly eager to discover ways you are wrong or could do things better. A 10% improvement should feel the same whether you’re just starting out or you’re already at the top.

“The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.”

from “Persistence” by Paul Graham

I’m reminded of Hokusai’s lament as he lay dying: “If heaven had only granted me five more years, I may at last have become a great painter.”

This from a man who may have been the greatest masters of ukiyo-e ever. Hokusai worked in ink, where one bad mark could ruin a piece that took months. He learned to move his brush like water, every stroke graceful yet evocative. Greatness, to him, was never really a destination. It was something always just out of reach, an ideal glimpsed but never grasped. The anima of his life was simply the journey towards it, like Reepicheep’s quest for Utter East:

“While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”

C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

That’s the spirit I recognize in both Jirōs, in Miyazaki, in S and in the other friends I admire most. It’s not passion, though it seems like it. It’s not confidence, though it seems like that too. It’s more like a sort of humble relentlessness, a hunger that endlessly refines itself until it’s as keen and subtle as a knife.

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The temple of the spirit is the body, not the mind.

Oh, the human mind can be a beautiful thing, but that’s as rare as grace. The happiest people only use their minds when they have to. As a general rule, the more you live in your head, the unhappier you are.

I know America never figured this out because we don’t have bathhouse culture.

My recent trip to East Asia was a godforsaken carousel of recycled air, fluorescent lightning, cramped seating, and lines. I was nauseous. My tongue was thick and furred. Errant noises made me flinch, and nothing felt real or good.

When I finally oozed into my hotel room in Osaka, I wanted to lie down much more than I wanted a bath, but there’s a specific griminess to long haul flights that feels like it’ll contaminate a bed.

Japan is known for its bathhouses. Famous onsens are radioactively heated, teeming with natural mineral waters, bejeweled with fallen citrus fruit. The hotel’s onsen was just a large, shallow pool on the top floor, softly steaming beside a line of showers. Still, it was transcendental.

Sitting down, the hot water just came up to my chin. The heat seeped into my skin like a blessing, untangling what felt like endless frayed knots in my nerves. My entire attention was on how my toes felt clenching and flexing in the steaming water. In that midnight bath I lost myself for hours in my own body, experimenting with the flexion of every muscle, reacquainting myself with my own breath.

I was not bored. I was not anxious. I was not lonely. I had no desire to look at my phone. I was fully inhabiting myself in a way I hadn’t for weeks.

Afterwards I was unbelievably, unscientifically refreshed and awake, even though I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. I watched the sunrise breakfasting on miso soup, rice, natto, and fermented vegetables followed by a great day exploring Osaka.

the body in culture

Wellness in America often feels like a battle against the body rather than an invitation into it. People treat their bodies like a beast to be conquered: punished with spin classes, regulated with calorie math, carefully dosed with supplements and substances.

There’s a subtle disregard for and alienation from our fundamental bodily perceptions, like our body is just machinery accompanying the all-important brain. We don’t have rituals of quietude or communal restoration. There is no appreciation or intentionality around the art of simply being.

In ancient Japan, bathhouses were often attached to temples. Cleansing the body was inseparable from cleansing the spirit. It is said that villagers watched a wounded egret heal itself by visiting the hot springs of Dōgo and so first discovered the healing powers of the onsen.

In Finland, too, the sauna has spiritual significance. Traditionally it is where babies are born and where the dying are washed one last time. They say even today that sauna is the poor man’s pharmacy: “If tar, spirits, or sauna won’t cure you, the disease is probably fatal.”

In Rome thethermae was for more than public hygiene. The Stoics believed in harmony between body and mind: bathing was part of that moral regimen. To maintain your composure in the forum, you first had to sweat in the caldarium.

We’re used to thinking of happiness as a mindset. But across cultures and centuries, it was understood more like a posture.

This publication is called observing happiness because for the longest time all I wanted was to just be happy and I didn’t know how. No one around me had especially bad lives, but clearly none of them were really happy except in rare, shining moments.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A psychologist might call my natural temperament manic-depressive. My brain chemistry let met get excited and delighted very easily, but the intense highs came with intense lows and (worse) periods of gray nothingness. The rollercoaster was fun, but I had no resilience or ability to self-regulate.

