Before making this piece tragic, let us consider comedy. Beyond laughter, there is the absurdity of existence, the unpredictable events that twist in ways no mere mortal could have scripted. Think of the person slipping on a banana peel, an ungraceful sight followed by a crash. It’s funny because it wasn’t us. It’s funny because the sheer randomness reminds us that we are little more than characters in the universe’s circus, fumbling our way through moments we’ll laugh about someday, if not today.

But comedy has its edges. I remember times I’ve laughed as a defense, not joy, a nervous chuckle to fend off awkwardness or pain. I’ve seen people laugh at funerals because grief is a weight that can only be lifted by the weightlessness of humor. No, they are not heartless people. A facade that is both real and mirage. Life is “lowkey” cruel in its comedy, as the GenZ Tweeter I know says.

And then, of course, there is tragedy. If comedy is the absurdity of existence, then perhaps tragedy is its inevitability. We are born into this world crying, and sometimes, it feels like the tears never quite dry. The tragedies of life: heartbreak, loss, failure; they are like milestones. They are predictable as the final act of a tragic story, one like Oedipus, where the hero falls just because that’s how the story goes. No reason.

Yet even in tragedy, I find beauty. Tragedy, unlike comedy, strips us of the grasp of pretense. It is without filter: raw and honest. It exposes our most humane moments, the ones where we stop pretending and simply exist. I’ve watched people in their darkest moments find connections they never had before, see things that they’ve overlooked for as long as they existed. As if tragedy, within it’s cruelty, is the thing that reminds us we are not alone.

So, is life a comedy or a tragedy? I think it is neither and both — the Schrödinger’s cat of fate where it is and it isn’t. A comedy with a tragic plot or a tragedy with momentary comic relief like in the Marvel films people love so much. The duality is what makes it bearable and folly. The moments of laughter, fleeting, fill in the long stretches of seriousness. The moments of pain remind us to let the absurd sink in, embrace the ridiculous, accept the mundane.

Perhaps life is just a play, and we, as Shakespeare said, are merely players. The genre? Well, that depends.

I have always found this waiting harder than the rain itself. Rain, once it comes, at least asks you to do something. And quickly. You run for cover, or you don’t. You get wet, or you don’t. But the waiting asks nothing and gives nothing back. It only sits on your chest like a held breath that forgot how to release.

This year the waiting has gone on longer than I remember it going on before. Maybe it always feels that way. Maybe every year I forget how the sky can hold itself hostage and call it patience.

I keep watching for signs the way farmers do, though I am no farmer. A certain heaviness in the air. A particular grey, low enough to cover the horizon. The smell of dust just before it turns to mud. None of it means anything on its own though. All of it might mean everything together. I have stopped trusting my own reading of the sky, which is a strange thing to admit, because I used to be sure of very little else. I could tell, now I can’t.

What I know is this. I am not going inside until it breaks.

There is a kind of person who runs from weather like this. The person who decides that uncertain skies are reason enough to stay indoors, to wait it out somewhere dry and unbothered. I used to be that person. I left rooms before they got difficult. I left conversations before they asked anything real of me. I called it instinct. It was only ever FEAR wearing a better name. Try it. Call your fears “instinct” and feel the rush. Did you?

Not this season. Not anymore.

This season I am standing outside with the umbrella closed, because opening it before the rain comes feels like a kind of insult to the waiting. It feels like I do not trust the sky (or clouds) to eventually be honest with me. And I want to trust it. I want to stand here long enough that whatever comes, comes to a person who did not flinch first.

Why do we treat waiting as wasted time? Why do we call the space before certainty empty, when it is the only time we get to choose. And when we do choose, it’s deliberate and it is without evidence. Do we choose to stay?

I do not know when the rain will come. I do not know if it will come gently or all at once, if it will be the kind that clears the air or the kind that floods the roads and strands people until the tea has been reheated again and again and again. I have stopped trying to predict which. What I have decided, instead, is simpler than prediction. I will be standing here when it does.

There is a helplessness in this that I am only now learning to sit inside of instead of escape. I cannot make the sky pour down sooner. I cannot argue a cloud into rain. All I can do is remain in the one place I said I would remain, so that when it finally breaks, there is no question of where I was. I shall always be there. Waiting.

People ask why I don’t just go in, come back out when the weather has decided something. As if affection, or waiting, or whatever this is, works on a schedule you can step away from and return to unchanged. It doesn’t. The staying is the thing. It is not the shelter you find. It is just staying where you are. Even if it is uncomfortable because it means something. It means everything.

So I am here. Dry, for now. Watching the ridge for grey. Holding nothing but the waiting itself, and the plain, stubborn fact that I would rather be soaked by whatever this sky decides than dry somewhere I have to be away from it.

Either way, I already know where I’ll be standing. Hopefully, the sky will too.

Let me begin by listing the commentators we shall be looking at. Shankaracharya was writing in the eighth century in the face of rapidly rising Buddhism influence in South Asia. Ramanuja came around the eleventh, Madhvacharya the thirteenth. Abhinavagupta also wrote somewhere around the eleventh, which puts him and Ramanuja as rough contemporaries. Dnyaneshwar wrote, or narrated, his commentary in Marathi sometime in the thirteenth century and was around fifteen years old when he did it. Aurobindo was active in the twentieth century. Prabhupada is also from the twentieth century, and is probably the most read of all of them if you count how many copies the Hare Krishna movement (ISKCON) has handed out on the streets.

Same eighteen chapters. Same verses. Yet there exist starkly different conclusions about what the words mean, what God is, what you are supposed to do, and what happens to you if you do it right. I find some of this easier to follow than others and will say so when it comes up.

What is real?

Shankara says Brahman is the ultimate. The Brahman is not a being, not a person, not a god in any ordinary sense. It is instead the one undivided awareness that everything else is occurring inside. Your sense of being a specific person with a specific history is real enough to get you through the day. But it is not the deepest thing that is there.

He uses a rope-and-snake image. You see a snake in dim light, you feel the fear, the snake is completely convincing until someone brings a torch and there is only rope. The snake was never there. He says the apparent world works like this. The appearance is not nothing, there is something real underneath it, but what you think you are seeing is not what is actually there.

I find this easier to follow as a concept than as a pragmatic claim, which I think Shankara would say is exactly the problem.

Ramanuja reads this and his objection is basically: no. Individual souls are real. The material world is real. They exist as the body of Brahman, inseparable from him, but still genuine in themselves. God is personal and has qualities and you can have a relationship with him. His reading of the text is a different metaphysics using some of the similar vocabulary as Shankara’s.

The word Maya is a good example of why this matters. In verse 4.6 Krishna says he manifests through his own Maya. Shankara reads Maya as illusion. Ramanuja goes to an ancient Sanskrit text called the Nighantu, finds that Maya also meant knowledge and sovereign will, and argues the verse is saying something completely different. God manifests through his own power and knowledge. Maya, hence, is not ‘illusion’ as one would otherwise believe. One word, and the whole question of whether the Avatar (Incarnation) is real or appearance turns on it.

Madhvacharya doesn’t find any of the non-dualist positions convincing. For him, God is God, souls are souls, matter is matter, and none of them are secretly the same thing looked at from different angles. He has a formal list of five distinctions he considers permanent and irreducible. This makes him the strictest dualist of the group, and his tradition in South India, called Dvaita Vedanta, is still active and still insists on it.

Abhinavagupta is not operating within Vedanta at all. His tradition is Kashmir Shaivism and once you know that, his readings start making more sense. The one reality for him is Shiva, and Shiva exists as pure self-luminous consciousness in which everything is happening. The universe is more like something Lord Shiva is doing continuously, freely, the way consciousness generates experience whether or not you intend it to. The individual soul is Shiva in a contracted state, but it cannot recognize its own nature. Which is why for Abhinavagupta, the Gita is fundamentally about recognition rather than instruction. Recognition and instruction are key points here, since almost all sects treat the Gita as an instruction manual on how to live life.

Dnyaneshwar holds the belief that Brahman and the world are not in opposition. The world is a living expression of the divine. His metaphysics is formally non-dual but his pragtamic is devotional, which sounds like it should be a contradiction. Reading the Dnyaneshwari (His commentary on the Gita) it doesn’t feel like one.

Aurobindo thinks the world is real and that the goal of spiritual life is not to get out of it. Consciousness is evolving, he says, moving through matter, life, and mind toward something he called the Supramental. He wrote his commentary partly as a philosophy of spiritual evolution, which puts him at some distance from all the classical commentators. The others were working within an inherited framework, while Aurobindo was building one altogether.

Prabhupada holds a position called Achintya Bhedabheda, which means inconceivable simultaneous difference and non-difference. The soul and God are both distinct and non-distinct in a way that cannot be fully resolved by logic. In practice, his tradition emphasizes the distinction. For him, Krishna is the supreme personal God. The soul is the soul. The relationship between them is the final destination. There is nothing to be learned except for Krishna. That’s it.

So Who is Krishna?

Shankara’s Krishna is ultimately a pointer. The personal form is real at the level of material or physical experience. At the absolute level, Krishna is Brahman itself (the ultimate truth), who is wearing a name and a form to be perceived in the material. In verse 4.6, where Krishna says he manifests through his own maya, Shankara reads maya as illusion. The Avatar (Krishna is said to be the incarnation of Vishnu) is mere appearance in the physical world. However, Shankara does not fully work out in his commentary how an illusory being accomplishes real work in a world that is itself unreal. But he does not seem troubled by this either.

Madhva agrees the Avatar is real and pushes it further. The personal form of God is ultimate. There is nothing impersonal behind it.

Abhinavagupta reads the dialogue itself differently. Krishna is the voice of Shiva-consciousness addressing an individual soul that has forgotten what it is. The conversation is consciousness talking to itself. Arjuna’s grief in Chapter 1, which every other commentator treats as a problem to be solved, Abhinavagupta treats as the point. The grief is the crack in the ego’s surface where recognition begins to enter. It is important to note that Abhinavgupta was also philosophizing beauty and aesthetics, which shows in his commentary. (More writing on this soon!)

Prabhupada is the most insistent of all of them. Krishna is not a symbol for anything. He is svayam bhagavan (God in his original form). Any reading that reduces Krishna to an impersonal principle is, in his view, a misreading. He says this directly, multiple times, in his commentary.

So What is the seeker supposed to do?

Shankara says Jnana, which is the direct inquiry into the nature of the self. Action and devotion prepare the mind, but they do not themselves produce liberation. Liberation is recognized once ignorance is removed.

Ramanuja says Bhakti, which is the loving devotion to a personal God. Knowledge and action are to be fulfilled inside/through/within devotion. The most important moment in the Gita, for him, is verse 18.66, where Arjuna surrenders completely. The submission is the point.

Madhva also says Bhakti, but with a sharper emphasis on divine grace. His idea of the path to salvation (moksha) places more weight on God’s sovereign choice than most Vedantic schools are comfortable with.

Abhinavagupta calls his path Pratyabhijna, recognition. The seeker does not acquire something new. They recognize what was never absent. It can happen through ritual, meditation, the grace of a teacher, or through intense aesthetic and emotional experience. This is exactly why Arjuna’s grief matters to him in a way it does not matter to the others.

Dnyaneshwar prescribes what the Varkari tradition he belonged to had been working out for generations before him: devotion saturated with knowledge, knowledge that does not go cold. The practices are Namasmarana, surrender, service. However, he is also part of the Nath tradition, so his practice of devotion rests on the foundations of Hathayoga (Asana and Pranayama), particularly the practice of Mulbandha, which he says is essential for a devotee before anything else. We can see this reflect clearly in his commentary on the Gita verses in Chapter 2. Dynaneshwor wrote the Dnyaneshwari in Marathi so people without Sanskrit could access the Gita’s teachings. The form of the work is itself an argument about whose spiritual life counts.

Aurobindo prescribes what he calls a triple movement: offering all works to the Divine, surrendering the fruits of action, and surrendering the ego itself so that WHAT acts in the world is no longer the individual self. For him, the goal is transformation of life on earth. He spent the last decades of his own life in his ashram in Pondicherry working on this, largely in silence.

For Prabhupada, the practice is hearing, chanting, and remembering Krishna. The maha-mantra (greatest mantra according to him; while others agree on OM to be the greatest mantra), Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare, is central to everything his tradition prescribes. Liberation means eternal personal service to Krishna. The soul keeps its individual identity.

What does liberation look like when you get there?

