Then, in that process, thought starts to feel less like an object I own and more like something with a temperament of its own.

She behaves differently depending on how closely I look at her. From a distance, she sits comfortably inside a sentence. But up close, she becomes difficult. I guess that’s the thing about intimacy, right? Once we get intimate with anything, in this case, thoughts, she starts to reveal her history and confront your assumptions. Then people we haven’t accounted for enter the frame too. Things begin contradicting themselves, to the point where the thought I was convinced I understood begins to rearrange the conditions under which it could ever have been understood in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I spend a lot of my life around ideas in their semi-finished state. I read them, teach them, compress them, make frameworks out of them, turn messy things into something that can survive a single coherent description. At work, someone would hand me a problem and expect me to hand back a clean shape by Friday noon. The same formula applies: three tensions, four quadrants, and one sentence that suddenly makes the whole mess feel intelligible.

Whatever else she may be doing privately, in public, thought arrives dressed up. And it’s worth scrutinising why the performance takes this particular shape, because I don’t think it’s merely an accident of temperament. I think it’s a property of the systems through which thought is forced to travel.

Certainty. That’s the word. I think we’ve mistaken it for intelligence. We like to conflate intelligence with knowledgeability. Smart people are the ones who seemingly know a lot and are sure about their knowledge. And so by that logic, we also mistake the enemy of intelligence as… hesitation. Because we think that hesitation can’t travel. She has no surface, nothing to grip, precisely because she’s unsure. But within that logic, we don’t realise that what we’ve built is a system that selects not for intelligence but for its most transmissible symptom, and then, because the symptom is all we can see, we’ve begun to mistake it for the thing itself.

So, of course, serious thinking is a strange thing to want within this belief, sociologically, because it makes us hesitate more, instead of more certain.

Intimacy towards a thought does something to certainty that distance can’t fake. And I keep thinking about Nietzsche’s idea that every belief has a genealogy, that if you trace a conviction back far enough, you don’t necessarily find “truth” at its root. What you’ll find, instead, is a need, a fear, or even a want that the belief was built to satisfy. What you find after that depth of digging isn’t necessarily absolute objectivity; rather, the fluidity of our own positionality. Which means asking why did I believe that? is perhaps a more honest question than defending whether I still do.

Proximity alters perception. I’ve said this before, and I keep finding new places where it applies. When you get near enough to a thing you were confident about from a distance, the confidence doesn’t usually survive the approach. Which means the person who has never revised anything is not necessarily demonstrating consistency. They may simply be telling you how far away (perhaps, not at all) they’ve stayed.

The point of self-confrontation, then, is not simply retrospective correction or intellectual housekeeping. It is the sheer willingness to sit with the uncomfortable recognition that a belief was never just an abstract position; rather, it was also a form of shelter, a way of organising experience so that something in me could remain intact. To confront the self in this way is to notice not only what I thought, but what that thought made possible for me emotionally, socially, even structurally: what it protected, what it simplified, what it allowed me to avoid seeing. It is a practice of re-entering the conditions under which a belief made sense without collapsing those conditions into excuses. The self-confrontation, however, isn’t about declaring the old belief wrong, but about admitting what it was doing for me at that moment, and allowing myself to grow enough to recognise that what it does to me now may be different. And that is fine.

Which is why, having my unfinished thoughts finished by the force of survivalism, lately, feels like a form of self-annihilation. Because in many ways, it’s like admitting defeat towards the world that suppresses us to stagnate at the expense of growth or self-evolution. Why cut parts of ourselves off from the possibility of becoming only because they are still in motion? Is it because the thought is so uncomfortable that we don’t dare sit with it for as long as it asks us to?

And if that’s true, then a good question is not a lesser thing than a good answer. In fact, it might be the more valuable object. Answers terminate an inquiry and hand you something you can put down. But questions keep the thing alive; they’re a commitment to remain, and remaining is where the actual work happens. Knowledge requires a standing willingness to revise not just conclusions but the assumptions that produced them.

So why does revision feel like a confession to being wrong?

Revision requires self-confrontation, and I want to be careful here, because self-confrontation is not the same as self-criticism. Self-criticism is somewhat easier, or perhaps, lazier. It can become a performance of humility that leaves the self intact and even slightly flattered. Self-confrontation is the thing you do when you notice you’re defending a position with more energy than you have evidence for, and you have to ask what, exactly, is being protected—the claim, or the person who made it?

That’s the fusion I want to name. We’ve bound our ideas to our identities so tightly that letting go of one feels like an amputation of the other. A position stops being something I hold and becomes evidence of who I am: intelligent, moral, progressive, critical, original. So when the position is threatened, the self rushes in to defend it.

What I mean to say is this: evidence should be allowed to inconvenience your identity.

That’s the whole thing, really. And it’s harder than it sounds, because the inconvenience is rarely intellectual. It’s very emotional, and also social. It costs something specific to say, I was closer to the surface than I realised, and the cost is paid in a currency we’re very reluctant to spend.

Because the social cost has been decided for us infrastructurally. We’re the first people to be archived at this resolution. Everything I’ve thought since roughly 2015 exists somewhere with a timestamp, and the archive doesn’t distinguish between a considered position and a random Tuesday. Which means we’re now expected to maintain ideological consistency across years of our own recorded lives. I used to believe X, and now I believe Y gets read as hypocrisy… or worse… evidence of unreliability—a proof that you can’t be trusted now either, since you were so sure then.

But scholarship works precisely the opposite way. The entire apparatus is built for revision and correspondence. You cite so that your reader can see where you stood before you moved. A field advances by being “wrong” in increasingly interesting ways, and the papers that matter most are frequently the ones that made a later correction possible. Nobody in that tradition thinks a revised position is a weaker one. They think it’s just a later one, or rather, a more foundational one.

So now it makes sense what I always doubted when people equate intellectual maturity with accumulating answers. Intellectual maturity is closer to enlarging your tolerance for the unresolved. Or for ambiguity that refuses to collapse. For paradox that holds the reality without the obligation to be internally consistent for our convenience.

And I think that fusion is downstream of a separate hunger underneath it all: our obsession with originality. And it’s a bastardised version of originality, too.

Yes, originality matters in the realm of scholarship, but it matters insofar as it measures your contribution. Contribution is the point, not originality as a shiny little word. I think Bloom phrased it as the anxiety of influence: the idea that every writer, every thinker, is haunted by the ones who came before and spends their career trying to prove they aren’t merely repeating them. That anxiety has become much more pervasive now, across every version of public intellectual life, because now it operates at scale and in public.

But since when did the goal become to arrive first? What would that serve except our own ego?

When ownership becomes the precondition of value, ideas become a commodity rather than a common good.

We stop asking whether a thought is useful, true, beautiful, generative, or capable of serving something beyond us, and start asking whether it is ours.

The thought brings me to the question of intellectual inheritance. Because what if originality was never the point? What if it’s a byproduct? The thing that occasionally happens when someone has inherited a question so thoroughly, and stayed with it so long, that they can finally see one inch past where it was handed to them?

Because so what if the existential and most important questions we have now are not new? Wouldn’t that, in fact, suggest something about their importance? Love, labour, power, freedom, justice, what we owe each other? People have been circling these questions for centuries. Perhaps their persistence shows us places human beings have to keep returning to because every generation encounters them under different conditions, and yet the crucial tension remains.

It’s of course much less glamorous to inherit an old question. It means resisting the fantasy that intellectual life begins at the moment of our own existence. And sometimes it means holding a question the way you’d hold something handed to you, knowing it survived arguments you weren’t around for, passed through minds more serious than yours, accumulated meanings in languages you may never read. You don’t have to preserve it unchanged. Inheritance is not obedience, but surely you should know what you’ve inherited before announcing that you have invented something new.

Intellectual inheritance requires reading people who are dead and therefore cannot promote you, cannot repost you, cannot validate the interpretation you’ve made of them. It requires the humility to arrive late to something and do the work to catch up, rather than announcing a new beginning at the point of your own entry. It produces something humbling: a position inside a lineage, which is a much less flattering place to stand and a much more accountable one.

And when we know how to inherit something well, we know not of the knowledge that distinguishes, but the knowledge that serves.

And this is where I think I find the culprit, because it’s hidden somewhere more institutional. It’s in the way we think about labour and purpose: that they need to be commodified to justify themselves. And when they are, everything becomes organised around competition rather than contribution. It’s no wonder, then, that we see life in stages towards graduating from learning to producing, and not producing in the sense of contributing, but in the commodified sense of advancing the so-called endless economic growth. In childhood, we are allowed curiosity. At university, we’re supposed to “tame” it by specialising it. Then in adulthood, we’re expected to convert it into something economically legible.

But if self-confrontation is the moment when we realise we’re not just evaluating an idea but also evolving the version of ourselves that can hold it, then intellectual work shouldn’t be reduced to something that prepares us for life, but is the part of life—or even part of the point of life itself?

If knowledge is inheritance rather than property, and thinking is something we practise rather than something we “complete,” then perhaps intellectual life doesn’t have to justify itself through finalisation. It can be iterative, excessive, and occasionally “useless.” It can contain wrong turns. It can be serious without becoming solemn.

Which is why I think serious intellectual work might actually be a playground, wouldn’t you think?

I think about that next to Arendt’s distinction between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, the life of doing and the life of thinking, and how she worried we’d lost the second almost entirely to the first. Play might be the only place those two things still meet without a permission slip. You try the idea on. You turn it over. You put it down, pick up a different one, see if the first one still holds up under the weight of the second. You build something and destroy it because destroying it taught you something about how it was built. Nobody asks a child mid-game to defend the version of the game she was playing five minutes ago.

And yet that is exactly what we do to ourselves in thought, while perhaps we should extend ourselves the same generosity. Often, we demand continuity where she instead wants to dance. We give her consistency where she wants to play and experiment. And we often give her finality when she wants to talk.

But play is not the absence of seriousness, but rather seriousness without the fear of permanence. It is the space where you can test a world without having to declare it finished, where you can be rigorous without being trapped by your own rigour. In that sense, thinking seriously is not the opposite of play. It is what play becomes when you care enough about the game to keep changing its rules to see what else might be possible!

And in confessing that, I said unfortunately because this has proven to be a remarkably inconvenient orientation towards the world. I love things long after it has ceased to offer anything particularly… pleasant? I remain inclined to stay in the discomfort through the discovery of contradictions. I struggle to withdraw care simply because the conditions under which I first extended it have changed. And even when something has disappointed me, even when the object of affection has become more difficult to defend, even when I have accumulated perfectly reasonable evidence that detachment would make my life considerably easier, I find myself strangely incapable of performing the clean exit that contemporary wisdom seems increasingly to recommend.

Yes, I have also reflected on whether it’s close to obsession or fixation. And I’m convinced that it’s not, because obsession, at least, requires the object to remain caught inside our desire for it. It insists, repeats, and wants possession or even sometimes restoration towards what we needed it to be. And what I mean by loving is almost the opposite. Because I think to love something is to allow it to become increasingly real to me, which is to say: it may grow to be disappointing, contradictory, and perhaps even separate from whatever function I had hoped it might perform in my life.

Loving, at least to me, isn’t about forcing something to remain, i.e., “I can’t let this go because I need it to remain what it was to me.” Rather, I see it as a more laborious work: “I can see that this is not what I thought it was, and I’m trying to understand what my care becomes now that I know.”

And what that becomes may look like unloving, deciding that hurt should be enough to disqualify my tenderness. The world offers very persuasive arguments for becoming otherwise. It’s very rational to think that experience would teach me caution. It’s also more rational to believe that hurt would offer us evidence for self-preservation. But there’s a small, yet stubborn part in me that wonders whether our fluency in the language of protection should by default exceed our fluency in the language of devotion.

Bottom line is: I cannot unlove things very well. That’s the skill I haven’t yet mastered. And I have tried! I tried hard because I had long thought that my problem was naivety. But increasingly, I think it might be the only intellectually honest position left to me, once I actually interrogated the categories we’ve agreed to think inside of.

I don’t think this happened maliciously. I think it happened the way most grammars happen (by repetition rather than decree), where we let the marketplace teach us how to read love. We inherited its risk logic before we ever interrogated whether it worked. High risk, high return. Low risk, low return. It is such a closed, elegant little system, and yet it has the tremendous advantage of being legible. You can defend your choices inside it very coherently. You can audit it, too. You can even feel virtuous inside it, because it rewards the appearance of prudence.

But I cannot help but sit with the categories longer and more deeply. Risk didn’t arrive to us as a neutral description of reality. It arrived as a definition, and definitions are never innocent. Rather, they’re the sediment of whoever had the power to decide what counts as a variable and what gets discarded as irrelevant. And in that definition, we absorbed the working assumption that risk is best measured at the point of entry. What goes in. And what is staked. It’s about the exposure at the start of the transaction. It’s a useful assumption if your objective is to price a loan, sure. But I see it as incredibly devastating the moment we let it migrate, unexamined, into how we evaluate love, labour, and the people who give both.

Because if risk is only ever measured by input, then two people can perform the identical arithmetic and mean entirely different things by it. Someone hands you nine dollars out of the ten they have. Someone else hands you twenty out of a billion. The second person is the generous one, would you say? A greater absolute number means a greater gift. And yet the part in us that predates our economics degrees knows this is only partial truth. The first person has handed us nearly the whole of themselves. And there’s almost nothing left of them. Yet the second has handed us a rounding error.

We keep mistaking the size of the gift for the size of the sacrifice, even though they are rarely the same.

I think this is what capacity does to the concept of risk. It doesn’t modify it, but it dismantles the very axis on which it was built. Once I admit capacity into the equation, I’m no longer measuring an amount. I’m measuring a proportion of a self—and a self is not a quantity that can be priced against another self’s quantity, because no two selves are running on the same total.

Which means the real ledger of love was never denominated in what was given. Rather, it was denominated in what was left of them after giving.