Lasting contentment always felt incomprehensible. I read neuroscience books, philosophy texts, everything eloquent and sensible people had to say about it. I guess you could say it was my special interest.

I unlocked consistent, natural, effervescent happiness through the body, not the mind. The mind is a brilliant tool, but it’s often misused—overworked, under-trained, or treated as the sole site of selfhood.

I’ve realized the mind can impede happiness very well, but it can’t create it. Euphoria? Passion? Obsession? Satisfaction? Yes. But not the kind of happiness I’m talking about: simple and sustainable, a soul-deep wellspring of contentment that makes everything from friendship to work to health easier and sweeter.

It’s even how I got over my social anxiety.

(I go into how to keep your mind from making you miserable in a another essay, called happiness from the inside out).

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I once saw a tweet that said “Stupid people can’t tell the difference between people trying to sound smart and people who are actually smart.”

I’ve noticed that people who find it hard to learn new things and are humble about it do get a fair bit of patience and understanding. What’s really annoying is when someone is confidently, stubbornly stupid.

I know more than one high IQ person who is habitually stupid in this way. They’re good at learning new things (that is effectively what fluid intelligence is) but they’re very bad at knowing when they’ve learned a new thing. They’ll speak about a topic with an enormous authority that impresses laypeople while putting off any real experts that are listening in.

Stupidity is a shortcoming that rarely gets any sympathy. In today’s world, intelligence is the foremost currency of human worth. You can find people encouraging positivity around every variety of bad luck, from physical beauty to mental health, but society seems content to denigrate stupidity as inherently, irredeemably shitty.

The thing is, no one is excluded from Dunning Kruger syndrome. It’s very easy to feel like you understand something, and it takes a LOT of effort to avoid referencing concepts or jargon incorrectly.

David Dunning himself puts it bluntly:

“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent… The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

So then how do you avoid being the idiot in the room?

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I got put in Kumon because I was lousy at math.

I could never seem to stop making silly mistakes. I have a very vivid memory of looking at a test where I’d copied 32 as 23, saying over and over to my dad, "It was 23 when I took it, I swear it was!"

He'd say "You didn’t check it twice, Divya. Always check it twice." And I’d say I did, it was 23 the second time too!

Anyway, they put me in Kumon, just for math. I did the placement test thinking this is pretty easy! When I got it back, I remember asking, "Do the red ticks mean correct, by any chance?" because there was more red than not. I still remember the kindly look on the old Japanese man's face as he shook his head no.

(This was, in fact, how I talked when I was six. I read too many books and didn't have enough friends).

Anyway, I was in Kumon for about two years. I hated going as much as they probably hated seeing me. I used to stick my hands in my pockets and whistle defiantly in line. The pretty grownup daughter of the old couple who ran it used to tell me off, saying, "Whistling isn't ladylike."

Which made me do it even more, because I hated girliness as much as I hated boys, two ironclad stances that somehow did not strike me as contradictory.

I'm not dyslexic, by the way, but my mother is. I had this issue only with numbers. It went away with time.

They gave us worksheets to take home. My mother was supposed to make sure I did them, but she was just as scatterbrained as I was.

We had an after-school program called Extended Care, for kids whose parents couldn't get them till six. A snack, a second recess, and then homework time for two hours. We weren't allowed to talk or do anything else during homework time, even if we were done with our assignments. They didn't want kids pretending they were finished so they could goof off.

Well, I'd spend that time finishing three days' worth of Kumon worksheets. At least I did in the beginning. It turned out the other girls were so bored that they jumped at the chance to occupy themselves, even with brain-dead addition.

With this outsourcing I eventually avoided doing Kumon take-homes altogether It was fun game, all of them trying to write in the same penmanship.

Looking back I can't believe Extended Care was only for three hours. It felt like an absolute eternity.

These days three hours — even three weeks! — pass by in no time at all.

It's the damn phones, I'm telling you.

Anyway, I decided I hated math. Really hated it. It was part of my identity, as much as hating girly things and hating boys.

