But when my grandparents or parents tell me stories of Kashmir, they used to tell me that everyone lived peacefully - until everything changed overnight.

So how did the neighbours who were friends and family, who loved each other, turn into people who couldn’t protect each other, and become the reason they had to flee?

All my life, I have tried to run the scenario through multiple universes, but what I still couldn’t figure out was what went on behind the scenes.

Because clearly, the people loved each other.

There must be someone pulling the triggers, or rather, pulling the threads on these puppets.

Now, Kashmir is my niche research. It was too fucked up - a lot of terrorism and politics research. If you are interested, you can read Jagmohan’s book or watch Kashmir Files.

But here I will be presenting more of the global examples that will open your eyes.

one

Make it make sense.

Google laid off 12,000 people while making $70+ billion in profit.

Pharmaceutical companies price drugs so high that people die from rationing.

Oil companies keep drilling despite knowing about climate change because their largest shareholders hold them to production targets and profit expectations.

Shell tried to mildly pivot toward green energy, their stock underperformed, and activist shareholders pushed them to go back to oil.

two

Nobody intends it, yet the system produces it.

In 2019, Boeing’s 737 MAX crashed twice. 346 people died.

The investigation found that Boeing had rushed the plane through certification, cut corners on safety systems, and pressured engineers to move faster.

Because Boeing had spent the previous decade doing stock buybacks instead of investing in engineering.

Between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent about $43 billion buying back its own stock. Money that could have gone into better engineering, better safety testing, and more redundancy.

Instead, it went into boosting the share price.

Of course, nobody wanted the plane to crash and people to die. What a monster that person would have to be. But they were blind in their pursuit of making the shareholders happy.

The deaths were just the result of the structure.

three

Seems insane from the outside.

BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street manage north of $20 trillion. They are the top shareholders in almost every major corporation on earth - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, JPMorgan, Exxon, Pfizer.

No, they don’t run the world, but no major corporate decision happens without their incentive structures shaping it.

Because when you own a good stake in a company while everyone else’s ownership is small and scattered, you have influence. Even though it’s not your company.

He ought to.

Everything else comes secondary - employees, the environment, green and sustainable measures.

What’s funny is the fact that they are managing your money. They take your retirement savings, pension funds, 401(k)s in America, mutual funds in India - and invest it.

And use your own money to create incentive structures that work against your interests as a worker, a consumer, and a citizen.

You are funding your own exploitation, and the fund manager is taking a fee for it.

four

Danone is the one that should genuinely scare you.

Their CEO, Emmanuel Faber, was trying to make the company more sustainable. He pushed for B Corp certification, environmental targets, and social impact metrics alongside financial ones.

And in 2021, activist shareholders - led by Bluebell Capital and Artisan Partners - fired him.

They said he was too focused on social goals and not enough on shareholder returns.

Shame on him, right?

five

Same happens in politics as well.

Political power has, like, three layers.

The face - politician. People think this is where power lives. But they’re incredibly constrained by the layers below them.

Permanent establishment. Politicians come and go every 4-5 years. But bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs, military leadership, central bankers - these people stay for decades. In America, they call it the “deep state.” The term’s been hijacked by conspiracy, but the structure is real - unelected officials who outlast every administration.

Donor and influence class. Every politician needs money to win elections. But politicians won’t reform campaign finance because campaign finance is how they won.

The media won’t expose media capture because they’re the ones who are captured.

And the common man? The common man is busy paying his EMI to again fund this whole fiesta.

I was only interested in Kashmir but ended up understanding something bigger.

And the pattern is the same. In Kashmir, the people loved each other. Someone above them needed them not to. Needed neighbours to become enemies. Not because of hate. Because someone had something to gain from the fear.

Once you start getting deep into the systems- about your job, your feed, your food, your EMI, your insurance - you can’t go back.

p.s. - I recently completed How to Rule the World by Theo Bake. I really like it for how it unravels the dark side of big institutions. Good starting point if this stuff pulls you in.

p.s.s. - next up, I want to go deeper into fear and greed from primal behaviour. What should I research and write more on?????

i don’t think anyone can stop you from doing what you want. you are free when you believe you are.

there’s a whole mechanism running inside your brain that’s keeping you stuck and once you see how it works, you can’t unsee it.

it started with a conversation with OOMF. cracked but CLEARLY UNHAPPY at his job telling me how he has no choice but stay another year before he can get any stocks.

so I looked into neuroscience and psychology on why people, especially smart people, stay in things that rot them from inside.

a few weeks of studying biases changed something good in me.

once you see how the whole thing is assembled, you can’t go back to feeling stuck.

this is not going to be a motivational self help guide with affirmations but studying the mechanism going inside your head and seeing the machinery that actually forms this shit.

let’s get into it.

you can’t leave that company.

YOU CAN but you won’t cuz the ESOPs aren’t vested yet.

so you wait.

one year. two years. three years.

ah f*ck it.

four years so you can vest 100% of the ESOP.

but then in four years you’re just one promotion away from being VP.

if you leave right now, getting a massive HIKE and the TITLE won’t be possible.

you will have to get your way up to the top again in a new company. new set of people you don’t know anything about. how to get along with them or - to be honest - how to get your way with them.

so you wait and wait and wait.

(rot and rot and rot).

for something that was uncertain since inception.

if you left the job four years ago, you could have started the business you always wanted or travelled to the country you always wished for.

the thing that nobody tells you about these golden handcuffs is that they are not made of gold but biases.

it’s like apps you never installed, running in the background, draining the battery of your decision-making without you even knowing they’re open.

i went digging and found four.

One

in 1976, psychologist Barry Staw at UC Berkeley found that when we make a bad choice, we spend more money to try and prove we were actually right. [1]

the reason he found wasn’t optimism but to justify oneself and prove your original decision was correct.

he also found that the more public the commitment, the harder it is to let go.

Two

in 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved that losing hurts twice as much as winning feels good. [2]

so when you think about leaving those unvested ESOPs on the table, your brain treats it as a real loss. it feels the same as if someone were taking money out of your bank account.

though it’s money you never had yet your brain still cannot tell the difference.

and it gets worse.

Three

if you leave tomorrow, the company will replace you within a month.

but you can’t process it because of what psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson call impact bias [3] which means you overestimate how much future events will affect you.

which means you and the company will both be fine after you leave.

life goes on.

regardless.

Four

The last bias is about identity, about who you think you are.

in 1966, a developmental psychologist named James Marcia studied how people actually handle the question of “who am I?”

he found four distinct patterns and called them identity statuses based on two variables: exploration and commitment.

the one that matters here is identity foreclosure.

which is the result of no exploration but high commitment i.e. when you commit to an identity - a career or life without ever going through the uncomfortable phase of self exploration.

paradoxically, foreclosed people often look MORE stable and put together than people who are actively questioning like they are the winners but they didn’t figure it out. they inherited it.

you join a company at 24. you’re good at it. you get promoted. you build a reputation.

soon it goes from being a job (something you DO) to becoming an identity (something you ARE).

Smeagol didn’t become Gollum the day he found the ring. he became Gollum the day he couldn’t imagine himself without it.

once your job becomes who you are, leaving doesn’t feel like changing companies.

it feels like cutting away a part of yourself.

that’s why it’s always hard.

tl;dr:

• self-justification keeps you from admitting the decision was wrong.

• loss aversion makes the cost of leaving feel twice as heavy as it actually is.

• impact bias makes you overestimate both the pain of leaving and how much they need you.

• identity foreclosure makes leaving feel like losing yourself, not just losing a job.

the golden handcuffs

nobody stopped you. not your manager. not the ESOP agreement. not the org chart.

you stopped yourself.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that even the most trivial action should be undertaken in reference to the end.

the end.

the question was never “can i afford to leave?”

the question was always “can i afford the person i’m becoming by staying?”

the golden cage was never locked.

you just never tried the door.

until next week,

don’t forget to eat your protein.

Drishti.

100 MILLION!

there i had a flashback. cuz earlier that month, i had shit ton level of anxiety over what had hijacked my feed that data centers will pollute all water and companies are suing a farmer for seeds and producing seedless fruits and veggies so we won’t be getting food even.

and at the intersection of both, my feed had already made a verdict for me that i, who don’t own land, who don’t have a water purifier that costs three lakhs, who don’t have a seed vault in my basement - i’ll live at the mercy of whoever controls the supply.

only god and my best friend knows how much i have panicked in those 2 months. every single reel, every single article would make me fear the future.

coming back to the present, i felt really so relieved that this was all a propaganda after all.

but no its not another reflection on social media is bad blah blah.

actually i went back home to get myself deep in the rabbit hole of how i really have been believing all this propaganda.

the plan was simple: read two or three case studies on how marketers bend reality to sell you things, feel clever, close the laptop. two weeks later i was still reading - and i’d somehow ended up in the year 1864.

when one of the earliest advertising agency, carlton & smith started selling space in religious journals.

even advertising started with faith.

sponsored by god?!

i could go all the way back but that’s a rabbit hole for another day. today i only wanna talk about how the internet is built to deceive all of us.

everything online is an (undisclosed) ad

so, we are gonna travel back to 1979.

when kahneman and tversky’s work on cognitive biases at princeton proved that humans don’t make rational decisions. we use mental shortcuts.

then richard thaler, on this learning, built nudge theory - the idea that you can design the choice environment to push people toward specific behaviors without them realizing.

then came 1998.bj fogg founded the stanford persuasive technology lab to research how software - can be designed to change what people believe and what they do. he coined the term “captology” - computers as persuasive technologies. he taught people who now work at facebook and google how to modify behavior without friction

in his book, he distinguishes between “macrosuasion” (the product’s overall persuasive intent) and “microsuasion” (small embedded design choices that nudge behavior).

every infinite scroll, every notification ping, every “x people are viewing this” label traces back to this research program.

it was uniting two fields of social science: marketing and public policy, where the former was applied to the latter.

In short, fogg gave tech companies how to design products that change what you believe and do. kahneman proved why it works and thaler showed how to execute it.

the people who control your feed studied all three.

and, this is what happens when they deploy the full stack.

there are a million ways marketing works today. billboards, ads or even the notifications (product led growth).

but the one most people outside marketing have never heard of is virality engineering.

marketing people aren’t just selling anymore. they’re engineering what you see, when you see it, and how many times.

here’s how the product you bought because “everyone was using it” was designed to feel exactly like that.

the art of faux organicity

brand drops a high production video and simultaneously 20-30 creators talk about it, engage with it and even make content about it.

the algorithm pushes the content with rapid engagement in the first hour of posting it, thus wider audience is unlocked.

even the comments are scripted. creators have an SOP for what to comment.

in the coming days, 5-10 daily posts from creators will be made.

the goal is to keep the “everyone’s using this” perception alive until it becomes genuinely true.

eventually the real users start posting organically out of sheer FOMO because of the ‘manufactured social proof.’

why we fall for it

gen z grew in an environment where crowd is the authority. an ecosystem built to capitalize on psychological weaknesses - flow state, fomo, and parasocial intimacy - that bypasses rational, deliberative thought.

identity is heavily constructed through consumption. when they see their peers or influencers do something, they experience a psychological need to keep up.

thus when a viral launch manufactures a trend, it’s not just selling a product.

it’s selling belonging.

the consequences

gen z has more “choices” than any generation in history but less actual agency. you aren’t free anymore. not of others thought but by your own which was planted subconsciously in you by others.

your identity is built on consumption signals, you never stop consuming. every micro-trend cycle is a threat to your sense of self.

and how do i know this all so well.

i am a marketer, really a good one actually. but i wish to have a more meaningful community like the one i am building here.

everything i write here i spend weeks researching, reading research papers, cross checking references.

because i am not doing this just for others.

but me.

myself and my future of which you all are a part of too.

yours truly (blatantly),
Drishti

You woke up, brush your teeth but oh your mint toothpaste is over.

you open Zepto but choose not the last one but another half its price, looks exactly the same.

just 6 minutes later, the delivery guy knocks on your door.

Next you order the ₹99 combo from Bistro for breakfast. when it arrives, it is wrapped in layers of plastic boxes, plastic wrap, and a big brown bag.

in the afternoon, you were scrolling when you got the ad for a new cotton shirt only ₹199. you click “buy” in less than a minute (win who wrote the CTA).

by dinner time, you completely forget about it.

the kurta arrives two days later. you wear it once, but it feels cheap. so you throw it away.

it will travel across the ocean, the same ocean now carrying microplastics from your cheaper toothpaste, to a giant pile of burning trash in Ghana.

yk the math never really made sense.

a ₹49 shirt cannot really be that cheap. 50% saved on that toothpaste is not really going in your savings.

It’s actually very costly.

And the price is what you’re paying with YOUR BODY. YOUR BREATH. YOUR FUTURE.

YOU JUST HAVEN’T SEEN THE BILL YET.