And here’s where the trouble really begins, because “what is left” isn’t something the giver can fully know, let alone disclose. It resists audit by nature. You can’t produce a receipt for your remaining capacity the way you can for the ten dollars you no longer have. What is left of a person after they give is not a fact sitting in the open, waiting to be verified. It’s closer to an interior horizon, something the giver themselves is only ever partially able to see, because the self that did the giving is not identical to the self doing the accounting afterward. This is, I think, the deepest failure of transactional thinking as applied to human beings: it presumes a stable, self-transparent subject who can always tell you exactly what a gift cost them.

The self that gives is transformed a little by the giving. It’s never quite the same self that shows up to be measured.

Underneath this, there’s a tension worth naming in the difference between an economy of exchange and what I might call an economy of gift.

Exchange requires equivalence where value must be matched to value; otherwise, the transaction is judged unfair, exploitative, and unbalanced. A gift economy operates on an entirely different logic because it doesn’t ask for equivalence, though it asks for response. A gift creates not a debt to be settled but a relation to be continued. And the tragedy of our moment is not that we occasionally treat love transactionally, per se. The deeper tragedy is that transactional logic has stopped being one available frame among others and has instead colonised the entire category, so thoroughly that most of us no longer have language for a form of giving that isn’t secretly waiting to be reciprocated in kind. We call it “boundaries.” We call it “reciprocity.” We call it, tellingly, “energy management,” as though the people we love were line items on a balance sheet we’re entitled to keep solvent. Underneath all of that vocabulary sits the same unexamined premise that love is a form of exchange, and exchange must equilibrate, or someone has been cheated.

I think this is precisely the deception hiding inside our contemporary fantasy of the so-called “healthy relationship.” We have somehow arrived at a shared, unspoken belief that “health” in relationship should announce itself as ease, and that the relationship works only if it makes things lighter, smoother, less effortful than the ones that came before. Because this absence of friction would mean there is a lower risk to bear, with equal if not more to gain. But what if it’s closer to the opposite? I think the confusion between the two is itself an error, a mistaking of comfort for the good.

A healthy relationship, as far as I can now tell, doesn’t exempt me from friction. It does the reverse: it insists on self-confrontations, repeatedly, at the exact moments I’d prefer to be excused from it. It’s easy to convert being hurt into a verdict about the other person. You wounded me, and therefore I am owed something. This is no longer serving me, and therefore I am entitled to leave without inventory. Both let us exit the “transaction” with our “ledger balanced” (i.e., character) unexamined. What is far harder, and far less rewarded by any framework we’ve been given, is to stay inside the hurt long enough to ask what in me answered it. Because the wound is not the only place where the real danger lives. The danger also lives in who we’re becoming once the wound resides in us.

And in many ways, “healthy relationships” force us to confront the deepest depth of our hearts, including our own monstrosity. That is the opposite of light, smooth, or effortless. Because isn’t it even more difficult to confront the monstrosity in us than that of others?

And I mean this literally. The impulse to withdraw affection as punishment. The impulse to catalogue someone’s failures the moment they’ve failed to meet us. The impulse to perform woundedness to extract an apology. The impulse, even, to leave and let someone construct their own private theory of what they did wrong, because staying to tell them the truth would require us to also examine whether our hurt was proportionate to the offence. None of these impulses feel monstrous in the slightest. It’s self-protection! Perhaps, it’s even justice! And that’s exactly what makes them dangerous, because they arrive disguised as the reasonable response of a reasonable person who has simply had enough.

What troubles me most isn’t that these impulses exist, but that the self is not a reliable witness to its own testimony sometimes. We assume, almost by default, that the person who was hurt has privileged authority over the meaning of the hurt—that pain confers interpretive rights, and whatever story the wounded party tells about what happened is, by virtue of the wound, true. But pain is a poor translator between narrative authority and moral authority. Pain tells us something happened, but it doesn’t really tell us what the appropriate response should be. The gap between those two is exactly where the bitterness may easily enter—not in the wound itself, which is most times real, but in the unexamined leap from I was hurt to therefore I am owed, or worse, therefore I am excused.

I know there have been times when I became too proud in my truth, pursuing fairness without pursuing generosity with the same conviction. And I have to be honest with myself about that. Truth is not enough. Some truths are harsh, and sometimes, in my desire to have those truths spoken, I have failed to cultivate the kinds of relationships in which another person might actually be able to hear them.

Healthy relationships, then, are not the ones that spare us this confrontation. They’re the ones that keep returning us to it. They ask us to look at the exact place where we turned our own pain into someone else’ s punishment, and to stay there long enough to take responsibility for it, rather than exiting into the much more comfortable identity of “the one who was wronged.”

This is, I think, the hard labour of intimacy. It’s more than just the labour of caring for another person’s needs, but the labour of continually excavating our own capacity from harm and refusing to let it operate unscrutinised.

Honest accountability is intimacy.

It requires treating our own perception with the same suspicion we’d extend to anyone else’s, asking not only what did they do to me but what is this doing to me, and is what it is doing to me actually proportionate, or is it simply the shape my particular wound likes to take?

It asks more of us than almost anything else we attempt in this life, because it requires holding two things at once that the world has trained us to treat as mutually exclusive: that we were genuinely hurt, and that we can still choose to care.

It is confronting. I think most of us can sense that something is shifting beneath us. We watch the world dim, and the debris of that darkness begins to settle into our own hearts, dimming our light until it becomes difficult to see beyond the immediate horizon of pain. We feel increasingly alienated, increasingly alone. All of this is telling us that something has broken. Perhaps what we are beginning to encounter are the limits of the so-called Enlightenment dream: the possibility of a neutral world in which the subjective human could somehow be translated into an objective order.

Somewhere in that pursuit, we lost something of the soul, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for hope. And worse, we’ve lost one another.

There’s a big question of time buried in the talks of caring. The marketplace, whatever else it has taught us, has taught us to prize velocity, whether it’s turnover, liquidity, or the swift reallocation of resources towards whatever yields more and faster. That means it treats prolonged difficulty as evidence of a bad position rather than as the ordinary texture of remaining.

Remaining to care, more precisely, might be the only posture that refuses the logic of velocity altogether, insisting some forms of value can only be produced by duration, by the sheer, unhurried accumulation of hours spent choosing to care and love in a world that has hurt you, past the point where choosing to love is considered… whimsical?

If risk is repriced by capacity rather than input, then time is repriced too, not as a cost to be minimised, but as the very medium in which a self capable of larger love gets slowly built.

Which returns me to why I think care is made specifically for the stubborn.

Because everything about the world as it is currently organised gives you a rational, well-argued exit at every stage of loving. The transactional logic will always furnish us with a reason: we’ve given more than we received, the risk was never properly priced in, or a better return exists elsewhere, and none of these calculations are even dishonest. They’re simply the wrong instrument for what they’re measuring. To love, inside a framework that keeps handing us permission to stop, requires something that looks, from the outside, irrational.

It is sooooo stubborn!

It’s so stubborn to still see beauty in loving as a sacrifice. And the ones who don’t stop are not the ones who feel the hurt less, or who have simply failed to learn the going rate. They’re the ones stubborn enough to keep operating on a different definition of risk altogether, one measured not by what left them, but by what, astonishingly, remained.

Which leaves me with a question I don’t think I can fully answer, only keep circling: if what is left for us after we give is not depletion but evidence that something in us was real enough to survive its own generosity… then what, exactly, are we measuring when we call a life well spent?

Is it the sum of what a person accumulated and kept, the way the marketplace has trained us to tally a life? Or is it closer to the sum of what they were willing to see disappear, given freely, into people who could not always repay it, in a world that rarely rewards the arithmetic of caring?

I could probably tell you what happened in the minutes before I said it. How the shape of the yoghurt in my breakfast bowl reminded me of the tutu I used to wear. How an article about a market crash somehow led me to think about the strange place of high art in a world obsessed with utility. Or how my mum’s dress that morning carried an echo of the nightgown Alice Renavand wore when she danced Le Parc with the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris. My mind moves through associations with a logic that often reveals itself only in retrospect. So… whatever insignificant path my thoughts took to arrive at ballet after all these years hardly matters.

What’s important is that my mum looked up almost immediately. “I tried to stop you from quitting,” she said. “But you told me you wanted to quit because you’d never become exceptional at it.”

The sentence landed with a force entirely disproportionate to its size.

There was no accusation in her voice, nor an attempt to teach me a lesson twenty years too late. Yet for some reason, I couldn’t leave the remark alone. It followed me for weeks afterwards, resurfacing at odd moments with the stubbornness of a question that had not realised it was a question.

It contained an entire philosophy I had apparently been living by without knowing I had chosen it: I didn’t quit because I stopped loving ballet; I quit because I decided, at some age young enough to embarrass me now, that love without the promise of greatness was not a sufficient reason to remain.

Devotion, the assumption goes, acquires legitimacy through excellence. The years you spend become meaningful in proportion to what those years eventually produce. Sacrifice, in so many ways, is an investment, and investments require returns. And so commitment, without mastery waiting at its horizon, begins to look like something else in this world. Delusion, maybe. Or a failure of self-knowledge? And yet… I find myself increasingly unable to explain what moves me most through this framework. It breaks down exactly where it matters.

The piano confronts me with this contradiction more honestly than almost anything else in my life.

There’s a haunting disorientation that emerges whenever I open a new score. We greet each other intimately like we’re best friends. And yet, the moment I begin to play, the encounter shifts from a greeting into something that feels shamefully like a betrayal. Or perhaps, more accurately, a self-inflicted fracture: I am betraying the very depth of what I claim to know about her.

I understand why Chopin stretches a phrase beyond where it seems it should naturally resolve, like his Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 in C minor. I recognise how a melody emerges from an accompaniment through careful voicing. I can hear the shape of a crescendo before my hands have found the first position. Looking at the score of a great piece often feels less like encountering something unfamiliar than recognising something that was somehow already waiting for me.

But when I begin to approach her on the keys, I’m confronted by the distance between recognition and embodiment. I can hear the unevenness in my runs. I can hear the melody disappearing, submerged beneath the weight of the harmony. Like… why is my left hand stronger than my right in any way? I can hear the exact threshold where the legato breaks apart, the rubato becoming clumsy rather than expressive. The failure announces itself with painful clarity precisely because my mind already understands what execution requires. But my fingers know much less than my ears. My wrists recognise much less than my imagination.

And it’s haunting me!

We’re trapped by our own discernment. The mind has been educated far ahead of the body, creating an internal surveillance that records every fracture in real-time. It’s the specific cruelty of the amateur: to be granted the sophistication to diagnose the wreckage, but not the capacity to prevent it.

I used to think this was frustration. But now I think that word is far too small for what it actually is. Because what makes this particular anguish strange is that some part of me already inhabits the beauty. I’ve already fallen so deeply in love with it! I’ve already heard it in its complete form in my head, even when no one is playing. And that prior inhabitation—the recognition, the love, the sense of arriving at something that was always meant for me—makes the failure at the level of execution feel much worse than a failure of knowledge.

This is precisely why I call it betrayal: that the self is not yet large enough for what it has already recognised. And there’s yet a clean vocabulary for that form of distance.

And I think this asymmetry is far more common than we allow ourselves to admit. There are moments (and perhaps you know them) where perception outruns possession. Where you encounter a form of love so generous that your existing emotional range is insufficient to receive it, let alone return it. Or where you recognise a form of goodness that exposes the exact dimensions of your own smallness. Where you understand a truth whose implications you cannot yet integrate without dismantling something you are not ready to lose.

That beauty is not waiting for me in the future. It is already here. Already fully present. Already making demands.

And it’s the realisation that what is incomplete is not the beauty. What is incomplete is… me.

And so the longing doesn’t point toward beauty that’s absent. It points toward a stage of self that doesn’t yet exist.

This is why I hold such deep admiration for artists who devote their lives to a craft until the craft itself becomes a witness to their life. The maker and the making begin to recognise one another like sisters—bound by a familiarity so intimate that the boundary between them grows increasingly difficult to locate. Eventually, it becomes impossible to tell where the artist ends and the craft begins.

The object of art is almost incidental, and while it’s mesmerising, it’s not what arrests me. What holds my attention is the evidence of what had to happen inside a person for the object to become possible.

Because skill, at its deepest levels, I realised, is not additive. It doesn’t accumulate the way information accumulates. Rather, I think it restructures and reorganises the very instrument through which a person perceives. A pianist who has spent thirty years with the instrument hears differently. They attend differently. Entire categories of experience become available that didn’t previously exist, not merely because they acquired more knowledge, but because sustained submission to a discipline, sustained encounter with its resistance, gradually rebuilt them from the inside.

Ballet, perhaps, more than any other craft, exposes the fiction that devotion is merely psychological. Most disciplines leave their traces in ways that are difficult to observe visually. Years of writing alter thought. Years of music alter discernment. Years of painting alter vision. The transformation is real, yet largely internal. Ballet offers no such concealment. The discipline inscribes itself directly onto the body. Every correction, every hour of forced turnout, every compromise with gravity, every repetition performed through exhaustion accumulates not only as memory but also as anatomy.

The body begins to carry the history of its allegiances. Bone, muscle, posture, flexibility, and even pain become records of what a person repeatedly chose when alternative choices remained available. The deformed legs and toes fascinate me for this reason. It’s not that suffering is inherently noble, nor sacrifice automatically deserves admiration. Rather, they function almost like archaeological artefacts. They reveal that a particular relationship once existed between a person and a craft, and that the relationship endured long enough to leave physical evidence behind.

The ballerina’s body ceases to function merely as a medium through which the craft is expressed. It is the craft. The body itself is the archive—the evidence of the craft’s prior existence.

And that devotion is almost defiant and stubborn!

It takes layers and layers of stubbornness to submit yourself to failure over and over again. To sit before something beautiful and repeatedly discover that you’re not yet capable of doing it justice. To hear a phrase exactly as it ought to sound, and then spend hours producing only distorted approximations of it. To love a piece of music so deeply that you can recognise every nuance of its beauty, only to watch your own hands flatten it, rush it, suffocate it, and fracture it beyond recognition.

I find this deeply agonising because somewhere in the process, losing that beauty becomes inevitable. I butchered beauty way too much that it fractured how I experience it. The piece becomes reduced to fingerings. Dynamics. Voicings. Measures 32 through 47. The music that once moved you becomes buried beneath correction and repetition. You stop hearing the composition and begin hearing only your own shortcomings reflected back at you.