My dad bought me really stupid books with titles like Ted Hates Math! and really clever books that brought out the beauty of math through stories, like The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat.

I saw through it, of course, and read the books with intense interest while pointedly ignoring the helpful exercises at the end of each chapter.

This was when I lived with him for a year, when I was ten. He would come home every night from work ready to spend Quality Time with me, only to find out I’d loafed off the whole day climbing trees and he had make me stay up late doing math.

Poor man, what else could he do? It only made me hate math more, though I had fun drawing unflattering cartoons of him in the margins of all my notebooks.

I went back to my mom after a really bad incident at the San Diego Zoo — rather, in the parking lot of the San Diego Zoo.

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I was sixteen and in a screaming match with my mother when I finally figured out how to be happy.

When anger is intense it feels like more than an emotion. It feels like a screw being tightened, tangible pressure building up in your head, an explosion as inevitable as the laws of physics.

I was on the verge of shouting my throat raw when I remembered a slim green novel I’d picked up randomly a few weeks before.

That book was Passage Meditation. I talk about it lot, because it was my first introduction to the idea that I could choose how I felt about my life.

It turned out I could make that fury grow or shrink like a balloon by leaning into or away from it. I then did something I’d never thought was possible: I exhaled, paused for a moment with a smile on my face, and shut the door calmly.

I still remember glimpsing my mother’s confused expression as the lock clicked. I was so delighted that I actually skipped away.

I used to think certain reactions were inevitable. Rejection had to make me sad, insults had to make me angry, praise had to make me happy. This was my first experience with the tiny, almost invisible space between perception and reaction, where, if I really wanted to, I could wedge in my toe (metaphorically speaking) and send things down a different path.

I learned to take a step back from my own mind, seeing it—not as me—but as a tricky and powerful thing I could master with enough determination. For the first time ever, I started feeling rather playful about the experience of existing.

This small but vital gap between you and your mental experience is what I refer to as detachment. Detachment allows you to take a step back from whatever you are experiencing and decide what you want to do with it — lean in or lean away.

I think a lot of people associate detachment with learning not to care and no longer trying. But it’s the exact opposite. Whatever you want to do and whoever you want to be, detachment helps you. For me it restored actually restored my lost sense of hope and agency.

I didn’t have a good time growing up, and the last few years living at home were particularly rough. I withdrew into myself like a nautilus, stopped trying at school, started self-sabotaging out of sheer boredom. Existence was a thing to passively endure until my circumstances changed.

That hopelessness I felt was the product of me engaging too much with unproductive ideas and feelings and bad experiences I’d had. Yes, there were many limitations in my world, but I saw them, got discouraged, and proceeded to put myself in an even smaller box.

You create the world you live in. Through action, yes, but even more profoundly through attention. Action’s power is limited; the power of attention is endless.

Learning to intentionally harness my attention was how I narrowly escaped wasting my entire life being depressed, useless, and self centered.

“A mind that is constantly reacting is a mind that is controlled by the world. A mind that observes without clinging is a mind that is free.

The difference between suffering and peace is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but the ability to remain aware without identifying with fleeting emotions.”

— Passage Meditation

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the world is a mirror of your belief

The human brain is great at finding patterns. You learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere. You start thinking about a specific car and begin spotting it all over the road.

This is called the frequency illusion—you didn’t summon more of that thing into existence, you just started noticing it. Attention is deeply generative.

In the famous Dartmouth Scar Experiment, researchers created scars on subjects’ faces using makeup and handed them a mirror so they could see the disfigurement. They were then told to report back any differences in how they were treated.

The subjects were full of stories about being discriminated against: people staring, refusing to engage, acting with disdain.

Here’s the thing: under the pretense of touching up the makeup, the researchers had removed the scar without telling them. The scar had never existed.

They were nervous about being judged, so they were—or thought they were, which amounts to the same thing. Their own expectations shaped every interaction.

This phenomena is called predictive processing and has been demonstrated in many other social experiments. Andy Clark gives many examples in his book The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Insecurity and other beliefs work like self-fulfilling prophecies. If you look for rejection, you will see it everywhere. If you assume you’re always welcome, the world offers you signs that confirm it. Through the power of attention you make your beliefs true.

