The allegation sitting with a prosecutor in Milan goes like this. For four years in the nineties Sarajevo was under siege. The city lies in a valley, the men besieging it held the hills above, and snipers fired down into the streets at whoever crossed them. That part is history. What’s new is the claim that rich foreigners bought their way in for the weekend. Businessmen, dentists, gun hobbyists, men from all walks of life. They’d meet in Trieste, drive down through Belgrade, get walked up into the hills and hand over something like a hundred grand for a rifle and an afternoon of shooting at innocent civilians. They shot at people crossing the road to get water. They shot at kids. They shot at people in their houses. Somebody, at some point, started calling it a safari. None of it is proven. But the testimony has been coming for thirty years, from too many directions to be nothing.

The first man they’ve named is eighty, a retired truck driver, living somewhere quiet in the north of Italy. That’s the bit I can’t get past. Not a warlord. Not a man with a record. A truck driver, who when the afternoon was over, probably got in his car and drove home through Belgrade and Trieste, right up to his own front door, put his keys down and went to work on Monday. Thirty years. Nobody noticed anything.

What we want is for him to have been wearing a costume. That the quiet life was a front and the real man was underneath it, something else, something that would be easily recognisable as pure evil. Every documentary about people like this reaches for that, and I don’t believe it, mostly because thirty years is far too long to keep a front up. Whatever he was on Monday morning was what he actually was. Something in him was broken, obviously, you don’t do this otherwise. But it didn’t break on the hill. It broke slowly, over years, and he did it himself, the way anything breaks if you keep working at it. And if a man can do that to himself while looking normal the entire time, I don’t think the rest of us get to sit in the gallery and watch.

Start with the thing that was supposed to stop him. Guilt.

We talk about guilt like it’s a set of scales. Small wrong, small pang. Enormous wrong and it flattens you. We need that, because it’s the last bit of fairness going: if the law never finds him, at least the guilt will. But guilt has never worked like that and you don’t need a study to know it, just take your own week. This week I’ve lost a night’s sleep over one sharp sentence said to someone I love. A man can put a stranger in a scope and pull the trigger and by the looks of it, feel nothing. If guilt measured harm, that man couldn’t exist. History is full of him. Massacre, after massacre, then sound sleep.

So it’s measuring something else, and I think what it measures is how much the person counted to you in the first place. Hurt someone inside your circle and it’ll chew on you for years. Hurt someone outside it and there’s just nothing there, and not because your conscience broke. It was never pointed that way. It doesn’t ask what you did. It asks who you did it to.

Which is why the word safari does more work than it looks like it does. It wasn’t dark humour bolted on afterwards. It’s the thing that made the afternoon possible, because once you’ve called the people in the street game, they’ve stopped counting before anyone touches a trigger, and then guilt looks the whole thing over, finds nobody in it, and stays quiet and these men also had each other. A small audience who thought the trip was impressive rather than sick. And shame in front of a crowd that’s impressed doesn’t just go quiet, it comes back round as pride. So nothing had to break in them that day. It was already done.

I don’t think there’s a wall between ordinary people and this. I used to. There’s just the question of who counts to you, and that gets settled years before anyone offers you a rifle.

Which leaves the rest of us, and this is the part I’ve been circling for weeks.

Nobody wakes up able to shoot a stranger for sport. You make yourself able, over a long time, in increments too small to notice while you’re making them. A contempt you let settle instead of picking at. An ugly word you take up without asking what it’s for. A kind of person you gradually stop seeing properly. The migrant, the beggar, the wrong voter, whoever it is for you. Each one counts a bit less than the last and every step feels like nothing, because every step is normal. Aristotle said we become unjust by doing unjust things, which sounds obvious until you sit with it. Character isn’t what you were handed. It’s what you’ve been practising. And everyone’s practising something.

So the honest answer to could I ever isn’t no. It’s not yet, and hopefully never. He wasn’t another species. He was further down a road I’m standing on.

There’s also the fact that he invented none of it. The words that shrink people, the small warm pleasure of despising someone from a safe distance, the whole business of deciding who counts, none of that was his. It got handed to him, and it’s being handed around now, kept warm by use, by us. He just took it further than we do. Karl Jaspers, went at this after the 2nd world war, trying to work out what ordinary Germans owed for things they never personally did, and underneath all the legal answers he ended up somewhere simple: they came from us. Same stock, same habits, same jokes. Nothing to do with me is the lie.

And then the last thing, which is the one that actually keeps me up, because it hasn’t stopped happening.

For thirty years nobody noticed. We say that like it’s a footnote. It’s the whole thing. What hid him wasn’t cleverness, it was normality, the general agreement that a quiet man with a pension and a clean record isn’t worth a second look. And we all know better than that. Nobody’s life is normal from the inside. You know what’s actually in your head, the mess of it, the stuff no neighbour would ever guess watching you take the bins out. But the honesty we can’t avoid about ourselves, we don’t extend outward. We hand everyone else the assumption instead. Calm face, clean history.

He didn’t build that cover. We did, and we’re still building it, around whoever else came down off those hills and drove home. Someone is handing one of them a coffee this morning. Someone’s waving at him. His grandchildren love him. Every one of those things is saying the same thing, which is normal, nothing here, move along.

So am I saying we’re all guilty. Not of Sarajevo, no. But of something slower, yes, I think so. Of carrying the same capacity around and quietly feeding it. Of keeping the habits alive that the whole thing ran on. Of building the hiding place, and then not looking at it. Guilty the way you’re guilty of a fire that never caught. Kindling laid, match in the drawer, with nothing else missing but the wind.