Shankara: The wave understands it was water. Nothing to achieve, no one who achieves it.

Ramanuja: Eternal conscious communion with God. Individual identity is kept and perfected, in relationship with God.

Madhva: Liberation is living in the presence of Vishnu, in joy, permanently distinct from him. The dependence does not go away.

Abhinavagupta: The liberated person looks, from the outside, identical to anyone else. The difference is entirely interior, which is either a beautiful idea or a convenient one depending on your disposition.

Prabhupada: The destination is personal service to Krishna in the spiritual world. That is it. He does not complicate it further.

Dnyaneshwar: Resting in the loving recognition of one’s own divine nature, still present in the world, still devoted. He does not make it sound like an exit on has to seek.

Aurobindo: Supramental transformation, and he believed it would change the body and matter itself, not just individual consciousness.

The seven of them cannot all be right in the same way. If Shankara is correct, then the personal relationship Ramanuja spent his whole life deepening was aimed at something that does not ultimately exist in the form he loved. If Ramanuja is correct, Shankara dissolved something irreplaceable in the name of philosophy. These contradictions do not seem, as far as I am aware, to have a resolution.

I find that genuinely hard to sit with. It feels like a problem we can never solve.

Years later, reading literature on Advaita Vedanta, I kept running into this claim: you are not the body. Atman, or the deepest self, is Brahman, pure consciousness, without any of the attributes the world assigns to you based on the body you arrived in. The caste you were born into, the sex of your body, your gender, the family name, all these are superimpositions that are real at the level of everyday experience but not ultimately what one is.

The philosophy has always contained this pressure against hierarchy. The question is whether the people who held the philosophy also applied it, and how.

Swami Vivekananda was explicit

He condemned untouchability and birth-based caste discrimination as corruptions of Dharma. To him it was the old Hinduism misunderstood and the deformations of it. “Each soul is potentially divine,” he writes in Jnana Yoga. For him, this statement operates both metaphysically and socially. If every being contains the same divine potential, then any system that treats some beings as structurally lesser is philosophically incoherent. It contradicts the very teaching it claims to stand on.

He also drew a distinction between varna (contemporarily characterized as the caste system) as guna — a natural stratification by character and capacity that he thought had ‘some’ legitimacy — and the birth-based hereditary system that had calcified over centuries. The latter he rejected without any qualification of any sorts. He extended the same logic to women’s education, which he supported not as a necessity that followed from Vedantic premises.

Ramana Maharshi just lived differently.

His ashram quietly practiced no segregation by caste, creed, or gender without making it a position. People of every background sat in his presence. He did not announce a social program. He saw what he saw: the Self, the same in all of them.

He is quoted saying, “There is diversity in the world. Unity runs through this diversity. The Self is the same in all.”

His understanding was that genuine social reform follows from genuine realization. That a person who truly sees the Self in everything cannot treat another being as structurally lesser. The seeing makes the discrimination structurally impossible. This is not, then, merely limited to being morally discouraged.

There is a critique of this position that it can sound like ‘spiritual bypassing’. The premise of ‘change yourself first, and social transformation will follow’ is pedantic at best, one could argue. Meanwhile people are being harmed by systems that do not wait for anyone’s realization. Ramana’s legacy holds both responses. The quiet living-against-the-system at the ashram, BUT the public silence on structural critique. Both are part of what he left behind.

Acharya Prashant is the most structural

Caste exists in the mind, he says. He says that it is ego organized by inherited conditioning. The body was given to us without our consent. We did not choose the family, the name, or the social position. Identifying with these as our essential self is the beginning of the problem, and caste-identity is one of the more durable and socially enforced forms of that identification.

On gender, the logic runs the same way. “You are not the body. What is male or female?” (Advait in Everyday Life) This sounds, at first, like a way of dissolving the problem rather than addressing it. He is careful to say that the practical inequalities exist and have consequences in the real world. But the person who fully realizes “I am not this body” cannot, from that seeing, justify the exploitation of anyone based on the body they were born into. The realization, if genuine, undermines the justification for hierarchy at its root.

None of the three have tangible answers that address social hierarchies. Do we work towards it actively? Or as the Maharishi and Acharya note; we must look inwards and change will follow. If a billion people decide to not look inwards and continue in the hierarchical practice, are we, as Advait practitioners, supposed to look the other way? That remains to be answered.

On Morality

On morality more broadly, the three share a foundation but differ in emphasis.

For Swami Vivekananda, ethical conduct is preparatory. Ahimsa, truthfulness, right action, discipline the mind for inquiry, make it more sattvic (clear, stable). They are not redemptive in themselves. A moral life, however, does not produce direct liberation. Instead, he argues that a life organized around harm and deception makes the mind unsuitable for the kind of clear seeing that Advaita requires. The ethics are epistemological.

Ramana says something similar about diet, which sounds like a minor point but is not. Vegetarianism, for him, is not an ethical rule imposed from outside. It is a practical necessity: meat produces rajasic and tamasic qualities (restlessness and dullness) that agitate the mind and obstruct inquiry. The prescription is rooted in what the practice requires. It is not sentimental.

Swami Vivekananda disagreed with this, or at least complicated it. He did not prescribe vegetarianism universally. His view was more developmental: dietary preferences change as the mind becomes more sattvic, but external rules—imposed before that internal change occurs—produce hypocrisy rather than purity. He ate meat himself.

Acharya Prashant frames violence more broadly. Killing where it can be avoided reinforces body-identification and the structures of exploitation the ego builds to sustain itself. It is not that meat-eating is a sin. It is that the indifference to harm required to sustain it reflects and reinforces something in the mind that Advaita is trying to dissolve.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad insists on a unity running beneath all apparent diversity. A unity of species, of persons, of social categories. All three teachers draw on that insistence. What differs is their urgency and the approach. Vivekananda argues it in public. Ramana lives it at the ashram. Prashant traces it through the psychology of daily identification.

The environment I grew up in had a certain character and I absorbed it without knowing I was being shaped by it. At some point you notice the wind that chipped away and moulded us into something that is optimized to absorb the flow. It gets uncomfortable. You start searching for the truth. You begin to see things you thought were normal. The way your mum waits for your father and grandfathers and uncles to finish their dinner before she can eat. The way you are frowned upon when you go buy meat in the month of Shrawan. The way people in your village tell you to not touch the old man playing the drum at functions and melas. That noticing is perhaps where it begins. But where do we go from there; I still have no answers from Swami Vivekananda, the Maharshi, or Acharya Prashant. Yet.

More Readings:

Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga and Bhakti Yoga

Godman, Be As You Are

Osborne, ed., Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi

Prashant, Advait in Everyday Life

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (on unity beneath diversity).

This is what people who contrast bhakti (worship) unfavorably with jnana (knowledge) tend to miss. It does not require a philosophical framework. The whole architecture of it is love, surrender, devotion. You do not need to understand non-duality to practice it. You just have to mean it.

Advaita Vedanta, at its theoretical highest, says all distinctions dissolve. Devotee, God, and the act of devotion are appearances within a single undivided consciousness. So technically, bhakti should be beside the point. And yet every major teacher in this tradition has had to take a position on it.

The popular image of Ramana Maharshi is incomplete

Everyone who has read a little Advait knows the teaching: trace the “I”-thought back to its source. The ego cannot sustain itself under scrutiny. What remains was never absent. This is what gets quoted. What gets quoted less is that Ramana spent more than five decades beside the hill of Arunachala in Tamil Nadu and composed devotional hymns to it, addressing it as a form of Shiva and simultaneously as his own Self. While it seems logical to argue that Maharshi composed the hymns as instruction to his students. But these hymns are the kind you write when something has actually gotten to you. They read like someone who actually felt something and wrote it down.

Sri Ramanasramam published a Tamil text called Sivabhaktavilasam, a purana on the glory of devotion to Shiva, and in its preface Ramana’s own words appear. What he says there does not support the image of someone who saw devotion as a mere preliminary exercise. He describes it as a complete path.

His position on the two routes is simple enough to quote directly: there is the path of inquiry, tracing the I-thought to its source, and there is complete surrender to God, leaving everything to Him. He said both paths arrive at the same destination. He called them the two wings of a bird. I find this more interesting than the version of Ramana that gets passed around in Western Advaita circles, where the inquiry is the whole story and devotion is for people who have not yet understood.

Swami Vivekananda on why most people start here.

Jnana requires a particular sharpness. Not everyone arrives with it naturally, and even if they do, it can become arid. Bhakti begins somewhere most people already are: they love something. A person, a deity, an idea. The practice is to take that love seriously, let it deepen, let it expand past its original object. At sufficient intensity, the boundary between the devotee and the worshipped becomes hard to maintain. What started as a relationship, became a merger.

Essentially Ramana Maharshi and Swami Vivekananda are saying the same thing when they talk about the destination. However, Vivekananda is saying bhakti is more natural as a starting point for most people, and that it ends in the same dissolution of the separate self that jnana aims at. He is also careful about what kind of love he means. Not the variety that we are accustomed to that depends on the object behaving in ways that please you. The Narada Bhakti Sutras have a term for what he is pointing at: para bhakti, supreme devotion, which asks nothing back. I have met very few people who love anything that way. Maybe that is the point.

Acharya Prashant keeps collapsing the distinction

Which is either very clarifying or a way of avoiding the tension depending on your mood when you read him. Genuine bhakti, he says, is the willingness to love Truth more than the ego loves its own continuity. When devotion actually reaches that, when the surrender is real, it becomes indistinguishable from jnana. They are the same activity described from two different positions. Fine. But that standard is so high that most of what gets called bhakti in practice does not qualify, which is also his point, and maybe he is right. In Acharya Prashant’s view, one learns through jnana to let go of ego and reach the stage of unconditional love; which, in fact, is Bhakti itself.

He is skeptical of devotional religion that keeps the ego intact under devotional cover. Prayer structured as a transaction, I will worship and you will protect me and mine, leaves the devotee’s basic orientation untouched. The form is devotional. The underlying structure is not. The ego has simply found a new costume. (Acharya Prashant YouTube videos on Bhakti)

The grace problem

The Katha Upanishad says the Self reveals itself to the one it chooses. I keep returning to this because I cannot put it down to a singular understanding. The tradition ‘asks’ you to practice, discriminate, inquire. And then it simultaneously says the ‘choosing’ is not yours. Grace is not something you earn through sustained effort. If anything it sounds more like what happens in surrender, in Bhakti, in giving up the project entirely. So what is the jnana path doing, exactly, if the outcome is not in its hands?

Ramana comes closest to answering this. The Sadguru (not Jaggi Vasudev), he says, is not a person external to the seeker but the Self itself “pulling the sincere seeker inward”. The effort and the grace are not alternatives. They are the same movement seen from two angles depending on where you are standing.

Maybe effort and surrender describe the same thing at different moments in the same practice. Maybe the question of which path to take is less important than the question of whether you are actually doing it.

My grandmother probably does not think about any of this. She just does the thing. Every morning, the same sequence. That might also be an answer.

More Readings:

Vivekananda, Bhakti Yoga and Jnana Yoga

Godman, Be As You Are

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi, preface to Sivabhaktavilasam

Acharya Prashant, Advait in Everyday Life

The Katha Upanishad

Years later I actually read the people who made that claim. Turns out the statement means something very precise, and something very different depending on who is saying it. Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, and Acharya Prashant all work within this tradition. Broadly, they agree. Once you ask what they actually mean by any of it, things get interesting. At least in terms of how they arrive at their landing statements.

So let us ask them to be specific.

What is real?

For Swami Vivekananda, Brahman is real. Everything else is real in the way that a wave is real. You see, the wave exists, it moves, it crashes, but it is water the whole time. The name “wave” is a convenience, not an independent thing. The world and the people in it have what he calls vyavaharika, or empirical, reality. Now if you are not real, you should not walk into traffic because you have understood Advaita. But the rock-solid separate self one thinks oneself to be is not ultimately what is there. (Jnana Yoga)

Ramana says something that initially sounds identical but points differently. The Self (which is always capitalized in his books) is the only reality. Contrary to Brahman as a concept to be understood, reality is the self, which is the simple fact of pure awareness that is present right now, before you attach any story to it. Everything else, including your sense of being a particular person with a particular history, rises and falls within that awareness. When you are in deep dreamless sleep, you do not disappear. Something remains. He says that something is the Self, and it is available to you right now without any preparation. The inquiry “Who am I?” is merely the direction you look.