The stubbornness is what moves us from seeing the piece as a mirror of our failures toward becoming the documents of our fidelity.

And what moves me to grief is the realisation that this is irreversible in both directions. The years of devotion cannot be undone from the body that has received them. And the years of absence—my years—cannot be restored to the body that chose something else.

I keep circling back to a question that has very little to do, finally, with either piano or ballet. What does it mean to be genuinely loyal to something?

It’s the stark opposite of the flexibility our culture has decided to call wisdom, where every identity stays provisional, and every commitment is held lightly enough to be released without grief when something more optimal presents itself. I mean the other thing. The thing we no longer have comfortable language for: staying with something long enough that it begins to impose itself upon you without your permission. Staying until the frustrations stop being interruptions and start being formation. Staying until the gap between recognition and embodiment is no longer experienced as failure but as the actual location of the work.

So, here’s where my regret lies. Because I wasn’t stubborn enough to create beautiful things. I did not know, at whatever age I made that calculation, that you can mourn the person you didn’t become as bitterly as you mourn the people you have lost.

And I long to stay. I long to stay badly enough that I am willing to be changed by staying in ways I cannot anticipate and cannot control. I want to belong to a question for decades rather than weeks. I want to love a craft until it leaves fingerprints on my instincts. I want to pursue an idea until it reorganises my thinking from the inside, and rather than having mastered it, I want it to have mastered something in me.

Which brings me to the most unsettling thing I’ve been circling: many of the things I love most require a version of me that doesn’t yet exist.

The possibility that what I recognise as beautiful—in music, in movement, in literature, in the most serious encounters with another human being—doesn’t merely require my effort or my time. It requires my transformation. And transformation is not something that can be engineered. It happens as a byproduct of sustained loyal encounter with a reality that insists on its own terms.

The Soul of the Rose (also known as My Sweet Rose (1908). Oil on canvas, 88.3 x 59.1 cm (34.7 x 23.2 in). Private collection

And if that’s the meaning this title holds, I’m embarrassed.

I force myself to observe very closely and really search for inspiration in what has accumulated across my inbox and professional peripheries—the trend reports, foresight decks, annual outlooks, you name it—and they’ve been less a body of work than a repetition of gestures. Some sort of choreography of “recognition” masquerading as “discovery.”' It’s not that they’re necessarily incorrect—which is precisely what makes them so difficult to contest—but they rarely feel as though they have arrived at anything that required genuine interrogation. What the industry calls “insight” often collapses into a surface-level behavioural observation seen from a distance—one that is immediately legible and therefore rarely questioned. But should visibility itself be a sufficient proof of understanding? I don’t believe so.

And I find myself skimming these reports out of a certain flatness of encounter because nothing in the work resists me long enough to require that I stay. Academic work may feel boring because it’s difficult to grasp, but this is a worse kind of boredom: polished language as a wow factor without substance underneath (yes, it’s the same kind of critique that I have against AI-generated output, to be completely honest).

We’re pushed to produce, with increasing sophistication, what I can only describe—perhaps unfairly, but not inaccurately—as a form of “insight laundering”: the continuous reprocessing of existing observations into newly articulated claims, where the appearance of novelty is sustained not by knowledge contribution, but by repackaging. This would explain why the industry has started to throw the word “taste” so carelessly as an edge, just like the tech companies did with “disruption” in the 2010s—replacing rigour with cultural capital, making preference look like insight without actually advancing understanding. And to me, that sounds much less like an inspiration than a projection of denied fear, a very lazy coping mechanism—a solution that shows utter disrespect to the labour of intent, sincerity, and discernment.

And I’m not saying that nothing is being produced, but that what is produced rarely exceeds the conditions from which it was derived.

And perhaps what is most striking isn’t simply that the work remains at a behavioural level, but most of the time it’s at the level of behaviour that’s performed. Even when it gestures toward something deeper—like shifting desires, fears, or beliefs—it retreats before those categories are allowed to destabilise the initial frame. The why is invoked, but never acknowledged, let alone endured. And I understand why: to remain with the why is to enter into a kind of slowness that is structurally inconvenient—a form of thinking that resists the “efficiency” and deliverables that organise the industry itself.

But if that’s the case, then why not let go of the word research entirely? Why cling to the name without the responsibility of protecting its labour? If it’s about rewriting, why not call it what it is? To earn the honour of the title, that labour is deeply necessary.

Because what comes with the weakening of insight is a reconfiguration of how the world itself is perceived.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the commentaries on how the world is becoming culturally flat, repetitive, and predictable. I keep wondering whether it is true that the culture is flattening, or whether our method is? Is the culture really static and unmoving, or are we just too lazy to dig its complexity more deeply? Because whenever I turn inward, I can sense shifting beliefs and fears—alive, layered, and textured—so why, then, does the report render them in such stark black and white?

Because the world isn’t becoming simpler, are you kidding me? The world is now more complex than ever. We’re the ones becoming more efficient at avoiding its complexity.

This is the point at which the discomfort ceases to be passive. If this is what “research” has become in the industry, then to continue participating in it without interrogation begins to feel less like contribution and more like complicity. It feels like letting go of sincerity and integrity, and ignoring any forms of accountability toward the knowledge we pass on to prominent agents of change—in this case, brands.

And so the question that has occupied me, increasingly, is not necessarily how to produce better outputs. I’m questioning the integrity that has a deep and direct impact on quality: how might we recover a different orientation toward the act of inquiry itself?

And I wonder… what would it mean (not rhetorically, but structurally) to introduce care into methodology—as the scarcest value in today’s world?

When I say care, I don’t think of it as a moral gesture, but as a discipline of attention. Or the art of noticing. As a way of deciding what’s allowed to remain difficult, what is refused a premature closure, and what’s taken seriously enough to be followed and wrestled with.

Care as methodology in three pockets of my reflections below.

I. Care in how we see

To care is, first, to refuse the reduction of differences into coherence simply because coherence is more digestible to communicate. It’s to remain with what doesn’t align and to treat contradiction as a signal that, perhaps, our lens of interpretation may actually be insufficient. The outlier, in this sense, ceases to be a contradiction to be explained away, and becomes instead a site of epistemic pressure—a point at which the limits of our current understanding are made visible. And this has consequences for what we prioritise too: not just interrogating whether we need to expand the scale, but also deepening our interpretation and refining its meaning. Care, in this sense, allows us to ask, not simply what is happening, but what must be true for this to be happening at all.

But care cannot remain at the level of perception.

II. Care for knowledge

Very little of what we encounter is new, and I think any honest researcher would acknowledge that. Most inquiry is already situated within a lineage of thought. Academia, for all its limitations, insists on positioning claims within existing bodies of work and deliberately making visible the conversations that precede them.

The strategy industry, by contrast, often operates as though each project begins from a blank slate—as though knowledge must be continually re-authored for it to be owned. If you ask why, my guess is that there’s an absence of accountability with an excess of unregulated ego. It becomes a competition over who pioneers what, who gets to claim something “new”—and not what makes something unquestionable, undoubtable, accountable; not what makes something ethical; not what sustains impact over time.

What this produces is not simply a matter of redundancy, but also a form of intellectual fragility: hypotheses may appear robust only because they’re designed to be some shiny hot takes, yet remain untested and unexamined in relation to alternative interpretations. And in a context where tools (particularly AI) can so easily generate and validate supporting evidence, the risk isn’t that we’ll lack proof to back them up, but that we’ll become less attentive to what has been excluded in the process of producing it.

Care, then, requires not just the ability to substantiate a claim, but the discipline to interrogate its limits: to ask what would disprove it, what it fails to account for, and what assumptions it relies upon. And yet, even this remains incomplete if care doesn’t extend to the question of who is permitted to produce meaning at all.

III. Care for our positionality

Today, even in its most progressive articulations, the research process sadly remains fundamentally extractive. We speak to people, gather their experiences, document their realities, but interpretation remains centralised. Meaning is still authored elsewhere. And while this is often justified through the language of expertise, it raises a more difficult question: what forms of knowledge are systematically lost when lived experience is treated as input rather than co-authorship?

Other disciplines—like sociology, anthropology, or public policy—have long grappled with this question, often contemplating the redistribution of authority. And perhaps this is where brands and the industry need to pause. Because when we take our brands seriously, we know that accuracy isn’t only desired, but it’s also required. We know that understanding can’t be constructed without those we claim to understand. The question, then, isn’t whether we should involve communities, but what becomes possible when we do so with intention: What would shift in the integrity of our insights? What does it cost us, but what does it return in truth? And ultimately, what does it demand of how we define impact, and not just for the brand, but for the people it claims to serve?

Borrowing from the school of public policy, IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation (Fig. 1) is one of the frameworks critical to methodology.

Brands today operate as cultural agents in ways not entirely different to political institutions: they shape meaning, influence behaviour, and participate in the trajectory of systemic change. And like politics, they depend on public legitimacy (or, in brand lingo, “brand loyalty”). Yet this raises a dissonance that’s difficult to ignore: why are brands so invested in loyalty yet remain comparatively disengaged from the very people they rely upon?

The movement from (1) to (5) is not simply procedural. It reflects a shift in who is allowed to determine what counts as “knowledge,” and whose interpretation holds legitimacy.

At present, brands understand that participation is fundamental, but only to the extent that it requires access to experience. There remains a persistent top-down orientation: people provide information, but interpretation of intent, need, and solution remains the domain of the “researchers.” It’s subtle, but it’s deeply consequential. Because it reveals that what’s being protected isn’t necessarily accuracy, but authority. And it’s exploitative. Extractive. And so the unavoidable question is: what knowledge is excluded when we assume that our expertise is inherently more credible than how people make sense and make meaning out of it?

Brands’ movement from (1) informing to now exercising the stage of (2) consulting illustrates this clearly. Consultation appears, on the surface, to be the most “objective” form of insight: clean, structured, and distanced. We engage in FGDs, IDIs, and ethnographies, and throw the so-called “voice of the consumers” on our decks. There’s a clear hierarchy: culture as object, people as data, strategists as interpreters, and brands as decision-makers. But even here, neutrality is fictional! When we care about our positionality, “insight” is already filtered through an institutional lens, shaped by what’s considered relevant, legible, and actionable. Yes, brands have to move within the limitations that only we will know, but pre-limiting the vast possibilities of our insights by our limitations is, perhaps, the poorest way to use our biases to our benefit.

The worst risk posed to us is encountering the unknowns of which existence we don’t even know.

So what would it mean to move beyond this?

What would happen if we began to (3) involve and to think with? In this mode, meaning-making becomes shared, and strategists relinquish monopoly over interpretation. There are iterative loops of validation that are incredibly valuable: Does this reflect you? Does this hold? Of course, insights are less “clean” and polished, but more accountable. To move further into (4) collaboration is more confronting still. Because here, control is redistributed. Strategy is no longer authored solely by the brands, but co-constructed with those whose realities it seeks to represent. This means community members become ongoing partners rather than one-off participants, and cultural insiders shape narratives in their own language.

The discomfort is inevitable, but perhaps necessarily so, because meaningful insights—if they were to be more than surface articulation, and better, groundbreaking—should unsettle us to some degree. It should resist immediate closure.

And beyond (4) collaboration lies the question of (5) empowerment as structure. What would it mean for engagement to move from extraction to circulation and to redistribution? Practically, this would require a shift that is both simple and profound: to stop ending at data collection, and begin involving people in interpretation; to stop presenting insights as fixed truths, and instead treat them as propositions to be negotiated; to build long-term relationships with communities rather than one-off engagements; to compensate not only for time, but for intellectual contribution; and to establish feedback loops that make visible what has changed as a result of participation.

The implications challenge not only methodology, but also identity. I’m deeply pondering on what it means to be a “researcher” or “strategist” today, but also how that role might evolve when there’s a ripe opportunity for authorship to become much less singular. Or when meaning-making is no longer fully controllable?

To dismiss these questions is shortsighted.

Much of what we call cultural insight today isn’t failing because it lacks empathy or inspiration. Rather, here’s the problem that gets me awake at night: cultural insight seeks proximity to culture, but resists any accountability to it.

If care were to be taken seriously as methodology, what would it mean for insight to be accountable not just to accuracy, but to the very people it claims to represent—and who, then, would have the authority to hold it to account? What would sincerity in research actually demand of us, if it required not better articulation, but a willingness to confront where our interpretations preserve our authority more than they reflect reality? And if care were not a posture but a method, how would we make sense of our role as “researchers” when meaning is not to be “stabilised” but rather sense-made?

At first, it appeared intelligible within a familiar frame: that collective life is disordered because it is poorly organised by either incompetent leaders in power or evil people in power, or both. And that with sufficient intelligence, coordination, and will, those disorders can be progressively corrected. This is the premise underwriting much of modern political thought—that society is, in essence, a solvable problem. The task, then, is optimisation.

But proximity alters perception. Immersion does something silent but far more unsettling: it reveals not just how the game is played, but why it must be played that way at all. What initially appears as corruption begins to disclose itself as coherence. Compromise is, in many cases, simply the system functioning as it was always inclined to. And so the question shifts from how do we fix this to something far less flattering: what is this really built on?

Because beneath the endless negotiation of interests, the cycling of crises, and the perpetual deferral of “solutions,” there is a more stubborn constant: that the problems we attempt to govern are not merely external. They are recursive. They regenerate. They adapt. And more often than we care to admit, they originate from the very agents tasked with resolving them.

This is where the analytic frame shifts from structure to source. Because if undesirable outcomes persist across vastly different institutional arrangements—across monarchies, democracies, revolutions, reforms—then the explanatory variable cannot be exhausted by systems alone. Something more constant is at work. The recurrence suggests not a failure of design, but a limitation of the designers!

This is where the optimism of reform begins to thin out. Not because progress is impossible, but because it is never final. History, after all, is not a trajectory toward resolution, but a repetition of rearrangements—new configurations of the same underlying tensions: power, desire, entitlement, and in many ways, fear. Justice is pursued, redefined, institutionalised—and then compromised. Equality is imagined, codified, contested—and then stratified in new ways. Each breakthrough contains, within it, the seeds of its own limitation. The vocabulary may evolve overtime, but the substance remains.