I’ve stopped asking whether I’d have pulled the trigger. It’s a vain question. Asking it turns the whole thing into a daydream where I’m the one up on the hillside being tested, and I pass. The real one is smaller and I like it a lot less. Who’s already started counting for less with me. That’s where this gets decided, not in some nerve you find at the last second, but in the dull unwatched daily work of keeping people counted as people. Everyone’s on that job. Most of us don’t know we’ve clocked in.

Those men gave it up long before anyone paid anyone. By the time the rifle was in their hands , money handed over, the seeing was already done. Then they drove home and became neighbours, and colleagues, and somebody’s granddad. Normal men. Normal was never the alibi. It was the cover.

The dining table seats twenty. Two eat there,

one at each end, so far apart that the salt

must be carried between them by a third person

who is paid to do this and does it well.

The food goes back to the kitchen every night

untouched by conversation.

The child has four bedrooms to choose from.

He chooses the one in the corridor next to the kitchen,

because that is where the talking is,

Tagalog, mostly, quick and laughing,

a language he was never taught

and the only one in the house he trusts,

and a child will always sleep

closest to the sound of people

who seem glad to be alive.

They bought a dog for the boy. The boy was lonely.

Then they hired a man to walk the dog,

because nobody had the time,

and then a woman to walk the boy.

The loneliness stayed on. Unsalaried.

Working longer hours than anyone.

The boy loves her. This has been noticed

and is being managed. Love in this house

is an employment matter. It has a start date,

a probationary period, and an understanding

about what happens when he turns thirteen.

She will be thanked. She will be referenced warmly.

She will be the one he means, at forty,

when he says the word mother

to a stranger paid by the hour to listen.

The grandmother’s room is cleaned every day

by someone who only knows her middle name.

She is visited quarterly, like the accounts,

and reviewed in much the same spirit.

When she dies the room will be cleaned once more,

then redecorated. It’s already been budgeted.

There is a phone kept charged on her table

in case somebody calls. In eleven years

the charger has been replaced twice,

the cleaning woman four times,

and nothing else about the arrangement has changed.

The family calls this stability.

The grandmother calls it nothing at all,

having stopped calling it anything years ago.

The husband keeps a second phone

the way the house keeps a second cellar.

Known about, never mentioned, descended to at night.

The wife has her own arrangements, and her own driver.

They have not touched each other in four years

but they’ve never been more polite.

They argue about money at full volume

in a house where sound was an expensive consideration.

They argue about money because money

is the last thing the two of them still hold together.

The marriage transferred its assets into it long ago,

the way one moves wealth into safer instruments

before a collapse.

The gate is four metres high and electrified,

built to keep out thieves.

Everything worth stealing

left the property years before the gate went up,

carried out gradually in briefcases and boarding passes and long silences

by the family themselves,

who remain the only people

ever to have successfully robbed the place.

Sixteen cameras cover the grounds.

In nine years they have recorded

no intruders, eight foxes,

and a boy crossing the lawn at 8 in the morning

to talk to the gardener.

The footage deletes itself every thirty days.

This is called security. It is the closest thing

the house has to a memory,

and it is designed to forget.

The house has a room for the wine.

A room for the cars. A room for guests

who send their apologies each year.

A room for wrapping presents, used twice annually,

by staff. And in all this floor space,

measured, admired, photographed for magazines,

there is not one room where anyone is held.

That particular function was overlooked

by three separate architects.

And at night the smallest one lies awake

asking the ceiling the same ordinary question.

The same one the poor child three miles away

is asking a different ceiling at the same hour.

Am I safe. Is anyone coming.

Both children get the same silence.

Except one child’s silence is imported,

hand-finished, architect-specified,

and cost, all things considered,

a great deal more.

I did everything today. Twelve hours of work, then my side hustle, then the gym, then two kilometres in the pool. I also called my mum. And cooked instead of ordering, which for me, is a big moral victory. Once I got into bed and the first thought waiting there was: you didn’t do enough.

I want to talk about that thought because I don’t think it’s mine. I think it got installed somewhere and I never checked the source.

At some point I started keeping a ledger. Every day gets audited. Not for whether I was happy or decent to anyone, just output. Did the day produce. And the problem with the ledger is it never balances, because finishing something doesn’t register as a credit. It just raises the minimum. Swim two kilometres and apparently three exists. Publish an essay and the ledger wants to know about the next one while the first is still uploading. Not once in my life has it said, that’s enough, go to sleep.

Here’s the thing that took me embarrassingly long to notice. I hold two beliefs that can’t both be true.

One: life is short, nothing matters cosmically, in a hundred years nobody will know my name, relax.

Two: every wasted hour is a small disaster.

I genuinely hold both. I’ll say the first one at dinner and sound wise and mean it, then lie awake prosecuting myself under the second. I’ve been living inside that contradiction so long it just feels like the weather.

And on top of that, my mind is good at hiding it from me. On ambitious days it tells me the striving is the meaning. On knackered days it tells me the rest is earned, which quietly confirms that unearned rest is a crime. It never lets those two days compare notes.

I think the reason the scam works is that I want it to work. If the ledger is real then my life has a scoring system, and if it has a scoring system it has a point, and I don’t have to sit with the possibility that it doesn’t come with one built in.