Prashant uses the word “Truth” where the others might say Brahman or Self. Reality, for him, is whatever is left when you take away all the noise the ego adds to experience. He is careful to say that this cannot be described because any description is already the ego doing its thing. The ego, Acharya Prashant says, is always organizing, labeling, claiming. What he is pointing at is the quality of experience when it is not being distorted by influence from society.

Who is God?

This is where the differences become visible but they only exist in the means.

Vivekananda allows personal God fully. “Ishvara” is a God with attributes, a being you can pray to, relate to, have a relationship with. This God is real at the level where most people live. But as understanding deepens, the boundary between the devotee and God becomes harder to maintain. Eventually, the personal God is not discarded so much as absorbed into something larger. The worshipper and the worshipped turn out to be the same thing. The personal form was a useful approach, not the destination.

Ramana holds Ishvara with more care. He would not dismiss devotion to a personal God, and he did not live as though that dimension of religious life was merely a stepping stone to be left behind. He composed hymns to Arunachala (the hill in Tamil Nadu beside which he lived for decades) addressing it as both Shiva and as his own Self simultaneously. But he is clear that from the absolute standpoint, there is only the Self. A separate God, separate from the one perceiving God, exists only as long as the sense of being a separate self exists. When that dissolves, what you had been worshipping turns out to have been your own deepest nature all along.

Prashant says Ishvara exists only while the ego experiences duality. He insists on the divine being the “force” that pulls one towards the center. (Advait in Everyday Life). However, we are never told what the center metaphysically is; just that the center is where ego cannot enter. Dissolve the ego, he says, and Ishvara is recognized as having always been Brahman, Atman, the Self. He is skeptical of religion that keeps God permanently external, permanently Other, because it serves to maintain the very duality it claims to be resolving.

What is Maya?

Maya is usually translated as illusion, which is the translation that produces the confused twelve-year-old at the religious gathering. Vivekananda’s version is more specific. The world exists. The problem is that you are misreading what it is. He uses the image of a rope seen as a snake in dim light. The snake is a genuine hallucination with a real source. The rope is really there. The problem is misidentification. Remove the dim light, the Swami says, and understand clearly what is actually present. We shall see then, that the snake never was.

Ramana does not spend much time analyzing Maya. His view is that Maya has no independent existence; it exists only in relation to the ego that perceives it. When the ego dissolves through Self-inquiry, Maya dissolves with it. Trying to understand or fight Maya directly is a mistake because you are then the ego engaging with its own projection, which keeps both of them in business. The solution is to find out who is being deceived.

Prashant treats Maya as primarily psychological. It is not a cosmic force operating on a metaphysical plane. It is the mind organized by conditioning, fear, and the compulsion to preserve the self-image. You do not see reality as it is because you are always seeing it through the filter of what you want, what you fear, and what you have been told you are. Maya, in his framing, is the sum of all those filters.

What is Kripa?

Kripa means grace. There are two kinds in the tradition: Ishwar kripa, which is grace from God, and guru kripa, which is grace from the teacher. And the moment you take Advaita seriously, grace becomes a blurry topic.

Because if the ego cannot dissolve itself by effort alone, i.e., if the one doing the sadhana is the very thing that needs to be dissolved, then at some point something beyond effort seems to be required. The Katha Upanishad says the Self reveals itself to the one it chooses (Katha Upanishad, 1.2.23). That is a remarkable statement in a tradition that places enormous weight on personal effort and discrimination.

Vivekananda does not dismiss grace but he does not let you park there either. The guru is necessary; guru kripa is real. But it operates through the student’s own sincere engagement. You cannot wait for grace as a substitute for practice. (Jnana Yoga)

Ramana takes grace most seriously of the three. The Sadguru (the true teacher) is the Self itself, drawing the sincere seeker inward. “Grace is always there,” he says. “It is because of Maya that we think it is not.” The “impulse to seek”, in his framing, is already grace operating.

Acharya Prashant is cautious. The ego, he points out, is very good at converting spiritual concepts into new forms of avoidance. “I am waiting for grace” is one of its better moves. Grace, for him, is what becomes available when the ego’s grip loosens. Less of a gift, more of a clearing.

The question none of them fully resolves is that if grace is necessary, and grace aligns more naturally with surrender and devotion than with self-directed inquiry, what does that say about the jnana (knowledge) path? I will come back to this in the next part.

(Part 2 will talk about Grace and practice, and Part 3 shall look at morality, society, and justice)

More reading about this:

Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga and Bhakti Yoga

David Godman, Be As You Are

Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I? and Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

Acharya Prashant, Advait in Everyday Life (PrashantAdvait Foundation, 2018).

The Katha Upanishad
Adi Shankara, Brahma Shutra Bhashya

I closed the laptop and sat in the quiet for a while. I am not sure how long. Long enough that it started to feel slightly illegal. Slightly uncomfortable.

I have been thinking ever since about what it would actually take to live differently. Not merely a thought experiment. A real question with real costs. Because I think I have been using the philosophical version of this question to avoid the personal one. It is easier to wonder abstractly whether modern life has become too complex than to admit that I am tired, specifically, and that I have built the machine that is tiring me, and that I keep maintaining it because I am afraid of what people would think if I let it slow down.

The first thing I would have to give up is the performance. I have been doing it so long I barely notice anymore. There is the version of me that exists in professional spaces, which is measured, careful, useful. The version shows up for family as dutiful, slightly edited, reliably fine. The version appears in social situations engaged, a little funny, asking questions I already know the answers to because it keeps things moving. I switch between them so automatically that I sometimes wonder at the end of a day and sit very still because I cannot immediately locate which version I actually am. A quieter life would require picking one. Just one. And walking into every room with it, even when it disappoints people, even when the air changes because I am not performing the expected version. I have not done this yet. I don’t know if I can. The adjustments, I suspect, are closer to cowardice.

The second thing would be to stop letting life expand. Mine has been growing for years in the way that seems completely reasonable from the inside. A better phone because the old one was slow. A gym membership because health matters. A freelance project because the money would help. A social commitment because I genuinely like these people. Each one made sense at the time. All of them together have produced a life that requires constant tending just to stay functional. I spend a real portion of my days managing the infrastructure of my own existence. I am not sure when this happened. I am not sure what I traded it for. I sometimes try to remember what I used to do with time before I filled it this completely and I find that I cannot.

Trusting people more directly would also be necessary. I have become good at keeping interactions inside their proper containers. Work conversations stay professional. Friendships are maintained through messages sent at appropriate intervals. I make sure I am never too much for any situation. This feels like social competence. I have started to wonder if it is just loneliness organized neatly enough that I don’t have to acknowledge it. There used to be people I called without a reason. I have stopped doing that. I tell myself everyone is busy, which is true, but it is also a way of never risking the call.

Then there is the meaning problem. I have a profession. I am okay at it. When people ask what I do I tell them and the conversation moves forward and that is the whole thing. But the job was never supposed to be the answer. It was supposed to fund a life that had its own answer. Somewhere over the years those two things swapped positions without my noticing and now the work is the center and the rest is what happens in the margins. “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans”, said John Lennon once.

I wonder what drove him to say that in the 70s. Perhaps like him, I don’t know what I would put at the center instead. That is the actual problem. It is easy to critique the structure. It is harder to admit that I have been hiding inside the structure because I haven’t figured out what I am for.

Time would have to change. I treat it now the way I was trained to. Time is supposed to be something to be used, justified, converted into outcomes. Even when I rest I am aware of the rest being “productive”, the sleep being necessary for “performance”, the walk being good for “mental health”. I cannot remember the last time I did something that had no purpose. Sat somewhere and let the hours pass without monitoring them. Let a conversation run until it was finished rather than steering it toward a natural stopping point so I could get back to something else. I am writing this and realizing I do not know how to stop optimizing. I have been doing it so long that unstructured time now produces a low anxiety, like a warning light, a sense that I am falling behind something.

Forgiveness is where it gets harder to write honestly. There are people I have not forgiven. I have accumulated disappointments, expectations that were never spoken aloud and therefore never met, affections that hardened over time into something more like obligation. I carry these quietly. They don’t ruin my days. They just occupy space. I return to them sometimes at night, running the same familiar loops, and I know on some level that the loops are not processing anything, they are just a habit the mind developed because releasing the weight felt harder than carrying it. I have not let them go. I keep thinking I will when the moment is right, which is another way of saying I have decided not to.

The real risk in all of this is that stepping back from the expected life can make you contemptuous of people still living it. I have caught this in myself. A certain private impatience with busyness performed as virtue, with people who seem not to have questioned any of it. This is the ugliest part. Because those people are navigating the same impossible set of pressures with the same incomplete information I have. The questioning is not wisdom. It is just what I do instead of changing.

I have not run the experiment. I have only thought about running it, which is considerably easier and produces no discomfort whatsoever. The calendar is still full. The versions of myself are still rotating on schedule. The life is still expanding incrementally in all directions.

But I sat in the quiet for a while that afternoon. And something in me recognized the quiet. I think that is where it starts. I think that is as far as I have gotten.

I read constantly. I underlined sentences I couldn’t explain. I learned how long a paragraph could sit in front of me before it stopped feeling like language and started feeling like resistance. Around me, people, my classmates, spoke with confidence. I listened. Silence became a skill. I wasn’t good enough to say anything. My opinions would have been funny to them. I didn’t even have an opinion because I understood nothing.

My family wanted me to be an engineer. I chose literature without fully knowing what that meant. I imagined novels, discussions, a slow sharpening of thought. What I encountered instead was distance. Between words and meaning. Between what I read and what I felt capable of saying about it.

The reading lists arrived early and heavy. Names stacked on top of each other. Philosophy crept in almost immediately. Texts asked questions I didn’t yet know how to identify. Meaning slipped away quickly. I kept reading anyway.

By the time Derrida appeared, confusion had already settled in. The language behaved differently there. Each sentence seemed to carry weight without offering direction. I moved through pages carefully, convinced that understanding might accumulate if I stayed long enough. It didn’t. What did accumulate was fatigue.

Other people seemed fluent. They nodded at the right moments. They spoke in ways that sounded “intellectual”. However, I would soon learn how easily certainty circulates in rooms like that. I learned how easily confusion can disguise itself as thought.

My life outside class mirrored that feeling. I was in a relationship that demanded interpretation. Every exchange carried a second meaning. Every silence felt instructional. I spent my nights moving between theory and affection, both asking more of me than I could give. Somewhere in that stretch of time, engineering returned to my thoughts. I felt like as an engineer, at least I could see where I stood.

Then I read Ion by Plato.

It was short. The shortness mattered. It mattered because I could read it 50 times in a day if I had to. After months of texts that expanded endlessly, this one fit in my hands without effort. Plato stages a conversation between a rhapsode (Ion) and a philosopher (Socrates). One recites poetry. The other asks questions. The questions accumulate. Something changes.

I followed the dialogue without losing my place. Ion spoke with confidence about Homer. Socrates asked what that confidence rested on. The performance slowly unraveled. Familiarity with Homer turned out to be insufficient for Ion. His recitation carried sound, not understanding. Watching that distinction take shape felt instructive in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

I returned to my other readings differently. I read while asking questions that had nothing to do with exams. What was being claimed. Why it mattered. What was at stake. The difficulty remained. My relationship to it changed.

In my second year, I took my first philosophy course. We read Dostoevsky.

Notes from Underground arrived without warning. The voice felt close. The narrator contradicted himself freely. Self contradictions. Yes.

Intelligence and resentment shared sentences. I recognized the movement of the mind before I recognized the ideas. I stayed with it longer than required.

By my fourth semester, a different frustration took hold. Academic writing began to feel ornamental. Arguments arrived wrapped in language designed to impress. Citations multiplied and kept growing. Felt exponential. Curiosity felt thin, like butter scraped over too much bread (from Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings). Philosophy started to feel preserved rather than practiced.

That semester, I met Professor Clancy Martin.

He listened. I told him I felt stalled. I told him I wanted to work with ideas without flattening them into “papers”. I asked if I could write short stories instead of academic papers. The permission arrived easily. Movie-like scripts were acceptable too. Fiction counted.

The effect was immediate. Writing stories demanded a different kind of precision. Ideas had to move through the characters in my story. Concepts required consequences. A character living in bad faith had to act. The theory stopped floating. It fought back.