THE FORWARDED BILL

economists have a word for this.

they call it an externality. it is the cost of a transaction that doesn’t show up on the receipt.

you pay ₹99. you think that’s the price. it’s not.

the rest of the bill - the part you didn’t see - gets forwarded.

and mind you, it doesn’t get forwarded to some abstract “environment.” it doesn’t get forwarded to a coral reef you’ll never visit or a glacier you’ll never see.

it gets forwarded to you.

your body. your lungs. your gut. your skin. your kids. your retirement hospital bills. your city’s air. your water table. your next 40 years.

the whole engine of cheap-and-fast runs on one illusion: the cost is somewhere else.

someone else’s problem.

it was always your problem.

you just couldn’t see the invoice yet.

INTERMISSION

i was in Pondicherry last week with friends. we took a motorboat into the mangroves. and it was beautiful.

for about 30 seconds.

first the smell hit. rot and chemicals. then you looked down and the water had this film on it - grey foam. and caught between the roots: Sprite bottles, plastic bags, a styrofoam plate, a diaper. a forest full of trees and trash in equal measure.

WE WERE IN A FOREST. IN THE MIDDLE OF WATER. surrounded by beautiful tall trees. and there was garbage just... sitting there.

between them.

like it belonged.

it wasn’t the plastic that broke me and made me think. it was the contrast. the fact that something this beautiful exists - and we put garbage in it anyway. we looked at this and decided it wasn’t worth protecting.

And it’s not any different than how we treat our own bodies.

we are filling our own bodies with ₹99 meals full of palm oil, food that isn’t even food.

we failed to protect our own body, let alone forests.

THE SCIENCE (STAY WITH ME)

the answer is in your brain.

there’s a cognitive bias that behavioral economists call hyperbolic discounting.

humans overvalue what’s immediate and undervalue what’s delayed. ₹50 saved today feels more real than a hospital bill in 2040.

the six-minute delivery high is neurologically louder than a landfill you’ll never see.

your brain doesn’t discount the future linearly - it discounts it hyperbolically. meaning the further away the consequence, the less it registers.

this is why you’ll choose the ₹99 meal over the ₹250 one even when you know the ₹99 one is industrial garbage. the savings are NOW. the cancer risk is in 20 years.

And it gets worse. your brain doesn’t just want cheap. it wants cheap AND fast.

Zepto didn’t invent impatience.

it weaponized the impatience that was already there. 10-minute delivery isn’t a logistics innovation.

it’s a patience destruction project. and once the baseline is set.

once your brain expects 10 minutes, waiting 2 days feels like deprivation. waiting a week feels like punishment.

WHAT CHEAP AND FAST ACTUALLY COSTS

here’s where it gets uncomfortable. i’m going to walk through five systems that cheap-and-fast broke.

food:

55% of calories consumed in the US come from ultra-processed food. in India we don’t even have good data yet. But seed oils replaced ghee. refined sugar replaced jaggery. factory farms replaced pastures.

the whole supply chain was redesigned for one variable: COST.

But unfortunately, the cost landed directly inside your body.

fashion:

Shein adds up to 10,000 new styles per day. a new design goes from concept to finished garment in 3-7 days.

₹199 kurtas. ₹79 dresses. ₹49 tops.

your Meesho cart is practically free.

But the thing is ₹199 kurta is polyester. every time you wash it, it sheds thousands of microplastic fibers.

those fibers go into the water. the water goes into the treatment plant. the treatment plant can’t filter them. they end up in the river. the river feeds the groundwater. the groundwater fills your Bisleri.

researchers have found microplastics in human blood. in breast milk. in placentas. in lungs. in brain tissue.

So the ₹199 kurta didn’t just end up in a landfill. it ended up inside you. inside your blood. possibly inside your future child.

AND YOU BOUGHT SEVEN OF THEM BECAUSE THERE WAS A GODDAM SALE!

soil:

industrial monoculture farming - the kind that produces your cheap atta, cheap rice, cheap everything - has stripped the earth. generating 3 centimeters of topsoil takes 1,000 years. we’re burning through it in decades.

Not only that, the nutrients you’d get from one orange in the 1920s. you’d need 8 oranges today to match it.

the soil is so depleted that the food growing in it is nutritionally hollow.

you’re eating more than any generation in history. and you might be the most malnourished generation that ever had a full plate.

attention:

content got cheaper to produce. algorithms optimized for speed of consumption. the average person now consumes more information before breakfast than someone in the 15th century consumed in a lifetime. And you paid with your ability to sit with a single thought for more than 45 seconds.

cheap and fast didn’t just pollute the earth.

it polluted the mind.

housing:

buildings used to last 300 years. a Rajasthani haveli from the 18th century is still standing. a Puducherry French-quarter house from the 1800s still has its plaster.

Today entire housing complexes are crumbling within 15 years.

the model is: build cheap, sell aspirational, let the buyer deal with the cracks.

we’re not building cities.

we’re building disposable shelters with EMI plans.

THE PATTERN

every single one of these is the same move:

make it cheaper.

make it faster.

hide the cost inside a delay.

by the time the bill arrives, you’ve forgotten what caused it. your gut pays. your lungs pay. your attention span pays. your hormones pay. your energy at 35 pays. your kid’s immune system pays.

this just might be the most successful fraud in human history. not because someone lied to you. because the truth was on a 15-year delay. and your brain - the one with the hyperbolic discounting - was never built to see a bill that arrives 15 years late.

BUT HERE’S THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART

it’s easy to read this and go yeah, capitalism is broken, corporations are evil, i’m a victim.

and look - the system IS rigged. the incentives ARE misaligned. the companies that sell you ₹49 t-shirts ARE hiding the real cost inside your future.

but. But….

the system doesn’t force-feed you.

it offers.

and you accept.

every single day. every Zepto order is a choice. every Shein haul is a choice. every ₹99 meal deal is a choice. you are choosing, every single day, to forward the bill to your own body. your own future. your own kids. and before you say “but I can’t afford the better option” - fair.

poverty is real. access is unequal. i’m not going to preach organic dal to someone earning ₹15,000 a month.

but most people reading this can afford to buy 3 things instead of 7. to cook twice a week instead of ordering. to keep a phone for 4 years instead of 2. to eat one real meal instead of three industrial ones.

the problem isn’t that you can’t afford quality.

it’s that cheap has become a reflex. and reflexes don’t think. they just fire.

the Shein founder’s family is not wearing ₹199 polyester. the Zepto founders are not eating ₹99 meal deals every night. the people who built the cheap-and-fast machine know exactly what it costs YOUR body. they’ve opted out of the cost. the whole system runs on the assumption that you won’t.

THE BOTTOM LINE

cheap and fast wasn’t a consumer revolution.

it was a bill you wrote to your future self.

you can’t see the bill yet.

but your body is already reading it.

It’s really time that you start reading it too.

P.S. It was actually the quality of ‘food’ and ‘life’ that made me realize all this.

until next week,

Drishti ‘the forwarded bill’ Pandita

These were not things one thought to be grateful for until they were gone.

In the new city - the one she had wanted since she was fifteen - she postponed everything. The haircut would wait for Diwali. The eyebrows for her cousin’s wedding. She came home at ten, relieved the cook hadn’t made tinde, no longer making the tamatar ki chutney without which, once, she could not eat.

Months went by.

Then she got the haircut. The new didi didn’t know about the step cut, so she learned to explain it. She found a chaat corner. The bhaiya there didn’t know about the hari chutney, so she learned to ask.

She found someone for the eyebrows. The first time the arc was wrong. The second time it was closer. By the third time, this one knew too.

She had not chosen it on any particular day. That was the thing about it. There was no morning she woke up and decided to belong. It happened the way hair grows, the way hunger returns - quietly, without permission, while she was busy learning how to live again.

starting over,

Drishti

I ordered black coffee for myself and a Java Chip Frappuccino with choco chips and caramel for her, along with a chicken sandwich. Not gonna lie, I was tempted by what she ordered, but you see, I had already exhausted my calories for the day and the only thing I was going to have next was a protein shake for dinner. She didn’t care about the macros—didn’t even know what calories meant, except when she told me that calories are actually kilocalories, we just say “calories” because it’s easier. Such a nerd she was.

She opened up and felt at ease as she started talking about the silly little things she had been learning. She told me she liked studying about extremophiles, was watching this lecture series on astrobiology or something from the University of Edinburgh, and really wanted to study science in depth. Like, surrender herself to research and understanding humans and every creature.

Probably because, as a human, she always felt like an outlier. Like no one could ever understand her. This was the only time I felt similar to her. While I think I’m more social than her, I couldn’t help but remember how I still feel alone in crowds, how I still zone out when I’m with people who are too cool for me.

She was really, really anxious about her future, believing that she was the one controlling her reality, and said she had to do it all by herself and that no, God is not real. While I could understand where she was coming from, I didn’t want to push her to the Bhakti Marg anyway — Guru ki bhakti bhi Guru ki kripa se milti hai.

Then she asked me what I was doing. I said I’m just chilling, reading books, having fun. She gasped—the idea of someone older than her saying such things felt like immaturity to her. She thought being older meant having it all figured out and knowing everything.

I laughed and said I used to feel the same, but that’s not how it is. She didn’t like that and got quiet again. I don’t know whether she thought I’m not a good elder for her and lost respect for me, or if she got offended.

But from what I know about her, it’s both.

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Until next week,

Heal your inner child

Drishti

there’s a version of me that lives in my head.

she wakes up unhurried. makes her favourite blue tokai pour over coffee. reads something before picking up the phone. walks to work and actually looks at things. eats lunch without playing tmkoc in the background.

she exists somewhere between 6am and the first notification.

i meet her sometimes. in the shower. in the auto when my phone dies. in that half-awake moment before i remember i have to check something.

and then i reach for my phone and she’s gone.

this newsletter is for people building something real in a world that never stops moving. i write about the decisions, the mental models, and the small acts that let you grow fast without losing yourself. build everything.

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i work in growth. always-on is the job description.

but something happened in the last year where the always-on stopped being a mode i enter and became the only way i know.

i notice it in small ways.

i open Instagram, spend eight minutes there, close it, open it again before i’ve put it down. i check metrics between thoughts - not because anything changed, but because my hands have a default now. i sit in a cafe and find myself half-reading a thread while a full cup of coffee goes cold next to me.

i’m not present for the coffee i made. i’m not present for the conversation. i’m not really present anywhere.

just buffering. always buffering.

convinced i’m here because my body is in the room.

but when i slow down, i notice things that were there the whole time.

i notice the guitar. the girl three floors below practices every evening at 7pm. i’ve lived here a year and a half. i heard it properly for the first time last week.

i notice the Bangalore sky does this thing at 6pm where it can’t decide what colour to be. goes through three or four versions before it commits. i’ve lived here 1.5 years. i saw it properly maybe twice.

i notice i have opinions about things i never let myself finish thinking about. half-formed ideas that kept getting interrupted and going back to the queue. when the interruptions stop, the ideas complete themselves. things i’ve been half-knowing for weeks suddenly just - land.

i notice food tastes like something when i’m not watching anything while eating it.

i notice silence doesn’t feel like a threat when i stop treating it like one.

there’s a reason it feels like a threat though.

your brain evolved to treat stillness as danger. when doing nothing meant falling behind the tribe, missing the hunt, being left out - stillness was a problem to solve. that circuitry still runs. the moment you stop moving, something in you starts pushing.

that voice isn’t your ambition.

it’s an ancient alarm system with nothing to actually alarm about.

and then there’s the dopamine loop - every notification, every open-Instagram-for-no-reason trains your brain to expect the next hit. the unpredictability keeps you hooked. same mechanism as a slot machine.

your brain doesn’t care that you want to slow down.

it just knows that checking felt like it might pay off last time.

so it keeps asking.

there’s a man in the Ramayan who had everything and was owned by none of it.

not because he rejected it. not because he lived simply or opted out or meditated in a cave.

he ruled. he fought wars. he ran a kingdom that never stopped needing him.

and somehow - in the middle of all of it - he was the most inwardly free person in every room he walked into.

his name was Janak. king of Mithila. father of Sita.

i think about him every time i catch myself checking something between thoughts.

not because he opted out. because he showed up completely and held none of it. the kingdom ran. he stayed still inside it.

a student came wanting to learn detachment. Janak made him wait three days without explanation.

the student came back furious. what are you teaching me by making me wait? i came here to learn something.