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reality is a choice

Objective reality is somewhat of a myth. Even if it exists, we don’t have access to it. All we have access to is our perceptions of it.

Your whole life is nothing more than a current of experience, an endless stream input from your mind and senses, not to mention your thoughts, feelings, and memories. It’s a strange combination of what is actually there and what you expect to be there.

Experience is almost infinite, but attention is limited. It’s like a spotlight illuminating only part of a stage. It’s why you can be so absorbed in memories of the past that you bump into something right in front of your eyes.

Both good experiences and bad experiences are inevitable in a lifetime, but you can choose which ones you actually fill your life with. You can take control of that spotlight and train it where it does the most good. I talked about this in the context of getting rich in another essay, “how to become exceptional.”

Very few people do this. Every negative experience they have adds on bitterness, resentment, and trauma, leaving them weighed down by more and more baggage as the years pass.

Your lover glances at an attractive stranger and knot tightens in your stomach, reminding you of being cheated on years ago. You have to speak in front of a crowd and it’s like you’re fifteen again, getting bullied for the stutter you don’t even have anymore. Someone criticizes your work and your fragile confidence vanishes the way it did every time your hypercritical mother picked something about you apart.

The impolite truth is this: you don’t have to be traumatized by the bad things that happen to you1 The trauma comes not from the painful experience itself, but from the fixation on the painful experience. You are tortured quite literally by your own mind.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl2

The power of attention allows two people to live through the same event and walk away with completely different experiences of it. It’s why some people survive enormous trauma and remain resilient while others are scarred for life.

It’s not luck; it’s skill, and you can learn it. As Visakan Veerasamy says over and over: Focus on what you want to see more of. So how do you train your attention to go where you want it to go?

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why I meditate

One of the common goals underlying every meditation technique is becoming more aware of the separation between experience and awareness.

Imagine sitting in a theater, watching the most immersive movie of all time — so immersive, actually, that you forget you’re watching. You shiver at the scary parts, weep at the sad, rejoice at the happy. “You” are simply a consciousness, pure awareness, a soul experiencing a human lifetime.

Remembering this keeps you from getting overwhelmed. There is nothing inherently positive or negative or shameful about an experience. It simply is. You have the choice to interpret that experience however you want. This is the first reason why meditation is so powerful.

The second is that meditation trains your attention to become “single-pointed” and therefore powerful. Most people’s attention is completely untrained, jumping from one thing to another like a grasshopper.

Instead of thinking about the meal you’re cooking or the homework you’re finishing, your mind keeps jumping to a coworker’s snide remarks, the errands you have to run, the five pounds you’ve gained, and god knows what else.

You are neither fully in the present nor anywhere else; rather than fully experiencing each moment of the limited time you have, you hover in inconsistent mental limbo. Everything you do takes longer, is accomplished less efficiently, and satisfies you less.

You can unlock tremendous focus, discipline, and happiness by learning to intentionally keep your attention in the right place. Instead of getting carried away in the film, you become the director who decides what stays in the final cut.

The mind well trained in meditation responds to a light, almost effortless touch. If the memory of a hostile act done to us by our partner tries to force its way in, we can eject it by turning our full attention to the many loving acts our partner has done in the past.

Here we are refusing to be pulled about relentlessly by our thoughts – we are thinking them in full freedom.

— Passage Meditation

If you want to study instead of scroll, your mind obediently studies.

If you want to stop ruminating on how you’re the least successful person in the room and interact with light heart, your mind puts those insecurities aside.

If you want to eat an apple instead of a bag of chips, your mind simply turns away from the snack cupboard.

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Meditation helps me practice the art of focus. As soon as I wake up, I sit for half and hour and repeat a certain passage in my mind over and over. My mind races to dwell on my anxieties, my to-dos for the day, random things I found interesting, anything and everything.

It’s like getting an excitable puppy to sit still and stop running around. Getting frustrated only takes you further from the goal. I gently and patiently bring it back to the words of the passage over and over.