I read differently again. Sartre became a set of pressures. Freud became repetition. Philosophy returned to human scale. It took longer, but it stayed with me.

Looking back, Ion makes sense. Philosophy was never about memorizing outcomes. It asked for participation. Plato, Kant, Heidegger were asking questions and refusing to stop once things became uncomfortable. Philosophy (The love of wisdom) demanded involvement.

That short dialogue did what years of theory hadn’t managed. It pulled me inside the conversation. It made thinking feel alive rather than ceremonial. Meeting someone who understood that, who allowed me to work with ideas on my own terms, made the difference.

I still don’t know how people evaluate my choice.

I do. And I think I would make it again.

And here’s something I want to leave you with. When you’re in a room where everyone else sounds so confident and speak in a way that it feels like everything whooshed past your head, like nothing makes sense, like you are not smart enough to get what they mean—there is a very good chance no one in the room knows anything!

I packed lightly, as if weight would betray intention. I told myself it was a simple decision. A week with her. A visit. People do this all the time. What I did not tell myself was that roads do not agree to lies. Every passing kilometer asks a question. Every vibration of the handle demands an answer. By the time I crossed the last stretch of highway, my body already knew what my mind was carefully avoiding.

I was in love with her by then. I just refused to admit it.

The first two days passed gently. Too gently. We walked, talked, ate, laughed, learned the small rhythms of each other. Nothing dramatic happened, and that, somehow, felt dangerous. Drama would have given me something to react against. Calm only deepened the truth. By the third day, it was impossible to pretend that this was casual. The weight of what was forming sat quietly between us, unnamed but undeniable.

That afternoon, we went to a café.

We chose a corner. A small divider separated us from the rest of the room. The light was dim, forgiving. We were hidden without hiding. I remember thinking that the space understood us better than we understood ourselves. We were serious about each other by then. Not in declarations, not in promises, but in the way we paid attention. In the pauses. In the restraint. In the care we took not to speak too far ahead of ourselves.

Outside the window, the street carried on. Vendors shouted prices into the air. Motorbikes cut through traffic with the confidence. People walked past with places to be and reasons that felt necessary to them. Whenever the conversation edged toward something irreversible, we looked outside. We watched the road. It felt safer to look at movement than at meaning.

That was when I began looking for reasons to leave.

I did not want to leave her. I wanted to leave the feeling. I have always been good at that—leaving before things settle, leaving while it can still be explained, but has begun getting uncomfortable. I told myself I was being rational. That this was adulthood. That love must negotiate with feasibility before it is allowed to exist.

So we talked about dating the way cautious people do. We spoke about what life would look like. About plans. About careers. About distance. About whether the relationship would be easy, whether it would drain us, whether it would demand sacrifices we would later resent. These were not hypothetical questions. They were shields.

I said what I had been rehearsing in my head since morning. That it was going to be hard. That I was terrified. That maybe we were not a good idea.

She agreed.

She did not argue. She did not soften the edges. She agreed, and as she did, tears filled her eyes. Mine followed before I could stop them. Agreement felt heavier than rejection. It closed doors I had hoped would remain politely open.

After that, we fell into silence.

Not the comfortable kind. The honest kind. The kind that does not ask to be fixed. We sat there for a long time—thirty minutes, maybe more. Time lost its urgency. The waitress came by and asked if we needed anything else. We smiled and said no, performing normalcy with impressive discipline. Our food lay half eaten between us, cooling slowly. Neither of us wanted it. Hunger had become irrelevant.

I tried to break the silence poorly. I asked if she wanted to eat. To prove that life could continue, I took a bite myself. It was difficult to swallow—not because of the food, but because my mind was busy constructing a world where she was not with me. I tried to imagine it honestly. I failed. Every version of that world felt uninhabitable.

She spoke then.

“Thank you for everything, Avinash.”

The sentence landed carefully. Too carefully. It sounded like closure.

“That feels like a goodbye,” I said, where I was referring to the finality in her tone. “Like we are not going to see each other again.”

She began crying. “No. You are in this city for me. I will not leave you by yourself. But after that, maybe. Yes.”

The word maybe did not soften anything. It postponed the inevitable just enough to let it hurt fully. We cried together then. Earlier that afternoon, we had been holding hands, sitting close, touching without thought. For the last couple of hours, we had kept a foot of distance between us—distance as discipline, distance as fear.

“I had barely begun knowing you,” I said, “and now I don’t know if I can handle a world without you in it.”

We held hands again. We did not speak.

In that quiet, I thought about the road I had traveled to be there. I thought about how easily we glorify movement that leads away from people, how “success” has been framed as departure, how careers are allowed to demand everything while love is asked to justify its existence. Why is progress measured by distance traveled and not by who remains beside us. Why do we call staying weakness, and leaving ambition.

I have chased a career for as long as I can remember—or at least the version of it that looks respectable, the kind that fits into conversations and plans. Sitting there, with her hand in mine, it all felt strangely hollow. What does success even mean if it costs us the people who make life feel real. Why do we accept lives that look impressive but feel empty. Why do we build futures that cannot hold the people we love.

“I think I am in love with you,” I said.

I was not entirely sure when liking had become love. I only knew that this time something was different. I wanted to work things out. I wanted to make effort. I wanted to believe that life could still happen without either of us disappearing. This was the first time I had felt this way. I have always been a runner—I have always trusted exits more than entrances. Not this time. This time, I wanted to stay and see what honesty demanded of me.

She looked at me through her tears and said, “I don’t think I am in love with you, Avinash. I know I am in love with you.”

I no longer care about what happens in the future. I told her then, that I wasn’t sure what happens now. But I say, “I am sure that you are someone I want to put in effort with, together. Yes. Of that, I am sure.” She agrees, and that’s enough.

So this is not a resolution. It is a record.

I did not get here suddenly. I got here the way I reach most things, by doing the opposite of what was expected of me; long enough for something truer to emerge. Long before content, before strategy pitch decks, before workshops and reels, there were quiet little gestures of rebellion shaping my life. I never fit neatly into the futures that were handed to me. In fact, I was terrified of them. I did not protest against them loudly. I simply avoided them.

When the time came for engineering entrances, I deliberately failed the IOE Pulchowk entrance exam. Think of IOE as the headquarters of the Nepali engineering cult—you get in, you make it in life (or so they say). This is not something I am proud of, but it is something I am honest about. I did not want to spend my youth in coaching institutes rehearsing obedience. I did not want to inherit ambition without consent. I learned early that if you explain too much, people start negotiating your life for you. So I explained very little.

I enrolled in literature without telling anyone at home. Later, after meeting Professor Clancy Martin, I saw myself shifting to philosophy. Again, quietly. At the time, it looked like confusion. I could never stick to one thing. In hindsight, it looks like alignment delayed by fear. I was not chasing passion. I was escaping suffocation.

Around 2011, I found my friend Nimesh. Or maybe we found each other. We bonded over The Bucket List, which feels ironic now. One conversation led to another. Acting entered the picture. That led to random short skits at school, and eventually Nepali film auditions. Mostly rejections. Rejection has a way of stripping intention down to its core. It asks a simple question: do you want this badly enough to keep going when no one affirms you? Somewhere between waiting rooms and polite dismissals, my interest shifted. Acting was no longer enough. I wanted to understand how stories were built, how meaning was assembled. Filmmaking arrived quietly and stayed.

Writing had already been there. I wrote because it helped me think without arriving too quickly at conclusions. I stayed because it tolerated uncertainty. Over time, filmmaking and writing became the only two things I could sustain. Not because they were always enjoyable, but because I did not abandon them when they stopped being rewarding. I have tried many things. I quit most of them. Writing and filming (and thinking to be honest) stayed.

Subscribe now

In between, I tried being normal, mostly to escape the agonizing scrutiny from nosey relatives. I entered professional spaces. I learned how organizations work, how narratives move money, how strategy can either clarify or conceal intention. I worked across media and education. I led campaigns. I wrote proposals. I trained educators. I spent agonizing hours at fancy cafes with people in suits who have gotten efficient at pretending. I facilitated workshops on critical thinking, organizational management, HR, leadership. I worked on INGO-supported initiatives. I stood in rooms with hundreds of teachers and students and tried to make complex ideas usable. I learned that I enjoy teaching, but only in bursts. I am good in rooms. I am bad at routines. Permanence exhausts me. Intensity sustains me.

Eventually, the corporate project I was working on ended. For years, this would have sent me into panic. Stability had always masqueraded as virtue in my head. This time, something else happened. Nothing followed. I did not look for another job immediately. I sat with the silence. For the first time, unemployment did not feel like failure. It felt like permission.

In April, I finally started the Instagram channel I had been postponing for years. I had rehearsed this beginning endlessly. I told myself I was not ready. That I needed one more course, one more credential, one more sign. That sentence protected me for a long time. This year, it stopped convincing me.

Around this time, I went to Banaras. Not as a pilgrim. Not as a tourist. As someone carrying a question without language. I walked the city without demanding revelation. I sat by the river without framing it for memory. What I realized there was simple and uncomfortable. Identity is not something you discover in a moment of clarity. It doesn’t come as a sudden realization. It is something you practice repeatedly, often imperfectly, clumsily, often without applause.

Love had not been kind to me before this year. Or perhaps I had not been kind to myself within it. I was gullible. I often mistook intensity for intimacy. I chased people who never fully chose me. The heartbreaks accumulated quietly until I stopped believing in love altogether. By July, I had become someone who stayed permanently available and permanently detached. It felt efficient. It felt safe.

Then she entered. Slowly. Texts in September. Phone calls by October. No grand declarations. No cinematic gestures. By the end of December, I had spent enough time in her arms to understand something I had forgotten. Being loved correctly feels calm. It does not demand performance. I had assumptions about who I would end up with. I thought I needed someone poetic, someone like me. It turns out she fills the gaps. I already do poetry. She’s probably reading this and rolling her eyes because we’ve had our moments of panic and saying, “yeah well, I’m not sure about the calm part.” But hey, a few bumps here and there are necessary reminders yeah?

As the year progressed, something else settled. Purpose. Not the dramatic, destiny-laden kind. The practical kind. I cannot do a nine-to-five. I cannot survive academia. I am not built for institutional permanence. What I think I can do is make people pause. My content began as philosophy videos. Short, dense, sometimes uncomfortable. Slowly, it is shifting toward short films. Stories that do not explain themselves. Stories that ask instead of conclude.

This is not a pivot. It is a convergence. Media, education, philosophy, writing, skepticism, all finally occupying the same space. The audience came later. Tens of thousands of people found the work. The numbers surprised me. But they are not what I am grateful for. I am grateful that I finally took responsibility for the life I was already living. I stopped hiding behind preparation. I stopped waiting to be ready.

I am grateful for the years of not fitting in. For the refusals that looked like failures. For the delays that protected me from futures I would have resented. I am grateful for the people who stayed, for the interests that endured neglect, for the questions that refused to be answered prematurely.

This account is not a brand. It is context. If you have ever wondered who the person behind these posts is, this is the answer. Untidy. Slow. Skeptical. Still unsure. But no longer drifting.

That feels like enough gratitude to carry forward.

Thank you, dear reader for making it to the end.

Yours,

JustAvinash27

“Food cooked on firewood tastes way better,” my uncle said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Really? Better how? Objectively, or just because it’s firewood?”

“Better,” my cousin chimed in. “It just tastes different. Richer. You’ll understand when you grow up.”

I laughed. I tried to imagine what “growing up” had to do with it. But I couldn’t let it go. My curiosity is relentless in these moments. I wanted to know if firewood actually made lentil soup taste better, or if we were just telling ourselves a story.

I went home and started digging. PubMed, research journals, blogs — anything I could find about firewood stoves versus LPG stoves. Answer: not really. There’s no scientific evidence that fuel type alone makes food taste better. The Maillard reaction, that browning magic that gives food its aroma and flavor, doesn’t care if the heat comes from wood or gas. Heat is heat. Smoke only matters if it actually touches the food, and in most firewood stoves, it doesn’t interfere enough to matter. Sure, the clay pots used on traditional firewood stoves retain moisture differently than metal ones on LPG, subtly changing texture, but that’s cookware, not fuel.

Curious, I decided to test it. Blindfolded, I begged my cousin to cook me two bowls of lentil soup: one cooked on a firewood stove, one on an LPG stove. I could not tell the difference. “You’re joking,” she said. “Nope,” I said, slightly defensive. She smiled knowingly.

