And perhaps it is.

The books we read, the films we watch, the people we elect, the taxes we pay, the wars we fund, the rights we defend, and even the things we choose to remain silent about—they all exist somewhere within the political landscape. I don’t particularly disagree with the statement. What I’ve found myself thinking about, however, is the strange expectation that seems to follow it.

If everything is political, then everyone is expected to have a political opinion.

And not just any opinion. A good one. An informed one. Preferably one that can withstand public scrutiny and can be explained in under two minutes if somebody asks. There is an odd urgency to it all. You’re expected to know what’s happening in three different countries, have a nuanced understanding of historical conflicts, understand economic policy, and somehow still arrive at the morally and intellectually acceptable conclusion.

I’ve started noticing something else too.

People seem far more comfortable with you having an opinion in theory than they are with you actually having one.

Because the moment you do, the sorting begins.

Mention a political opinion, and suddenly people begin filling in the blanks themselves. You support this? Then surely you must also believe that. You disagree with that? Well, then you probably belong to this particular camp. It happens so quickly that it’s almost impressive. Entire personalities are constructed from a single viewpoint, as though human beings have suddenly become considerably less complicated than they were a decade ago.

I don’t know when we became so good at putting one another into boxes.

Maybe it was always this way, and social media simply made it visible. Maybe we’ve always preferred certainty over ambiguity. After all, ambiguity is inconvenient. It doesn’t trend very well. It doesn’t fit neatly into biographies, hashtags, or headlines.

But I do find it fascinating that we live in an age where having no political opinion is considered irresponsible, while having the “wrong” political opinion is considered unforgivable.

And perhaps “wrong” isn’t even the right word anymore.

There seems to be an increasingly narrow range of opinions that are considered legible in public discourse. Some opinions make you thoughtful. Others make you dangerous. Some make you intellectual. Others make you uninformed. We have, quite unintentionally, built an entire hierarchy of political acceptability.

Democracy feels like one of those words we’ve all become very attached to in theory.

Everybody loves it until it begins producing people they disagree with. Then suddenly the conversation shifts. The issue is no longer whether people are allowed to have opinions, but whether they’ve earned the right to have those opinions.

The strangest part is that this isn’t confined to one country or one ideology. It happens everywhere. It happens on the national stage and the international one. It happens on university campuses and in family WhatsApp groups. It happens among progressives and conservatives, among activists and academics, among people who would otherwise agree on almost everything.

We keep asking people to think for themselves, and then seem disappointed when they do.

I sometimes wonder whether we’ve confused democracy with consensus. Democracies were never designed to produce agreement. They were designed with the assumption that people would disagree—frequently, passionately, and often inconveniently. Millions of people, carrying different histories and fears and values, were always going to arrive at different conclusions. That isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.

Maybe this is just what growing up in the internet age feels like, but I can’t remember the last time I saw someone publicly admit they were still thinking about something politically. Everyone appears so certain all the time. They know exactly where they stand, exactly who is right, exactly who is wrong, and exactly how history will remember it all.

Meanwhile, most people I know are simply trying to make sense of an increasingly complicated world.

They read. They listen. They change their minds. They hesitate. They remain unconvinced. They occasionally hold contradictory beliefs. They are, in other words, being human.

Democracies were never meant to produce identical citizens. They were meant to make room for inconvenient ones too.

A democracy that can only tolerate one kind of citizen is still struggling to understand what a democracy is.

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Shakespeare, rather famously, asked, “What’s in a name?” The answer was supposed to be “not much.” A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo would remain Romeo even if he belonged to another family. It’s one of literature’s most enduring arguments, and one I’ve accepted without much resistance for years. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether Shakespeare underestimated something. Not the power of surnames or family legacies, but of first names; the ones that are whispered over cribs before we have a personality to match them.

A name is one of the few things we receive before we’ve done anything to deserve it. Before we’ve spoken our first word, before we’ve formed our first memory, before we’ve discovered what frightens us or what kind of people we’ll love, someone has already decided what the world will call us. We spend decades hearing that collection of syllables attached to every report card, every birthday cake, every introduction, every mistake, every triumph, until it becomes difficult to imagine that we were ever anything else.

Somewhere along the way, a sound becomes a self.

I sometimes catch myself making assumptions about strangers before I’ve met them. Certain names feel gentle. Others feel confident, artistic, serious, adventurous. We like to think we meet people first and names later, but the opposite is often true. A name walks into the room several seconds before its owner does.