Cause and effect begin to look less linear and more recursive. We construct systems to manage human tendencies—competition, self-interest, the desire for control—yet those very tendencies re-enter the systems we build, reshaping them from within. Regulation produces circumvention. Power invites consolidation. Ideals generate their own distortions when filtered through imperfect agents. The result is not resolution, but iteration: new configurations of old problems.

It becomes difficult, then, to sustain the belief that the world’s disorder is simply a matter of misaligned structures or insufficient policy. There is something more deeply implicated—something less tangible, yet far more pervasive: the inclination toward self-preservation over justice. The rationalisations that make harm appear necessary and the persistent tendency to prioritise calculated, maximised, individualised benefits, even at collective cost.

In that sense, politics is not merely a field of governance. It is also an expression of anthropology and, also, in honour of my expertise, sociology. It reveals, perhaps more honestly than any other domain, what we do when we are given power—and what we justify in order to keep it. And this is where the earlier assumption—that we might eventually engineer our way into an ideal order—begins to collapse under its own weight. Because if the source of disorder is not only in our systems but in ourselves, then no configuration of those systems can fully resolve it. At best, they can contain; at worst, they can amplify.

And yet, alongside this empirical record of non-arrival, there persists a remarkably stable phenomenon: the human capacity to imagine the ideal.

Across epochs, cultures, and ideologies, we have articulated visions of perfect justice, enduring peace, uncorrupted governance, or harmonious coexistence. These visions differ in form, but they converge in structure: they exceed what has ever been historically realised. There has never been a moment in which these ideals were fully instantiated. And still, they remain thinkable—intelligible, even compelling.

This creates a tension that is difficult to ignore. On one hand, history provides no evidence that such ideals are achievable through human construction. On the other, the mind continues to generate them with striking clarity, as though they correspond to something more than fantasy. So, the question becomes less about how to achieve the ideal, and more about why it is conceivable at all.

If our cognitive and moral frameworks were entirely products of our historical and material conditions, one might expect our ideals to be constrained by what has been empirically possible. But this is not what we observe. The imagination consistently outpaces experience. It produces standards that reality fails to meet, yet refuses to relinquish them. Where, then, does this surplus come from?

One explanation is evolutionary: that ideals function as directional heuristics, guiding incremental improvement without ever requiring full realisation. But this account, while useful, feels incomplete. It explains utility, but not insistence. It does not fully account for the normative force these ideals carry—the sense that they are not merely aspirational, but in some way binding, as though they expose a deficiency in the world rather than simply embellish it.

Another possibility is that these ideals are not generated ex nihilo, but are derivative—traces of a standard not constructed by us, but apprehended by us. In this view, the human capacity to imagine the ideal is less an act of invention than of recognition. We do not create the standard; we encounter it, imperfectly, and attempt to approximate it within the constraints of our condition.

This would explain the peculiar asymmetry: why we can conceive of justice more perfectly than we can enact it; why we can articulate goodness more clearly than we can sustain it; and why the imagination reaches further than history ever seems to follow.

It also reframes the earlier problem. If the limitation lies not only in our systems but in ourselves—if the agents of construction are themselves implicated in the disorder—then no purely endogenous solution will suffice. We cannot fully resolve a condition to which we are intrinsic. If the problem is, in major part, us and our humanity, then what would it mean to be “saved” from it? And can any structure, designed by the same flawed agents, accomplish that?

It is here that thought begins to reach its limit. Not in the sense of intellectual failure, but in the recognition that certain questions exceed the boundaries of purely instrumental reasoning. They are the questions of justice that cannot be reduced to enforcement. They’re the questions of “goodness” that cannot be legislated. They are also the questions of transformation that cannot be externally imposed. At this point, political reasoning approaches its boundary. Not because it becomes irrelevant, but because it becomes insufficient. It can diagnose, manage, mitigate—but not ultimately redeem.

And so the original assumption—that the domain of politics is the site where the world is fixed—gives way to a more sober understanding. Politics is where the consequences of human nature are negotiated, not transcended. It is where we attempt, repeatedly and imperfectly, to approximate standards we can perceive but cannot fully realise.

Which returns us to the unresolved question: if the ideal is both intelligible and unattained, if it persists despite its non-realisation, then perhaps its origin lies beyond the conditions that consistently fail to produce it. And in interrogating that, I don’t think we’re trying to escape from politics; rather, we do so as a way of understanding it more truthfully.

Because if politics exposes the limits of human capacity to perfect the world, it also sharpens the question of what, or who, could. And in that tension—between what we can build and what we cannot become—there emerges an almost reluctant acknowledgment: that the deepest problems we face may not be solvable in the way we have been trained to solve things.

And yet, paradoxically, this does not lead to withdrawal. If anything, it clarifies participation.

Because the point is no longer to believe that we can complete the work, but to recognise the nature of the work we are in. Not to perfect the world, but to act within it with a different orientation—one that is less invested in mastery, and more attuned to responsibility. Less concerned with control, and more aware of limitations. Less certain of its own righteousness, and more cautious of the ease with which it can justify harm.

Politics, then, becomes something else entirely: no longer a project of ultimate resolution, but a site of wrestling with ongoing tension. Not a stage for idealism alone, but a confrontation with the realities that idealism often refuses to account for. And perhaps most importantly, not a domain where we prove our capacity to fix the world, but one where we are continually reminded of why it cannot be resolved.

And perhaps, my reflections produce more questions than they do answers: What kind of justice would not simply redistribute consequences, but interrupt the cycle that necessitates them in the first place? If the deepest disorder lies within the human condition itself, what kind of intervention would be required to address it—one imposed from within the system, or one that enters it without being subject to it? And if such an intervention were to occur, would it look like power asserting itself—or like power relinquishing itself?

And more unsettling still: If the standard we cannot reach has, at some point, stepped into the very condition that fails to reach it—what would we be looking at when we see it?

Raphael (1509-1511), The School of Athens.

I used to believe I was in a transition. That my life was moving with the courtesy of clear thresholds. To be precise, my summer felt like it was softening into autumn—a graceful descent that should, somehow, someday, make an emotional sense. But now it feels less like a transition and more like an overlap that refuses to resolve. And perhaps, while conflicted, I am starting to accept its paradox.

I am standing in warmth and decay at the same time.

Something in me is… ripening(?) while something else is already falling apart. And there is no clean vocabulary in this world for that kind of coexistence.

Grief is a funny thing. I wish I could release its latch from the back of my neck and say, “Sit nicely, please,” and pat her on the head and whisper to her, “Good girl.” And all that romanticisation of traumas and grief in those cinematic supercuts they keep feeding us with… none of them really prepare us for what’s coming. No, she doesn’t linger in the background, dignified and poetic.

She’s loud. She claws. She accuses. She demands to be acknowledged in its full, unflattering intensity. There are moments where she feels almost moral in its outrage, screaming: how dare you move forward, how dare you soften, how dare you even consider beauty in something so broken. Time and time again, I find myself caught in that accusation. Because grief has positioned herself as the gatekeeper of my sincerity. To feel anything beyond her is betrayal.

And in its chaos, I feel illicit for keeping a sense of wonder. To look to the sky and feel awe. To notice something so gentle and let it land on my hand. To feel the butterflies in my stomach when feeling seen by the people I never expected to meet me. To smile at the laughs of children. But in noticing their beauty, I tend to pause and wonder if such an act requires justification. Beauty, she said, needs to be earned. Beauty, she said, isn’t appropriate in the presence of pain. And she has me indulge in the shame of allowing myself to marvel at something when I know, intimately, how the world can fracture me. A part of me wants to resist it, to stay loyal to the wound, to prove that I have understood its weight. Because isn’t it necessary to be in pain? It’s how I know it’s real in the first place. That the cause of grief was significant. Because otherwise, it would’ve meant that all this time I was wrong in clinging onto something that never mattered to begin with?

But there’s also something else in me that refuses that logic. It’s something more courageous than a rat running across the highway. Betrayal, in its evilness, is necessary. Perhaps, to notice beauty is not to deny suffering. Because perhaps, beauty is not a reward for healing, but a resource within it: a way of knowing that there are still parts of myself that can recognise, receive, and respond to something beyond pain. And to not betray guilt is to betray the part of me that’s able to receive grace.

Pain, in its own way, has already made itself so familiar to me. It’s not the possibility of being in pain that terrifies me. I’m now scared of being bitter much more than I’m scared of being hurt. I’m scared of hardening. Of closing off. And that kind of erosion feels more permanent and more dangerous. It doesn’t claw like grief does. It’s more subtle, like a ghost shadowing in silence, clutching itself on my back and disguising itself as wisdom.

And I confuse myself one too many time because I find myself, for the first time, making a decision that doesn’t feel entirely rational, and yet… find peace in it. It’s the decision to continue loving, even with full awareness of what it can cost. It’s almost defiant! Because if the world has the capacity to wound, it also has the capacity to narrow us down to make us smaller, more cautious and more transactional. And I’m scared to be. I’m scared of turning sour for the world.

Because I want to be good. And being good is being stubborn. Sometimes unreasonably so. I want to be so stubborn that I keep loving even when the world is against it. I want to keep giving even when the world is taking all of it from me. I want to keep caring even for the world that doesn’t deserve it. I want to keep offering something of myself even when I know it may be misunderstood, mishandled, or rejected. Yes. The audacity, they say. The audacity for me to make that choice. The audacity in so stubbornly refusing to let the brokenness of this life dictate the limits of my capacity.

I want to be good that’s deliberate. That no matter how inconvenient, no matter how much it costs, I want to care.

In fact, I’m so longing for the day when people are striving more to be good than they are to be great. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be.

Hope is a precious thing that betrays guilt. It’s far more contained, far more private than a sweeping belief that everything will be neat. Hope is the betrayal against the unfortunate evidence of the things that collapse in its entirety have left us rotten and numb. It doesn’t hold on to material reality. Instead, it holds on to the unceasing, unshaken longing for something more meaningful than this, that keeps showing from within every single time grief screams. There has never been any real evidence that the beauty we seek can exist in the way we imagine it. And yet, we cannot seem to stop imagining it, or yearning for it. Why?

Whatever it is, I beg myself not to kill that light. Because what is life if not the act of reflecting each other’s light back into the world. What is life if not extending the love I have received—no matter how small, how undeserved—toward other wounded humans who need it just as deeply. And what is my pain, if not a living thing that has known grace closely enough to recognise it. Otherwise, all these seasons in life… would they not be in vain?

Rembrandt (1668–1669), The Return of the Prodigal Son.

I’m too quiet and too loud, too guarded and too open, too careful and too porous, and I keep imagining some invisible instrument hovering over me, measuring my existence and flashing red as if I’ve crossed a threshold I was never taught how to stay within. I keep wondering if there is a correct way to be human — a narrow, acceptable temperature for feeling and expressing and needing — and whatever I’m doing seems to sit permanently outside it.

I don’t know how to love in measured doses. I don’t know how to love small. I don’t know how to hold back without feeling like I’m betraying something essential in myself. It spills out of me in full, with my whole body leaning forward, already aware that this closeness might hurt and yet… choosing it anyway. Loving feels like an act that involves my entire nervous system, not something I can portion out neatly or control with discipline. And yet loving like this, in this world that treats care like a negotiable asset, feels like volunteering for a slow disappearance. But people see it as generosity, or worse, an ambition in many ways (?), but they watch long enough that it begins to feel like a beautiful way of vanishing while everyone applauds the grace of the act.

People tend to adore the idea of someone who gives endlessly. They love the softness, the availability, the way you seem to hold space without complaint. But they rarely sit with what it costs. Not asking for anything in return is framed as purity, as enlightenment, as proof that you are somehow above need. And yet I keep finding myself emptied by it, praised for my largeness while being left alone with the aftermath of giving too much. I can’t tell anymore where the harm lives. Whether it’s mine, for not protecting myself more fiercely, for refusing to turn love into something conditional. Or whether it’s theirs, for encountering abundance and mistaking it for permission rather than care. For mistaking it as strength rather than grace. For mistaking it as capacity rather than voluntary sacrifice.

There’s a part of me that still wants to keep giving — stubborn and almost childlike — something older than logic that refuses to be reasoned with. But alongside it lives a quiet ache I don’t know how to resolve. I don’t know how to receive without asking, and I don’t know how to ask without feeling like I’ve broken something delicate and unspoken. I keep wondering if care really needs to be requested to exist, or if there is a way of being loved that doesn’t require me to shrink myself into instructions, to translate my longing and fatigue into something neat enough to be granted.

Beneath the exhaustion sits a deeper hunger: to be known without having to educate others on how to love me. To be met without having to provide footnotes. I’m tired of intimacy that feels like a presentation, where proximity is mistaken for understanding and time spent nearby becomes a substitute for attention.

I long to be studied. Saying it out loud feels indulgent, almost embarrassing, like confessing to a desire that sounds excessive.

Again, I’m too much. I’m too much. Just too much.

But… am I?

Because isn’t it human to study? Isn’t it human to be curious when you care? To be studied means someone stays long enough to notice patterns rather than moments. It means someone remains curious even when I contradict myself, even when I change, even when I don’t make sense. It means not being reduced to the loudest version of me or the softest confession I once offered, not being frozen in the form I happened to take during someone else’s decisive moment.

There’s something deeply intimate about that kind of attention — something that feels increasingly rare. Attention that doesn’t rush to conclusions. Attention that doesn’t require me to be consistent in order to remain… lovable. I want to be known the way a place is known by someone who walks it often, who notices when the air feels different, when something blooms unexpectedly, when something withdraws without warning. That kind of knowing carries patience inside it. It carries care without control.

Instead, I keep feeling finished by other people. I feel people looking at me with a certainty that feels unsettling, the kind that comes from having decided who I am and seeing no reason to check whether that decision still fits. And I feel like I’ve been wrapped up and set aside, categorised into something manageable so they can digest me. They want to digest me so they can move on. You’re intense. You’re sensitive. You’re difficult. You’re strong. What’s next? Each word lands like a quiet closing statement, each one sealing me into a shape I never agreed to inhabit. None of these feels like an ending to me. They feel like beginnings that were abandoned too early.