So that’s the trade I made without signing anything. Chronic guilt in exchange for the feeling of meaning. The guilt of not doing enough is at least a manageable pain. It fits inside a day. The real dread underneath it is shapeless, which is that you could do everything, optimise everything, waste nothing, and still get to the end having somehow missed it. Not failed it. Missed it. Like watching a whole film while checking your phone to make sure you’re not missing out on anything outside.

Because from the inside, wasting your life and optimising your life feel weirdly similar. Both are ways of not being where you are. The bloke on the sofa doing nothing and the bloke doing five things at once are often running from the same place in different directions. I’ve been both of them in the same afternoon, and I still judge the first one from inside the second one, as if motion were the difference between us.

I’m 24. By any sane maths I have wasted nothing yet. There hasn’t been time. The ledger disagrees, and it has always disagreed, which should have told me a long time ago that it was never actually reading the numbers.

The days I remember, properly remember, years later, were mostly not productive. An afternoon that went nowhere. A conversation that ran on too long. Stuff I’d have marked down as a loss at the time. The ledger gave those days a zero and they turned out to be worth more than anything I’ve built. So one of the two scoring systems is broken, and I know which one, and I keep using it anyway. Every night. I audit my days in a currency I know is fake because it’s the only currency anyone around me accepts.

Maybe that’s the actual engine of the whole thing. The ledger was never mine. It’s printed somewhere else, and I keep exchanging my hours for it because the alternative question has no market at all: what would today have looked like if nobody was watching, including me? I honestly don’t know. I’ve tried to picture it and I get fog. Twenty-four years of being watched, school, sport to jobs where being watched is the whole job, and I can’t cleanly find where the audience ends and I start. Sometimes I think the fear of wasting my life isn’t about death at all. It’s the suspicion that under all this documented effort there might not be someone who wants anything. Just someone who wants to be seen wanting the right things. I don’t fully believe that about myself. But I can’t rule it out either, and that’s an uncomfortable sentence to leave standing.

I’m suspicious of essays that end with the writer cured, so this one won’t. What I’ve got is small. Some nights when the thought shows up “you didn’t do enough”, I ask it: enough for what? Its never answered. There’s no total it’s counting toward. No number that converts one day into a life that was worth it. It was never about amounts.

When I ask that question it goes quiet. Not away. Quiet.

And there’s something almost free in that, if I let it be, because if no amount was ever going to be enough then the whole prosecution collapses. Not because I’m innocent. Because the law was made up. Nothing I did today justified my existence and nothing needed to. The day was never an exam, and I’ve been sitting it anyway, every day, for years.

I know that. I even believe it.

Tomorrow night I’ll open the ledger anyway. Both things are true, and I’m done pretending otherwise. If I can’t get rid of the contradiction, the least I can do is stop lying about which side of it I actually live on.

Something shifted in me in that car, even if I could not name it then.

What I came to understand, slowly, in the months that followed, was that my mum was not trying to wound me. She was just a person, with her own pain that she had been carrying for too long and needed to put down. Her own interior life spilling out because it had nowhere else to go and no better time than now. And the reason it hit me so hard was not what she said. It was that I had never really given her permission to be that. To be unfinished. To be still figuring it out. In my mind, she occupied a role, not a life.

If you grew up around a mother like mine, of Latin, south asian, middle eastern descent, you already know the texture of it. The self-sacrifice worn openly. The guilt that arrives before the request. The love that is vast and genuine and, in its vastness, occasionally suffocating. There is a particular kind of motherhood that becomes almost mythological in the family structure, the person who holds everything together, and in holding everything together quietly disappears as someone anyone thinks to ask about.

We put them in that box young. And they often climb in willingly, because the role gives them purpose and a place in the story. But a role is a costume that eventually fuses to the skin. At some point the person inside it forgets it was ever a choice.

We tend to think of identity as something we build outward, self constructed from choices and experiences moving forward in time. What we ignore is how much of it is built backward. The mother who became the martyr did not arrive there alone. She was shaped by her own mother, who was shaped by hers, each generation handing down a set of emotional instructions nobody ever wrote down and nobody ever questioned.

What changed for me was simple and also not simple at all. I just started looking at my mum as a human being who had things wrong with her. Who had known loss and disappointment and probably a version of her own life that did not go the way she planned. Who had been sitting on something heavy and needed her son to know about it before he walked out the door, because that is what you do when you love someone and the moment feels like it might be the last one that is honest enough to say it in for a while.

And when I stopped waiting for her to be the archetype, something in the relationship loosened. The guilt landed differently because I could see where it came from. The weight she carried became something I could sit beside rather than absorb. She had not changed. My perspective had.

This extends beyond the two of us. The parent and child relationship is the only one we enter without any say, and we spend most of it moving through a shifting dynamic so gradual we barely notice it turn. There may come a point where the child becomes the more emotionally articulate one in the room, where you start to see that your parents have spent parts of their lives operating from wounds they never addressed, patterns inherited from their own upbringing, stories told to themselves in moments of hurt that are still quietly running their behaviour decades later. When that recognition arrives you face a choice. Keep grieving the version of them you needed and never quite got, or extend to them the same understanding you would offer a friend who was also trying to figure all of this out for the first time.

That is not absolution. Some parents do real damage, and accountability for that is its own necessary conversation. But for most of us the work is quieter than that. It is the decision to take someone out of the box you put them in and look at them properly, maybe for the first time.

My mum said what she needed to say in that car. Something she had been carrying and needed to put down. I just happened to be carrying my own weight at the same time, and the goodbye became ten times heavier than it already was. Two people in a small space, both breaking a little.