Psychologists have spent years studying whether names quietly influence the lives people end up living. There are theories about expectations, identity, and the strange tendency for people to drift towards what feels familiar. The evidence is complicated, and probably less magical than we’d like it to be. Even so, I find the question more interesting than the answer. Imagine introducing yourself by another name every day for twenty years. Imagine teachers calling on someone else. Friends shortening a different set of syllables. A lover saying a different name with the same tenderness. At what point would that imagined person stop feeling imaginary?

Perhaps identity is sturdier than a name. Or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps we spend so much of our lives responding to a particular word that it slowly teaches us how to respond to ourselves. A name is repeated thousands of times before we are old enough to decide who we want to become. It accompanies every version of us: the shy child, the difficult teenager, the uncertain adult. It is present for every reinvention, and somehow survives them all.

I don’t think a different name would have given me a completely different life. That would be too neat a conclusion for something as untidy as identity. But I do wonder about the version of me that never existed because someone, years ago, paused over a list of names and chose this one instead of another. We spend a great deal of our lives imagining alternate careers, alternate cities, alternate upbringings. We rarely imagine the alternate self who answered to a different name, grew into different expectations, and carried a different story through the world.

Maybe Shakespeare was right. A rose would smell as sweet. But people are not roses. We are creatures who grow into the stories we are told about ourselves, and our names are among the very first stories we ever hear.

Do you think you grew into your name, or did your name grow into you?

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At first I laughed. Then I spent an embarrassingly long amount of time thinking about it (which unintentionally proves the point 😬).

Because if you’ve spent years reading closely, you’re trained to believe that details matter (worse if you’re a habitual annotator). Literature rewards people for paying attention. You notice a sentence repeated twice, a particular colour appearing throughout a story, a character hesitating before answering a question, and eventually you learn that none of it is accidental.

The curtains are never just blue. The recurring dream is never just a dream. The silence after a question is never just silence. There’s always another layer waiting underneath. I think that’s why I sometimes struggle with uncertainty.

Not because I’m anxious by nature, but because I’ve spent so much of my life consuming things that were intentionally constructed. You see, stories have authors, authors make choices, and those choices shape how we understand what happens.

Life however doesn’t always work like that. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine, sometimes there’s rain too, sometimes a strange interaction remains a strange interaction forever, even your favourite person isn’t in the right space to respond and then that silence doesn’t always mean something deliberate.

In such premises, there is pretty much nothing to uncover beyond what already happened.

And yet I keep looking.

I find myself replaying conversations, revisiting moments, examining tiny details as if eventually I’ll stumble upon the sentence that explains everything. As if life secretly operates on the same rules as literature and all I need to do is become a slightly better reader.

The problem is that people are terrible texts.

They contradict themselves. They change their minds. They say things they don’t mean and fail to say things they do. Half the time they probably don’t fully understand themselves, let alone provide enough information for somebody else to understand them. It’s humane to be so.

And somehow I still expect coherence. From what I’ve learned the assumption that every loose thread can be followed to an answer is the one that actually keeps you tangled.

I still haven’t decided whether reading too much will ruin my life. For what it’s worth, reading is analogous to living for me.

But I do know it has left me with a habit I’m trying to break, I have to step up to be kind to myself and the people I love. Every time something confuses me, my first instinct is to search for meaning. Lately I’ve been trying something else.

Sometimes I just let the curtains stay blue.

I had this very random thought yesterday where I wondered what I would say if somebody asked me to name one thing about myself that is entirely unique.

Not “favourite colour” unique. Not “I like this niche film” unique. I mean genuinely, down to the tiniest detail in a way that has never existed before and will never exist again.

And every time I have thought of it ever since, I come to the same slightly terrifying conclusion!?

probably not much.

There are eight billion people on this planet. Somebody else laughs the way I do. Somebody else rereads messages before sleeping. Somebody else is a supportive girlfriend too. Somebody else gets irrationally emotional while listening to songs on public transport. Somebody else cuts fruit for the people they love in the exact same absent-minded way my mother does.

Even love starts feeling strange when you think about it long enough. Like, woah. At some point I looked at a random man and thought, yes, you get access to my inner world now.