I’m tired. And I feel so cold and lonely.

It’s such a lonely place to be perceived without being explored. In being admired without being held. In being looked at closely and still not felt, in being observed and yet never really reached, like being traced carefully but never touched.

I don’t want to be adored as an idea. I want to be engaged as a living, shifting being with moods, hesitations, contradictions, and internal weather. I want someone to notice the moments in between — how I retreat after intensity, how I soften when I feel safe, how I sharpen when I don’t. Or stay long enough with my stutters mid-sentence, when I haven’t figured out myself. Or when I’m angry but haven’t yet known why. Or when I’m hurt. When I’m not my best. When I’m not strong. When I’m not an anchor. And care enough to stay with those movements instead of flattening them.

Maybe this desire asks for too much. But inside my body, it doesn’t feel grand or dramatic. It feels simple and aching. Like wanting someone to sit beside me and squeeze my hand the moment they feel my body tremble in tears, instead of pushing me forward or cheering from a distance. Like wanting company in the complexity rather than applause for enduring it. Like wanting to fight for me and not let the ship sink when I’m not on the wheel.

And if being studied is, in some quiet and essential way, what it means to be loved, then I can’t stop wondering what it means that so few people seem willing to stay long enough to really look.

Let me preface this: my deepest concern around AI isn’t about the disruption per se. But the more unsettling question emerges when we zoom out and examine what, and whom, AI ultimately serves. And despite all the glossy rhetoric of empowerment, I often suggest that AI serves capitalism—and not the benign, Adam-Smith-esque version, but the extractive version. It’s a system optimised to expand productivity and minimise cost, but also externalise harm with near-total detachment from the human consequences.

So the question isn’t just whether AI will replace our jobs, but whether the jobs left will still hold meaning, dignity, or purpose. While some AI tools appear helpful, they do so by coercing us to match the pace of a machine-driven market. Said plainly, while we used to joke that we were slaves of capitalism, that irony has probably been made reality by the rise of AI.

The paradox of being ‘too poor to replace’

We already know that AI doesn’t replace labour equitably. Historically, thousands of workers were displaced by machines that could perform faster and cheaper, like mechanised looms and printing presses. Its brunt was borne particularly by the blue-collar—while the white-collar roles, requiring interpretation, coordination, or judgment, remained relatively insulated. In fact, the upheaval gave more rise to new white-collar jobs: administrative staff, software engineers, or compliance officers—as industrial systems needed human cognition to optimise what machines could not yet manage alone.

But now, AI, and more recently, GenAI, handle cognitive tasks that were once considered uniquely human—writing, designing, coding. The existential question has now breached the glass walls of offices: Will my job be next?

Despite this newfound anxiety, the structural inequality and classism remain intact. In countries with high labour costs and strong institutional protections, AI is deployed to streamline operations, leading to displacements of many.

Meanwhile, in most of the Global South, where labour remains cheap and protections are limited, automation is often postponed—not due to ethical considerations or technological lag, but because hiring humans is still cheaper than hiring machines.

The cruel paradox is this: many workers are spared not because they’re valued, but rather because they are undervalued. And the only reason some workers are not yet made redundant by AI is because their continued exploitation is more profitable than innovation.

This isn’t about technical feasibility, but economic convenience. The paradox of being too poor to replace reveals AI adoption is less about progress than it’s about arbitrage.

Bullshit jobs are now the infrastructure

The late anthropologist Graeber (2013) coined the term "bullshit jobs" as a work so “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious” that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, “as a part of the conditions, the employee feels obliged to pretend that their jobs are necessary.”

In the AI era, I argue, this category is expanding and becoming more necessary, especially to maintain the illusion of productivity in a system that values motion over meaning.

Jobs now emerge to simulate value: prompt engineers, AI validators, machine-learning auditors. Their primary function is to simulate value: to make machine outputs legible to other machines. They’re epistemic shell games: roles that exist not for humans but for systems that have become too complex to be left unattended.

Then consider the growing layers of even more vague jobs in digital marketing, forecasters, strategists or trend trackers whose jobs are to prevent influencers from getting outpaced by the social media algorithms—organising around AI-generated content calendars on fancy dashboards. All to retrofit AI outputs into posts that feign creativity.

Imagine all months of work result in a dashboard about an engagement rate of a post that was written by a model. Then imagine if it were all deleted tomorrow, would society carry on unbothered, or perhaps even… relieved?

These roles are routinely hailed as “the jobs of the future,” yet a closer inspection reveals their disturbing redundancy. I’m not saying that all AI-adjacent labour is pointless. But we have to admit that many of these roles don’t exist to truly serve people. They exist to serve systems. They emerge not from human need, but from the institutional obligation to appear busy, to justify budgets, or to demonstrate agility.

Ironically, the more sophisticated the technology, the more performative the human layer. So while we claim to build a future of liberation through automation, we’re building a future where human work becomes ornamental—its value judged by proximity to machines.

The accelerating rise of what I call the ‘gold collar workers’

One of the more insidious consequences of AI is the way it distorts our sense of contribution. As the line between human and machine labour blurs, we begin to internalise a quiet panic: we must prove our irreplaceability. We overstate our so-called human “value-add”: creativity, emotional intelligence, cultural nuance—even as space to deploy these shrinks.

The result isn’t a flourishing of human potential, but a culture of professional performativity. What matters isn’t the output, but the narrative: the carefully crafted story of why this particular work required a human touch. We convince ourselves and our clients that the insight we offered came from a kind of affective depth that AI can’t reach, or from an interpretive layer too subtle for machines to detect. “What I offer,” we say, “can’t be bought from an algorithm.” And increasingly, that is the product: not the work, but the claim that, “it couldn’t have been done without us.” The labour of justification eclipses the labour itself—because from there, we create demands to justify our own existence.

This logic, I argue, breeds a new category: gold-collar work.

If blue-collar means physical, and white-collar means cognitive, gold-collar involves roles that exist primarily to package outputs in ways that feel distinctively human and strategically irreplaceable. These jobs are shiny, aesthetic, and often deliberately vague in function. They thrive in highly subjective measures of values—precisely because all that is measurable, optimisable, and objective has already been handed over to machines. And subjectivity—framed as taste, vision, intuition—becomes the last bastion of human uniqueness, the final frontier for economic legitimacy.

Gold-collar work is about signaling exclusivity. Because when AI solutions saturate the market, they no longer stand out. And to differentiate, companies purchase what AI cannot convincingly simulate: the illusion of freshness, humanised veneer of strategy.

And this becomes the new currency of class—not competence, nor impact—but branding human labour as luxury: bespoke, boutique, and irreproducible. This is why gold-collar work is, arguably, the most bullsh*t of all bullsh*t jobs because its primary function is to not be AI, and in doing so, deception becomes their feature product.

And it’s exhausting. It demands emotional labour without reciprocity, creativity without autonomy, and oversight without authorship. Yet, we cling to it because the alternative is worse: admitting that human work is reactive, adjacent, and ornamental.

But perhaps the more uncomfortable truth is this: gold-collar work doesn’t exist in spite of AI. It exists because of it. In propping up the human brand, we may stay visible, but we build nothing of real value anymore.

The optimism industrial complex

We often hear a recurring refrain: AI will free us to pursue more meaningful work. The statement is often delivered with such confidence that to question it feels contrarian, even regressive. But “meaningful”, in this context, is never clearly defined.

We assume automation will remove rote tasks and leave us creative, enriched. But that liberation rarely arrives. In reality, the jobs that add value and require care and presence—educators, nurses, or social workers—are still underpaid and undervalued. Meanwhile, AI-centric roles are expanding precisely where ambiguity is easiest to monetise.

If there's a way forward, it will begin with a philosophical reckoning. We have to ask what kind of labour deserves protection or instead disappear. The reality is that the jobs worth preserving are often the least scalable, the least profitable, and the most human. They involve contradiction, slowness, intimacy, and care. They bind communities, educate, challenge norms and build ethical resilience. They’re irreplaceable not because AI can’t mimic them, but because their social value cannot be reduced to output.

To resist the bullsh*tisation of work isn’t to romanticise labour either. It’s to demand that the future of work be measured by more than efficiency and productivity in a traditional sense. To assert that value cannot be determined by price alone. To insist that dignity be engineered into systems before they become too powerful to challenge.

There’s something almost grotesque about the human capacity to still be holding on, long after logic has folded its arms and left the room. I know this because I’ve been doing it. And even as I write this, I’m participating in the absurdity of grief’s ongoing negotiations: making tiny bargains with absence, dragging pain like contraband through so many rejections and closed doors and pretending that somehow, if I carry it far enough, long enough, and offer a brighter future over and over again—if I let it see enough sunrises in secluded places, it’ll eventually grow tired and dissolve into something poetic.

But not everything deserves to be made beautiful. I now resent even the suggestion. To turn this into art would feel like betrayal—like declaring anger, rage, and violation into something acceptable or even romanticised. I’m not ready for that kind of neatness.

The problem is: I don’t know how to write about anything without you submerged somewhere in its undercurrent like a knife cut deep into my skin. You have become the sediment layer beneath every paragraph. Even when the topic isn’t you, it’s still you. I keep romanticising old wounds into stories because fiction feels safer and more distant and controllable than the randomness of loss. And so I keep re-opening old scabs, not to heal them, but to control the narrative of how they bled—as though rearranging the chronology might offer me even a drop of relief. I’m terrified I might never stop.

I know that time eventually stitches most things back together. But unlike everything else in my life, this isn’t an assembly line I can speed up with effort. There are no fast passes for the heartbroken. Sometimes the only thing left to do is hurt—impressively, unapologetically, and grotesquely. I’ve spent the last 8 months physically stationed in one of the most beautiful places on earth, an alternative timeline where we couldn’t fall apart. Like a ghost life playing on repeat.

The thing about grief is how loyal it is. I’ve escorted mine through islands across oceans. I’ve seen it settle itself on my couch, dining chair, guest bedroom, within mirrors, pouring itself coffee with a slice of orange in it, placing its socks politely on top of the shoes next to my front door. It shows up in the cracks of my wine glass catching the dim evening lights. It breathes inside my watch, ticking its own private countdown.

November. It ends. December. January. February. March. It ends again. And again. And again. And now it’s June. It tucks me in and yanks me awake, like an unwelcome roommate who refuses to respect the lease.

At the top of my coffee table. At the bottom of the frozen grapes. In the stillness after dinner when the sky folds itself into navy blue. I perform distractions like rituals—small spells against remembering—but behind each curtain pull, there you are. The bullshit, imaginative idea of us, in some bastardised version of infinity, trapped between dimensions. Immortalised in half-finished poems I drunkenly whispered to no one. A love that was both underwritten and overwritten at once.

And then I laugh—because how embarrassingly predictable of me. To still be bleeding out over something that I saw barreling towards me for months.

But laughter keeps muttering the same thing under its breath: it was never that this was beautiful. It was that it hurt. And somewhere along the way, I started confusing endurance for evidence like surviving the wound made it worthy of being preserved. I kept draping my pain in velvet, embalming it in language, convincing myself that if I dressed it up enough times, if I made it elegant and tragic, it might retroactively deserve to exist. That somehow, if I could turn the bleeding into theatre, the stage lights would make it easier to watch.

I kept casting us as victims of misaligned timing, as if we were mere casualties of some cosmic logistics failure. That it wasn’t you who fractured me; it was fate. It was life. It was everything else but your hand on the wheel. But every time I sit still long enough—every time the noise dies down—I am forced to face the one thing I’ve been dancing around: it was you.

The truth—and I’ve been expertly avoiding it—is that I’ve been swallowing my rage like it’s some impolite indulgence. I’ve been denying myself the full extent of my violation. You whispered tenderness but your action was contradictory cruelty. You invited me into some ‘one day’ that you were never willing to build. You offered me devotions that, when tested, collapsed into nothing more than ornamental words. My loyalty was accepted like a gift as if it didn’t cost me anything at all.

All the choices lived inside you. You held them like precious drugs, as though making any definitive choice would expose you to moral injury—the injury you’re completely fine with when I’m the one bearing them. So instead you sold me this fantasy that “one day” you’d finally be in a position to choose—a hypothetical you kept feeding like a stray animal, while resenting me for its existence in your present life. And in your mind, you twisted it into some act of love. As if what I wanted was for you to suffer inside your indecision, as if your guilt was a suitable substitute for actual commitment.

It isn’t. What I wanted was devastatingly simple. To be loved is to be chosen. Not just promised, romanticised or theorised.

But you tried to separate the two, like it should be enough for me to accept the sentiment. Something more than that, it’s ‘expecting too much.’ But now I can finally say that it’s bullshit. It wasn’t love. It was cowardice wearing love’s cologne. You hurt me because you were too terrified to carry the weight of your own choices, so you outsourced that responsibility to fate, to circumstance, to guilt, to anything else but yourself. But here’s the fact you can’t dress up: you hurt me.

All the times I silenced my anger, I did it because I thought that’s what love was supposed to do. But it’s not so much love as it is betrayal. And where there’s betrayal, there’s permission to burn. And I’m angry. I’ve decided, finally, to trust your decisions more than your words. Because what you chose exposed what you actually meant, no matter how tenderly you spoke.

There’s no more return address for what’s left behind. There’s no more kiss for the road.

Closure, that fabled adult concept, is one of the most overrated spiritual myths we circulate to pretend that time is more obedient than it actually is. You can’t force it, threaten it, or coax it to arrive early. It’s so feral and indifferent.

Life, ever cruel in its generosity, offers these previews of futures we almost get to keep. But while they’re possible, they’re never promised. And that future is no longer the romanticisation of this bullshit. The future I hope is when I can finally erase this altogether.

Eventually, all that remains are the improbable truths. Not the simple stories: you hurt me you’re a villain; I didn’t see it coming—those feel way too cheap now. Instead, I sit with the more difficult multitudes: I’m so very angry. I cannot believe this is what you believe love is. Did you ever really love me—or was it just the idea of me? This ending was inevitable.