When I finally let myself see that, something in me that had been quietly clenched for a long time let go. Not forgiveness, because there was nothing to forgive. Just understanding, arriving a little late, the way it usually does.

For centuries the medieval Church had a policy for people who killed themselves: you did not get a grave in consecrated ground. The body was sometimes buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through it, so the soul could not find its way home to trouble the living. In England, the Crown could seize the dead person’s estate, a practice that survived in some form into the nineteenth century. The logic was simple and theological. Your life belonged to God. Ending it was a kind of theft, and that theft stripped you of the right to rest among the faithful.

We tell ourselves we have moved beyond this. We have not moved as far as we think. We have simply changed the language. Where the medieval world said sin, we say selfish. It sounds softer, more secular, but it serves much the same purpose: it takes the most agonised act a human being can commit and quietly recasts it as a moral failure.

You do not die alone, even when you die by yourself. When someone kills themselves, the damage does not stop with them. A partner reaches across the bed for years. Children carry the loss, not only emotionally but in ways that reshape the course of their own lives. So a person is not simply leaving. They are leaving others to carry something unimaginably heavy.

This is why the accusation of selfishness has such force. It recognises a truth: suicide devastates the people left behind. Philosophers such as Kant gave that intuition moral weight. He argued that suicide is wrong because it treats one’s own humanity as a means of escaping suffering rather than as something of absolute worth. Beneath that lies an older idea: we owe obligations to those who depend on us, and we cannot dissolve those obligations by ourselves. On that view, calling suicide selfish is not merely emotional; it rests on a coherent moral argument.

But the argument depends on one assumption: that the person making the decision is reasoning freely. Kant’s case relies on an autonomous will. Remove that, and the moral judgement becomes much harder to sustain. That is exactly what modern evidence forces us to confront.

Thomas Joiner’s interpersonal theory of suicide argues that the desire to die emerges when two beliefs coincide. The first is thwarted belongingness: the feeling of being fundamentally alone, cut off from other people. The second is perceived burdensomeness: the conviction that the people you love would genuinely be better off without you.

That second belief changes everything.

The belief driving many suicides is not, “I matter more than you.” It is the opposite: “I am a burden, and my removal is a gift.” That belief is false, tragic and produced by illness, but it is not selfishness in any recognisable sense. The person is not failing to consider those they leave behind; they are thinking about them constantly and, through a poisoned logic, conclude that leaving is the generous thing to do.

Roy Baumeister described suicide as an escape from the self: a desperate attempt to shut off unbearable self-awareness rather than a calculated decision to bring about death. The person is not calmly weighing their life against their family’s future and choosing themselves. They are trying to make an intolerable inner state stop, and death has become the only exit they can see.

Edwin Shneidman, who helped found the modern study of suicide, placed the phenomenon on a single foundation: psychache, or unbearable psychological pain.

Once the discussion is centred there, the moral vocabulary starts to look misplaced. We do not call someone selfish for pulling their hand from a hot stove. The impulse to escape overwhelming pain is one of the most universally human responses there is. The suicidal person is responding to the same impulse, only the injury is one nobody else can see.

There is one place where this becomes more difficult. Not everyone who dies by suicide is in an acute, chaotic state. Some plan for months. They write careful letters, put their affairs in order, and appear entirely lucid.

The honest response is that lucidity is not the same as freedom. This is where Kant’s rational agent slips through our fingers. Someone can reason flawlessly from a premise that illness has installed. Joiner’s perceived burdensomeness is exactly that kind of premise. If you genuinely believe your existence harms everyone you love, then calmly planning your own death is not evidence of clear judgement. It is evidence of how completely the distortion has taken hold. The reasoning may remain intact; the foundation beneath it has been poisoned and in a way the cold preparedness of some suicide cases is representative of a sort of miscalculated love, where the person who ends up ending their own life is trying to minimise the damage their departure will inflict of those they love.

Does that explain every case across human history, including genuinely rational exceptions such as terminal illness with unmanageable pain? No. Pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. But those rare cases are not what people mean when they call suicide selfish after an ordinary death.

Émile Durkheim demonstrated something that should not exist if suicide were simply an individual act of selfishness. Suicide rates are remarkably stable within societies and differ predictably between them. If suicide were only the product of personal weakness or selfishness, we would expect far greater randomness.

Durkheim traced those differences to social integration. The weaker a person’s connection to family, community and shared institutions, the greater the risk. He called one form egoistic suicide, but the egoism he described was not selfishness. It was the collapse of social connection.

More than a century later, that insight remains strikingly relevant. Male suicide rates, in particular, reflect a profoundly Durkheimian story: men stripped of role, community and any socially acceptable language for admitting they are struggling. If suicide rises alongside unemployment, isolation and social fragmentation, then it is responding, at least in part, to conditions created collectively. Every time we call it selfish, we place responsibility on the one person with the least control over those conditions and ignore the society that helped produce them.

Why, then, does the word survive?

Because it serves the living. If the act can be explained as a defect in the dead person’s character, then it was not a hand we failed to take or a warning we failed to notice. Their supposed selfishness quietly absolves everyone else. But that comfort comes at a cost. The people who pay for it are those still alive and still suffering, learning what will be said about them if they ever admit how desperate they have become. Call despair selfish often enough, and you teach people to hide it until they no longer can.

On the weight of what we understand today, suicide is not selfish.