Janak looked at him for a long moment.

you already did. you sat with discomfort for three days and didn’t dissolve. you survived the not-knowing. you proved to yourself that stillness isn’t the same as falling behind.

the lesson was never something i could hand you. it had to happen to you.

it already did.

i’m not trying to be a king. i’m a growth marketer in Bangalore who is very online and has no plans to stop.

but i want to build like Janak. all in, hands open.

present for the work. not owned by it.

what i’m learning is that slowing down isn’t a schedule change.

it’s an attention change.

you don’t have to delete Instagram. you don’t have to do a digital detox or move to a farm or wake up at 5am. you just have to occasionally - deliberately - let the gap be a gap.

the walk to get coffee. the wait for the auto. the two minutes before a meeting starts.

don’t fill it.

let the thought finish. let the meal be the meal. let the evening be an evening.

your brain has a whole system - the default mode network - that only activates in the gaps. it’s where your best thinking happens. the ideas that feel like they came from nowhere. the clarity you couldn’t find when you were looking for it.

it only works when you stop filling every space with something to consume.

we plugged every gap. and then wondered why nothing settles anymore.

the version of me that lives in my head -

she’s not more disciplined. she doesn’t have a better morning routine. she’s not waking up earlier.

she just stopped treating silence like a loading error.

she let the coffee be coffee. the walk be a walk. the evening be an evening.

she’s not ahead of me somewhere.

she’s just in the room she’s in.

and maybe that’s all i’m actually trying to find my way back to.

not a different life.

just a different way of being in this one.

i spend hours researching every piece i write — the science, the stories, the frameworks that actually hold up. if you want more of this in your inbox for free, every week

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until next week,

build like it matters. hold it like it doesn’t.

Drishti.

p.s. i wrote “she makes coffee and actually drinks it” and let my coffee go cold while writing this. so it goes. working on it.

p.p.s. what’s something you noticed this week only because you slowed down?

I know you.

You’re young. You’re ambitious. You think you’re going to do something great with your life. I know because there are 14 tabs open in your browser right now.

The pitch deck you started in October. The Notion doc called “ideas - final final.” The DM from someone who wants you to co-found.

You keep clicking between them. You keep promising you’ll come back. But you don’t.

I know because the list of lives you want to live keeps getting longer.

Founder. Creator. VC. Solopreneur. The guy who quit and moved to Bali. The guy who stayed and stacked equity.

Here’s the thing.

I’ve spent most of this year wanting things too.

A company. A book. Something I’d commit to forever. In all that wanting, I was very, very productive.

In my head.

The actual building is a different story. Three Notion docs. None of them past page 2. My reading is worse than it was in college. My mother called twice last week and I sent her a TTYL both times.

Since college, options have only multiplied. Every life I scroll past looks possible.

The feed makes all of them feel close enough to touch.

And too far to actually reach.

the offer

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

I have every reason to jump.

A friend just closed pre-seed and wants me to join. An incubator has been chasing me. My mentor - settled, exited - told me he’d put money in me.

In less than a year out of college, I went from cracking organic distribution to leading US and SEA GTM. 43k on LinkedIn. 12k on Twitter. 100 million views.

I have the proof. I have the capital. I have the believers.

And I am not jumping.

Not yet. Maybe not for a year.

Most people think I’m stuck. That I can’t find the idea. That I’m scared.

I am not stuck.

I’m choosing something different.

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what success costs

I look at the people who said yes.

The founder who tweets about miserable corporate people pops a sleeping pill at midnight. The growth lead who wakes up at 5am to journal needs two Red Bulls to make it to lunch. The 28-year-old exited founder everyone is jealous of hasn’t called his mom in three weeks.

This isn’t an opinion. The data is there.

Michael Freeman, a researcher at the University of San Francisco, surveyed 242 founders. Half had a diagnosable mental health condition. They are twice as likely to have depression. Three times more likely to abuse a substance. Eleven times more likely to have bipolar disorder.

One in five is carrying three or more conditions at the same time.

These are not the failures.

These are the ones you follow on Twitter.

The sleeping pill is not in the team photo. The three weeks of not calling your mother does not show up anywhere.

You’re watching the highlight reel and assuming it is the film.

It is not.

the body is keeping a list

We are spending 1.1 trillion hours a year on smartphones. Five hours a day. Most of it on social media, gaming, and video.

We have collectively agreed to live inside, on screens, and outsource our health to Whoop and Apple Health.

And then health becomes a priority. Not because the knees hurt. Not because the sleep is broken. Not because you cannot feel hungry in the morning anymore.

It becomes a priority because it’s a flex now.

Marathon medal to post. Protein brand to collab with. Hyrox prep to film.

The body stops being a home.

It becomes a project.

what isn’t on the deck

Now look further out.

Incomes are higher than they’ve ever been. Access is higher. Information is higher.

And somehow, presence keeps getting deferred.

Something is upside down.

You are not building a life anymore. You are building a résumé of a life.

One day the résumé is going to be very long, the life is going to be very short, and you are going to wonder where the person went.

the part nobody admits

Here is the deepest cut.

It is not just your time and your body. It is your wants.

A 2024 paper at the ACM Web Conference (Anwar, Schoenebeck, Dhillon) found that recommender algorithms make people more similar to each other over time. None of us actually broaden. We just all converge.

Same ramen. Same shows. Same pickle ball. Same startup. Same deck. Same landing page.

You liked cricket. The feed said pickle ball. Your body wanted dal makhani. The feed said ramen. You wanted to go home. The feed said one more year.

You think the algorithm is showing you what you want.

It is showing you what people like you want. Decided by what you clicked at 1am when you were tired and bored and not thinking clearly.

It is showing you the wants of a person you might not actually be.

And then it gets worse. You start wanting what it shows you. Because how would you know any different?

When was the last time you sat in a room with no phone and asked yourself what you actually wanted?

You haven’t just outsourced labour to AI. You haven’t just outsourced taste. You have outsourced desire itself.

And once you’ve outsourced desire, you can have everything - every job, every win, every milestone - and feel nothing at the end of it.

That is where most of the founders you respect on paper actually live.

You can use this whole essay as an excuse to never start anything. Sitting at home, refusing every offer, calling your inertia wisdom. Calling your fear patience.

That is a real failure mode. It is the one most people who read essays like this will fall into.

So let me be clear.

The question is not whether to jump.

The question is what you are jumping for.

what i’m actually playing for

Here is the line. I’ll just say it.

My win is dying with no regrets and a full heart.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

Not a specific cast. Not a specific house. Not a specific number in the bank. Just - at the end, the heart is full, and there is nothing I am still apologising to myself for.

I call this The Last Hurrah.

And the part nobody tells you about The Last Hurrah is - it is not with someone else.

Not with the girl from first year of college who told me I would not amount to anything. Not with the people who funded me. Not with the audience who shared my tweets.

It is with me.

The kid I was. The woman I am becoming. Whoever is left at the end.

Three versions of one person, sitting in a room, looking at each other.

If they nod, I have won.

If they cannot, I have lost - no matter what the rest of the world is calling it.

The kid will remember what I actually wanted before I knew what was trending. If I betrayed her, she will look away.

The woman in the bed at the end will be tired in a way no supplement can fix. If I gave her a résumé instead of a life, she will wish she had two more hours with her mother. One real Saturday that was not already content.

That is the whole game.

the only question that matters

Here is what I want you to sit with. Properly. Not while you scroll to the next thing.

What do you want?

Not what the feed has decided people like you want. Not what your group chat is congratulating people for. Not the version of the next ten years that would look good in a thread.

You. Alone. With no phone. With no audience.

What life are you trying to build for the person who is going to be in that bed at the end?

If your answer matches what the feed is selling you - good. You are aligned. Go take the offer. Build the thing.

If your answer is different - and for most of you, it is different - then the most ambitious thing you can do right now is not to do more.

It is to put the phone down. Find out what you want. And refuse every offer, every congratulation, every viral tweet, every promotion, every co-founder seat that does not move you toward the nod at the end.

That is the only game worth playing.

Most people will lose this game. They will say yes to everything. They will get rich. They will get followers. They will wake up at 34 in a body they do not recognise, in a marriage they are rehearsing, on a path they do not remember picking.

And the kid in the bed at the end will look away.

I do not want that for you. I really don’t.

Want what you want. Not what is being sold.

That is the only thing worth doing.

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Until next week,

Play your own game.

Drishti

P.S. If you have been calling your indecision being lost - try calling it being patient instead. See what changes.

you’re in bed, scrolling LinkedIn.

the guy who used to copy your assignments got promoted. “elated to share i have been promoted to Director.” 47 likes already. some manager you don’t know commented “well deserved.”

you put the phone down. screen-side up. you look at the ceiling.

you pick it back up.

now it’s the girl you always thought was too dumb. she raised a seed round. you scroll the post. you scroll the comments. you scroll the comments under the comments. you don’t even know why.

you put the phone face down this time.

something is wrong but you can’t name it.

you’re not lazy. you’ve been working hard since you were 15. coaching classes. internships. you did everything they told you to do.

you should be further along by now.

you’re not.

three years in and you’re still in the same flat, having the same 1:1 with the same manager who tells you you’re “on track” in that tone that’s somehow both kind and a put-down at the same time.

meanwhile some guy who dropped out of college in 2020 with a laptop and a wifi connection is now backpacking across europe with a hot gf.

how.

HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN.

because the thing is, you ARE working hard. that’s not the question. you know people who work less and earn more. people dumber than you, doing better than you.

it’s not luck. it’s not connections. it’s not hard work.

it’s something else.

something nobody put in the curriculum. something your parents didn’t know to teach you because they didn’t have it either. something most people never figure out, and the ones who do don’t always know how to explain it.

you stare at the ceiling.

and somewhere underneath everything, there’s this small voice going:

what am i missing.”

i left a great corporate offer and PPO in 2025. to join an early stage startup. with a pay cut. with no title.

i was the first and only growth hire. i joined when we didn’t even have double digit users. today we have more than 100K daily active users.

i didn’t know any of it before. i just figured things out as i went. i cracked things and built playbooks for everything. twitter. linkedin. college leagues. branding. notifications and email campaigns. instagram, niches, IPs.

it was the most uncomfortable time of my life.

and also - i can say this now - the most clear.

because in that time i started noticing something. a pattern. across every person i’d ever read about who’d done something real. people who’d started with nothing and ended up somewhere. they all had one thing in common.

not the same skill. not the same background. not the same industry.

the same wiring.

five specific rewires they’d done to their own brains. five settings they’d flipped on the default operating system most of us are running.

let me show you.

rewire 1: they make wanting harder.

walter mischel ran a study in 1972. four-year-olds. one marshmallow on a table. the kids were told: you can eat this now. or wait fifteen minutes and get two.

most ate the first one within a minute.

the kids who waited tracked differently for the rest of their lives. higher SAT scores. better grades. lower BMI. better stress control. mischel kept following them for decades.

the gap wasn’t intelligence. it was a single muscle.

the ability to feel a craving and not act on it.

now look at dhirubhai ambani.

before he was DHIRUBHAI, before the empire, he was a 17-year-old gas station attendant in yemen. he saved every single penny. he didn’t drink, smoke or go out. his friends thought he was boring. he was the only one of them who left as a millionaire.

charlie munger called this the most underrated mental skill of all time. he called it deferred gratification, and he said almost no one has it because it means being uncomfortable for years before anyone claps for you.

here’s the part nobody tells you:

i’ve been working full time for a year now. i could have bought an iphone in the first month, no emi, easy. i didn’t. i haven’t bought anything big for myself in the past year. this month i finally bought an iphone - because i’m now starting video content.

rewire 2: they stop wearing poverty like a name.

oprah winfrey was born in rural mississippi, 1954. her grandmother washed clothes for white families. oprah wore potato sacks because there wasn’t money for dresses. by every metric - race, class, place, gender, era - she should have stayed exactly where she started.

she said something once that’s stuck with me.

she said the moment her life changed wasn’t when she got the talk show. it was years before when she realised that the only person who’d decided she was “the girl from rural mississippi” was her.

she dropped that identity before she had any proof she could be anything else.

carol dweck’s work on mindset shows that people who treat their circumstances as their identity (”people like me don’t start companies,” “i’m from a small town”) behave in ways that prove that identity right. it’s not weakness. it’s the brain doing exactly what it’s wired to do - close the gap between how you see yourself and what’s real.

if you see yourself as “stuck,” your brain will work overtime to keep your life stuck. so the story stays true. so you don’t have to feel the gap.

identity moves first. circumstances follow.

rewire 3: they get cold.

ratan tata, when the 2008 financial crisis nearly took out tata motors after the jaguar land rover deal, didn’t give a single dramatic interview. didn’t post anything. just quietly fixed the debt, rebuilt the supply chain, and the brand he’d bet $2.3 billion on became one of the most profitable parts of the tata group within four years.

the founders who win aren’t more confident. they’re more quiet inside. they feel everything the rest of us feel - fear, envy, doubt, anger - they just don’t hand those feelings the steering wheel.

most people fuse the two. they feel scared, so they act scared. they feel angry, so they act angry. what they feel inside and what they do outside are the same thing.

the people who build wealth from zero have split these two apart.

they feel. and then they choose.

rewire 4: they get comfortable with not knowing.

in 1994, a 30-year-old hedge fund analyst on wall street told his boss he was quitting to sell books on the internet.