I don’t want to know who you are anymore. I don’t want to know how your days go. I knew we were doomed and I still charged headfirst into the storm because—and let’s not sanitise this—it’s not pathetic to wanna be loved and be chosen. There’s heroism in reaching out a hand, knowing it may never be held back.

I used to fantasise that you’d regret it faster. That I could wrap myself in that tiny satisfaction like a quilt. That way I could lie and say that your love never touched me. But it did. Just not in the capacity I needed.

It’s now winter in Melbourne. So I’ll put on my coat. You timed your exit just as I was rehearsing my arrival—giving up on one more little reach after I had walked mountains to get to you.

That’s how it ended.

The strange part is that I still can’t pinpoint the exact moment things began to shift. It was just a feeling at first. The unspoken tension. A slight hesitation where there used to be ease.

The silence wasn’t cold. It was tender. That’s what made it so hard. It would’ve been easier if there had been a moral catastrophe or a radical tragedy. Something to hold onto. Something to hate. But there wasn’t. There was just the ache of growing apart from someone who had once been the extension of my soul.

I don’t remember exactly what we said in our last conversation, it all seemed too vague. I remember the way our presence used to feel—like being wrapped in something warm and familiar, something that asked nothing of me except to exist. We were the only place I could fall apart without judgment, the only place I could say, “I’m scared” and not be met with advice or discomfort. Just space. Just breath. Just that steady kind of witnessing that doesn’t demand me to make sense.

I was so safe there. And God, how I miss feeling safe like a child.

There are still places I avoid because they make me feel like the past I used to enjoy a little bit too much. Cafés where we spent days reading to self-find from strangers’ perspectives. Songs that carry the kind of emotional specificity only shared memories can give a track. The rooftop where we had an eye-to-eye with the stars as the full moon was our witness. Clothing I haven’t worn in years because its smell reminds me of who I was when I wore it—when it felt like home.

And maybe that’s the worst part. It wasn’t that anything was wrong. Just the inevitability of change. Just time doing what time always does. Just space expanding larger than we could ever be. And then just me, evolving into someone that didn’t quite fit in that life anymore.

I didn’t choose to outgrow anything. But I did. And now I live with the guilt of survival. The regret of moving forward. The contradicting ends of a string—of finding the comfort that I had to leave behind.

It’s something older than romance. But it’s quieter and deeper. Like Norah Jones’ low hum in the background of a whisky chit-chat, reminding me of the version of myself that felt the most real. And it’s not nostalgia. Just a missing person. The ease. The clarity. The complete lack of performance that was confusing but liberating.

The world loves stories about breaking up with other people. We have an entire dictionary for it. Language soaked in metaphor and therapy speak. But no one gives you words for the deep cuts of grief that happen when you outgrow yourself.

No one tells you how much it can feel like heartbreak. No one tells you that the grief will mimic everything you’ve ever felt when someone walks away and doesn’t look back. The confusion. The rage. The resignation. The quiet hope that maybe, one day, you’ll run into them again and be able to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to change.”

And then one day, without disclaimers, I woke up fluent in a language I was never meant to learn. I used to speak instinctively and in hunger. Or the irrational joy of being known without needing to justify myself. But now I’m busier thinking about my posture and softened takes than I am about my substance. In tidy little frameworks that keep the mess at bay.

Because it’s not enough to say that I want this, it has to be overintellectualised. Then it’s not enough to say that I feel hurt, I have to self-diagnose. It’s also not enough to say, I need it, it has to be overexplained. Because this world is not made for honest people to be embraced. It’s made for those stoïc enough to repress their feelings to the point of flattening themselves into a piece of card no one can read, then decorate it with only a subtle hint of feelings to make themselves seem human.

And that’s what I did. I did all that to strategise communicating the part of myself I’m so scared of being misunderstood by others I fear may “un-love” me. And most frequently people who are closest to me, whose perceptions and actions matter the most to me. And I’m thriving. I’m excelling at the art of careful calibration—a negotiation between essence and appearance, shaped by my persistent fear that what lies at the core might be reduced, distorted, or worse, dismissed entirely. I rehearse every sentence through hypothetical reactions. I reroute it through possible interpretations and rewrite it to preempt potential harms. I morph expressions in careful calculations, not out of deception but in defence. Because what I need most to express is precisely what I fear exposing: the interior truths that, if misread, would feel like annihilation of my existence. So I rehearse because I can’t afford not to. Because being seen for who I truly am feels like a luxury and a condition for survival all at the same time. And so, rather than speak plainly, I choreograph nuance. Rather than trust my subject of conversation, I over-code the message. Rather than relying on who I am, I avoid at all costs any possible interpretations of who I am not.

So I risk becoming incomprehensible, even to myself.

My way of speaking—of expressing, of articulating, of making myself known—has become so tethered to context, so bound by the dimensions of space, audience, and interpretation, that I’m no longer sure if it belongs to me at all. It’s shaped by imagined receptions, coded for legibility in rooms I sometimes don’t even want to be in. I’ve become so obsessed with perfecting the semantics—so attuned to how it’ll be heard that I’ve stopped listening to what I’m actually saying.

I suspect I don’t understand any of it anymore. Not in a way that this language feels like a bridge between the inside and the outside.

And people call this “growth.” But sometimes I can’t seem to see it that way. I sometimes see it as a betrayal. A slow one. A betrayal that claps when I perform clarity but looks away when I quietly lose access to the parts of myself that I used to feel comfortable in. But in the process, I stopped speaking me. And the scariest part is that I got so good at it—so good at translating myself that I almost forgot there was another language underneath.

You know the one I mean. The one I spoke before I knew words like “self-regulate” or “boundaries.” The one that wasn’t bound by space and time, nor processed in ways that fit into others’ understandings and perspectives. The one that didn’t need to be cross-checked for narrative coherence before it left my mouth. The one that used to blurt things out at 1 AM and fall in love too fast and cry too easily and say this matters even if no one put a spotlight on it, aside from Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 orchestrating its backdrop.

And I know I had to toughen up. The world isn’t built for that kind of softness. Especially not if you want to be respected. Especially not if you want to be taken seriously. So we shaved off the parts of us that made people uncomfortable. We sanded ourselves down to a clearer shape.

And it costs a lot.

I feel like I learnt to put on competence as a stand-in for connection; only to learn that in reality connection is the stand-in for competence when competence actually matters the most—as long as it’s the right connection. Then I was taught that honesty was a value to uphold to become good—only to find that “doing the work” is a choreographed performance of being the most palatable version of myself because honesty is not really honesty. Honesty is eloquence in dressing up lies and masking it as our truth.

And if this is what we call growth, I’m angry. I’m grieving. And I think so are the people around me. A kind of rage so vast, most don’t know where to put it, how to release it, or who could possibly hold it. So some carry it quietly. Some bury it beneath pleasantries. Some repress it until they forget it was ever there. And that last one, people say, is part of not only growing, but maturing. You learn to withhold and suppress. Deny, deny, deny. And in denial, people develop yet another language—one they speak with astonishing fluency: a language that neither they nor anyone else truly understands, because this one isn’t made to express nor communicate. It was built to conceal.

I think I’ve been correct in what people see as correct. Strategic in a way that people do see me the way I portray myself to be. I think I’ve been careful and consistent and occasionally even profound. But I don’t think I’ve been honest—not in the way I was when I was still allowed to be confused. Not in the way I was when I didn’t yet speak this shiny new dialect of adult selfhood that sounds amazing in theory but never quite reaches the gut.

This is the kind of betrayal that doesn’t break me all at once. But it makes me less certain. Less moved.

It’s the slow, necessary, high-functioning erosion of the self that once believed I could be both messy and ok. That I could be broken, wanting to be fixed, and yet accepted all at the same time. But that self wasn’t sustainable in this life. She would’ve combusted. But damn, she was fluent in something I can’t even touch anymore. And I miss her voice. But I don’t know who’s doing the translating anymore.

The cover art is the artwork that represents my 3-year Fine Art degree. It’s an artwork in a form of a self-made language, and it’s still evolving as I evolve. And this piece speaks, in part, of what and who inspire it, though I’ll keep some mysteries fully personal for the time being.

You know him. The “Green Flag Guy.” Shows up on time. Texts back within minutes. Remembers your oat milk. Says things like, “Let me know when you get home,” and “I filled up the car so you can use it tomorrow.”

But still… something’s off. Like a rom-com missing the chemistry. He’s responsible. He’s not a walking red flag. And yet—he’s not quite it. Not yet.

We throw around phrases like “green flag,” “emotionally available,” “committed,” “supportive” like they’re synonyms—but they’re not. And even though pop culture keeps serving up examples of both incredible and deeply mediocre partners, we’re still left wondering: what actually makes someone an ideal partner?

So we keep asking ourselves the same questions over and over again, not just because we’re unsure, but because we’re also unsatisfied. We don’t know why we feel so unfulfilled. We know for sure we’re not looking for the perfect man either; we know it’s impossible. Are we just being too picky, too greedy? Or are our needs genuinely unmet? Is my partner not doing enough, or are we just fundamentally incompatible?

Which brings us to the bigger stuff: Why do “good” people still make terrible partners? Why do women feel like they’re communicating well and still not being understood? Why do men feel like they’re doing everything, and still not enough? Why does modern dating leave so many of us resentful—of each other, ourselves, even romance itself? Why does modern dating feel like we’re all stuck in a loop of therapy buzzwords, mismatched timelines, and halfway-there green flag relationships?

The male gaze shaped the blueprint of men for women

It’s easy to instinctively picture the alpha men when society paints the image of the ideal man. The heroic archetype. The charm of Henry Golding, the build of Michael B. Jordan, and the soft, knowing smile of Henry Cavill. Maybe even a dash of Robert Downey Jr.’s quick wit. Chiseled like a Greek god, with a jawline sharp enough to cut through silence—or another man. Maybe he’s a quarterback, running as fast as he runs from his problems. He’s inked just enough to seem rebellious, but not so much that he looks like a basement punk. He’s too cool to care, because he’s stoic. Polished. Always composed. He gets the girl because he’s a go-getter. The kind of man who doesn’t take no for an answer. A relentless chaser—effortless, but never idle.

But when we finally get “the guy,” why don’t we feel at peace about it? Why do we sleep at night still yearning for I-don’t-know-what and still meet with haunting emptiness every time Laufey is on?

And the butterflies crept in, not when we’re with him; but rather when we were just talking to the sentimental boy next door. The one who stays home to write about stars instead of chasing them. The one who notices small things. Who sees the world slowly.

Like we adore Chris Hemsworth from afar but we feel our lips curl into a smile when Shawn Mendes talks about love like he’s still trying to understand it. Or when Glen Powell gazes at a woman like he’s really looking. When James Franco, as Harry Osbourne, smiles that aching smile—half mischief, half sadness. When Andrew Garfield reads a love poem and his voice cracks, and suddenly we feel everything he’s trying not to say. It’s in those moments—fleeting, fragile, cinematic—that something inside us falls in love. Unexpectedly. Entirely. Without permission.

And then there’s the guy friend. The one we feel safest with. He’s kind, unassuming. The one who makes us laugh, teases us, in Tom Holland-esque banters—effortlessly close, like breathing. The one who texts, “Please let me know when you’re home. I mean it. I won’t fall asleep until I hear from you.” Why does that feel like the most desirable thing of all? Why does basic decency suddenly feel like a grand gesture? Why does care feel like intimacy? And is wanting that intimacy too much? Or have we simply forgotten what it feels like to be gently loved?

We sat in that unease long enough—past the part of us that want to blame ourselves for being “too picky,” to a point we start to see the real fracture:

The ideal man, as we have been taught to recognise him, was never actually built for us. He was built for men. Built by the male gaze, for the male gaze. Constructed out of a fantasy not of love, not of intimacy, not of relational electricity—but of power, status, utility, and self-congratulation.

A man was ideal if he could be envied by other men, not if he could be felt by a woman.

But increasingly, that old blueprint is cracking. Women are finally reclaiming the right to not only refuse what we don’t want, but to define what we do. We’re no longer satisfied with the mere absence of harm, nor confusing absence of badness for presence of goodness.

We’re learning, sometimes clumsily, sometimes in bursts of rage or grief, how to articulate the textures of our own desires after centuries of being told we shouldn’t have any at all.

And it’s messy. Because desire that’s been silenced for generations doesn’t return in perfect, confident declarations. It returns in stammers, overcorrections, and in the heartbreak of mistaking the bare minimum for the dream. In the confusion of wanting more but not yet having the language to demand it.

What the female gaze demands of an ideal partner: The Three Efforts

But if we want to understand why “good” relationships can still feel so quietly devastating, why women can love their partners and still feel profoundly unseen, we have to go deeper than the green flag discourse.

We need to start by asking whether a man is first and foremost a “good human being with basic human decency,” then we can start asking whether they are ready to be partners: emotionally, sexually, spiritually, practically. And that means recognising that the ideal partner isn’t someone who just avoids harming others.

The ideal partner, through the female gaze, is someone who chooses desire, labour, and self-responsibility daily, deliberately, and with depth.

Through this lens, he’s defined by three interwoven characteristics: effort for the partner, the relationship, and the self. Without all three, love collapses into either a performance of duty or a hollow theater of affection. And we’re tired of performances. We’re tired of carrying the invisible weight of emotional labour and relational maintenance while being told we should be grateful that he texts us good morning.

Note: This is not in any way to diminish the role of the women in making the ecosystem ripe for the men to grow in these three elements. So, while we ‘re illustrating the framework below in the context of men, the framework also applies to people of all genders as romantic partners.

Part II: Bear with us; we’re totally overanalysing this, but it’s worth it.

Love is a verb. And intimacy emerges when love is a daily active choice.

Love, when left unexpressed, doesn’t quietly wait. It shrivels, fades, and slips into the background until it becomes an ache you can’t name. It’s the daily, deliberate practice of desire. It’s not grand gestures or cinematic moments, but the small, specific, often unnoticed ways of saying: I see you. I want you. I still choose you, even here, even now.