Not because the survivors’ pain is unreal. It is the most real thing here. But that pain also reveals why the accusation fails. Genuinely selfish people do not spend months or years convinced that those they love would be better off without them. They do not overwhelmingly arrive at death believing their absence is a gift. That belief is not self-interest. It is a catastrophic distortion created by illness.

From the inside, suicide can feel less like abandoning the people you love than sacrificing yourself for them. The tragedy is that the sacrifice rests on a lie. The pain convinces the person that everyone else will be better off once they are gone.

The medieval world drove a stake through the body to stop the dead from wandering back to trouble the living. We drive the word selfish through the memory of our lost ones for a similar reason: to make the grief easier to explain, to close the story, to believe there was a moral failing rather than an illness we could not reach in time.

But neither response gets at the truth. The humane response to someone destroyed by psychological pain was never condemnation, and the accurate one is not either. It is something closer to this:

You were ill. The pain lied to you about what your absence would mean. We only wish we had reached you in time.

Well, what story did you tell yourself?

My dad asked me this question the other day when I was venting to him about some actions I was regretting from my past. And after he explained to me what he meant, it struck me, mainly because I felt as though it made so much sense in explaining behaviour. Not just mine, but everyone else’s too.

The question, ‘what story did you tell yourself?’, pinpoints the exact moment in which we, humans, decide to act on something. Every single human behaviour is justified by reasoning that makes sense to the person making that decision in that precise moment. Now after, you may look back and tell yourself “God what were you thinking” but in that moment, it made complete sense to you, enough for you to make it. And these decisions we make, under the approval of our very lenient inner board of directors, can be monumental, life changing, hurtful, incredible, amazing, sad, damaging and you can add every other human adjective onto the end there too.

Psychologists have a name for this. Cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we feel when our actions conflict with our self image, is something the human brain is remarkably skilled at resolving, not by changing the behaviour, but by changing the story. Leon Festinger figured this out in the 1950s and yet here we all are, still doing it daily, still editing the narrative in real time to make ourselves the reasonable one. The brain is not built for truth, it is built for survival, and a story that keeps you feeling okay about yourself is a survival tool.

I believe that we as humans are far too uncritical of our own reasoning behind decision making. In the midst of the push for societal individualism, we became bombarded with story lines. Story lines from other people, telling you how they think your life should play out, from parents and friends to movies, music and so on and so forth. But in these never ending forces of direction, we begin carving out stories for ourselves, based on how our lives are going and have gone. Some of these stories can be true, others are invented and some others aren’t even yours to begin with.

That last point is worth sitting with. Anthropologists have long understood that humans are fundamentally narrative creatures. We are the only species that organises its entire existence around story, passing meaning down through generations not just through genes but through the tales we tell about who we are, where we come from and what we deserve. The problem is that this same mechanism that allowed our ancestors to build cultures and civilisations also means we inherit stories we never chose. Attachment theory backs this up. The stories we form about love, safety and self worth are written almost entirely before we are old enough to question them, shaped by the people who raised us and the environment we landed in. By the time we are adults making decisions, we are largely acting out scripts drafted in childhood.

Behind every action is a story, and behind every story is an experience that created that story. Stories can cause long lasting patterns of behaviour, that with a simple question outlined earlier, can probably be worked through internally quite quickly. That question led me by the hand quite obviously back through my past, to the moment where that story began.

But here is where it gets interesting. Because there is another layer to this, one that I think is even more powerful in real time. Not just asking yourself after the fact, not just doing the archaeology on old decisions, but catching yourself mid thought, mid feeling, mid justification and asking, what story am I telling myself right now, to justify this action?

That is where the real work lives. Because the stories we tell ourselves in the moment are the ones we are most convinced by. They feel less like stories and more like facts. The person who sends the message they know they shouldn’t send, the one who walks away from something good because something in their past told them it wouldn’t last, the one who picks the fight, takes the drink, makes the call. In every single one of those moments, there is a story running in the background, and it is making complete sense to the person living it.

Neuroscience adds another uncomfortable truth here. The brain processes a threat to our self concept in the same region it processes physical pain. Which means being wrong, really sitting with the possibility that the story you told yourself was just wrong, genuinely hurts. No wonder we avoid it. No wonder we rewrite instead of reflect.

The scary part is how rarely we pause to question it. We are the author, the narrator and the audience all at once, and we almost never heckle ourselves.

So I have started trying to catch it. Not always successfully, but trying. That split second before the decision, just asking the question. And what I have found is that half the time, the story does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny. It falls apart almost immediately when you shine a light on it. Which tells you everything about how much of our behaviour is running on old, unchecked scripts that were written in moments we have long since moved past.

My dad’s question is deceptively simple. But pull on that thread and it unravels quite a lot.

When you’re not taught how to love, How does one deal with the overwhelming feeling of it?

When the love I feel for you appears all consuming, where do I put it?

As I sit here on the train coming home to you, the jitters, this unending hole in my stomach that opened this morning - because of, I assume, that weekend we had together, I had to leave you to continue your flag bearing across this earth. And to a part of me, the part of me uneducated in love, the feeling is killing me.

Growing up and now grown up with an anxious/insecure attachment style, the feeling of being too in love with you appears. And not only does it appear but it tears through me, like a violent stream, reaching every crevice and crack of my security. To love you more, means to hurt more, and a panicked scramble back to the feeling of comfort - loving you less? No. Maybe pretending I love you less? It’s confusing.

The weird thing about attachment is that it feels as though you get a tattoo etched on you when you graduate the age of single digits, and there’s no changing it.