his boss told him: you have a sure bonus this year. you have a sure career. why would you trade that for cardboard boxes in a garage.

jeff bezos quit anyway.

your brain hates not knowing. it reads uncertainty as danger. to the amygdala, an uncertain future looks exactly like a tiger in the bushes. this is why most people, when they don’t know what’s coming, freeze and pick the option that gives them the most info - usually the option with the clearest path.

salary. title. KPIs. promotion ladder. five-year plan.

these aren’t bad things.

they’re just options that let your amygdala stop firing.

the people who get rich from zero have trained themselves to act before the amygdala calms down.

they make moves while unsure.

they sit with the not-knowing. they make peace with it. and over time the muscle gets so strong that the lack of certainty stops feeling like danger - it starts feeling like opportunity. because they realize most of the upside in life lives in exactly the zone everyone else won’t enter.

rewire 5: they chase skill. status follows.

charlie munger says: read a lot. stay curious. try to get a little wiser every day. become someone who is genuinely, clearly useful at something the market values - and the market will eventually rearrange itself around you.

most people skip this.

most people chase looking valuable instead of the thing underneath. the title.

steve jobs, after he got fired from apple in 1985, didn’t go chase the next big CEO job. he went and learned. he went deep on type design. he went deep on animation through pixar. when he came back to apple in 1997, he wasn’t the same person who’d been fired.

the iphone, when it launched, was beautiful because of the type. apple beat netscape and microsoft at design because jobs had spent twelve years learning what nobody else in tech was learning.

skill before status.

every time.

i still have no fancy title. on linkedin i’m a founding member of a high growth startup. but in the last year i’ve gone deep on cracking distribution. building playbooks. getting users. learning copywriting, storytelling, advertising. running campaigns. cracking global markets - USA and korea. each of these is a skill the market is paying real money for right now. and i’d rather be the person who knows how the inside of these things work than the person with a title that implies they should know.

skills are forever. titles are weather.

the part that’s actually hard

here’s the dark side beat.

every single one of these rewires costs you something the people around you will not understand.

deferred gratification costs you the present.

dropping the poor-kid identity costs you the comfort of fitting in. some of the people closest to you will lose the version of you they grew up with.

going cold in business looks like coldness from the outside. people will say you’ve changed. and they’re not wrong.

sitting with uncertainty costs you the safety your parents worked their whole lives to give you. they will not be okay with you trading it back.

and chasing skill over status means that for years - sometimes a decade - you will look, from the outside, like a person who’s going nowhere. people will assume you’ve fallen behind.

you have not.

you are running a different protocol.

but it costs you something every day to keep running it. and most people are not willing to pay that cost. that’s why it works.

that’s why “anyone can do it” and almost nobody does.

the bottom line

your wiring is the moat.

you can’t out-network it. you can’t out-hustle it. you can’t out-fake it.

the people who go from nothing to something - buffett, oprah, jan koum, jensen huang, bezos, jobs, dhirubhai - they were not given anything you weren’t. they had less, in many cases.

they just rewired their default settings.

most people will read this and forget it by tomorrow’s standup.

a few of you won’t.

until next week,

Drishtibution is the moat.

P.S. if you read all the way to here, you’re already not the average person. the protocol is half-installed. just keep going.

it finally happened on a random tuesday.

i was on a call with a founder friend. we were trying to figure out who to hire for growth. someone who takes a lot of bets, i said. scrappy. comes in with the mindset of building systems first, then scale them.

we hung up. i sat there for a second. and then, for some reason i could not name, i stalked my own LinkedIn profile.

mine read:

BTech. content writer. social media manager. research associate. consultant. freelance ghostwriter. product manager. growth associate. growth lead. storyteller.

ten titles. four years. four industries. three cities.

my phone buzzed. it was dad’s text. i stared at it. i didn’t reply.

i was going to reply tomorrow. i had been going to reply tomorrow for three days.

the thing screaming inside me wasn’t i am behind. though that was loud.

it was something quieter.

what if all of it was a waste?

i sat with that, for a long time. longer than i thought i would.

and then i started to see something i had not been able to see before.

something the call earlier had cracked open without me noticing. something my own sentence had given away. “Systems scale”.

what if i had been building one all along.

what if the muscle i’d been describing to my friend on the call -

was the muscle i had been quietly building inside myself for four years.

and i hadn’t even known it.

i want to tell you what i saw next.

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THE MACHINE NOBODY EXPLAINS

neuroscientists call it chunking.

every brain has the same hard limit. you can hold about four to seven things in your head at once while you think. that’s the ceiling. it is why you forget the third item on your grocery list. it is why you can’t remember a phone number after hearing it once.

so how does a chess master look at a board with thirty-two pieces and just see the move?

he doesn’t. he sees five chunks.

every position he has ever played has been squeezed, in his head, into a shape he recognises. he doesn’t think about each piece. he thinks about each shape. the board has thirty-two things. his head sees five.

the limit didn’t move. the unit did.

this is what intelligence actually is.

not how fast you think. not your IQ.

it is the size of your unit.

beginners work in pieces. masters work in patterns.

THE SCIENCE (STAY WITH ME)

everyone gets pattern recognition wrong.

in 1993, swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson walked into a music school to settle a 50-year-old argument: what makes someone the best?

the violin students he studied were already child prodigies.

ericsson asked the teachers to sort them into three groups.

best - who could become world-famous solo performers.

good - who would join an orchestra.

teachers - who end up teaching violin to other people’s kids.

three groups. ten students each. same school, teachers and age.

ericsson asked everyone: how much do you practice alone.

not perform, take lessons, play with friends. those things are pleasant. those are social. those are easy.

how much do you sit alone in a small room with your violin and a piece of music you cannot yet play, working on the bar that keeps going wrong, listening to yourself fail, fixing it, failing again, fixing it, for hours, with no one watching.

he called this deliberate practice..

the teachers group had done around 3,400 hours by age 18. the good group 5,301. the best group 7,410.

by age 20, the elite group would hit roughly 10,000 hours. the 10,000-hour rule, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, says that’s how long it takes to master any complex skill.

there’s another one.

a swiss chess master named Fernand Gobet got curious about himself in his twenties. he was good enough to play for the swiss national team, and he could not explain why. he saw things on a board that other people couldn’t. he didn’t even know what he was doing when he saw them. so he stopped playing chess seriously and went back to school for a PhD in how the brain works, just to figure out what was going on inside his own head.

over the next 20 years, gobet put chess players inside brain scanners and watched what happened while they looked at chess boards.

He found when beginners look at a chessboard, the activity in their brain lights up in the thinking and problem-solving parts.

when experts look at the same board, the activity shifted to the parts of the brain that store long-term memory.

the expert is not solving the position.

the expert is remembering it.

YOUR GRANDFATHER’S CAREER WAS DIFFERENT

now zoom out.

your grandfather probably worked at one place for thirty-five years. so did your father. their job at twenty-five looked a lot like their job at fifty-five. the office was the same. the work was the same. by year twenty, they were the person in the room who just knew things.

their brain had built the chunks the way human brains have built chunks for thousands of years - slowly, deeply, in one place, over a lifetime.

your career is not that.

you are switching companies every two years. you are switching industries every five.

so you panic. you compare yourself to the friend with four years at one company. you assume she is winning because her path makes a clean story. and your dad is asking why you keep moving and you don’t have an answer.

but here is the thing your family doesn’t know yet.

the career your grandfather had does not exist anymore. the world doesn’t reward depth in one place the way it used to. it rewards the rare person who has chunks across many rooms - and can see the pattern that connects them.

that person looks scattered for a long time.

then year four arrives. and the shapes connect.

AND THE WINNERS KNOW IT

there’s a second layer.

most of the people you watch winning today did not take the linear path. they took the loop.

elon musk sold PayPal in 2002 and started SpaceX with no rocket experience.

for six years he tried to build a rocket. three of them blew up.

by august 2008 he had no money left, Tesla was nearly dead, and the fourth rocket was being assembled in six weeks out of spare parts.

he later said the fourth launch was the last money they had - if it failed, that would have been the end of SpaceX.

it didn’t fail. on september 28, 2008, falcon 1 became the first privately built rocket in history to reach space. three months later nasa called and offered him a contract for one and a half billion dollars.

the version of this story told on instagram is delusional optimism.

but what happened is that musk had been chunking rockets for six years. every failure was a chunk.

james dyson spent five years and built 5,127 prototypes of a vacuum cleaner before one worked. his wife taught art classes to keep the house running. by prototype 4,000, any sane person would have called it a failure. he didn’t stop because every prototype was teaching him a chunk. by 5,127, the chunks added up to a vacuum.

WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING TO YOU

1. it’s not a strategy problem. it’s a chunks problem.

strategy is what you build after you have enough chunks to make a real choice. before that, every “strategic” move is just a guess.

you’re not behind. you’re collecting.

2. effort doesn’t scale. position does.

seeing across rooms is a different skill. it comes from being in many rooms, not from effort. your brain only builds chunks when it’s uncomfortable - when it’s noticing something it doesn’t have a word for yet.

the moment a room makes full sense, it stops teaching you.

3. delusional optimism isn’t blind hope. it’s trust, mispriced.

every time you try again, with attention, you fix one more thing. try enough times. one of them works. that’s not faith.

that’s just how numbers work.

THE FIX STARTS WITH YOU

it’s easy to read this and decide that every restless, confused, half-committed twenty-something with a messy resume is secretly building a masterpiece.

the cautionary tale, at the largest possible scale, is theranos.

elizabeth holmes dropped out of stanford at 19 to build a machine the size of a printer that could run two hundred different blood tests on a single drop of blood and raised nine billion dollars.

she became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

there was one problem.

the machine didn’t work.

for 15 years, theranos ran fake demos for investors

in 2022 she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud.

delusional optimism without the noticing is fraud, not founder.

the loop only builds the muscle if two things are true:

1. you commit to each room: you go deep. you make at least one playbook in every role - even a tiny one. something that lasts after you leave. something a successor can run.

2. you pay attention to what repeats: the moment something at role 1 reminds you of something at role 2, you don’t move on. you sit with it. that moment of huh, this looks familiar is the entire game. that is your brain trying to fire a chunk.

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FIVE RULES TO STEAL

1. one playbook per room.

no matter how short the stint, leave one document behind. how this team onboards. how this funnel works. how this client argues. write it for the next person, not for yourself. if you can’t write a playbook, you weren’t actually paying attention.

2. keep a “huh, this looks like” log.

notes app. every time something in a new room reminds you of something in an old room, log it. don’t try to be smart. just notice. six months in, read it back. that list is the shape of your specific knowledge. it works. it is the cheapest career hack in the world and almost nobody does it.

3. switch on a thesis, not on a feeling.

restlessness is data, not a verdict. before you leave a role, ask: what specifically am i trying to learn next that this room can’t teach me? if you can’t answer in one sentence, you’re not ready to switch. you’re just bored. boredom is not a strategy. curiosity is.

4. hire your own replacement, even when no one asked.

the day you write a playbook good enough that someone else can run it, you’re free to enter the next room. most people guard their work because they think their job security is in being the only one who knows. that’s the slowest version of the game. the fastest version is making yourself replaceable so you can compound.

5. Long term bet.

zoom out. give yourself time before you compare your CV to anyone else’s. patience here is not a virtue. it is leverage.

THE BOTTOM LINE

your career was designed for a world that no longer exists.

the muscle this world rewards is the one almost nobody has been told to build. chunks across rooms. the only way to build it is to sit in many rooms.

it is not luck. it is not talent. it is the slow, attentive, repeated work of letting your brain build a library.

the same people keep winning because they ran this loop long enough for it to compound. and almost nobody around them could see it happening, because while it’s happening, it doesn’t look like winning. it looks like flailing.

until next week,

stay in the room,

Drishti

alarm goes off at 7. you’ve checked WhatsApp, two work emails, the Instagram story your friend posted at 1am, and a reel about morning routines before your feet touch the floor.

you shower. open Swiggy on the toilet. order breakfast. open Zepto. add toothpaste. add a chocolate. add three things you don’t need. order.

standup at 10. you’re on mute, scrolling X in another tab. someone says your name. you unmute. “nothing from my end.”

lunch. you eat with one hand, scroll with the other.

3pm dip. you open Instagram. twenty minutes vanish.

dinner. Netflix. phone in lap.

bed. phone glow on the ceiling till 1am.

you did this yesterday too. and the day before. you’ll do it tomorrow.

and here’s the thing.

some part of you knows this is wrong. some part of you is screaming. but that part is small. and tired. and losing.

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REWARD MECHANISM

neuroscientists call it the reward circuit. the loop in your brain that decides what you want.

that loop has one job. spot something good. make you chase it.

in the jungle, “good” meant rare. a ripe fruit. a potential mate. a new piece of information that might keep you alive.

the loop fires. you chase. you survive.

that’s it.

that’s the whole machine.

but it was not built for 2026.