“See? It’s the mind. You expect it to taste better, so it does.”

And she’s right. People talk about firewood-cooked food being richer, smokier, more flavorful. And yes, sometimes it is, but the fuel itself is rarely the real factor. It’s tradition, nostalgia, memory, and the small rituals surrounding the food. The scent of the kitchen, the creak of the stove, the way sunlight hits the room, the chatter and laughter around the table. All of it flavors the experience far more than firewood or gas ever could.

I thought about all the things I do the same way. I trust “old methods” because they feel right. I assume complexity adds value. I let perception dictate preference. And now, even the taste of my own lentil soup felt like a question mark. Our minds are powerful. They color our experiences. They whisper “this is better” long before we even know why. Sometimes they’re right, often they just believe.

I was back at my family table some months later. The same conversation came up. I shrugged, and said, “Okay, maybe firewood tastes better in our heads.”

They laughed. I laughed. We ate.

There’s a lesson in this, I realized. Taste isn’t just on the tongue. It’s in the stories we carry, in the expectations we bring, in the tiny rituals we barely notice. Firewood doesn’t magically improve lentil soup. Instead, its our memories, our culture, the little things we associate with cooking. We taste with our minds long before our mouths ever decide. And maybe it’s okay.

However, dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, you probably have opinions on things too. But I’d like to leave you with this — how do we decide when our opinions need to be examined? What if not every opinion we have can be laughed off like I did on the dining table?

Yours sincerely,

JustAvinash27

He does not notice when this begins. It feels natural, almost virtuous. Someone he loves is struggling, so of course he should try. He listens more carefully. He offers reassurance, softly at first, then with increasing precision. He thinks about what he could say differently, how he could be warmer, clearer, calmer. He watches her reactions like data points, trying to infer whether his presence is helping or merely occupying space. And when the anxiety remains, as anxiety so often does, the verdict arrives quietly. “I am insufficient”.

Philosophers have warned about this confusion for centuries, but warnings are useless when emotions are involved. The Stoics spoke of control, of understanding what belongs to us and what never did. But love laughs at such boundaries. In love, another person’s inner weather feels intimately tied to your moral worth. If they are calm, you have succeeded. If they are not, you must have failed. Responsibility expands beyond action and intention and begins to swallow outcomes, moods, silences, and pauses that were never yours to command.

This is where the cycle tightens.

He sees her struggle and feels an almost ethical urgency to respond. To do nothing feels cruel. To step back feels like abandonment. Emmanuel Levinas might call this the demand of the Other, the way vulnerability pulls at us before logic can intervene. Levinas’ "demand of the Other" is the core of his ethics. Its a non-reciprocal call for responsibility that arises from the vulnerable "Face" of the Other person, which interrupts our self-centeredness and appeals the "I" to be "one-for-them”.

Now, He does not want to fix her, at least not consciously. He wants her to know she is loved. But love becomes indistinguishable from effort, and effort becomes indistinguishable from obligation. He keeps reaching for the right words, the right timing, the right version of himself that might finally make things lighter.

When it doesn’t work, he tries harder.

Soon another fear appears, quieter but sharper. What if he is doing too much? What if the reassurance feels repetitive, heavy, suffocating? He notices subtle shifts. Shorter replies. A request for space framed gently but firmly. Now he is trapped between two equally terrifying possibilities. Try less and risk being absent. Try more and risk being intrusive. Every choice feels wrong, and indecision becomes its own form of guilt.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the self dissolves when it depends too heavily on another’s perception. This is not dramatic or obvious in daily life. It looks like overthinking messages, or rehearsing conversations that may never happen. Like constantly asking yourself whether your care is visible, welcome, or excessive. Love becomes something you monitor rather than inhabit.

The cruel irony is that this obsession with being enough slowly makes presence impossible. He is no longer there with her. He is there with his anxiety about her anxiety. He is listening, but also judging himself for how well he is listening. He is caring, but also watching himself care, measuring it, adjusting it, correcting it. The relationship becomes crowded with self-surveillance.

At some point, a question forms that he is afraid to answer. Should he let her be on her own, or should he keep trying to be there for her?

There is no clean philosophical rule here. Modern advice culture offers slogans instead of wisdom. Hold space, but do not fix. Be supportive, but respect boundaries. Be present, but do not lose yourself. These are not instructions. They are ideals that collapse under real emotional weight.

What philosophy can offer instead is a shift in how the problem is framed. When anxiety becomes something he feels responsible for resolving, she quietly turns into a problem to be managed, and he turns into a tool whose value depends on results. This is not because he lacks love, but because he has mistaken love for efficacy.

Anxiety does not obey love. It does not dissolve because someone cares correctly. It can coexist with being deeply loved, and this is the truth that feels hardest to accept. When he ties his worth to her calmness, he turns love into a test he can never pass consistently.

The moment of resolution, then, arrives as exhaustion.

He realizes that trying to be enough has made him smaller, not stronger. That love offered under pressure becomes brittle. That his constant effort to reassure is not proof of devotion, but evidence of fear. Fear of being inadequate. Fear that without constant effort, he will disappear.

Letting go does not mean withdrawing care. It means releasing the demand that care must cure. He begins to learn, slowly and imperfectly, to say less without saying nothing. To be present without hovering. To allow silence without filling it out of panic. He understands that loving someone does not require constant demonstration, and that trust includes trusting their capacity to sit with their own feelings.

This does not eliminate doubt. Doubt still visits. But it no longer runs the show.

The quiet resolution is this: he stops auditioning for the role of a good partner and simply occupies it. He accepts that he can offer steadiness without control, affection without guarantees, presence without performance. He learns that being enough was never about doing more, but about doing anything, only with all the honesty he can muster.

And in that restraint, love finally has room to breathe. Thank you, my Queen.

Then it continues. Some people say life is measured by the ones you leave behind. Some say faith. Some say love. Some say it doesn’t matter at all. And then the narrator (Morgan Freeman ❤️) continues, “Edward Cole lived more in his last days than most people do in a lifetime. And I thought, yeah, maybe, but also—maybe not. Maybe it’s completely, utterly, ridiculous.

I watched the movie, and I had fun throughout. Really fun. Two old men, rich, with cancer, deciding to live their last months like teenagers who just discovered the world. Sports cars in the desert, airplanes, mountain views, hot air balloons, coffee in places most of us will never see. I laughed at some of it. I shook my head at other parts. It’s absurd, right? Cancer doesn’t care about sunsets. It doesn’t give you extra time for forgiveness or perfect lighting for reconciliation. Families don’t suddenly hug each other in hotel rooms and pretend everything is okay. It’s kind of messed up. It also seems unfair. And yet, there they were on my screen, living it all, and you can’t help but feel. Something.

Then there’s that scene on top of the pyramids. Carter and Cole, looking out at the horizon, talking about heaven, about truth, about deception, about the questions we all have but rarely ask: Have you found joy in your life? Has your life brought joy to others? These were important questions because your answers would determine if you’d be granted entry in the Egyptian heavens. It’s quiet, even in the middle of this loud, cinematic adventure. And I felt a jolt. I thought about my own life. I thought about days where nothing much happened. I thought about afternoons that felt like they stretched forever but disappeared too quickly. I thought about the people I’ve tried to love, and failed.

Kierkegaard would have ‘tsk tsk’ed me. He’d say the despair I felt in that moment—the weird, uncomfortable confrontation with my own life—is exactly what it means to live authentically. Despair is not sadness. Despair is the recognition that maybe I have been living a life given to me by others. The life everyone expects me to live. The life measured by accomplishments, by applause, by checklists. And suddenly, on top of the pyramids, absurd as it all is, the movie asks me to confront my reality. Have I found joy in life?

And then there’s Dostoevsky, knocking on the doors at the edges of my thoughts. His characters always feel like they’re carrying too much. They carry the weight of freedom, the weight of choice. Every decision, even small ones, matters. Cole has everything you can get when you have a net worth of millions, and yet none of it matters. Carter starts as a man with fewer advantages, more ordinary, and slowly, he begins to understand what really matters. He chooses. He decides. And that is perhaps what makes the movie stick. It’s not the adventure, or the cars, or the desert, or the impossible adventures, but choice. It’s the act of choosing to live consciously. It’s the act of trying to find joy, even if life feels impossible. Cole learns. He makes a choice too at the end.

The opening monologue frames it all. Life measured in things, in faith, in love, in emptiness. And the ending letter closes the loop. Carter writes to Cole:

Dear Edward, I’ve gone back and forth the last few days trying to decide whether or not I should even write this…But in all honestly, if I had the chance, I’d do it again…find the joy in your life. My pastor always says our lives are streams flowing into the same river towards whatever heaven lies in the mist beyond the falls. Find the joy in your life…close your eyes and let the waters take you home.

I paused again. Sat back. The room felt quiet. Outside, pigeons lined up on the balcony railing. A car horned somewhere in the distance. And I realized that this is the part that sticks. Not the list. Not the wealth. Not the improbable adventures. The river. The letting go. Joy, maybe, isn’t something you chase. It’s something you let find you.

Although, I can’t seem to get past the absurdity. Real life is nothing like that. People don’t get perfect moments, timed for emotional resonance. The movie is sanitized, almost painfully neat. It risks being insensitive to those who really suffer, who really watch life slip away without any adventure, any closure, any cinematic revelation. And yet, despite that, it leaves something stubborn behind. The questions it asks are the same Kierkegaard asked in his journals, the same Dostoevsky wrung out in the small tragedies of his characters: How are you living? What matters? What have you actually done with this life you were given?

I thought about the mornings I’ve wasted. The afternoons I spent scrolling, pretending I was busy. The evenings I avoided conversation, avoided reflection. And I realized that even in its absurdity, the movie forced me to measure my life against the one measure that matters. Not the achievements. Not the applause. Not even the relationships as others measure them. Just: Did I allow myself to feel joy? Did I bring joy to anyone else? Did I try? Did I notice? Did I pause long enough to let the river carry me somewhere meaningful?

And maybe that is why it lingers. It is unrealistic, improbable, sometimes laughable. But it is also effortlessly insistent. It asks the questions we generally avoid. It reminds us that life, albeit messy, is a river, and the river will carry us whether we are ready or not. The joy isn’t in checking boxes, reaching milestones, scoring goals, buying the house, marrying the love of your life, or whatever . It’s in the awareness that the river exists. That you exist. That joy is possible if you’re willing to accept it. That maybe, if you allow it, you can let yourself drift a little, and just be.

I find myself thinking of that scene again. Days later, while walking past a pond in this pond-full town I live in, I began noticing how the leaves fall in slow, random patterns, how the wind pushes and pulls and drag them sideways and diagonally along the water. I remembered Carter and Cole sitting on the pyramids, talking about the Egyptian heaven, about whether they had lived. And I wondered: have I lived? Have I measured myself? Have I chosen consciously, honestly?

It’s terrifying and beautiful at the same time. And maybe that is the point. The film doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t give you a neat, clean formula for living. It simply asks the questions, and then leaves you to wrestle with them, maybe for the rest of your day, maybe longer. The questions will not go away.

Have you found joy in your life?

Has your life brought joy to others?

And you carry them, quietly, like a secret that is only yours, like a leaf caught on the water.

And I think that is why I love The Bucket List so much. Even if the film’s plot is unrealistic and absurd. Even if it is insensitive to people dealing with terminal illnesses in parts. It asks the questions that matter. It reminds us that life is not about checklists, it’s not about what others think, it’s not about perfection. It is about the river, the flow, the letting go. And maybe, just maybe, that’s where we find joy.

She is six, endlessly moving, full of energy, and obsessed with monsters. Not the monsters in books, not the ones adults say are “symbolic.” She talks about the ones under beds, behind doors, crammed into the tiny space between the closet and the wall. Waiting. Always. Ready to grab your ankles when you’re not looking. Real monsters, in her universe. The kind that breathe and watch and hide. At first, I laughed. Of course there are no monsters. It’s just shadows cast by streetlights, just the monkeys dropping things on the roof, just the ordinary whispers of a child’s imagination. My mind had a list of all the ways her fears were constructed: evolution, cognitive patterns, trauma, and whatnot. Rationally was immune though. I had outgrown irrationality years ago. I should have stayed immune.

Then she invited me to play. Hide and seek. With monsters.