A cage, like that image of the bird holding onto the singular steel bar, unaware that there is a lot of free space around him. Is there a way out? I’m yet to find one. I doubt it gets healed with more love because the love you show me is abundant, and it’s exactly that why I love you so much.

Another part of love that especially hurts, is that in order to love you more, I need to let you be, let you free, allow you complete freedom from judgement, commentary and prejudice.

But what a difficult task it’s becoming.

Because to lose control of you inadvertently means to hand you control over my life too. Over my ego, the ego that’s fed by the fact that I feel more in control when you are dependent on me. Nonchalance, that terrible high, a psychological game, turning everything strategic. Because if you feel like I love you less, hopefully you’ll pile on more love - and by default I’ll feel more secure.

This turbulent dance my pride engages in with you feels like there are no winners. Because the only thing my ego wants is to feel like its won. In the pursuit of victory, you lose touch with the aim of everything in the first place. What was the point?

How can I expect myself to keep you, when I’m obsessed with feeling like I’ve beat you.

Maybe in idea of loving in masculinity, I equate control with stability. But I’m sure I have it all wrong.

She tells me she relies on me emotionally, that I always look unbothered by things. That perceived control feels masculine, that I’m the one with my head above water, but by reading back this article, I appear as the opposite.

And maybe that’s the paradox I can’t seem to untangle: the more I try to appear unshakable, the more I feel the ground slip beneath me. The strength she admires, the calm she leans on, it isn’t always real and sometimes its a mask I wear to survive the intensity of feeling you. And the truth is, underneath it, I’m not unbothered at all. I’m afraid. Afraid that loving you fully might mean losing myself, and afraid that holding back might mean losing you.

Admitting that I also need you, feels like a surrender. Losing my strategic distance from you, feels like losing status.

Maybe love isn’t control. Love must be allowing you to be free and trusting in the fact I won’t collapse when you are.

Always making sure it’s with me, but never really wanting it there.

To my phone: why did the universe curse me with the burden of my dependence on you?

Did we have to reach such a pinnacle of technology, for the world to sit permanently at our fingertips?

From the moment it was placed in my hands at thirteen by my parents, through the deep wanting I felt for it at the time, my life has revolved around this little brick. For some it came earlier, for others later, but it’s hard to find anyone untouched by its pull. And to those lucky enough not to need one, I pray the day never comes that you do.

What makes the dependence so unfair is not just its strength, but the absence of consent. It wasn’t a habit I picked up out of curiosity or a contract I signed. There was no space to understand the cost. It arrived disguised as convenience but by the time the consequences became visible, opting out was no longer a plausible option.

At thirteen, I didn’t consent to a lifetime of constant reachability. I didn’t consent to having my attention fragmented (more than it already is) or my emotions gamified. I was handed a tool that quickly changed the way I think, relate, and regulate myself, long before I had the language or agency to question it.

Consent implies the ability to refuse.

But refusal was never really on the table. School required it. Work would later demand it. Friendships migrated onto it. Love lived inside it. To exist socially became synonymous with being reachable, responsive, visible. Disconnection stopped being a choice and became a deviation. Time away felt like time missing out on life, especially during those foundational years.

The phone feels like a perfect symbiotic pairing with the state of our society. The ability to rapidly switch between applications, information and tasks in mere seconds mirrors how we now have to operate day to day. Emotionally especially. A single scroll exposes you to an absolute bombardment of stimuli, more than the brain was ever designed to process. Grief, lust, anger, envy, joy, all compressed into seconds. And if that scroll wasn’t fast enough, don’t worry, they even added in a x2 speed mode. Regulating a nervous system under that kind of emotional load becomes a very, very difficult task.

Technological advancement, though largely beneficial, has been fast, forceful, and largely non-consensual. We are pushing it forward, no doubt, but rarely stopping to ask whether we were meant to live like this. The infrastructure was built long before the consequences were understood. A very familiar pattern. Execute first, think later.

The unprecedented access we now have to one another, at any time, is more than our willpower could ever handle.

We are animals after all.

We are closer than ever, and yet, as a society, at the pinnacle of loneliness.

Loneliness has grown so widespread it now carries institutional weight. No longer dismissed as a passing feeling, it’s now classified as something chronic.

There is simply more at play now.

Delivered. Read. Liked. Blocked. Left on seen. These are such disproportionate types of communications, so easy in execution but so profound in impact. The moment we gamified communication, we lost a big part of the blissful naivety that developing meaningful relationships requires.

There is greener grass everywhere we look. Constantly visible. Constantly accessible. How could we not indulge? It’s just a text. A like. A call. Nothing serious. Until it is.

Every decision feels like it holds so much more weight. There’s more spectators. Even when no one is actively watching.

Paranoia runs rampant. Accusations follow. Relationships exist under quiet surveillance.

These devices were meant to hold our attention, time and emotions. So how were we ever meant to stand a chance? It was barely a fair fight.

Instead, we blame ourselves. We tell ourselves we lack discipline. An addiction reframed as a personal failure, despite being handed to us, fully formed, by adults we trusted. Perhaps they should have known better. Or perhaps they didn’t.

There is a powerful illusion of agency at work.

If only I were stronger, we think. More focused. Less weak.

But this is not a personal failure.

It’s a biological mismatch.

This wasn’t an individual lifestyle choice. It was pre-decided. Calling it a choice after the fact feels dishonest.

This is where the resentment starts. Not towards the technology itself, but towards the assumption that we ever agreed to this. That we opted in knowingly. That this dependence reflects a weakness of character rather than a condition of modern life.