(A SMALL INTERLUDE)

it’s 08:47pm. Bangalore. i’m here at Teka, Indiranagar with matcha. i just shut my phone and laptop because i needed to take a break from Twitter (laptop) and Insta (phone).

i’ve been thinking about this all week.

why is it so hard to just... not.

why does the phone always win.

THE SCIENCE (STAY WITH ME)

everyone gets dopamine wrong.

dopamine isn’t pleasure but wanting.

Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist, spent decades proving this. he found that the brain has two separate systems. one for wanting (motivation, craving, the pursuit) and one for liking (actual enjoyment).

dopamine drives wanting.

liking is run by a different chemistry.

read that again, because it explains your entire life.

you can spend an hour scrolling and not enjoy a single second of it. the wanting circuit is firing. the liking circuit is empty.

that’s not a bug. that’s the whole machine.

BUILT FOR THE JUNGLE

in the jungle, that wanting circuit was sacred. it only fired when something rare and survival-relevant showed up. a ripe mango. a potential mate. a novel piece of information that might keep you alive.

the system assumed: if this is firing this hard, it must be rare. drop everything. chase it.

that assumption is wired in. your brain still believes scarcity is the default.

but you’re not living in scarcity anymore.

you’re living in a world where every single trigger that the system was built to chase is available on a button. calorie-dense food: Swiggy. sexual novelty: any app. social information: Instagram. status data: LinkedIn. curiosity: Twitter. music: Spotify.

all of it.

all the time.

one tap.

you didn’t get more disciplined as the world got faster. the world got better at hijacking the same circuits that were always there.

AND THE APPS KNOW IT

there’s a second layer. the dopamine system doesn’t fire hardest when you get the reward. it fires hardest when the reward is uncertain.

this is why slot machines work. B.F. Skinner figured this out in the 1950s. variable-ratio reinforcement. the unpredictability itself is the drug.

pull-to-refresh is a slot machine.

every time you pull down on Instagram, your brain doesn’t know if the next post will be boring or amazing. that uncertainty is the hit. the post itself is almost a footnote.

come on.

and it gets worse.

Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford who runs an addiction clinic, has this concept she calls the pleasure-pain balance. the brain is obsessed with equilibrium. when you pound the reward circuit hard for long enough, it compensates. it dials itself down. fewer receptors. lower baseline.

the more you stimulate, the less you feel.

so the walk that used to be enough? doesn’t register anymore. the book? boring. the conversation? flat.

your baseline has been pushed below zero, so even ordinary life now feels like deprivation.

and what do you do when ordinary life feels empty?

you pick the phone back up.

WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING TO YOU

1. it’s not a willpower problem. it’s a baseline problem.

willpower is a tax on a rigged system. your brain thinks the phone is food. silence is starvation.

you’re not weak. you’re calibrated.

2. boredom isn’t a problem. it’s the reset.

every time you reach for the phone the second a moment goes empty, you abort the reset.

then you wonder why nothing feels good anymore.

because the meter never gets to zero.

you’re permanently overdrawn.

rules aren’t restriction. they’re protection.

the part of you that wants to read, build, sit with a friend, finish the project?

it cannot overpower the urge in the presence of the stimuli.

the only way it wins is by deciding in advance. before the circuit fires.

your prefrontal cortex is the slave. not the master.

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THE FIX STARTS WITH YOU

it’s easy to read this and go: yeah, the apps are evil, the algorithm did this to me, i’m a victim of the attention economy.

that’s also a cop-out.

because the algorithm only works if you let it.

Mark Zuckerberg famously doesn’t let his kids on Instagram. Steve Jobs didn’t give his kids iPads. the people who built this stuff know exactly what it does. they have rules. their kids have rules. the whole system runs on the assumption that most people won’t make rules.

and even if the apps disappeared tomorrow, the wanting circuit would still be there. it would just find new targets. online shopping. food delivery. Tinder. dating in general. politics. drama. gambling. career anxiety. optimization itself.

the phone is the most efficient delivery mechanism. it’s not the disease.

the disease is the mismatch.

and no one is coming to save you from it. the companies are paid to make it worse. the government won’t legislate your phone out of your hand. your friends are losing the same fight.

FIVE RULES TO STEAL

1. friction on the bad. ease on the good.

phone in another room overnight. charger in the kitchen. apps that hijack you go to a folder on the second screen, never the home screen. books on the bedside table, kindle pre-loaded. the friend you want to call: number favourited.

this is engineering.

you don’t trust yourself in the moment because the moment is rigged.

make the decisions when you’re calm and well-fed.

pre-commit.

2. one boring window per day.

pick a 30-minute window where you do nothing. no phone, no podcast, no audiobook, no music, no input. walk. stare. wash dishes. lie on the floor.

this window is non-negotiable because it’s the only time your dopamine baseline gets to reset. if every gap in your day is filled with stimulation, the meter never zeroes.

boredom is not the enemy.

it is the medicine.

3. protect the first hour.

the hour after you wake up belongs to your prefrontal cortex, before the mesolimbic system has been switched on for the day.

no phone in that hour. no email. no socials.

read. stretch. write. sit. drink water. look out the window.

whatever circuit you fire first wins the day.

if you start with an infinite scroll, the rest of your day is uphill against your own brain.

4. variable rewards stay capped.

anything pull-to-refresh is a slot machine. Twitter. Instagram. Reddit. LinkedIn. dating apps. even Slack now.

cap them. app timer for 30 minutes a day. greyscale on. notifications off, all of them, except actual humans.

if you cannot use the app inside the cap, the app is not a tool you own.

the app owns you.

5. the recalibration sprint.

once a quarter, do a 7-day reset. Lembke’s clinical recommendation is actually 30 days for people in clinical addiction states, but a week is enough for a working professional to feel the baseline come back.

rules: no scrolling apps, no Netflix, no online shopping, no constant podcasts. the only inputs allowed are books, conversation, music with no algorithm, walking, work.

day 3 is hell. day 5 something starts to come back.

day 7 you remember what your own thoughts sound like.

that sound - that’s your signal. that’s the thing the abundance has been drowning out.

THE BOTTOM LINE

your brain was built for the jungle.

you live in a casino now.

every app, every feed, every notification is a slot machine engineered by smarter people than you to extract your attention.

you will not out-discipline them. you will not out-willpower them.

you have to design rules.

because the default settings of the modern world are designed for someone else’s profit, not your peace.

until next week,

Drishti ‘primal_brainer’ Pandita

P.S. if you build your five rules, reply and tell me what they are. i read everything.

somewhere around 15 you created a deadline. by 22 you’d be in ‘THIS’ college. by 25 you’d have ‘THIS’ body, ‘THIS’ job, ‘THIS’ apartment. by 28 you’d marry the love of your life.

BUT it’s 2026 and you didn’t.

and now you’re sitting with the void. scrolling. comparing. opening instagram like it’s going to help. (it won’t.) telling yourself you’re falling apart.

(you’re not).

your life is not falling apart. it’s just not the fairy tale you were promised.

Truth hurts

you are here because of you.

you didn’t study and you didn’t get the college you wanted. you stopped going to the gym and looking in the mirror feels terrible. you kept cancelling on your friends until they stopped inviting you. you picked the safe job and now you hate it.

who did this?

not your parents. not your ex. not your boss. not the economy. not the algorithm.

YOU.

but this isn’t this liberating.

if someone else did this to you, someone else has to fix it.

and nobody is coming.

if you did this to you, you can undo it. today. next month. on your own terms.

"No one is coming to save you. Your life is 100% your responsibility."

acceptance is not giving up

everyone thinks acceptance means rolling over. it doesn’t.

acceptance is not “my boss is toxic, i guess i’ll just take it.” but “my boss is toxic. i’m going to quietly start applying somewhere else. i’ll leave in 8 months with better pay and my dignity.”

not “i isolated myself, i guess i’m alone now” but “i isolated myself. so i’ll be the one who texts first now. even if it’s awkward.”

“i’m overweight, this is just who i am.” but “i’m overweight. i’ll fix my lifestyle. slowly. without hating myself.”

acceptance is not agreement. it’s just honesty about where you actually are.

"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."

stop trying to fix your life by friday

here’s where everyone crashes.

you read something like this. you get a rush of energy. by monday you’ve promised yourself gym at 5 am, no sugar, quit the job, call every friend, read 30 pages, meditate, journal, start a side hustle.

by wednesday you’ve broken every promise.

by friday you’re crying into a packet of maggi at 11 pm, telling yourself you can’t do anything.

STOP.

you didn’t fall apart in a week. you’re not going to fix it in one.

want to leave the job? give yourself 8 - 10 months. save properly. update the linkedin quietly. have the coffees.

want to lose 10 kgs? give yourself 5 months. 2 kgs a month. sleep earlier. walk after dinner.

want your friends back? one call a week. that’s it. that’s the whole plan.

your brain is convinced that if you don’t fix it today, you’re a failure. your brain is also the thing that got you here. maybe stop hanging out too much in your head.

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” - Confucius

you are going to fall again

let me save you some heartbreak.

you’re going to fail a few interviews. you’re going to eat a week’s calories in one evening. you’re going to cancel on the friend you just promised yourself you wouldn’t. you’re going to skip the gym for ten days and spiral for a weekend.

this isn’t the plan breaking. this IS the plan.

every fit person, every rich person, every person whose life looks perfect online has a secret folder of weeks where they ate like garbage, ghosted everyone, and slept at 4 am doomscrolling.

the difference is not that they don’t fall. the difference is what they say to themselves the next morning.

they don’t say “see, i knew i couldn’t do it.” they say “okay. that was yesterday. i’m still in this.”

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Confucius

stop thinking everyone else has it sorted

they don’t.

rich people have anxiety. hot people have eating disorders. the girl with the villa in bali lies awake at 3 am convinced her husband is cheating. the founder who just had a big exit has a therapist he’s scared to be honest with. the influencer you follow who posts about morning routines rehearses her pitches in the shower because she’s scared everyone will figure out she’s making it up.

you think “if i had her life, i’d be fine.”

you wouldn’t.

they have their own fears. the 3 am spirals. just dressed in better clothes.

when humans don’t have problems, we invent them. your brain is not built to feel okay. it scans for what’s wrong, fixes it, then finds the next wrong thing. that setting kept us alive for a million years.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Theodore Roosevelt

two things. every day.

that’s it. two.

one thing that moves you toward the life you want. just one. apply to the job. walk 30 minutes. text the friend. read 10 pages. one.

one thing that brings you actual joy.

this is the one everyone skips. because it feels like cheating. like you’re not allowed to enjoy anything until you’ve fixed yourself.

that’s a lie. and it’s why you keep crashing.

watch the show. play the game. cook something weird. sit on the balcony and do nothing for an hour.

because - what’s the point of fixing your life if you’re never going to enjoy any of it?

people think the grind is the whole thing. “i’ll be happy when i’ve fixed the job, the body, the bank account.” you won’t. you’ll find the next thing to fix. you’re a human. that’s what we do.

the happy life is not waiting at the finish line. it’s the daily mix.

fix one thing. enjoy one thing. every single day. that’s the whole life.

30 seconds, please?

before you open instagram again. before you compare your life to a stranger’s life for the ninth time this week.

Take a pause for 30 seconds.

ask yourself, honestly -

is my life actually that bad?

do you have a roof. do you have food. do you have one person who’d pick up at 2 am. do you have a body that mostly works. do you have a mind that could read this whole thing.

if yes - your life is not falling apart.

your life is just not the fairy tale you were promised.

and the sooner you stop mourning the fairy tale, the sooner you start living the actual life.

which, spoiler - is the only one you were ever going to get anyway.

P.S. - if you had to pick ONE thing to change in the next 10 months, what would it be? reply and tell me. sometimes saying it to a stranger is how it gets real.

Until next week,

Drishti

Not kidding.

I pick it up every time I feel stuck. Every time I forget why I started. It’s the one book I never outgrow.

Because every single time I read it, I find a different line. Like the book knows what I need.

It’s a story about a boy named Santiago. A shepherd in Spain who keeps having the same dream. A treasure at the Pyramids of Egypt. He ignores it. He ignores it again. And again.

Until one day he doesn’t.

That’s it. That’s the whole book.

And also that’s your whole life, probably.

where it all starts

Santiago kept having a recurring dream - a child showing him hidden treasure at the Egyptian Pyramids.

He didn’t go looking for it. He didn’t read about Egypt and get inspired. It just kept finding him.

Having a dream is the easy part.

The hard part is believing it’s real enough to act on.

I studied computer science. Four years of BTech CSE. And the whole time, the only thing I actually wanted to do was tell stories. Not code. Stories.

When I told people, they’d laugh. Back then, storytelling didn’t pay. Marketing was the lowest paid at campus placements. 4-5 LPA. It wasn’t what you did with a CSE degree.

So I kept quiet.