I should have refused. I should have stayed in the living room with the adults, slurping my coffee, discussing bank interest rates and disappointing election candidates. I should have stayed logical. And yet, when she grabbed my hand, her eyes wide with excitement and terror, and whispered, “They’re looking for us. We need to hide before they find us,” something in me bent.

The game seemed easy enough. She took off down the hallway and pressed herself against the wall, poking her head around the corner like she expected something to jump out. I tried the same move and failed. I couldn’t match her finesse in movement with all my mobility issues.

“Can you hear them?” she whispered. I listened. Nothing. Just the fridge humming, people talking somewhere far off. “No,” I said. She looked at me with something like pity. “Listen carefully!”

And then something shifted.

We played for what felt like hours, even though it was probably half an hour at most. We hid behind chairs and tables, crept around corners, whispered whenever the room got dim enough. We kept coming up with elaborate escape plans. We argued about whether monsters could actually see in the dark or if they just sensed movement, like some kind of animal. And then we invented rules. Water was a barrier, so the bathroom counted as safe territory (although it didn’t feel safe to be honest). The whole thing kept expanding, round after round, until this little universe we’d made had its own logic, like it had always existed.

I ended up laughing (really laughing!) because of how much fun she was having and how seriously we were both treating this ridiculous world. And somewhere in the middle of that, I noticed I was ‘actually’ scared. Nothing in front of me was actually dangerous, but I was scared anyway. Scared of something imaginary, something harmless, something that didn’t exist outside the game. And somehow that was the kind that mattered. Because it meant I’d let myself sink into it, let myself play without analyzing every second, without holding the whole moment at a distance the way I usually do.

The fear was tiny, almost nothing, but it was real. My heart sped up when we ran. My breath caught a little when we hid. I moved more carefully than necessary, quieter too, as if any sound might matter. I even found myself looking at the darker corners of the room, believing for a second that something might actually be there. It made no sense. It was irrational. And it was wonderful!

Later that night, after she had gone to bed feeling triumphant, I sat in the dim light trying to understand it. Why had I felt anything at all. How could a game built entirely from imagination produce real reactions in my body and real emotions I could not deny.

Nietzsche wrote about embracing life in all its contradictions, about the vitality of instinct and experience that can’t be reduced to concepts. That evening, following my cousin into her imaginary world, I had done exactly that. I had let instinct guide me, let acting overtake analysis, let joy and fear coexist without needing to resolve the contradiction.

What struck me most wasn’t the philosophical precedent but something simpler: I had forgotten how to do this. At some point, in becoming an adult, becoming rational, becoming serious, I had stopped allowing myself to fully enter experiences that weren’t strictly logical. I had built such a fortress around myself—walls of evidence and proof—that I’d lost the ability to simply be in a moment without rationalizing it.

Children do this effortlessly. They slip between worlds. One moment they’re eating cereal; the next they’re on a rocket ship to the stars. They don’t need proof. They don’t need it to make sense. They have flexibility that we adults squeeze out of ourselves. We learn to be skeptical, to question, to demand evidence. But somewhere in that process, we forget that not all experiences are meant to be proven. Some are meant to be lived.

That evening, my cousin had given me permission to remember. Not to return to childhood, but to carry forward some of what makes childhood so desirable. The capacity for wonder. The willingness to pretend. The ability to invest fully in something without needing to believe it’s literally true.

Because here is what I understood in that moment. The monsters did not need to exist for the experience to feel real. The fear did not need a logical cause to rise in my chest. The joy did not need any kind of justification to matter. I could know, with complete confidence, that nothing lived under that bed, and still feel my pulse jump when my cousin whispered that something was getting closer. Both things could sit side by side. I could hold both realities at the same time.

Rationality is a tool. A magnificent tool, perhaps the greatest our species has developed. It has given us medicine, technology, the ability to predict eclipses and even split atoms unleashing powers no human should possess. I would never dismiss its impact on what the world looks like today. But it is a tool, not the totality of human experience. There are other ways of knowing, other ways of being in the world.

When I followed my cousin into her game, I wasn’t abandoning reason. I was adding to it. I was allowing multiple modes of experience to coexist. I could be both the rational adult who knew the monsters were imaginary and the engaged participant who felt genuine fear. I could hold both truths simultaneously without one negating the other.

This is what children understand intuitively and adults often forget: “play” is not the opposite of seriousness. My fortress of logic, which I thought impenetrable, had been breached by innocence. And it had felt wonderful.

That day, I understood something simple and strange: reason and imagination, skepticism and fear—they are not enemies. They are layers of the same life, each illuminating the other, each necessary to experience the world whole.

Philosophers have often celebrated the contradictions of life, the importance of saying yes to experience in all its forms. These aren’t just abstract philosophical statements. They are descriptions of what it means to be human, to be alive, to navigate a world that reason alone cannot fully comprehend.

And I learned it all from a six-year-old girl who believed in monsters.

The film wasn’t saying anything mind-boggling. It wasn’t being righteous, or lecturing or moral-policing. It was just showing people making choices. Carefully, nervously, sometimes selfishly, sometimes helplessly. But as I watched the characters hesitate, I kept feeling this uncanny familiarity creep in from somewhere beneath what I was watching on my screen. I realized (and I was almost annoyed) that I too lived in the same world these characters lived in, and that this world had been quietly shaping the way I think about relationships without ever asking for my permission.

We love to pretend our choices are clean and emotional and honest. But if I’m being honest with myself (really honest), I know that a lot of decisions I’ve made weren’t only about affection or connection. They were also compromises. They were also about the world around me. Rent, the future, the fear of instability, the awareness that one wrong step, or an unexpected twist, can ruin years of careful balance. None of this is romantic, of course. But it’s real. And this is what the film reminded me that modern love grapples with chains of expectation, ambition, and that its not free and present anymore. It moves through the narrow corridors consumerism built for us, like everything else around us.

I don’t think any of us consciously wake up and say, “Let me evaluate this person based on material conditions.” Maybe the ancient Greeks did that. But the evaluation happens anyway. It slips in through the back door. The way the low buzz of current through your cheap faulty wiring becomes part of the background noise. Before you notice it, you’ve already integrated it into your life. We grew up hearing a hundred different versions of what success should look like, and somewhere along the line, it stopped being a suggestion and became a measurement. A proper life is a neat life, a stable life, a predictable life. A certain kind of future where happiness looks like destiny rather than precious moments.

I didn’t like realizing the kinds of questions I actually ask myself in love. They feel almost absurd when spoken aloud, but quietly shape how I show up. If they call me and ask me to come over, do I have enough gas to get there without worrying about the rest of the week? Will I be able to pick up the snacks they like without cutting into what I’ve already budgeted? Can I swing the sunflowers they love for their birthday without feeling guilty afterward? If they want to go somewhere, will I be able to say yes without silently calculating the cost of the trip? It’s uncomfortable, but it’s human. And maybe the small shame we feel about these questions is proof that we still want love to feel full and generous, even when what counts as “full” and “generous” has been defined in ways that make it almost impossible to be enough.

I don’t think people have become greedier. I think life has become louder. Success now is not an achievement but a defense mechanism. Like a shield. A way of proving to the world and to yourself that you are safe from chaos. Happiness, too, has been redesigned. Instead of being “felt”, it has become a checklist.

1. Get this

2. Reach that

3. Secure this

4. Maintain that

A process of assembling rather than experiencing. And when this is the template we absorb, day after day, how can it not creep into the way we love?

There’s a strange tension here that lies quietly in the background. Not big arguments or dramatic breakups. Just a subtle sense that maybe life could be better if only we pushed a little harder. Earned a little more. Became a slightly more polished version of ourselves. Consumerism has this annoying habit of convincing us we’re almost there. It turns the “good” into the “almost good”, and the “almost good” into the “not quite enough”. And when that becomes the default mode of thinking, even love starts to feel like something that needs improvement.

When the film ended and I stepped out, I realized the plot itself didn’t matter much (Chris Evans wasn’t Captain America, but a regular guy??). What mattered was the world it held up like a mirror. The characters were torn between the futures each decision represented. Futures shaped less by love and more by the pressures of a society where desire and survival are now tangled so tightly that pulling one loosens the other. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is exactly what so many of us are navigating without ever saying it aloud.

But the strange thing is that I didn’t close my laptop screen feeling cynical. If anything, I felt a kind of soft respect for anyone who still manages to choose love today. Real love, not the strategic version almost feels almost rebellious now. Like you’re quietly refusing to participate in a system that wants you to calculate everything. Choosing a person, without filtering them through “what kind of life can we build?” or “what can they protect me from?” feels like reclaiming something we lost on the way.

And maybe that’s the only hopeful conclusion I walked away with: that love hasn’t weakened at all. It’s just lifting heavier burdens now, carrying the weight of a world obsessed with measurement. And the fact that people still choose each other—despite everything that tells them not to—that feels like a little miracle. Not loud, not dramatic, not even beautiful, but present. Like a quiet reminder that some parts of being human refuse to be trapped by constructed truths that are true only because people agreed, like we did with paper with faces on them, to let them be.

Leave a comment

Image : bigthink.com

I realized it one afternoon, marching through life with my checklist face on, carrying deadlines, goals, fears disguised as dreams, and dreams disguised as fears, when I noticed a little flutter at the corner of my attention: a breath. Just a breath. Gentle, insistent, almost shy. It didn’t say anything to me. It didn’t promise me anything. It simply existed, and for the first time in weeks, I felt myself noticing. I resisted at first, because who has time for a breath when there are emails to answer, meetings to attend, futures to build, and productivity to prove?

Share

But the breath persisted, lingering at the edges of my attention like a person who refuses to leave until you acknowledge them. Eventually, I bent down and picked it up, awkwardly, as if holding it wrong might break it. I placed it beside my alarm clock, the one that rings at 5 a.m., shouting at me to “GO WIN THE MORNING.” The breath and the alarm sat together like roommates who don’t particularly like each other. One was soft, unambitious, indifferent; the other militant, relentless, demanding.

I tried to nurture the breath. I carved out moments, sacrificed tasks, rearranged my day, creating a little corner just for it. I treated it like something precious I was afraid to lose. And then, inevitably, I ruined it. I began timing my inhales, counting my exhales, tracking it, optimizing it. I was trying to squeeze perfection from something that had only ever asked to be seen. Philosophers have warned that the greatest danger is losing oneself quietly. They say we lose ourselves not in dramatic gestures, but in the subtle, polite ways, we forget we’re alive. I was doing exactly that, hiding life itself under calendars, streaks, and rules.

Subscribe now

And then, as expected, the breath wilted like a flower forgotten. Shallow, mechanical, impatient. I realized what I had done: we hustle as if we’ll live forever, as if the future we are working toward has already sent us a confirmation receipt. Seneca called it humankind’s greatest tragedy: “we live as if we will never die, postponing joy, deferring presence, forgetting that life could vanish in an instant.” We treat time as infinite and forget that each breath, each moment, each person who crosses our path is a fragile gift we’re borrowing.

I notice the way she laughs across the room, how her presence doesn’t demand explanation or justification. The quiet moments we share feel fuller than words. Pauses hold more meaning than any checklist or goal I chase. Being around her makes me see how much I’ve rushed, how many moments I’ve overlooked, and might have overlooked, in my pursuit of the future. Like the breath, like life, like love itself: trying to perfect it for later, trying to control it too tightly for later. And by doing so we risk losing what matters most. The present.

I see that some things don’t need fixing. I don’t have to optimize joy or performance or connection. I can simply exist, and in doing so, I learn to exist for myself. That’s why I am, in the full honesty of my soul, still an ignorant f*ck. I sometimes forget I am mortal. I forget that chaos could claim me at any moment. I forget that no streak, no goal, no carefully crafted future will protect me from that truth. But in these moments of complete presence, I remember that life is not a metric to maximize or a future to hustle toward. Life (and the people who walk with us through it) is fragile, fleeting things, and sometimes all they ask is that we pause, breathe, and simply exist before the world pulls us along again.

This paper examines the curious species known as “people who like papers.” Through qualitative observation (mostly me watching people highlight PDFs with religious intensity, and more recently, hearing her talk), this study explores why certain individuals experience genuine joy when encountering citations, theoretical frameworks, and words like “ontological” (justavinash27, 2019). The findings suggest that these individuals have developed a deep attachment to academia itself, regardless of whether the content says anything meaningful or anything at all.

Introduction

I handed someone a short story I’d written. Before I could tell them if they liked it, they messaged me: “Give me a few minutes, I am reading your paper.”