If my mind remains still for long enough, I can feel myself sinking deeper into my own consciousness, getting a sense of the profound and eternal peace that lies underneath all my surface-level thoughts and reactions.

After many years of (honestly inconsistent) practice, I can still only go a few minutes without getting yanked back to the surface. Some days I can’t even do that.

But for the rest of the day, I’m calmer, happier, more present, and more disciplined. My many quick-shifting moods and impulses don’t have quite as much control over me.

I feel things, yes, good and bad, but I don’t get swept away in my feelings. I can choose not to act on them or get carried away by them. Instead of fixating on what makes me unhappy or worried, I can move the spotlight to what makes me feel optimistic, cheerful, and at peace.

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detachment vs. repression

Most people assume that pushing an emotion down makes it go away. It doesn’t. It actually makes it stronger.

Taking control of your mind doesn’t mean forcing yourself to “think positive.” It doesn’t mean pretending you don’t feel what you feel. That’s not control—that’s repression, and it will eat you alive.

Repression is resistance. It’s when you feel something negative—anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, grief—and you decide No. I shouldn’t feel this. I shouldn’t be sad. This is dumb. I shouldn’t be angry. I should be better than this. I shouldn’t care this much. I shouldn’t want this this much.

So you push it down, you try to ignore it, you pretend it doesn’t exist. But the more you fight, the harder it pushes back.

Detachment is observation. It’s when you feel something and think okay. That’s interesting. I feel this right now. You watch the thought or emotion float by on the river of experience while you stand on the shore. You don’t owe it anything: any action, any justification, any battle.

The difference between repression and detachment is shame. Emotions feed on attention, and shame is an extremely obsessive form of attention.

“What you resist persists. What you accept transforms.”

—Passage Meditation, Eknath Easwaran

When you feel ashamed of something, you’re fixating on it, bracing yourself against it, constantly on the lookout for it. Ironically, this locks you into an endless war with the experience you started out wanting to get away from.

Carl Jung popularized the concept of “the shadow self” — the desires and thoughts you have that are deeply shameful and taboo. A lot of his approach to wellbeing is centered around confronting, understanding, accepting your shadow self. In doing so, those hidden desires and fears lose their power over you.

This is the same as what I’m talking about—the neutral observation of all mental experiences without shame.

Many times throughout my life I’ve become aware that I was, well, shitty. I was making my life and the lives of those around me worse. I was actively creating problems, and if I wanted things to get better, I’d have to change.

The idea being deeply flawed fills many people with distress, but to me it was completely matter of fact.

I was merely observing relationships between my thoughts, my emotions, my actions, and the world around me. All of these things were just experiences, no more a stain on my “true self” than Divya, twenty-four year old software developer, would be guilty of a murder she just read about on the news.

This way of approaching my identity helped my personality become fluid, adaptable, and resilient in the best way. Like any other experience, my thoughts and feelings can be crafted intentionally through the power of attention, and so can yours.

In the end, your experience is not the simple sum of what happens to you. The worst day you’ve had can expand to fill up your whole life if you think about it all the time. In learning to control of your attention, you control what your life becomes.

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light reading

• Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran - a clear and gentle introduction using the techniques described in this essay. I picked it randomly off a bookshelf and it changed my life.

• The Dhammapada is a collection of simple verses about enlightened thinking that I come back to again and again

• Duet by Glen Keane, one of the most beautiful animations I’ve come across

• Thought of You by Ryan Woodward, a haunting illustration of love and limerence

You have something you’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Get in shape. Learn that new skill. Find a job that pays better, that excites you. Start that business or blog or newsletter.

Some of you have been talking about your big plans for so long that the words feel stale even in your own mouth. The people around you smile and nod, but deep down they’ve already written you off. It’s never going to happen.

We’ve all, I think, been there.

I spent years with an ever-growing list of pending accomplishments, the task of finishing them all growing more daunting by the day. I’d start working on one and then leave it off and tackle another.

In the past year and half, however, I started knocking them down one after another, from coding projects to changing jobs to building a profitable side hustle to starting content creation. The unlock came observing how differently I approached my goals from the most effective people my age that I knew.

Here’s the advice I wish I could give myself 5 years ago:

define the MVP

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