But the feeling didn’t go away. It just waited. Like Santiago’s dream. Coming back every time I had a quiet moment.

Four years later, the world is paying a premium for storytelling. For voice, for taste, for the human behind the brand.

What felt like rebellion then is a skill everyone wants now.

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waiting for the perfect time

Before we follow Santiago, I want you to meet someone else in the book.

The crystal merchant.

He runs a small shop. Santiago walks in one day - broke, lost, doesn’t speak a word of Arabic - and asks for work. The merchant gives him a job.

Over time, Santiago learns something about him. This man had a dream once too. He had wanted to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

But there was always a reason to wait.

Business wasn’t good enough yet. Then it was, but he was getting older. And on. And on.

He still talks about Mecca like it’s something he’ll do someday.

It’s not a story about a man who forgot his dream. It’s a story about a man who held on to his dream so tightly - as a reason to keep going - that he was terrified of actually living it.

That man is not a villain. He’s a warning.

the noise isn’t your enemy

It’s easy to read this and think: people who played it safe are weak, I should quit everything tomorrow.

But the static - the noise that buries your signal - isn’t evil. It isn’t even wrong, most of the time.

The static is your parents staying up at night worrying about whether you’ll be okay. The teacher who put you in the “practical” track because that’s what she knew.

The static is a kind of love. Clumsy, sometimes suffocating. But love.

The problem isn’t that the static exists. The problem is that we get so good at building it that we stop hearing anything else.

That mysterious force is not the world. It’s us.

It’s the static we build ourselves, brick by brick, because it feels safer than listening.

the worst mistake of your life

Santiago decides to go.

He sells his sheep. All of them. He crosses the sea to a city where he doesn’t speak the language, knows nobody, has nothing.

And then he gets robbed.

First day. Everything gone.

Nobody tells you this part when they romanticise following your calling. It doesn’t feel like the start of something beautiful. It feels like you made the worst decision of your life.

Santiago sits in the marketplace with nothing, thinking: I have been so stupid. I should have stayed. The sheep were enough.

This is the moment most people turn back.

But he makes one small decision. Instead of seeing himself as a victim, he says to himself:

“I’m an adventurer, looking for treasure.”

That tiny reframe. That’s the whole thing.

He finds a job at the crystal shop. Starts again from zero. Works hard. The money slowly comes back.

He goes from dreamer to builder. From “I have a dream” to “I know how to survive.”

First layer stripped. One frequency clearer.

every time he let go

This is the pattern Coelho draws through the whole book.

Every time Santiago lets go of something - a comfort, an expectation, a version of himself - the soul’s voice gets a little bit clearer.

He releases his parents’ dream for him and hears the call to travel.

He releases the shepherd’s comfortable life, the familiar routes, the flock he knew by name, to chase his dream.

He stays at the crystal shop long enough to rebuild, then releases it too.

And then there’s Fatima.

Santiago loves her. Actually loves her.

She tells him: go. Finish your journey. I’ll be here.

He goes.

You are not one big leap away from your life. You are dozens of small releases away.

Each one hurts. Each one feels like loss before it feels like direction.

Each one makes the practical voice say: was this really necessary? Couldn’t you have kept this and still had that?

No. You couldn’t.

Because every single thing you hold on to is one more layer of static. And the soul’s signal is quiet. It doesn’t shout. It waits for you to clear enough noise to finally hear it.

the man who wrote ‘The Alchemist’

Paulo Coelho wanted to be a writer since he was a teenager.

His parents committed him to a mental asylum three times for it. They genuinely believed his ambition was a sign of madness. Eventually he gave up, became a lyricist, made good money, had a comfortable life.

At 39, 39!!! he walked 500 miles along the Road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Something broke open. He quit his other work. He wrote The Alchemist in two weeks. Said the story was “already written in his soul.”

The first publisher dropped it after a year.

He kept going.

35 million copies. Most translated book in the world by any living author.

The soul knew at 17. He listened at 39.

It was never too late. And it never stopped transmitting.

what you’re actually holding on to

Most of us aren’t carrying big dramatic attachments.

We’re clinging to something much smaller. The version of ourselves that other people can understand. The acceptable dream. The ambition that fits in a LinkedIn bio. We’ve learned to want in ways that are easy to explain at family dinners.

Underneath that is the real thing. The thing you wanted before the world handed you a rubric for wanting.

The crystal merchant was afraid that if he went to Mecca, he’d have nothing left to dream about. Santiago was afraid that leaving meant losing everything.

Both fears were real. One man listened. One didn’t.

you don’t have to QUIT

You don’t have to quit your job. You don’t have to cross a sea.

Santiago’s journey is not a prescription. It’s a mirror.

It’s not showing you what to do. It’s showing you what’s possible when you stop adding more static on top of the signal.

Maybe it’s the side project you open on Friday evenings. The writing you do before the world wakes up. The thing you’re learning not because it’s on your performance review but because something in you needs to. The creative thing that has no ROI but makes you feel like yourself.

“Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.” - Rumi

Maybe don’t run. Walk. Crawl.

Take one small step and see what happens.

But keep the curiosity in you alive.

the journey is the reward

Santiago reaches the Pyramids. He digs. There’s nothing.

He gets beaten up by refugees who find him there. As they mock him, one of them mentions a dream he keeps having - a ruined church in Spain, a boy sleeping with his sheep, treasure buried under a sycamore tree.

Santiago knows that church. It’s where he started.

He goes back. He digs. He finds it.

The treasure was home the entire time.

He couldn’t have found it when he left. He needed every mile, every loss, every moment of starting over - not to find the treasure, but to become someone who could recognise it.

The soul was never pointing at Egypt.

It was pointing at the person Santiago needed to become.

what’s your dream?

Spoiler alert: You know it.

It’s the thing that comes back at 2am when you can’t sleep. The version of your life that you imagine and then immediately call naive.

That’s not naivety. That’s the signal.

You don’t have to make one big dramatic decision today.

Just one small release.

Put down what you’re carrying that isn’t yours.

The signal knows where it’s going.

It’s been waiting for you to trust it.

Until next time,

Drishti ‘Follow Your Dreams’ Pandita

P.S. - Pick up The Alchemist if you haven’t. Read it again if you have. You’ll find a different line this time. You always do.

P.P.S. I LOVE THIS BOOK SOOO MUCHHHH

My friend wants to go grocery shopping.

Every single week, we have this argument. He grabs his tote bag. I open Blinkit. He says it’s an experience. I say we’ll save 40 minutes.

He thinks I’m being lazy. I think he’s making a whole thing out of buying sabzi.

And honestly? Yeah. I am lazy.

Not like I won’t waste 40 minutes scrolling Twitter. But wandering through aisles with no list, picking up stuff I don’t need, spending money on things I’ll forget about - nah. I don’t want the experience. I want to get what I need and move on.

Blinkit. Same cart. Same checkout. Done in 10 minutes. The system works.

But, I guess life doesn’t work like that.

If you only stick to what’s easy, you never bump into what’s unexpected.

And this isn’t really about groceries.

why you’re always busy but never living

Something has happened to us. Quietly. And nobody noticed.

I call it the Optimization Epidemic.

Robot vacuums. Coffee machines on timers. Meal shakes instead of actual food. Everything automated. Everything handed off. Every rough edge in your day filed down until your whole life runs like an app.

And we do it all to save time. FINE. Time matters. Everyone knows that.

But nobody asks the obvious question:

What are we saving all this time for?

Because from what I can tell, the time we buy back with every shortcut doesn’t give us more time to live. It gives us more time to work. Which is just more time to optimize. Which is just…

THE LOOP.

Save time → fill it with work → feel busy → optimize harder → save more time → fill it again.

You’re not saving time. You’re laundering it.

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what you actually lose when you “save time”

Here’s what I call The Optimization Tax.

It’s what you actually pay every time you “save” a minute. Not in money. In feeling. In aliveness. In the small stuff you didn’t even know you were cutting out.

“There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

Read that again.

We’re all washing dishes to get to the next thing. We’re never just… washing dishes.

You order groceries online - you lose the random find. You automate your morning - you lose the ritual. You skip the walk and take an auto - you lose the 15 minutes where your best ideas show up.

Every shortcut is a trade. And the thing you’re giving up is almost always the thing that made you feel alive.

Think about that.

Think about your last week. How much of it was optimized? How much of it was actually lived?

you will never have enough time.

The truth is - and this is the part I keep coming back to - no matter how much you optimize, you’ll never have enough time.

You’ll never be fast enough.

The inbox will never be empty.

The to-do list will never be done.

You will never reach that magic future moment where you’ve saved enough time to finally start living.

That moment doesn’t exist.

The constant chase of saving time is also the biggest waste of it.

I know that sounds like something you’d read on a fridge magnet. But sit with it for a second.

“The life we receive is not short but we make it so. We are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”
- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Bro wrote this 2,000 years ago. And he’s still describing us😭😭😭.

Every hour you spend making life faster is an hour you didn’t spend actually being in it. Every system you build to remove friction is a bit of texture you’ve smoothed away. Every 10-minute delivery that saved you a trip is a walk you’ll never take, a stranger you’ll never talk to, a random aisle you’ll never wander through.

Life mostly happens in the in-between. And we keep trying to kill the in-between.

why your rest doesn’t feel like rest

Even in my free time - the time I supposedly saved for - my first move is to optimize it. Podcast while cooking. Emails while eating. Book summary instead of the book. Video at 2x. Audio at 1.5x.

My free time doesn’t feel free. My rest doesn’t feel like rest.

POV: You’re lying on the couch on a Sunday. No plans. Nowhere to be. And within six minutes you’re thinking about what you should be doing instead. You open your phone. Check the to-do list.

Feel guilty for doing nothing, even though doing nothing was the whole point.

Bro.

When did rest become something we need to earn? When did sitting still become a hack we need a meditation app to teach us? When did we start treating every waking minute like something to squeeze juice out of?

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The Bhagavad Gita talks about nishkama karma - doing things without being obsessed with the result.

But we’ve built an entire culture on the exact opposite.

Every action has to lead somewhere. Every moment has to justify itself. Every hour has to show a return.

We’ve turned living into a KPI.

i’m not saying throw your phone in the ocean

I’m not saying optimization is bad. I’m not saying delete Blinkit and hand-grind your coffee and churn butter like some slow-living influencer cosplaying the 1800s.

Some things should be optimized. Your commute? Go ahead. Your taxes? Please.

But just cuz you can make everything faster doesn’t mean you should.

That’s the whole thing. The question isn’t whether to optimize.

The question is: what are you cutting out?

Because the stuff we’re so eager to get rid of? The 40-minute grocery trips. The slow meals. The aimless walks. The long conversations that go nowhere useful.

That’s the stuff that makes life feel like life.

And a life without it - idk - just feels empty. Like really, properly empty.

i couldn’t stop working

Here’s what made me write this.

Last 4-5 months, I’ve been handling GTM across 3 countries. India obviously. Then figuring things out from scratch in the US and Korea. That’s like 10 workstreams at any given time - and I’m not even counting the agency stuff, the platform juggling, the 10-15 stakeholders I’m talking to at once.

My body was telling me to slow down. I thought I was just being lazy. Or inefficient.

So I took a break. Went to Rameshwaram for 2 days.

And what did I do the second I got there? Took a work call. When we checked out and had nowhere to sit, I took the next call from the hotel rooftop. Standing there, phone to my ear, looking at the ocean, not seeing any of it.

That’s the Optimization Tax. Right there. I went all the way to Rameshwaram to take a break and I still couldn’t stop.

And look - I’m the last person you should take this advice from. I’m not preaching. I’m confessing.

This newsletter is me trying to talk myself into actually living.

A reminder that:

“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.”
- Rumi

I haven’t figured this out fully. I still feel the pull. I still catch myself listening to a podcast while brushing my teeth like a lunatic. I still feel bad when I spend an hour doing absolutely nothing.

But I’m practicing.

Because spending time well doesn’t mean spending it being productive. It means spending it like it matters. And sometimes what matters is wandering through a grocery store with no list. The random recipe. The sabzi you forgot existed.

The in-between.

Give yourself the time to spend it however you want - even if it could be faster.

Ask yourself what a waste of time actually means.

You might find that the “wasted” hours were the only ones that counted.

Until next week,

Wandering,

Drishti

P.S. If you have a thing you do slowly on purpose - cooking, walking, reading, existing - reply and tell me. I want to know what your version of the grocery store is.

P.S.S. My life has started to feel very repetitive - same calls, same briefs and feedback cycles. Kinda getting jealous of the travel influencers, don’t be surprised if I leave it all behind for something unconventional very soon.

Img credits: pinterest (cuz its beautiful)

Not who replies “as per my last email.”

Not the one who takes 3 days to text back and then says “haha sorry was busy.”

The kind that disappoints people on purpose - so they can stay real.

Sounds terrible. I know.

But stay with me.

the job nobody prepares you for

My job right now is to figure out stuff that nobody has figured out. Things so new there’s no playbook.