It wasn’t a paper. It had no abstract. No references. No methodology section explaining how I arrived at the emotional conclusions. It was just... a story. With feelings.

This moment made me wonder: At what point does a person stop reading for pleasure and start reading for structure? And more disturbingly: why do some people seem unable to consume any piece of writing without mentally dividing it into sections, assigning it a theoretical framework, and deciding whether it “contributes to the discourse”?

I have watched people turn restaurant menus into conceptual mumbo jumbos. I have heard casual observations about the weather transformed into claims that “require closer observations.” These are not academics doing academic work. These are people who have internalized the form so completely that they cannot escape it, even when ordering food (justavinash27, 2021).

This paper is an attempt to understand that transformation.

Literature Review (Which I Didn’t Actually Do)

If literature on this topic existed, it would probably say something like: “Academic communities function as self-perpetuating ecosystems of complexity, wherein the process of knowledge production becomes the content” (justavinash27, 2019).

But I didn’t read any literature. I’m citing myself, which is exactly what this paper is about.

What I have observed is that people who love papers share certain tendencies:

1. They use words like “praxis” and “interrogate” in normal conversation, as if these words mean something different from “practice” and “examine” (which they don’t). However, saying them differently makes you feel like you’re part of something (justavinash27, 2020).

2. They fear simplicity. If an idea can be understood on first reading, it must be shallow. Difficulty is mistaken for depth. Confusion is mistaken for rigor.

3. They exist in a closed loop of mutual citation, where everyone references everyone else until the whole thing becomes a perfect circle of self-validation. Nobody checks if the original source actually said what everyone claims it said (justavinash27, 2025).

The irony is that most academics don’t fully understand what they’re reading either. They’ve just learned to pretend better. The whole system runs on mutual shoulder-tapping.

Methodology

This study uses what I’m calling the “Observational Overthinking Method.” I watched people. I listened to conversations. I paid attention to how certain humans interact with documents that have headings.

No participants were harmed, though several were mildly annoyed when I asked them to “theorize” their Spotify playlist (justavinash27, 2022).

The data is unscientific, anecdotal, and completely shaped by my own biases — which is true of most research, honestly, but most researchers don’t admit it in the methodology section.

Let me know if you know why I used this image here :)

Findings

1. Identity Paper’tics’

For some people, liking papers is more about personality than a preference.

They talk about journals the way other people talk about music or food. A paper isn’t just a document, but a worldview, a statement of who you are, proof that you belong to the intellectual tribe (justavinash27, 2021).

I once met someone who introduced themselves by saying, “I work on some (I forgot) theory and postcolonial temporality.” I didn’t ask for their research interests. I had said, “Hey! I think we met briefly at the literature festival”.

This happens because academic identity is fragile. Outside the university, nobody cares that you published in a “top-tier journal.” Your family still thinks you’re a student. Your neighbour hasn’t read your dissertation. The only people who validate your existence are other academics. And they, unfortunately, only do it if you speak their language (justavinash27, 2023).

So papers become lifeboats. Each citation is proof that you matter. Each footnote is a small reminder of your existence.

2. The Citation Circulation Complex

There’s a particular kind of pleasure that academic-minded people experience when they drop a citation into conversation. I call it the Citation Circulation Complex.

Someone will say something completely ordinary — “People like being understood”, and the academic will immediately respond: “Yes, as Ennie Mennie makes this argument about human psychology in Baa baa blacksheep...” (justavinash27, 2022).

The citation adds nothing to the conversation. But it establishes something else: membership. It says, “I have read the things you’ve read. I know the names you know. I belong here.”

It’s the intellectual version of pretending that you like Americano. And it works, because the other person either nods in recognition or feels vaguely embarrassed that they haven’t read Ennie Mennie, even though they probably should have by now.

The funniest part is when people cite papers they haven’t actually read, or cite them for ideas the paper doesn’t quite say. But nobody checks because checking is exhausting. We’re all just trying to finish our own reviews (justavinash27, 2017).

3. Gatekeeping or Nah?

Academics love gates. Conceptual gates. No, not literal. Conceptual.

Their instinct is to decide who is “in” and who is “not sufficiently grounded in the discourse.” The gatekeeping usually starts with a question: “Have you read [obscure theorist]?”

This is almost never genuine curiosity. It’s a test.

If you say no, you’ve failed. If you say yes, they’ll ask a follow-up question to see if you really read it, or just skimmed the introduction like everyone else, and me lol (justavinash27, 2021).

Gatekeeping also shows up in language. If you can say something in a way that makes most people feel confused? Voila! You’ve succeeded! This is why academic writing often sounds like it was written by someone who learned English from a translated philosophy textbook and never gets invited to parties.

But here’s the thing: I argue, citing myself, that even academics don’t understand half of what they read. They just nod along, hoping nobody asks them to explain. The whole system depends on everyone pretending at the same time (justavinash27, 2023).

4. Structure, Structure, and more Structure

People who spend years writing papers eventually forget how to not structure their thoughts.

Everything becomes a framework. A simple observation like “It’s raining” gets transformed into: “This meteorological event can be situated within broader patterns of climatic instability, which themselves reflect anthropogenic interventions in ecological systems.” (ChatGPT generated this statement, I didn’t know how to—sorry readers)

I once asked someone how their day was. They said, “I’m going to answer that in three parts.”

They were serious.

Part one: morning.

Part two: afternoon.

Part three: “reflections on temporal experience and productivity” (justavinash27, 2024).

Academics also cannot tell stories without first providing 10 minutes of context. A 5-minute anecdote requires a full historical background, a theoretical framing, and some other stuff. By the time they get to the actual story, everyone has forgotten why it mattered.

This is what happens when you train people to write 8,000-word essays. They lose the ability to just say things they want to say (justavinash27, 2022).

5. The Sweet Seduction of Clarity

If something is easy to understand, it must not be rigorous.

This is the unspoken belief underlying academic culture. Clarity is treated as a flaw. Accessibility is suspicious. If you finish reading something and actually understand it on the first try, you start to wonder if it was even worth reading (justavinash27, 2017, Literary Theory Class).

I’ve watched people dismiss genuinely good ideas because they were expressed too clearly. “It’s a bit too accessible,” they’ll say. As if being understandable were a design failure.

This creates a perverse system where complexity is rewarded and simplicity is punished. Writers learn to inflate their prose, to add unnecessary clauses, to say “interrogate” instead of “examine”. The goal stops being communication. The goal becomes sounding intelligent.

And it works. The most cited papers are often the least readable. People cite them because they don’t fully understand them. The confusion becomes proof that it must be important (justavinash27, 2023).

Let me know if you know why I used this image here too :)

Discussion

So why do people fall in love with papers?

I think it’s because papers offer something increasingly rare: order!

The world is chaotic. People and relationships are messy. Feelings are, well, feelings. But a paper? Ooh lala. A paper has sections. It has a clear structure — introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, and conclusion. It has citations that lead to other citations, forming an endless web of connections. Everything has its place (justavinash27, 2024).

Papers are comforting because they pretend that knowledge is stable and cumulative. Each paper builds on the last. Each scholar stands on the shoulders of previous scholars (or at least on the shoulders of people who got published). There’s a sense of progress, even if that progress is just more papers about papers.

But here’s the truth: I get it.

Maybe we’re all just trying to make sense of things. And if papers help some people do that, then who am I to judge?

Conclusion

People who like papers are both delightful and slightly exhausting.

They treat documents with a seriousness that most of us reserve for life-or-death decisions. They speak in frameworks and theoretical lenses. They cannot order food without contextualizing their choices within broader systems of meaning (justavinash27, 2021).

But there’s something oddly sincere about it. There’s devotion in their complexity. There’s passion, which is perhaps misdirected, I’d say, but passion nonetheless.

When they say “I’m reading a paper,” what they really mean is: “I’m entering a world where things make sense. Where knowledge has structure. Where everything has a place.”

Even if that world is built entirely out of citations, subsections, and words that nobody uses in real life.

And honestly? I respect it.

Because we all need our rituals. We all need ways to pretend the universe is comprehensible. For some people, that’s religion. For others, it’s art. For paper-lovers, it’s the abstract-introduction-methodology-findings-discussion-conclusion structure.

It’s their way of praying.

Maybe papers aren’t about knowledge. Maybe they’re about faith (justavinash27, 2025).

References

justavinash27. (2017–2024). Everything I’ve ever observed, thought, or pretended to understand. Unpublished, but somehow still cited.

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about why we do the things we do. Why some people, and maybe all of us at one time or another, throw ourselves headlong into work, study, projects, milestones, as if each small accomplishment might somehow whisper to the universe, “See me. I exist. I am enough.” And I wonder: who told us that the world’s acknowledgment is necessary? Who gave it the authority to validate our existence?

It’s tempting, of course, to think that achievement can bind us to reality, as if a grade, a paper, a promotion, an award, a recognition, could anchor us in the world more securely than our own breathing. But then I pause and ask myself, “what if this bond is imaginary? What if recognition is an illusion we clutch so tightly that we forget the weight of simply being?” I honestly don’t have an answer. I only notice the way it happens again and again, how quietly compelling it is, how quietly exhausting. When I see the most interesting and sweet human beings running a race that knows no end. Like in the movie Tamasha, Ranbir Kapoor’s ‘Ved’ breaks away from Don (his alter ego) because the race doesn’t recognize him as anything other than “just” Ved. And I wonder about the moments in between, the unmarked minutes when nothing is accomplished (and I say accomplishment in a way that is visible to the world), when the world might not even notice that we exist. Whether those moments hold more truth than the ones we spend performing.

The Small Transformations

Kafka knew something about the strangeness of being. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a cockroach, and everything around him adjusts. Everything adjusts not to him, but to his new form. His family adapts. The world continues without doubt. Nothing really changes.

They see him, yes, but only as part of the absurdity of their own lives. And yet, he exists. He breathes. He moves. He thinks. He is. Even in a form that renders him almost invisible, he persists. I wonder if Gregor would’ve woken up being worried about being late to work if someone had, even just once, told him - “you are awesome just as you are!”

And I find myself asking: does he suffer, or does he only discover? Discover that being unobserved and unmeasured is still “existing”. That life persists, even when acknowledgment vanishes. And if Gregor can exist without proof, why do we bind ourselves so tightly to the fragile illusion that someone else must mark us as worthy? What if life’s value does not need to be affirmed? What if the quiet act of inhabiting, truly living, a moment is proof enough?

Sometimes I imagine Gregor lying there, thought fluttering, wondering if he is less, if he is too little, if his being is too strange or too small to count. But to me, it counts. Existence counts. You and I are not going to be here forever. And even if the world doesn’t see you without your coat, briefcase, ties, and the professional mask you’ve been wearing, I do, and you are amazing!

The Pause in the Doing

There is something curious about the pauses, the spaces between the doing. In those moments, when no achievement is recorded, no paper is graded, no project completed, we are left with ourselves, and that can feel frightening. Because in the quiet, the question rises: Am I enough if nothing else acknowledges me?

Perhaps that is why people fill these spaces with tasks, lists, emails, deadlines, or anything at all to avoid the stark confrontation with existence itself. But here’s an idea: what if we let the question sit, unanswered? What if we linger in the silence without reaching out for proof or validation? Would it be terrifying, or liberating? Perhaps both.

I remember a friend once saying that the scariest ghost is the realization that nothing and no one can make your existence necessary. That the world will go on, indifferent to your presence, whether you succeed or fail, whether you leave a mark or vanish without a trace. It’s a curious kind of fear. And yet, perhaps it is also mercy? Because if nothing insists that we exist, we are free to inhabit existence as we are. No need for armor, or scorekeeping, or performance.

The Calmness of Not Counting

There’s a strange calm in being unseen. In a world that doesn’t calculate your worth, you can lose momentum. You can pause. You can be messy. You can be incomplete and uncertain. You can live in the small gestures of being. You know, the breath, the glance, the thought? And I think that these alone are sufficient. To exist in this way, without proof, is to inhabit the world fully, because nothing outside you can add or subtract from the fact that you just ARE.

And in these moments, I think about the compulsion to chase, to accumulate, to prove. What do we hope to gain? Recognition? Validation? Comfort that our being has been noticed? But what if we tried, instead, to trust the quietness of existence? What if we stopped calculating, stopped tallying, stopped performing, and simply let ourselves BE, knowing that life itself, in its raw, unmeasured, ordinary unfolding, is enough?