Millions of people are in love right now. Millions are texting goodnight, remembering coffee orders, sitting through arguments, sending paragraphs they typed and deleted three times before finally pressing send. None of it is technically original. And yet I don’t think that makes any of it less real.

Was individuality ever supposed to come from inventing entirely new ways of being human? Maybe it exists because of the tiniest things in our being? Timing. Context. The exact version of you that existed when something happened. A thousand people may say “drive safe” every day, but nobody says it in your friend’s voice after the exact conversation you just had. Deep down you know that nobody means it with the same fear, affection, irritation, history, tenderness, or exhaustion attached to it.

The actions themselves are ordinary, yet they cannot rob you of the emotional texture behind them, can they?

See, most people I remember deeply from my personal life are not memorable because they were unprecedented human beings. I remember them because they are specific.

The way they hold eye contact for slightly too long.
The way they say my name when they are annoyed.
The way they go quiet before admitting something honest.

What makes people irreplaceable is rarely novelty. I think it’s accumulation more than anything else. Tiny things gathering quietly over time until a person becomes inseparable from them in your mind somehow. Inside jokes repeated too many times. The routine of calling the same person first whenever something happens to you.

Even though it’s all ordinary on its own, but after enough time, enough history, enough moments stacked over each other, a person stops feeling interchangeable with anybody else.

I still don't think I have an answer. If somebody stopped me tomorrow and asked what I do that nobody else does, I'd probably tell them nothing. Maybe if you'd asked me a few years ago, that would've bothered me. Now that I think, there's something comforting about it. The things that make me feel most like myself are so ordinary that millions of people probably do them too. I just happen to be the one doing them from here.

In today’s article you and I explore if there was ever a need to make our mornings slower, have morning lineups, and why suddenly everyone is performing rest online.

Nobody is posting:

woke up anxious, doomscrolled for 40 minutes, reheated my coffee twice before rushing to work

But THAT is closer to most people’s real mornings. Have you ever thought why? A huge reason for that is probably Instagram and pretty much all other social media platforms succeeded amongst individuals because they offer you the perspective of a life that’s entirely different from the only one you think is possible. And well, that was fine until you stopped seeing the difference between a curated life and your actual one. Fulfillment is probably the most natural serotonin there is. And in my humble opinion, the truth gets sullen when the lines get blurred.

Recently I saw so many morning lineups all over my feed, and while I liked how aesthetic the chrome plates with the perfume samples and hand creams looked, I wondered, if I have all the products, the luxe goods, then why do I not have a morning lineup? Turns out, I don’t need one, and neither do you. Most people do not have two uninterrupted hours to journal beside a sunlit window. They’re eating standing up, checking emails while brushing their hair, and hoping they’re able to book their commute on time.

While I do appreciate the thought of having your vitals in, your workout and skincare clocked, and your journal all set (pretty much my routine), I absolutely do not understand why all this has added to “slow living” becoming expensive.

Do you really need ceramics, chrome plates, and incense sticks to have a slow morning? Nah ah.

a truly slow morning is probably one you never thought to post.

And before you say a little whimsy never hurt anybody, my love, whimsy and feeling the need to do your rest right are two different things. You can attach slow mornings to being disciplined. But the kind of discipline we talk of is a luxury the poor cannot afford.

I don’t think people actually want slow mornings. I think people want mornings that don’t immediately make them feel behind.

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The image used belongs to the respective owner on Pinterest.

Some books feel like cold coffee left beside your bed for too long. Some feel like sea shells and others, more specifically, feel like a kitchen light on at 2 am when you can’t sleep yet.

Anyway, here are a few books matched accordingly. If you’re a trinket-lover like me, I know you’ll lean towards the Smiski.

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OUTLINE - RACHEL CUSK

I don’t think this book is interested in dramatic revelations. It observes people so carefully that eventually you start feeling observed too. Everyone in this book is speaking, but it’s really about what slips out accidentally; the text speaks like the tiny contradictions people reveal when they talk too long. I’d say it is quietly hypnotic in a way that sneaks up on you.

THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH - LEO TOLSTOY

Tolstoy writes existential dread in a way that is so painfully ordinary that it almost unsettles you more. There’s no dramatic collapse, just this growing awareness that a person can spend years carefully building a life that looks respectable from the outside while feeling completely absent from it internally (I have felt that, and it takes years to outgrow that image). The horror of the book is not death itself, but the realisation that you may have mistaken routine for living the entire time.