I still reach for my phone instinctively.

I’m not writing from above it.

Maybe this is just what it means to be alive now. To carry the world in your pocket and to feel the weight back.

I really don’t know if we were meant to live like this.

But I do know that none of us were asked.

Since I left home at 20 and moved continents to figure out what the world had in store for me, that belief has only grown stronger.

After one of our weekly/daily chats the other day, separated by 15,000km of land and ocean, I was left with a feeling of deep gratitude and contentness for the rock that she has become in my life.

She is my sharpest advisor, my confidant, my role model and because she is someone that lives by such a strict and balanced moral code, she’s almost become a sort of ethereal figure in my mind when I think about decisions I make without her.

And on a normal tuesday, as I boarded the TFL, looked upon the countless people trading glances with me and then turning their gaze downwards, I thought, all these people on this train have mothers too. And they too, they too must believe, a hopeful majority at least, that their mothers are also the best mothers in the world.

Conflicting.

How could their mums also be the best mums in the world, if my mum already holds that position?

I came to the conclusion that ‘best’ in this context wasn’t a competition, but a deeply personal truth. Can many ‘bests’ exist simultaneously in our world?

Yes.

Some would say that my experience of my own mother doesn’t exist in a space where she can be compared with every other mother on earth. It exists in my own ‘lifeworld’, the private, rich, unique bubble I inhabit, and within that world, she is the central axis around which so much of my life has revolved around.

And that person on the train?

Also shaped by their unique circumstances and their mother may be too their central axis, or one of them.

These bests don’t collide because they don’t occupy the same objective plane. My mother is the best in the only world I can inhabit and decide upon, my own.

And it was then I took some time to reflect on this beautiful assumption.

Their mothers shape their choices, their values, their sense of right and wrong, just as mine shapes mine. These beliefs don’t cancel each other out because they aren’t competing claims. They come from lived experience, not comparison.

The contradiction only appears when we try to rank something that was never meant to be ranked.

Some truths don’t exist on a shared scale.

They are absolute only to the people who live them.

And theres a real beauty in that.

To have the luxury of noticing.

When I say this, I mean it in the sense that, like most people reading this from a 1st world country, we have the privilege of being aware of the countless billions of lives around us. Having the mental space to be able to spend time of your day worrying about what others are going through is a commodity.

Most of the world doesn’t have the mental or emotional space to be aware.

The average income of a family in Burundi is about $150 a year, or $0.41 a day. At that level of income, awareness isn’t philosophical, it’s physical, it’s about surviving, what are my children going to eat tonight. Making it to tomorrow. The fact that I can sit in my bed, fed, safe and write a Substack post like this, is privilege. Awareness of what is occurring in the Middle East, is a privilege. As I’m sure the people from these regions, are mostly unaware of what is happening in the recent UK elections, or the new Big Beautiful Bill that trump has inducted into the US. When basic survival is appearing uncertain, reflection - especially reflection about others, becomes a secondary thought.

Psychological energy is a resource, and just like any other resource, is not evenly distributed.

From a place of privilege, we assume that everyone has the same capacity for concern. We expect everyone to stay updated, empathetic, clued in to the latest war-crime, latest celebrity gossip or viral video. But this expectation fails to account for the fact of how unevenly distributed time, attention and stability are.

To even notice or care about what others, not immediate to us, are experiencing, requires that your world isn’t on fire.

Awareness flows toward comfort, not away from it.

The fact that I’m not in immediate crisis allows me to philosophically introspect, and that is a very high place of privilege. The fact nothings on my mind or threatening my life enough to be dealing with it right now, while I write this article, is serious privilege.

And for that I am grateful. Awareness is not free, it is earned through stability, time and space, and in most cases, these 3 things do not happen without divine luck to begin with. We should treat it less as a given, and more as a fragile, hard-won capacity, a privilege we are lucky to have.

And, when we are in pain, especially emotional, there is no titan, no juggernaut, no atomic bomb that could dwarf the strength of that inner chaos. It is over-consuming, it is selfish and debilitating but primarily, and most importantly, it’s human.

However, I feel as though we are encouraged and coaxed towards the comparison of pain. Partly through society, in maybe the way we are raised, we try and invalidate our own feelings through comparison. As if there's a matchup of who is feeling more pain on that day.

There is no ranking, no news, no juxtaposition that you could offer me that would make the pain I’m feeling right now less significant than someone elses. Your suffering doesn’t become less valid just because there are people out there struggling more than you - that just sounds silly, doesn’t it? But internally we tell ourselves to calm down, as if there is a quota we’ve breached, and anymore just isn’t acceptable.

Emotional experience is subjective and absolute in the moment.

Break free from that thought that you are feeling too much. You are in pain, you are feeling exact, to the singular tear, the amount of pain you are meant to feel. When we suppress the pain we feel, we silence the remaining pain that hasn’t yet been exposed to us, feel shame as a result of that, sometimes we isolate ourselves as well, and we just end up feeling more pain after that.

A cycle.

Being emotionally invisible compounds our emotional weight.

Growing up, when I was upset, I remember my friends coming up to me, empathetically trying to say one of their painful moments, as if it would make me feel better, and I think the remnant from that common reassurance into adulthood is surprisingly regular. It’s meant to soothe but it often feels like a dismissal.

Is it meant to make us feel better? or keep us quiet?

Is the imposed perspective just emotional anaesthesia?

What if we let it be real though?