Perhaps this is the lesson Kafka leaves, not as advice but as observation: that we need not insist upon recognition. That even when the world adjusts without us, even when no one notices the precise rhythm of our days, we are alive. We are present. And that, perhaps, is the closest we can come to anything like certainty in a world that refuses to pause for our validation.

The Thing About Being Enough

So no, I don’t think we need to leave a legacy. We don’t need to be remembered or celebrated. There’s a quiet joy in being uncounted, in letting life flow without tally, without judgment, without score. Even Gregor, in all his confusion and strangeness, exists. He is, and that is proof enough.

Maybe that is the truth we overlook: that the measure of life is not in how it is seen, but in how it is lived. That simply existing — breathing, thinking, feeling, moving through moments — is sufficient. That the unremarkable, ordinary act of “being” can contain everything we’ve been frantically seeking in recognition, achievement, or applause.

And if we can accept that, perhaps then we see the mercy in being forgotten. That we are free to be fully, undeniably ourselves, without performance, without proof, without compulsion.

And in that freedom, maybe we find the quietest, truest form of ‘enough.’

The Bucket List

I remember watching this film called the Bucket list back when I was in grade 11. Two cancer patients, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman whip up a piece of paper, note down things they wish to do before they die (kick the bucket!), and then actually go ahead and do it.

In once scene, the pair sit atop a pyramid in Egypt, and Morgan Freeman’s character, the smart guy, tells Jack Nicholson’s character about Egyptian heaven . He says, “you know, the ancient Egyptians had a beautiful belief about death. When their souls got to the entrance to heaven, the guards asked two questions. Their answers determined whether they were able to enter or not. ‘Have you found joy in your life?’ and ‘Has your life brought joy to others?

I ask myself these questions often. I have no answers still. But you dear reader, yes you, have brought joy to mine.

When I was seventeen, my family wanted me to take the IOE entrance exam at Pulchowk. Pretty much every Nepali kid who could spell “circuit” was supposed to. It was a ritual that separated the disciplined from the dreamers. I remember sitting in that examination hall, the computer in front of me looking like a crossword puzzle written in Algebraic X,Y, and Zs. I knew the answers. At least I knew most of them! But I also knew something else.

I didn’t want to be there. So I did the most insane thing a quiet, obedient kid could do. I got every answer wrong. The ones I didn’t know, I left ennie minnie mangoed. I did it not by accident but by design. That single act of deliberate failure felt like freedom. I remember walking out of the hall thinking, “Good riddance! I’ll figure something out to tell them at home.”

What I figured out, years later, was that I had chosen the harder path — not the romantic one, not the fulfilling one — just the harder one. I chose writing. But let me tell you something people don’t say enough: I don’t love writing. I need it. It’s not passion; it’s compulsion.

The Lie in Loving What You Do

When you tell people you write, they assume you must love it. They picture you sitting by a window with coffee and a laptop (wish it were a typewriter), or a cafe, typing out profound sentences while the world buzzes quietly outside. The truth is closer to this: you sit at a desk, the cursor blinks like it’s mocking you, laughing at you, and every word feels like peeling your own skin.

Nietzsche once wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Writing, for me, is the how. However, the why keeps changing. I write to make sense of myself. I write to feel less lost. I write to prove that I can still think. It’s not joy. It’s survival. Albert Camus called this the absurd condition — the confrontation between our need for meaning and the world’s cold indifference. Maybe that’s why I write. Because I can’t stand the silence. Because I need to throw words out there and hope they echo back something that accepts me.

The Seduction of Literature

I sometimes wonder if my obsession with writing began when I first watched Midnight in Paris. The film sold me a lie — that writers lived fascinating lives, that Paris was a temple for the artistic soul, that Hemingway was always sitting at a bar waiting to talk about life, courage, and meaning. I was naive enough to believe that if I studied literature, I could live that life too. So I did. I signed up for English literature, thinking I’d meet people who carried poetry in their pockets. Instead, I met people as lost as I was. Some pretended they understood Derrida, others quoted Heidegger to hide their confusion.

But amidst all that noise, I found philosophy in my third year at college. And for the first time, writing began to feel less like embellishment and more like exegisis. Philosophy taught me that writing is not just emotion. Socrates never wrote, but he questioned until the truth exposed itself (at least that’s what Plato sir told us). Kierkegaard wrote under pseudonyms because truth, for him, wasn’t universal. It was personal. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop writing. It’s the only way I know how to think.

The Burden of Creation

Some mornings, I wake up and think, “I could’ve been an engineer.” A job that ends when you clock out. A profession with logic, output, and certainty. Instead, I chose a ‘something’ that has none of those. Writing doesn’t end when the day does. It seeps into your walks, your meals, your dreams. You are never not thinking about it. There are days when the act of writing feels holy. You know, like I am decoding the universe, sentence by sentence. But most days, it feels like punishment for wanting too much meaning in a meaningless world.

I recently made a video on Instagram where I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre, who once said, “Man is condemned to be free.” I think writers are condemned to articulate that freedom. That they are condemned to turn chaos into paragraphs, pain into metaphor, and confusion into clarity that they themselves barely understand. So no, I don’t love writing. I am bound to it.

The Arrival of ChatGPT

And then 2022 happened. ChatGPT happened. It was like watching someone break into your house, rearrange your room, and somehow do it better. The first time I saw what it could do, I laughed. “It can’t possibly replace thought,” I told myself. But slowly, it began to. Emails. Reports. Essays. Then poems. Then reflections. I started using it for “help.” Then “editing.” Then “idea generation.” Eventually, I wasn’t writing with ChatGPT; it was writing for me. I remember thinking, “If a machine can do what I must do, what does that leave me with?”

Heidegger warned us of this. He suggested that the danger of technology is not in replacing us, but in dulling our capacity to question. Have we grown so complacent that we’re ready to outsource our thinking? I used to say I couldn’t function without writing. Now I can’t function with it either. Not when it’s so easy to ask an algorithm to do the thinking for me.

The Conflict Within

If I were to be brutally honest, writing doesn’t feel great anymore. It feels like maintenance. Like keeping an old machine running when everyone else has bought the latest model. But still, I do it. Because there’s something sacred in the struggle.

Writing, for me, is that thin thread between insanity and meaning. The more I think about it, the more I realize I didn’t choose writing. I simply refused everything else until only writing remained. And maybe that’s what love really is. It’s not affection, not joy, but the inability to let go.

29 and Reckoning

I turn 29 today. And I’m rethinking everything — the IOE exam I failed on purpose, the years of writing I’ve done half out of duty, half out of defiance, and the arrival of an AI that threatens to render all of it redundant. People say, “Do what you love.” I say, “Do what you can’t live without.”

Writing is not what I love. It’s what keeps me from collapsing into silence. It’s the way I breathe through confusion. It’s the one thing I’ve tried to quit and failed at every single time. So yes, “I love writing” is a lie. But it’s a beautiful one. Because if I stopped lying about it, I might stop writing altogether. And that, dear reader, would be far worse than any truth I could write.

Now I am JustAvinash27

Because sometimes, lying to yourself is the only way to keep living honestly.

The speaker said, “the moment you associate knowledge with something, it ceases to be art.” It makes one think that perhaps everything we now call art is just capitalist propaganda, an expensive illusion of meaning built by those who profit from it. “The Mona Lisa”, the speaker said, “isn’t beautiful, it’s simply famous”. I found myself agreeing to the statement. Yes, the world decided to call it art, then built an empire of interpretation around it. It’s skillful, yes, but skill is not art. “Art”, the speaker said, “should be an experience free of association. Art should be something that exists beyond language, knowledge, and context.”

I was stuck between agreement and a lack thereof. I began the stream with the question: is art expression or confrontation? You see, my idea of art is anything that forces me to confront myself and my beliefs. When it takes me outside the physical world for a moment and shows me something I didn’t know was there, it feels like art. Anything that can make me forget myself, even for one instant, is art. But I couldn’t still dismiss the speaker’s point, because its terrifyingly valid. Maybe the act of naming something “artistic” already traps it. Maybe every interpretation, every museum piece that tells us WHAT to see and HOW to feel, really does strip art of what made it art to begin with!

Philosophers have tried to explain art for centuries. Immanuel Kant said that aesthetic judgment (which is the moment we find something beautiful) is “disinterested.” It’s not about knowledge or utility. We don’t love a painting because of what we know about it or what it represents. We love it because it gives us pleasure without reason. Yet Kant warned that once we attach concepts to beauty, once we explain WHY it moves us, we lose the purity of that experience. In that sense, the speaker on my live stream wasn’t far from Kant. I agree that as soon as you start knowing, you stop seeing. But the trouble I have is this: knowledge, sometimes, also deepens experience. Knowing who painted something, why they painted it, and what world it came from often intensifies the feeling, not erase it. So perhaps it isn’t knowledge that kills art, but our certainty (Hey! I’m an expert!) about that knowledge? I don’t know.

Image From : https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/everyday-philosophy-on-kants-birthday/

Later philosophers like Arthur Danto made it even more complicated. He proposed that art isn’t really about the “object” at all, but it’s about the context. Danto talks about the idea of the Artworld, a network of curators, critics, and institutions that decide what is art (and, sadly, what isn’t). A thing becomes art when people within the Artworld present it as worthy of appreciation. For Danto, art is more than just “intrinsic qualities”. It’s about history, context, and the Artworld’s recognition. Which, to me, means art, as we experience it today, is inseparable from the systems that name and sell it. The Mona Lisa isn’t sacred because of its beauty; it’s sacred because of the years of recognition and attention it has received. That’s just how culture works! However, it does mean that the wild, private experience of art is often informed by public opinion?

Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Art might lose its wildness when we define it, but it also disappears when we don’t. We need language to share what we feel, even if language can never fully capture it. Art exists in that tension between knowing and not knowing, between meaning and mystery. When I said on that live that art is what forces me to confront myself, I wasn’t defining it. I was describing an instance of explosion that resists definition. If it changes something in you, even slightly, that’s enough for me.

There’s a story I once read about a man who spends his whole life trying to experience a sunset the way he did as a child. Everyday just before dawn, he stares at the horizon, but all he sees are clouds, colors, and weather analysis. He knows too much now. His knowledge blocks the awe he hopes to experience, like he did when he was little. Maybe that’s the real challenge of art: to unlearn, not to learn. To look without immediately trying to understand. To return, if only for a second, to the world before names and definitions. But does that mean knowledge destroys art? I think it just means that the experience we call “art” begins in the small gap between perception and explanation.

When I think back to that TikTok conversation, I think perhaps both of us were reaching for the same thing: a moment untouched by certainty. The speaker wanted art to remain pure, free from thought. I wanted art to remain transformative, full of thought but not consumed by it. Maybe we were both right. Maybe we were both wrong. Maybe it is I who does not understand art at all. Maybe art doesn’t even exist, only experience does.

But lets just say art is what happens in that brief second before you name it. You know, before you say “this is art.” And though it dies each time we define it, it’s reborn the moment we see again, without reason.

The following, though, I must still say.

I think of art as an debate between the artist and the world. Thus, by extension, it is also a battle between the artist and their self. An internal battle that finds no resolution and thus has to be expressed through paint, music, words, and whatnot. When I encounter something that confronts me, shows me a mirror I don’t want to look at, when a poem makes me aware of my futile attempts to life, when silence in a movie forces me to forget my existence, it’s art. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s honest. Art is the place where the mind meets its own contradictions and still decides to stay—with affirmation, with resolve. Art is anything that affirms uncertainty and contradiction!

After the conversation last night, I think I now believe that art doesn’t cease to exist when knowledge takes over, but it dies when curiosity disappears. The danger perhaps, dear reader, lies in thinking there’s nothing left to know. When we see the Mona Lisa only as a museum artifact, we kill the art in it with admiration and respect. But when we look again, freshly, as if we didn’t know who painted it, and let ourselves feel something wordless, we resurrect it. Will we feel anything? I do not know. Maybe we won’t. And that’s okay. We move on to the next piece on the wall and see if it does anything.

Maybe the task, dear reader, is not to rid art of knowledge but to let knowledge serve wonder, not replace it. Maybe the goal is to look at something and admit: I understand, and yet I don’t. Because that vulnerable territory between knowing and not knowing is where art truly lives.

And so I leave you with a question: when was the last time you looked at something with complete awe? When was the last time you sought not to understand it, not to define it, but to simply be changed by it?