KITCHEN - BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Kitchen feels like the emotional equivalent of standing alone in a softly lit kitchen after everyone else has gone to sleep. The book understands grief in such a quiet, domestic way (if you’ve read my previous article, you know your emotions do not have to be all-consuming for them to matter) as something that slowly settles into everyday life beside you. There’s warmth in it, the kind that comes from small routines, late-night meals, familiar objects, and the strange comfort of continuing to exist even after losing someone you thought you couldn’t live without.

THE LOVER - MARGUERITE DURAS

The Lover reads like somebody remembering their own life from far away and still being unable to fully explain why certain moments stayed with them so intensely. Everything in the book is slightly feverish — the heat, the desire, the loneliness, the shame. Marguerite Duras writes memory so beautifully because she allows it to remain fragmented and emotionally inconsistent, the way real memories usually are. You finish the book feeling less like you read a story and more like you briefly entered somebody’s private recollection of youth, longing, the versions of yourself you would rarely visit. (— does not mean it’s AI 🤓)

DEPT. OF SPECULATION - JENNY OFFILL

Dept. of Speculation may feel difficult for some people to get through because it is written almost exactly like the inside of someone’s mind. The thoughts interrupt each other and wander unexpectedly. There is technically a marriage and a storyline holding the book together, but it barely reads like a conventional narrative. It feels more like sitting inside somebody’s stream of consciousness while they try to make sense of love, routine, resentment, intimacy, and the quieter forms of loneliness that appear even when nothing is visibly wrong (I HATE when it happens to me).

THE MEMORY POLICE - YOKO OGAWA

Yoko Ogawa has written memory in a way that feels so strangely delicate, as if even language itself could quietly disappear if nobody held onto it carefully enough. The Memory Police takes place on an island where objects vanish one by one, and slowly, people stop remembering them entirely. But beneath the dystopian premise, the book feels explores forgetting of objects altogether with emotions, identities, relationships, and versions of ourselves.

I think sometimes objects say more about books than genre-based labels do. A shell told me more than “contemporary fiction” ever could, and I hope this post resonates with you.

If you’ve read any of these, tell me which one made it to the top of your reading journal. And if you want, send me an object and I’ll try matching it to a book next time.

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I think the internet has made us really bad at describing normal human experiences.

Whether you’re chronically online or not, you’ve probably noticed how everything now has to be the best thing you’ve ever consumed… Every book “ruined you.” Every show “altered your brain chemistry.” Every café apparently changed the trajectory of your existence because they put cinnamon on cold foam.

And I know people exaggerate online for fun, I do it too sometimes, but I’ve begun to notice that the phrase “changed my life” genuinely does not hit the same way it used to because when you hear it every single day, eventually it starts sounding like another way of saying I liked this a lot.

I realised this a few weeks ago when I finished a book that I actually loved. Like genuinely loved. I was recommending it to everyone, thinking about it while showering, rereading random paragraphs before sleeping. And naturally, it was life changing for me on so many levels, but as I sat down to write a review, I realised calling things life-changing doesn’t do them justice anymore. The weight to that phrase has just flattened.

Be honest with me (and yourself), the last book/media/art you called life changing actually earned that title, or did you just rate it 5 stars on Goodreads? See, I get it, I have read pieces of literature that have altered my course at that VERY moment in life and it’s so sad to see how you and I have become TOO SCARED to admit that something simply affected us temporarily..

Sometimes someone says one beautiful thing to you at dinner and you carry it for months without them ever realising.

Not everything meaningful has to become part of your personality forever.

Do you realise social media has trained us to speak in emotional extremes because normal reactions don’t really perform anymore. Saying “this was nice” sounds almost illegal online. You HAVE to be devastated. Obsessed. Consumed. Spiritually rearranged.

I think it does create this weird consciousness gap as well, sometimes things just don’t work out for you the way they do for others, and I end up doubting if I do not have the literary/emotional capacity to feel what everyone else is feeling? We’re not LLMs or algorithms; it’s high time you stop expressing emotions and opinions as if you’re algorithmically trained.

A book should not have to ruin you for it to matter to you.

Sometimes something can simply be good. Or comforting. Or special for a particular version of yourself.

I think that’s enough. Do you relate, or do I just seem cynical? Let me know down below

Did i just change your life? (pun intended)