It’s the flirtatious smile thrown across the dinner table after a long day. It’s the hand on the back as you pass each other in the kitchen. It’s the meme sent because only the two of you would understand why it’s hilarious. It’s catching their eye across a crowded room and feeling the world collapse into a private universe only you two inhabit.

Without this, even the most stable relationships feel starved. Because love, if not actively expressed, becomes a ghost story inside a living body.

But wanting, no matter how electric, no matter how intoxicating, isn’t enough to hold a life together. Some men know how to spark that feeling. They know how to look at you like you are the only thing worth breathing for. They know how to make your skin hum, your heart stutter, your body remember itself. But they also know how to disappear. When effort for the partner is the only thing they know how to offer, you find yourself burning bright… and then burning out.

Him, we call the Romantic Performers. The ones who ignite you but can’t hold you. The Ted-Mosby’s. The Edward-Cullens. They stare at you like you’re salvation, yet never quite step fully into the messy, living, human parts of love. They know they want you. They just don’t know how to stay.

He’s intoxicating. But he burns bright and fast and then leaves you cold.

Desire isn’t enough. It’s about the commitment to grow together.

It’s where love stops being a feeling and starts becoming a practice. It's the part where you move beyond the electricity of connection and into the slow, sometimes tedious, profoundly sacred work of building a life together. It's about taking co-ownership. Not just of the good times, but of the hard parts: the routines, the compromises, the mental load, the shared dreams that don’t just happen but have to be constructed, piece by careful piece.

It’s noticing when the groceries are low without being asked. It looks like scheduling the difficult conversation instead of avoiding it. It looks like holding your partner through their messiest grief, not because it's fun, but because you chose this person, and you choose them still.

Without it, even the most romantic relationships collapse under their own weight. Because if a man can show up with passion but disappears when it's time to share real responsibility, he becomes a beautiful but unreliable narrator of love.

But of course, we all know too well the men who show up, but only for the parts they were taught to value. The ones who never cheats. Who doesn’t ghost. Who never leaves… but also never quite… arrives? He never fails to pay the bills on time, but he simply fails slowly—by making love feel like an obligation rather than a living, breathing act of devotion. We call them the Responsible Roommates—because that’s exactly who they become. Think Mike from 17 Again, who understands the duties of marriage but somehow forgets the daily magic of choosing someone again and again in the every day.

And even when responsibility and romance exist side by side, even when the flowers arrive on anniversaries and the bills are paid on time, something still rots under the surface if one thing is missing: the self.

They make relationships their one and only thing. They give and give and give until they are a shell of their former selves, quietly eroding under the weight of their own self-abandonment. This is the Repressed Devotee. Think Charlotte York from Sex and the City, who bends and softens and perfects herself endlessly to fit the shape of a life that still leaves her hollow.

When someone gives without tending to their own inner world, they eventually wither. And no relationship, no matter how lovingly built, can thrive in the presence of that slow decay.

Which is why we need the third, most neglected layer.

Heal, so love has somewhere safe to land.

Self-work is the quietest, most invisible labour, but it is the ground beneath everything else. It’s the work of facing your own patterns before they sabotage the life you’re trying to build. It’s recognising that the anger, the withdrawal, the neediness, the fear—none of it will stay politely contained just because you love someone.

This means cultivating emotional regulation instead of demanding your partner to do it for you. It means noticing the ways you flinch before you lash out, the ways you shut down before you vanish. It’s the difficult, tender art of drawing boundaries, but only enough that they don’t become walls. They communicate needs mindfully enough not to project them as ultimatums. Apologising without twisting the knife of guilt. Taking responsibility for your inner world so your partner doesn't have to become its janitor.

Without it, even a man who loves well and builds well will still, eventually, hurt you in ways he doesn’t understand. And will never understand. Because without self-work, love becomes an arena where old wounds re-enact themselves over and over again.

But having this alone, of course, isn’t enough. Because you’ll find yourself a Self-Work Hermit. It’s the man who has journaled his childhood traumas into oblivion. Who knows every attachment theory. Meditates. Sets boundaries. Who is deeply in touch with his own needs—and yet somehow, still holds you at arm’s length. He never feels like he’s ready for a relationship. This person is Emma Morley from One Day, whose self-discovery often runs parallel to connection but rarely entwines with it. Think Clementine from Eternal Sunshine, so busy untangling herself that she forgets love requires being tangled with someone else, too. Too busy focusing on things they can fix about themselves while forgetting that the relationship needs so much fixing too.

The Self-Work Hermit can talk beautifully about intimacy. But when you reach for them, there’s often a subtle withdrawal. A prioritisation of their own growth over the shared life you’re trying to build.

Part III: What we’ve called yearning is actually reclaiming our needs

The green flag men we talk about: Present but unplugged

And so we’re grateful we’re now increasingly surrounded by men who have clearly done some major work. He’s emotionally literate. He divides chores without being asked. He knows how to communicate, compromise,and respect your boundaries. On paper, he is everything we were taught to want: the poster child of modern partnership. And yet, when you’re lying next to him, there’s a kind of loneliness that you can't explain without sounding spoiled. A silence between bodies that should be familiar but feels impossibly distant.

This is the man we often call Green Flag. Safe. Respectful. Responsible. But something essential is missing: the active, daily wanting. The effort not just to maintain peace, but to cultivate presence. The instinct to reach for you not out of obligation, but out of genuine hunger. The Green Flag checks every logistical box, but somehow, being with him feels more like living inside a carefully negotiated treaty than inside a life built together. You’re protected, but not adored. You’re respected, but not ravished. You’re chosen, but sometimes… unnoticed. Unseen.

It’s not that he’s doing anything wrong. It’s that the bar was set so low—just don’t be abusive, don’t disappear, don’t cheat—that the absence of harm started looking like the apex of love. But it isn’t. Safety is the floor, not the ceiling. It’s the minimum required for intimacy to even be possible, not the final destination.

Craving more than this is not greedy. It is not ungrateful. It is the natural human yearning for connection that doesn’t just stabilise you, but ignites you. Women are finally learning that wanting to feel chosen, desired, actively loved—not just accommodated—is not asking for too much. It’s asking for what was missing all along.

Because love, real love, should not feel like walking on well-polished floors. It should feel like walking into a fire you both chose to build and choosing, every day, to keep it alive.

The centre: The ideal partner through the female gaze

You want to say how you feel but the words don’t come out right. They gather in your throat, thick and sharp, tangled with the fear that maybe this is the moment he’ll flinch. Maybe this is when you’ll become too much. So you hesitate. You fidget with your sleeve. You say, “It’s fine. I’m just tired.” And you hope he doesn’t press. And you hope he does.

But he notices the crack before the fall. He reaches across the space between you, gently, slowly, and takes your hand, like he’s done it a thousand times before. “It’s okay,” he says, voice low. “You can tell me. I’m all ears. Do you want me to just listen?”

And you nod, unsure, eyes already welling. He doesn’t try to fix it. He doesn’t offer platitudes or rush to the part where it’s all better. He doesn’t say, “it’s going to be ok,” like he thinks he’s expected to when he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t tell you to calm down. He doesn’t shrink from your storm. He just stays. Quietly. Tenderly. With you.

And when you finally speak, when the sob breaks through your sentence, when your voice cracks mid-thought and you apologise for it—he still doesn’t say much. But the way he looks at you says everything. I’m here. I feel you. I love you.

And then the overthinking begins. You start to panic inside, Am I dumping too much on him? Is this selfish? Should I be handling this on my own? Why can’t I just be easy to love? But then, he squeezes your hand. Not hard. Just enough. Just once. As if to say, You are not a burden. You are not a mess I’m here to clean. You don’t have to be okay to be held. And in that moment, something loosens. The guilt you’ve carried for being too emotional, too complicated, too much begins to fall away. Because for the first time, someone isn’t trying to carry you out of your feelings—they’re sitting beside you in them. And you’re not too much to handle. You’re not too much to love.

And when that happens, you start to breathe differently. You don’t have to shrink. You don’t have to over-perform your worth. You don’t have to narrate your pain for him to believe it. You finally feel what it’s like to be met. Not saved. Not managed. Not tolerated. Met.

That’s when you realise: this—this is the love you were never taught to expect, but always knew to want. The kind that doesn’t ask you to earn softness. The kind that doesn’t disappear when it gets hard. The kind that feels, at last, like home.

They’re not men who arrive fully formed. They’re men who wake up every day and choose to love. Not as a performance, not as a default, but as a living, breathing, relentless act of effort. The Chandler to Monica, the Patrick to Tiffany. The Fonny to Tish. The kind of love that’s built, not fallen into. The kind of love that survives not because it’s easy, but because it’s chosen, taken care of, noticed—deliberately, stubbornly, beautifully—over and over again. Because love isn’t just chemistry. It isn’t just kindness. It isn’t just showing up. It’s effort, everywhere, always—partner, relationship, self. All at once. Every day.

This is the kind of man women are learning to name, to seek, to insist upon. We’re starting to understand that love shouldn’t be a hunger strike. It’s a feast built together. And if it isn’t, it’s not worth it.

Cover art: Venus and Adonis, Titian (1553-1554). Museo Nacional del Prado. Open access: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cool is always elusive. Slippery. It doesn’t like being stared at too long. Try to describe it, and it rolls its eyes. Try to chase it, and you’re already embarrassing. But here’s the thing: cool isn’t random. It’s not some cosmic aura granted to the chosen few. It’s math. Social math. Cultural math. Class math. And today, in a world where brands, influencers, and even activist movements are scrambling to look effortlessly subversive, we need to decode it—not to kill it, but to expose what makes it tick. Because, while taste (and its twin, cool) has always been classist—now, it’s luxury designer classism on steroids! The aesthetic of resistance is reserved for those who can afford to “dress up.”

Because cool isn’t really just about style, but rather about fighting the system. Then it’s about how you package the fight. And how you package the fight is deeply entangled with status, access, and aesthetics.

Here, I want to do what cool never wants you to do: call it out.

I: Cool through the ages: Getting a taste of the different ingredients

Cool has always been defined by its tension with the times.

1980s: Cool = Spectacle — because power was spectacle. Reagan and Thatcher pushed polish, power, and profit. MTV was born, Wall Street exploded, and capitalism became sexy. So youth responded with noise and neon. Madonna in mesh—the “Like a Virgin” performance in lace and crucifixes, Prince in purple satin, punks in plaid, eyeliner as protest. Cool in the '80s was glam with bite—because visibility itself was rebellion.

1990s: Cool = Apathy — because hope felt hollow. The Cold War ended, but so did the plot. Gen X was raised on broken promises—divorce, debt, disillusionment. So cool stopped caring. Grunge. Boredom. Winona Ryder’s deadpan with Kurt Cobain in thrift-store cardigans, followed by the sullen heroic chic like Kate Moss. Riot Grrrls shouted from basements. MTV unplugged the polish. Zines beat magazines. Cool in the '90s was an emotional exit: a fuck-you with a cheeky shrug.

2000s: Cool = Curated Chaos — because… internet. The internet let us remix ourselves. Emo met preppy. Paris Hilton reigned for nothing—like fame was hackable. Identity fractured into style collisions and ironic detachment. Everyone copied each other while pretending not to. Cool in the 2000s was chaos you curated.

2010s: Cool = Woke Aesthetics — because politics was cool. Burnout became branding. Self-care was resistance. Instagram made identity visual. You had to be political—but photogenic. Angry—but filtered. Influencers wept, then sold merch. And this is why no matter how much Great Thunberg yelled, the vegan soy matcha gurls with glitter nails next door are the ones driving the script of “sUst41in1bilitY.” Cool was a revolution in a palatable content strategy.

And now, cool = Hyper-Aware Contradiction — because we live in the post-artifice, with aesthetics as the new assembly line. Post-pandemic, post-authenticity, mid-apocalypse. Everyone is a character. Every subculture is a trend. TikTok turned sincerity into satire. Everyone knows it’s a performance—and performs knowing. Cool in the 2020s is self-aware absurdity. You win by admitting the game is rigged—and playing anyway.

Things change. Cool has changed. But you’ve seen the pattern. Here’s the truth underneath it all: no matter the era, the formulation is the same.

II: The formulation of coolness: Different ingredients, same recipe

Cool sits at the centre of four forces. Let’s break them down.

Effortlessness: It shouldn’t be about the style; it should be “lived”

Effortlessness isn’t less about the lack of effort but about living in conviction. The people who radiate effortlessness aren’t pretending. The clothes, the choices, the vibe—it all feels natural, not because it’s unstyled, but because it’s lived. There’s no trying because they don’t need to try. The lifestyle is the look.

When effortlessness is missing, you’ll be the one doing the most but moving the least. And this is why Machine Gun Kelly is trying to punk harder than punk ever did. Or luxury brands selling “anti-fashion” looks with four-figure price tags. It’s all noise, no soul.

Rebellion: Something to fight against

Don’t mistake rebellion for being loud—it’s about living differently and refuses to apologise. It doesn’t chase the counterculture—it is the counter. Like when Rihanna skipped the Met Gala to eat pasta in New York. Rebellion is about standing so fully in your values that the world has no choice but to feel the friction.

When rebellion is missing, we get… mainstream. Safe. Likable. Algorithm-approved. Like Hailey Bieber in a slicked bun and glazed skin—so polished, so timely, and so... harmless. Or Emily Ratajkowski calling herself a feminist while selling average-but-overpriced bikini brands.

Cultural Resonance: It lands because we’re ready

Timing. It’s knowing the moment—not trend-chasing, but zeitgeist-tuning. It’s cool that emerges right when we’re craving it. It looks right and it feels right. It vibrates at the same frequency as the now. Like when Billie Eilish first showed up in baggy clothes when Instagram was full of polished perfection.

When cultural resonance is missing, we’re just looking at anyone who’s been doing the work before the work became sexy. They’re saying what needs to be said. But without resonance or aestheticisation, they’re ignored or called aggressive—until a white influencer “discovers” the cause over brunch and gets 50k likes. A cause without resonance is important—but invisible. It’s the truth that doesn’t trend. Yes, you’re smelling classism here; but I’ll get to that.