If someone in the US cracked it - nobody’s done it in India. If an agency did it - nobody’s done it in-house.

So I build the playbook from zero. I crack it. I hire people to replace me. Then I move to the next thing where I suck again for 2-3 months.

Does it look good on my resume? No.

Does it make me a polymath, high agency, first principles thinker? Yes.

But every single time - right before things click - I’m the asshole. The one with nothing to show in the daily standup. No dashboards turning green. No “shipped this” screenshot in Slack. The one people side-eye. The one who looks like she’s doing nothing while she’s drawing the whole damn map from scratch.

I don’t get ego boosts. And honestly? That’s the gift.

Had I stuck with something too long, I’d get attached. I’d start posting LinkedIn carousels about my “journey” instead of actually being on one.

The moment you get comfortable, you stop being dangerous.

Because being an asshole - the real kind - means being okay with sucking. Getting doubted. And rarely giving a fuck.

Or at least trying not to.

the good girl tax

Now here’s where it gets real.

There’s this thing society does. It’s quiet. It starts when you’re like 6. And by the time you notice it, it’s already inside you.

They teach you to be good.

Good daughter. Good girlfriend. Good employee. Good friend. Good girl.

You know what “good” actually means? Available. Agreeable. Small.

Don’t say no. Don’t make people uncomfortable. Don’t take up too much space. Manage everyone’s feelings before your own.

Society doesn’t want you to be good. It wants you to be convenient.

And the moment you stop being convenient?

You’re the asshole.

Look around. Watch how it plays out.

Your boyfriend wants you to dress up when you go out - but throws a fit if you skip dinner with his friends to work on your own thing.

Your boss tells you to “take ownership” - then pings you at 11pm on a Sunday asking “any update?” on something you started 4 days ago.

Your best friend wants you to listen to her rant about the same guy for the 47th time - but the one time you vent about work, she hits you with “you overthink too much.”

See the pattern?

Everyone gets to need you. But the moment you need yourself - you’re selfish.

You’ve been giving away pieces since you were 12. A piece to make dad proud. A piece to keep your friend group happy. A piece to not rock the boat at work. A piece to be the “chill” girlfriend who doesn’t ask for too much.

And now you’re standing here with nothing left. Wondering why you feel empty even though you did everything right.

Guilt is the tax you pay for having boundaries.

And society? Society is the tax collector. Shows up every month. Never misses.

The “nice girl” who never says no? She’s not nice. She’s running on fumes. She’s one more “yeah sure I’ll adjust” away from forgetting what she actually wants.

The “nice guy” who’s always there? He’s not kind. He’s keeping a tab. Every favour is an invoice. He’s investing niceness and expecting love as ROI.

Niceness without boundaries isn’t kindness. It’s a transaction with a smile.

the asshole protocol

So here’s my framework. I call it The Asshole Protocol.

Not about being cruel. About being selective.

1. Your 100% is the only criteria.

Give your full self to the thing you chose. That’s it. That’s the whole bar.

It is not your job to do everything. It’s your job to do YOUR thing - fully.

Sachin didn’t try to be a fast bowler. Shah Rukh didn’t try to direct. Cristiano doesn’t swim laps between matches.

They picked one thing. Went so deep it became their identity.

Legends don’t multitask. They choose.

2. Burn bridges on purpose.

Not all of them. Not out of anger.

But the ones that lead back to a version of you that isn’t real anymore.

The job you stayed at because “at least the salary is stable.” The friend group where you laugh at jokes you don’t find funny. The relationship where you made yourself smaller every month and called it compromise.

3. Be 100% you - even if you’re “evil.”

I’m being dramatic. But even Ravan had an army.

So if you’re the weird one - yeah, you’ll attract weird ones. If you’re intense, you’ll find intense people. If you’re the one who leaves the party early because you’d rather read - you’ll find someone who saves you a seat at the bookstore.

The wrong people will leave. That’s not a loss. That’s filtration.

You’re not performing niceness to collect people who love a version of you that doesn’t exist.

And here’s what’s wild: you’re probably not even that intense. You’re just someone who’s been told that having boundaries makes you a villain.

the real villain

Let me be honest about something.

It’s easy to read this and go: “Yes queen, burn it all, toxic IDGAF energy.”

No.

That’s not what this is. That’s just another costume.

The Asshole Protocol isn’t about not caring. It’s about caring so deeply about the right things that you say no to everything else.

Saying no to the wrong things is how you say yes to the right ones.

The reason it feels like being an asshole is because the world isn’t built for people who choose themselves.

The world runs on guilt. On obligation. On the quiet tax of being available. On the unspoken rule that if you have free time, it belongs to someone else.

The real villain was never you.

The real villain is the system that taught you - since childhood - that choosing yourself is selfish.

That rest is lazy.

That boundaries are bitchy.

That eating alone means you’re lonely.

That saying “no” to your parents means you don’t love them.

That leaving a relationship means you didn’t try hard enough.

You were never the problem.

The guilt was.

When you stop paying the guilt tax, people notice. They say you’ve become “different.” They liked you better when you were easier to use.

The people who leave when you set boundaries were only there for the absence of them.

picking your game

I suck at my job every few months. I get doubted. I sit in rooms where I have nothing impressive to say while everyone else is presenting decks with 47 slides.

And I’m telling you - that’s the best position to be in.

Because it means I’m in a new room. Learning a new thing. Building a new muscle.

The alternative? Stay in the old room. Know all the answers. Get head nods. Post about it on LinkedIn with a selfie and a “grateful for the journey” caption.

I’d rather be the asshole in a new room than the star in an old one.

In the old room - I stop growing. I start performing. And slowly, without noticing, I become someone who optimizes for applause instead of truth.

Applause is addictive. Growth is uncomfortable. Pick one.

And at the end - that’s all that matters.

People who get you.

Not people who need you. Not people who tolerate you. Not people who love the version of you that says yes to everything and never complains.

People. Who. Get. You.

The right people won’t ask you to shrink. They’ll make room for all of you.

Until next yap,

Love,

Drishti

P.S. - You’re no demon, girl. You a queen. You slay.

P.P.S. - If you burned a bridge recently and you’re second-guessing it - don’t. You already know why you did it. Trust that version of you.

Aryan is smart. Really smart. Top of his class. Great job. The whole package.

Last month he told me he wants to quit and start something of his own.

I asked him what he wants to build.

He said: “I’m thinking AI SaaS. Or maybe a D2C brand. Something in the creator economy could work too.”

I said: “Okay but what do YOU actually want to build?”

He went quiet.

Then he said something that hit me: “I don’t know. I just know what’s trending.”

That’s the disease. He knows what the market wants. He doesn’t know what he wants.

before we go any further

Let me hit you with some numbers nobody talks about.

The average Indian spends 7 hours and 47 minutes on screens every day. That’s more than most people sleep.

2 hours and 41 minutes of that is just social media.

52% of all articles on the internet are now written by AI. Not assisted by AI. Written by AI.

On TikTok, the algorithm decides what you see. Not who you follow. Not what you search for. The algorithm. Your feed is built by a machine studying your behavior.

And over 71% of TikTok users have bought something they discovered on the app. Not searched for. Discovered. Meaning: the algorithm showed it to them, and they bought it.

You’re not browsing. You’re being browsed.

the bali problem

Here’s another one.

A friend of mine went to Bali last year. She spent weeks planning it. Researching cafes, beaches, temples.

When she came back, I asked her about the trip. She showed me photos.

Every single photo looked like an Instagram reel I’d already seen. Same spots. Same aesthetic.

I asked: “what was your favorite moment?”

She said: “honestly? When the wifi went out at our homestay and we just sat on the porch and did nothing for an hour.” I laughed so hard because I had a very similar story.

The best part of her trip was the only part the algorithm hadn’t designed for her.

Think about that. Her dream vacation was curated by an algorithm. And the only real moment was when the algorithm lost signal.

the invisible machine

Think about your day. Actually think about it.

You wake up. Check your phone. Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp. Before your eyes are fully open, someone else’s content is in your head.

You’re hungry. Open Zomato or Swiggy. The app decides what you see first. Not based on what’s best. Based on who paid more to be at the top.

You want to learn something. Open YouTube. The algorithm doesn’t show you what’s true. It shows you what keeps you watching.

You want to connect with people. Open LinkedIn. Now connection means “engagement.” Friendship means “networking.” Being honest means “building a personal brand.”

Every basic human need - food, connection, curiosity, rest - now has an app. And every app is a marketplace. And every marketplace is run by an algorithm. And every algorithm has one job:

Keep you on the screen. Sell your attention. Repeat.

the hall of mirrors

Even the people you trust - the writers, the creators, the “authentic” voices - are playing the same game.

That “raw” post your favorite creator wrote? They spent 2 hours testing hooks before writing it. They know exactly what time to post. They studied which words get more saves. They A/B tested the thumbnail.

I know this because I do it too. I work in growth. My job is literally to crack distribution. I study what works. I test formats. I optimize.

And the honest truth is: sometimes I don’t know where the real me ends and the optimized me begins.

Even the “human” content you’re reading might not be human at all. You’re standing in a hall of mirrors. Every reflection looks like a person. But half of them are machines.

When was the last time you had an original desire? One that didn’t come from a reel, a tweet, a podcast, or someone else’s highlight reel?

Think about that. REALLY THINK ABOUT IT.

a different kind of poor

The old artists were broke because they created for themselves.

We looked at them and said “failure.”

But now, everyone creates for the algorithm. Everyone optimizes for likes. Everyone performs their life instead of living it.

And we’re rich. We have Zepto in 10 minutes. Blinkit for anything. Netflix for every mood. AC cabs. Swiggy. UPI.

But we’re empty.

A meditation app won’t fix this. A weekend trip won’t fix this. A self-help book recommended by the same algorithm that broke you won’t fix this.

Because the problem isn’t screen time. The problem is that your entire life is designed so you never sit with yourself long enough to ask one question:

Is any of this actually mine?

the uncomfortable part

Now - I need to be honest about something.

It’s easy to read this and go: “yeah, the system is broken, I’m a victim.”

But that’s also a cop-out.

Because the algorithm only works if you let it. It’s not holding a gun to your head. It’s just very, very good at giving you what feels good in the moment.

The real question isn’t “why is the system doing this to me.”

The real question is: “why am I so easy to capture?”

And the answer, at least for me, is scary: because I don’t know what I want badly enough to resist what’s easy.

When you have a deep desire - a real one, not a borrowed one - the algorithm has no power over you. You don’t scroll for 2 hours because you have something you’d rather be doing.

The emptiness isn’t because the system is too strong. It’s because our own signal is too weak.

the compass

There’s this concept in the Gita. Nishkama Karma.

It means: action without attachment to results.

You’re doing it because the work itself is the point.

The moment you create for the marketplace, the marketplace owns you. The moment you create because you can’t not create - you’re free.

The people who changed the world didn’t start by asking “what does the market want.”

They started by asking “what do I want so deeply that I can’t not build it.”

That desire - the one the algorithm can’t monetize and therefore never shows you - that’s your compass.

one thing

Take one hour this week. Just one.

No phone. No laptop. No input.

Sit with a blank page and answer one question:

If nobody would ever know. No likes. No followers. No metrics. No audience. What would I build? How would I spend my days?

What comes out will be messy. It might scare you. Because it’ll look nothing like your current life.

Good.

That’s the first honest signal you’ve received in years.

Do it again next week. And the next. Each time, one more borrowed voice falls away. And what’s left - after the algorithm’s voice, your parents’ voice, your ego’s voice all go quiet - what’s left is yours.

Build from that.

That’s the only life worth living. One that’s actually yours.

bye for now.

Drishti.

p.s. this week i tried making a video that was not optimized for algorithm.

p.p.s. that creator I met, he texted me last week. He made a short film. Posted it with zero optimization. Got 400 views. He said it was the happiest he’s been in a year.

p.p.p.s. if you know what you’d build in silence, reply and tell me. I read everything.

someone you worked too hard to become. disciplined. sharp. certain. you thought that was it. you had cracked the code.

you felt invincible.

and then you went out to prove it.

you chased things. built things. months passed. then years.

and somewhere in between- quietly- you stopped being that person.

–

now you look at yourself and it feels unfamiliar.

you are working more. you are wiser. more capable.

but somehow, it feels like your peak was behind you.

like the best version of you already happened. and you can’t go back.

–

but what if nothing was lost?

what if that “you” was never solid to begin with?

just memory. just pattern. just a collection of reactions you repeated so often they started to feel like identity.

and now one pattern is dissolving. and another is trying to form.

but you won’t let it. because the old one felt like home.

–

this is what no one tells you about growth:

it doesn’t feel like growth while it’s happening.

it feels like loss.

you don’t feel yourself becoming.

you feel yourself unraveling.