What if we stopped minimising and started witnessing, feeling, experiencing what we are meant to feel. The correct ‘quota’ as to say. Although it fluctuates, all our pain is valid.

Whether you have been broken up with today, whether you have just lost your family under a building, whether you said bye to a friend that’s moving away and won’t see them for a while - it is okay to let yourself be absorbed by the emotional turmoil washing over you. Let yourself feel everything entirely, and lastly,

Feel. Cry till you can’t cry anymore, then, and only then will you feel lighter.

It is weird isn’t it?

I’ve recently re-started photography and I’m focusing on capturing the essence of London. Some task, I know, but the city is at an interesting cross road of the priveleged and the struggling. On my photographic outings, I consistently notice how paranoid people are of someone with a camera. Security guards tasked with guarding million pounds worth of jewellery hide behind mannequins. Old women out with their friends scurry past the lens of the camera, owners of flashy, expensive vehicles grimace with uncomfortable posture.

Do you not want to be seen?

I think whats at hand is a bit different.

We want to be seen, but we don’t want to be looked at. For too long, a few seconds at most. Any more and thats just weird.

Stop looking at me.

The obsession with controlling how we’re perceived is, I believe, a worldwide sickness.

I think the idea of being immortalised, potentially forever, in an image that you may/may not have full control over who see’s it is the main concern here. But why? As I mentioned, we have absolutely no control over who perceives us on the day to day.

I think it stems from a need for perfection, a desire to always appear flawless. As the artist who creates the painting, the more they look at it, the more they will change it, and often to the point where they end up hating the art they created.

In the parallel, if the subject of the art, looks hard enough at it, they too will end up disliking how they look. And of course sometimes this isn’t the case, and we plaster them all over our social media for the world to see how perfect we are.

There is obviously a perverted angle to this idea, the whole “why is he taking pictures of me” fear, but I’m fairly certain close to 99% of photographers capturing the world around them are not using the media they capture for nefarious intent, they just think it looks good. I also think, given today’s social climate, we no longer trust each other enough to keep this fear in proportion.

But -

I thought the scene you helped create in this world of infinitely possible scenes is beautiful, but you think I’m weird.

This paradox has made, capturing London, in many ways, very difficult. I often find myself awkwardly pretending I’m not about to take a photo, only to quickly snap the shot before anyone notices. When you are trying to capture people completely unaware of a camera, this is the problem you must face.

The honest work around will end up being communicating to these people who for the most part, already don’t want to be photographed, that I would like to photograph them, and if they could please act like I’m not standing in front of them pointing a black box at their face.

Nah.

Not for me.

Although I’m sure we could all acknowledge that images have saved lives, captured heartbreak, offered us glimpses into the lives of others in the present and past and have all round been an incredible tool for mankind to use, it appears to me we are far too paranoid at the moment to respect these gifts in the present.

And while there’s a long way to go in terms of rebuilding the general publics trust in each other, I think in the meantime, the only option I’ll be left with is to be the silent photographic ninja.

Taken by me at Oxford street, last week.

But we do - and we jump—often, excitedly—and somehow, it never gets old. Being in relationships is something that humans find natural, enjoyable, exciting and they make up such a fundamental part of our overall enjoyment and satisfaction with life.

So why are we so bad at choosing the right ones?

I think I’ve got an idea.

We tend to hyper-fixate on people who feel familiar. People with similar interests, patterns of behavior, ways of navigating life. It feels comforting. But it also means we end up amplifying whatever issues we already carry — because we’re basically dating a reflection of ourselves.

And let’s be honest: doubling your own flaws rarely ends well.

70% of relationships see the same fate.

So whats the workaround?

The answer lies in rethinking what compatibility actually means.

We’ve decided, entirely, as a society, that compatibility means similarity, but its often the opposite which leads to growth and balance.

Choosing people that possess what we don’t.

I, for example, am someone who’s life is very spontaneous and on-the-fly. I wouldn’t have it any other way and although it is a ton of fun, there also comes high chances of it being problematic. In the past, I chose partners who approached life with the same spontaneity that I had.

And what ensued was a f***king disaster.

So I decided to try switch it up.

I decided that my next partner, will possess a fundamentally different approach to mine, in these main areas of life.

And what I found was that, it was a mutually beneficial agreement.

My partner was also subconsciously trying to find a part of herself that was more spontaneous and on-the-fly, and I was subconsciously yearning to find the opposite.

As they say, order can only exist in contrast to chaos.

By exposing ourselves fully to each other all while possessing such a basic difference in the way we ‘do life’, we both benefited.

I became more organised, all while keeping my spontaneity, and she became more spontaneous, all while keeping her organisation in check.

And no, I’m not saying, “if you’re organised, go find a disaster.” It’s not about extremes. It’s about recognising which parts of yourself are overdeveloped — and which might benefit from being stretched.

I think you can apply this idea to many other well known - deal breakers (when approached with an open mind).

1. being goal-orientated vs being present-focused

• While one side of the equation will ground the relationship in the ‘now’, the other one will move it forward - but in a more balanced way.

2. Introverted vs Extroverted

• Both sides can help each other grow emotionally and socially, balancing out time when needed.

3. Minimalist vs Collector

• the minimalist encourages clarity while the collector adds depth.

When we stop looking for mirrors and start looking for those differences, we become more whole — and so do our relationships.

And then maybe we can start chipping away at that 70% figure.

But hey, in the meantime, keep ghosting your hinge matches because you don’t like small talk. It’s working great. :)

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