–

you want summer to stay. you want clarity to last. certainty to freeze.

but you are not a season.

you are the weather.

always shifting. always forming. never meant to hold one shape.

–

so the suffering begins.

not because you changed. but because you held on.

you didn’t just have that version of you. you fused with it.

and when it faded, it didn’t feel like shedding skin. it felt like losing a limb.

–

so you sit in this space- missing who you were, while refusing to meet who you could become.

trapped between a memory and a possibility. choosing the memory every time.

because at least the memory is familiar.

–

nostalgia is a liar.

it shows you highlights without context.

confidence without the anxiety underneath.

you romanticize your past self the same way you romanticize people after they leave.

you forget the mess. you keep the montage.

–

and that decay doesn’t look dramatic.

it looks like: opening your laptop… and closing it again. knowing what to do… and not doing it. thinking about your old self more than building your next one.

quiet. slow. comfortable.

the most dangerous kind of dying.

–

you are not your discipline. you are not your sharpness. you are not your worst phase or your best phase.

you are whatever is underneath all of it.

the thing that was there before the confidence. and the thing that’s still here after it left.

–

you don’t need to go back. you need to go through.

through the confusion. through the discomfort. through the identity crisis that feels like it’s swallowing you whole.

because on the other side is someone you haven’t met yet.

and they were built by everything you’re surviving right now.

–

you were never just “someone.”

you were always becoming.

and becoming doesn’t stop just because it stopped feeling good.

–

until next week,

Drishti

p.s. the version of you that you’re mourning? she did her job. she got you here. thank her. and let her go.

p.p.s. I love you.

it’s currently 2:47am in Bangalore.

I just spent the last two days completely offline and I’m trying to make sense of what happened.

–

I was sitting in a cafe last week.

there was a family at the table next to me. parents in their mid-40s, kid around 4-5 years old.

both parents were on their phones..

the kid didn’t have a phone, so she was just playing with the cutlery. stacking spoons. making patterns.

every few minutes she’d try to show them something. “look!”

just usual ordinary things, but you know children and their child like curiosity.

they’d glance up. “nice, beta.” then back to the phone.

–

that kid will get bored one day, demand a phone and will be extremely stubborn about it.

they will give it to her to keep her quiet.

and then all three of them just sit there. silent.

and I realized - fuck, I’m living exactly like those parents.

–

we have everything now, right?

Zepto delivers groceries in 10 minutes. Blinkit brings anything. Urban Company cleans your house. everything automated.

we have more time than ever before.

so why the fuck are we all exhausted?

you go to office in AC cabs. order food on Swiggy. watch Netflix. what’s there to even be tired of?

yet we need “getaways” and digital detoxes.

we say we’re connected. new social apps every day.

but families sit together in silence. everyone’s on their phones.

at work, no one wants to be disturbed. at home, everyone’s disturbed by notifications.

–

I work in growth.

my entire job is cracking distribution. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.

I’m always ON. not just consuming - creating.

but last week I completely burned out.

like, couldn’t-get-out-of-bed kind of burned out.

–

so I did something stupid.

put my phone on silent. switched off internet. no calls, no messages, no scrolling.

nothing.

day 1: I just slept. a lot.

day 2: got bored of sleeping.

–

both my flatmates were at their hometowns, so I was completely alone.

I started cooking. put on this YouTube channel about simple living in the background.

cleaned my room. properly. inside out.

cooked meals from scratch.

cleaned the fridge. arranged cabinets.

I even tried making a resin tray. it came out ugly as fuck. but I made it.

–

and sitting there, stirring dal, watching paint dry on that terrible tray, something shifted.

I don’t want to live in a race anymore.

I don’t want to optimize every second and hustle until I’m 40 and realize I forgot how to just... exist.

–

I want to live for my gut feeling. bring my ideas to life. make people happy.

If not everyone, then for my small world.

I want to be rich. but I want to be wealthier.

there’s a difference.

at least, for me.

–

there’s this king from Ramayan. Janak.

Father of mother Sita.

he had everything. wealth, power, kingdom.

but he wasn’t attached to any of it.

he ruled, he worked, he had responsibilities. but inside - completely free.

–

that’s what I want.

not to reject wealth or quit startups or run away.

but to build everything without needing any of it to define me.

if Janak could be a king and stay detached, what excuse do I have?

–

so here’s what I’m thinking.

this is my promise to my 40-year-old self:

I will have passive income. businesses that run while I sleep. products that help people when I’m not there.

I will keep writing. not for followers or fame. but because it helps me think.

I won’t try to be important. I’ll give away my playbooks. share what I learn freely.

because the work matters more than who gets credit.

–

at the end of the day, life goes on.

empires fall. apps die. trends change.

nothing I build will last forever. and that’s okay.

the point isn’t to leave a permanent mark.

the point is to live meaningfully now. build, create, help where I can. and then let it go.

–

so that when I’m 40, sitting in a cafe with my family, I’m not on my phone.

I’m actually there.

watching my kid stack spoons. and when they say “look!” - I actually look.

–

I don’t know if this makes sense.

I’m still figuring it out.

but after those two days offline, something feels different.

I want to build businesses that run without me.

write to think, not to perform.

give away what I know.

live simply while building massively.

be rich. but stay free.

just like Janak.

–

I don’t know what this new chapter will bring.

but it feels right.

and that’s good enough for now.

I’ll keep writing about this as I figure it out.

bye for now.

Drishti.

p.s. that family at the cafe left after 30 minutes. the kid never got their full attention. I don’t know their story but I know I don’t want to be them in 15 years.

p.p.s. if this made you think of something, feel free to reply. I read everything.

p.p.p.s. that resin tray didn’t turn out how i wanted. but I made it with my hands. no pronto, no automation, no optimization. just me and resin and time. and it felt more real than anything I’ve built online in months.

We’re mid-conversation . 1 am in the living room, netflix playing in background.

The vibe is chill.

We are all just having.

Or so you think.

I’m supposed to be off. Present.

And then someone says something. Something completely unrelated to work. And I go quiet for half a second and then just... go off on a tangent.

My friend shows me this cute video. WHICH IS A BRAND AD BTW. My friend says “this is so cute.” I’m already reverse-engineering the virality. The emotion the reel aroused. Why this music? What was the positioning they were going for? I start talking about it. My friend says “can you just watch the video?”

Here’s the thing.

Every human is a consumer. Every human interaction is an experiment. I can’t turn it off because it’s not a switch it’s just how I see things now.

And I never studied any of this.

I just learned how to learn even when I wasn’t supposed to learn.

I never studied any of what I do.

No degree. No course. No formal anything.

I showed up at Matiks as the first growth hire. Which means zero playbook. Zero handover document.

JD: figure it out.

So I figured it out. Broke things. Ran experiments. Sent notifications that would give any rational person a heart attack. Learned Mixpanel by being confused by Mixpanel. Did branding, community, product marketing, college leagues, all at once, with no idea what I was doing.

Today I am trusted with crores of budget. (Burning money MAUAHAHAHAH).

I meet people who are nose-deep in marketing. Frameworks tattooed on their brains. Strategy decks on standby. And I’m just here going off on tangents at dinner tables reverse-engineering ads my friends are trying to watch in peace.

I’m not smarter than them.

It’s just obvious to me. I see it everywhere.

What people talk about, what people like and then selling my product in the same packaging to go viral.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Dan Koe said it better than I can.

“No skill is going to save you. The ability to learn any skill fast, however, will.”

He calls it the meta skill. The one that compounds every other skill on top of it.

I’d been living this for a year without naming it. Reading that line felt like someone describing a colour I’d been seeing my whole life but had no word for.

Most people learn skills. Pick a lane. Get good at the lane. The world doesn’t care about your lane.

All those projections about AI, the future of work, what to learn in 2025, they’re probability dressed in confidence. Nobody knows. Not even the people writing the Twitter threads about it.

You don’t know where the world is going. I don’t either.

The only hedge is: become someone who can learn anything, fast, from scratch.

Pieter Levels never worked for anyone.

Not once. Not a single job in his life.

Self-taught. Moved across 40+ countries. Built Nomad List, Remote OK, PhotoAI. $3M/year. Solo. No team. No VC. Vanilla PHP and a laptop.

He didn’t study product. He built products until he understood product. He didn’t study marketing. He shipped things until he understood distribution.

The loop is simple:

build → break → understand → build again.

Most people wait to understand before they build.

Levels built until he understood.

That’s the difference between someone reading marketing books for six months and someone who got 10K users by running 47 experiments and understanding what the data was saying.

One of these people knows marketing. The other one thinks they do.

The second skill is weirder. Harder to talk about.

Knowing you deserve better.

Not in a self-help poster way. In a functional way. As a survival mechanism.

I’ve watched brilliant people stay in rooms they outgrew years ago. Not because they couldn’t leave. Because somewhere inside them, a voice said: maybe this is enough. Maybe I’m not the kind of person who gets more than this.

You don’t need your boss to tell you “good job” — celebrate 40% YOY growth and then cite budget constraints to justify your 5% hike — to know your worth. You don’t need a partner to tell you you’re enough. You don’t need your best friend to tell you you deserve better.

You have to know it first. Or you will always accept whatever’s in front of you.

People go from obese to athlete. Broke to millionaire. Heartbroken to the relationship they actually wanted.

Not because of any strategy. Because they decided — really decided — that the bare minimum was not what they came here for.

They knew their treasure existed. Even when nothing around them confirmed it.

There’s a story I keep coming back to.

Santiago is a shepherd boy in the south of Spain. He has a recurring dream about treasure buried at the Pyramids.

He could stay. The sheep are comfortable. The fields are familiar. The life is fine.

Fine is the enemy of the treasure.

He sells his flock. Crosses into Africa alone. Gets robbed immediately. Loses everything. Starts over from zero. Crosses the desert. Finds an alchemist. Gets robbed again. Keeps going.

Every time he thinks he’s close, the world tests him one more time.

But there’s a voice. Running underneath all of it. Telling him his treasure is near. That each setback is the path, not a detour from it.

“When you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

He makes it to the Pyramids. Digs. Finds nothing.

Then learns the treasure was back where he started. Under the tree where he first had the dream.

But here’s what everyone misses when they tell this story:

He couldn’t have found it without leaving.

The journey wasn’t the detour. The journey was the excavation. He had to become someone capable of recognizing the treasure before he could find it.

That’s learn to learn. And he had to believe — against every external signal — that the treasure was real. That he was the kind of person who deserved to find it.

That’s the second skill.

It came from being dropped in the deep end and deciding: I’ll figure this out.

Not genius. Not luck.

Just the decision that the world was learnable. And that I deserved to figure it out.

If I could go back and tell 21-year-old me anything, it wouldn’t be a skill to learn.

It would be two questions:

Do you know how to learn anything you need - fast, from scratch, from first principles?

And do you actually believe you deserve what you’re chasing?

Because if the answers are yes and yes -

honestly, nothing else matters that much. The rest is just time.

Until next week,

Drishti

P.S. — If you’re in a room you’ve outgrown, this is your sign. You already know.

or a writer.

ever since i was a kid, i was just… curious. not “why is the grass green?” or “why is the sky blue?” (cv raman handled that.)

but why do people do what they do?

i didn’t want answers.

i wanted access.

i wanted to get inside their heads.

i could never understand why people were different from me.

how they thought.

what made them choose the things they chose.

and if i’m being honest?

i always thought i was the best.

therefore, what i do is always right, why is everyone else wrong? what is the reason behind them choosing different?

so it became a mission.

13-year-old drishti. roll no. 14. 25/25 in math.

staring at chinmay. roll no. 13. 2/25.

and i wasn’t judging him.

i was confused.

• what is happening inside his head?

• what led to this?

• how does he keep getting the same marks and not change?

• how does he not see this is wrong?

that was the beginning.

(13 yr old drishti chased academic validation).

the feeling grew.

the only thing that consistently worked in my favor was this:

i am curious as fuck.

and painfully open-minded.

it stopped being comparison.

it became research.

while other kids were watching netflix during covid,

i was watching anthropology lectures from the University of Edinburgh.

• astrobiology.

• robert sapolsky.

• yuval noah harari.

• heuristics and biases.

• behavioral science and finance. (i have published a paper on psychology of investors and biases :p)

i studied human behavior like it was a survival skill.

i could have studied the curriculum. i didn’t. (don’t regret it).

even now, when i’m out with friends, after promising myself i won’t think about work,

i’m psychoanalyzing them.

why did she react like that?

why did he deflect?

is this insecurity? status play? fear of abandonment?

• and my brain starts connecting it to robert greene.

• carl jung.

• nietzsche.

it’s funny.

and sometimes exhausting.

but that’s the secret.

although a part of me still wants to believe it’s normal.

i’ve been told, again and again, it’s not.

• this obsession with understanding.

• with mapping invisible motivations.

• with decoding power, fear, ego, validation.

that’s what makes me, ME.

chase curiosity obsessively,
@primal_brainer