Aestheticisation: Aspiration, style, fashion

This is the glossy finish. The packaging. The visual poetry. The ability to turn protest into a palette. Rage into merch. And it’s not inherently evil—humans are drawn to beauty. But beauty is a gatekeeper. And the ones who can afford beauty often get to narrate the revolution and turn it into aspiration.

Let me say this clearly: aestheticisation is the class entry fee to cool. Not just about looks, but about the resources to stylise your beliefs. The tools to curate, not just survive. When aestheticisation is missing, you can change culture from the edges all you want but will never get the credit. Bob Dylan in his folk radicalism. Skaters who didn’t know they were fashion. Queer kids in Midwest basements inventing aesthetics that coastal elites later co-opt. They get studied—but only after the fact.

III: The so-called “good taste”—aestheticised cultural appropriation, the wannabes, and the post-cool apocalypse

This is where it burns. Because when someone aestheticises a rebellion they didn’t live through, they aren’t participating. They’re packaging. And often, they make it cool by scrubbing it of risk. Here’s what it is: that’s not “cool”. It’s theft.

Marginalised communities invent the cool because they must. Out of necessity. Resistance. Hunger. But they’re told it’s ugly. Loud. Dangerous. Until someone richer, paler, or algorithmically blessed says the same thing in suits—and suddenly it’s “disruption.” It’s called “good taste”. Just because they’ve got the look. The pose. The lingo. Think Kendall Jenner handing a Pepsi to a riot cop. Think brand accounts tweeting Black Lives Matter while underpaying their interns. Think influencers reposting AI-generated “All Eyes On Rafah” while defending their brand deal with a weapons manufacturer’s fashion line. They checked all the boxes but forgot the cause.

If I haven’t been clear, let me clarify: taste is classist. It always has been. It’s just another way of ranking lived experiences. This is good taste. That is bad. This is cool. That’s cringe. Behind every aesthetic judgment is a power structure deciding what gets spotlighted and what gets dismissed.

We take someone’s culture—someone’s actual life—and call it a trend. We strip it of context. We repackage it as novelty. Run it through the algorithm. And once it breaks into the mainstream, we discard it. Too common. Too diluted. Too cheap. What it’s saying is: it’s too “democratised” now, it’s no longer ’eX0t1C.’ *cough* cultural appropriation *cough*

But for the people who had been living that experience we had rebranded as trends, it was never aesthetic. It was reality. And yet capitalism—teamed up with algorithmic supremacy—gets to decide what goes viral and what vanishes. What becomes visionary, and what stays invisible. Cool is curated, exclusionary, and enforced by systems that benefit from the class systems.

It’s all about: Who gets access to own cultural capital? Who has the time to cultivate that perfect balance of mainstream appeal and niche edge? Who can afford the fashion, the filters, the feeds? Good taste has become a proxy for access. For power.

IV: Cool in the age of performative anti-performance: I think we’re doomed

We’re drowning in performance. Everyone has the ingredients now. Everyone knows the recipe. But not everyone can bake.

Cool today is knowing the formula and pretending you don’t. It’s being self-aware enough to mock the system, but privileged enough to do it in vintage Prada.

And the damaging peak of this is when real good causes become nothing more than aesthetic bait. When solidarity becomes status. When wearing a shirt, resharing an infographic, or posting a black square becomes the way to say, “I’m one of the good ones.” Not out of care, but out of curation. For those who live the struggle, it felt like a mockery. Like their pain had been reduced to a filter. A moment of relevance. A cool cause to click.

We’ve hit peak post-cool. The simulation cracked. Now we’re all mimicking a vibe invented by someone else, performed for an audience trained to scroll past it.

“Good taste” became the finish line, not the foundation. It became the goal—not the tool that comes after you have something to say. And when everyone’s chasing the same elusive polish, creativity becomes a race to sameness.

And this is why I don’t care about what’s cool. But here’s what I do care: I care about who gets to be cool. And who keeps getting edited out of the frame.

Cover image: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

A portrait masquerading as a moment—where the painter, the subject, and the viewer all perform for each other. It’s about visibility, status, and who gets to be seen.

We were in a kitchen. Someone had spilled tea. A child was sitting on the floor trying to put stickers on a cat that clearly didn’t want stickers on it.

I remember smiling because I knew it was meant kindly. But there is a peculiar thing about that particular compliment directed at me: they often arrive carrying an invisible future inside them.

You’re nurturing. So when? You’re patient. So why not? You love children. So surely the story ends there.

But I’ve increasingly started to wonder whether loving children and wanting to produce one are actually the same instinct at all?

I love children in the way some people love thunderstorms or old bookstores or dogs with human eyes. It’s the love that’s not of an abstract romanticisation, but a love that’s discerning and specific. I love that children ask questions that adults are too embarrassed to ask out loud anymore. A six-year-old once asked me whether fish ever get thirsty. Another asked me if dreams continue running after we wake up, like when Netflix asks if you’re still watching.

Children have not yet learnt how to flatten themselves into social acceptability. Their emotions arrive with full force. If they are devastated, they collapse dramatically onto the floor like 18th-century tuberculosis patients. I love their oversized emotions, the kind that turn a broken crayon into a national tragedy, and a hug into a full-body act of forgiveness. I love the way they narrate life out loud like they’re the main character in a musical no one else can hear. “He followed me into the toilet,” one told me once, pointing at his own shadow, genuinely spooked. If they love you, they say it every seven minutes as if worried the feeling may expire unless constantly renewed.

Adults call this immaturity. But I sometimes suspect it is simply sincerity before humiliation enters the body.

And precisely because I love them so much, I think I take them perhaps a bit too seriously to casually assume I should birth one.

This is the thing I can never quite explain without sounding insane: I think many people love the experience of children more than the children themselves. People love babies the way people love tiny handbags or aesthetically pleasing pastries. They squeal. They reach for them. They say things like “I just want to squish him!”

Which is affectionate, certainly. But affection is not the same thing as devotion. The difference reveals itself later. Like how people adore children when they function as emotional special effects. The giggling. The dependency. The feeling of being needed in a pure and uncomplicated way.

But then the child develops personhood. Suddenly, they are fourteen and angry and embarrassed by you and locking doors too loudly. And then you start to deny the remarkable fact that society so transforms from “children are blessings” to “teenagers are nightmares.”

Which is interesting, because adolescence is merely the stage where children begin resisting ownership.

I sometimes think many adults who claim to want children so badly actually do not want children at all. Or, perhaps they do, but perhaps they want children mcuh less than they want a kind of emotional permanence. They want legacy. They want one relationship where abandonment feels less likely.

A child becomes proof that somebody will carry traces of you after death. Which is not evil, exactly. Just frighteningly common. You hear it constantly once you notice it, and find it perplexing how no one stops to question its oddity.

“I want to give my child the childhood I never had.” “I want someone with my husband’s eyes.” “I want to experience unconditional love.”

It’s undoubtedly beautiful. But slightly terrying too? If we dare to see more deeply, have we made children vessels for our unresolved longing?

Then I started to see it everywhere. In ads, children are posed like soft-lighted accessories to adult purposes—signs of love, success, and normalcy. We say we love children, but often what we love is how they make us feel—needed, adored, fulfilled, and young again.

Or in movies, from Life Is Beautiful to The Pursuit of Happyness, children often exist not as complex beings, but as emotional amplifiers. They’re props to make an adult’s journey look redemptive. We infantilise kids when it suits us, then demand obedience when they grow inconvenient.

What if we don’t really love children? What if we love compliance, and we like to dress it up in cute costumes to make us feel less bad about it? Can I have your permission to say this: I think… it’s a projection?

And I think this is partly why motherhood feels so culturally sacred. It is one of the few forms of care society knows how to recognise without suspicion.

And it grieves me to see it: If a woman deeply nurtures people but does not have children, society becomes confused about where to place them. For most, there are only two culturally legible options available to women: a mother, or a career woman. Either you devote yourself to children or to productivity.

But who am I when I’m neither?

What if my longing is to build lives around emotional stewardship? What if I enjoy remembering birthdays with frightening precision simply because I care? What if I enjoy hosting dinners that make exhausted people feel briefly less alone? What if I long to master this discerning skill of knowing which friend is pretending to be okay from a single “haha” over text… just so I can be there for those who need it?

What if I long to carry a home wherever I go the way that candles create atmosphere simply by existing?

We struggle to name this labour because it doesn’t produce decent salaries or surnames.

We’ve romanticised the idea that the highest form of homemaking is to birth children. What if the deepest form of love isn’t in the creating of life, but in the preserving, nurturing, or witnessing of lives? Not only our own children, but also our friends’ children, our nephews and nieces, our friends who don’t know where to go home to, or those who are in need of care simply because care is getting more and more scarce, precisely because we’re all so busy trying to convert our care into a transactional chip, and invest it only into the things that can satisfy us and only us.

I wonder if we really do so out of love or simply out of self-centredness? And that’s precisely my biggest fear: not that I won’t be able to birth children on my own, but that I will be bringing children into a world when I don’t even have the heart to care for the ones who are already gasping for attention. I’m less scared of not being able to have kids, and more scared that I might love a child for what they make me feel and not who they are. That my need for purpose could eclipse their right to exist without being a project.

What if love means making this world a better home, not just a better bloodline? What if homemaking wasn’t about creating the perfect family, but about creating softer landings?

And what if homemaking was the labour we’ve been overlooking all along, not only as that confined to the walls of a house, or a family, or a last name, but embedded in how we care, and who we choose to care for?

What if homemaking wasn’t a place, but a posture? A decision to hold others when the world forgets to. To leave a porchlight on—not only for a child, but for anyone who’s tired. Anyone unravelling in silence. Anyone too proud to ask for help but hoping someone might offer anyway. Because not everyone has a home. But everyone deserves to feel at home somewhere.

And maybe the point isn’t who you care for, but that you do. Not out of obligation. But out of belief that no one should have to earn tenderness.

To be a homemaker is to insist that care doesn’t have to be scarce. That it can be ordinary, abundant, shared. That we can be each other’s safe place—not just in crisis, but in the boring, beautiful middle of life. When someone’s not broken, but just a little lost.

Cover art: The Artist’s Mother (1871). James McNeill Whistler. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

There’s a certain kind of movie that stays with you—not because of how much it shows, but because of how much it doesn’t. Not because two bodies crash together under neon lights, or because someone moans the way you’re supposed to, but because of a… pause. Or a hand hovering near a cheek. Or a glance across a room that says everything without saying a word.

Movies like The Worst Person in the World. Amélie. Before Sunrise. In the Mood for Love.

Films where eroticism lives not only in the bedroom. But in the kitchen light. Or the train ride. And like that silence before someone says something brave.

They don’t show you how to seduce someone, but they remind you how it feels to be undone by presence— eye contact, or uncertainty. They show us that longing, yearning—not sex itself—is often the sexiest thing.

It’s strange, isn’t it? We live in a time where sex is everywhere. It’s in our ads. Our podcasts. Soft porn movies. Actual porns in one click. Our Instagram captions and dating profiles. We have endless language for it. We own it now, proudly, loudly, beautifully.

And yet… something still feels missing. Because while we’ve made sex visible, we haven’t always made it felt.

We reclaimed the right to orgasm, then made it the only thing we look for.

Let’s start here: I think that the feminist rewriting of sex was necessary.

For so long, sex was about his pleasure. His timing. His release. Everything else was background noise. Women’s orgasms only exist in rumours. Foreplay was a vocabulary people only recently casually adopted.

So when the conversation shifted—when we said, “women deserve to come too,”—it felt radical! Like we were reclaiming our bodies, and our right to be touched, slowly and properly and fully. We brought the clit out of hiding. We made toys beautiful. We told our friends what we wanted, and sometimes even asked for it during sex.

It was liberation.

But here’s the thing about liberation: sometimes, it becomes a script. And scripts, no matter how well-written, aren’t always felt. What started as empowerment began to harden into expectation. Now, you’re not just allowed to orgasm—you’re supposed to. You’re supposed to know your body perfectly. To communicate with clarity. To climax efficiently. To be in control, but still open. To come, and then maybe cuddle, and then maybe journal about it.

And if you don’t, you feel like you failed at feminism. Especially when your partner has tried really hard to make you orgasm too.

We went from sex being something done to us to something we were meant to master. But mastery doesn’t always leave room for mystery. And what’s been lost along the way is the “in-between.” The slow exhale. The “I’m not ready yet, but I like you so much” feeling. The space where nothing happens—and still, everything does.

And this is the difference between desire and arousal. Arousal without desire leads to “I came, but it was meh” at best, and hollow emptiness at worst. And while arousal meeting desire feels surreal, desire without arousal makes you linger. Yearn. And that’s so f*cking hot.

We often forget that desire doesn’t always need to move forward. Sometimes, it’s allowed to hover. To hum low in the background like a song you don’t want to end. To bloom gradually, on its own timing, without needing to prove its existence through touch or climax.

Not every touch has to lead somewhere. Not every night needs a resolution. Sometimes, pleasure lives in the possibility. In the suspension. And sometimes—and this part matters—it’s also okay to feel pleasure in his pleasure. Not performatively. Not self-sacrificingly. But viscerally, deeply, because you want to.

Because the way he exhales when your hand finds his chest feels like a reward in itself. Because his moan is so unguarded, it makes you wet. Because there’s something exquisitely hot about watching someone unravel—because of you.

Sometimes, pleasure is witnessing. And sometimes, pleasure is being witnessed. It’s in the way he looks at you like you’re something sacred. Not in a pedestal way, not in a you’re-not-like-other-girls way—but in a you’re-here, and I’m lucky kind of way.

You feel it when his hands slow down. When his eyes linger a little longer on your hips, your neck, your face—not trying to find the next place to kiss, but just taking you in. And suddenly you’re not thinking about how you look—you’re thinking about how it feels to be seen like that.

Like your body is not a checklist. Not a shape to evaluate. But a landscape someone is honoured to explore. That’s pleasure, too. The quiet kind. The reverent kind. The kind that doesn’t demand anything, but makes you want to give more. Not to please—but to participate.

Pleasure isn’t always a crescendo. Sometimes it’s an invitation. Sometimes it’s the breath before the kiss. Sometimes it’s the gaze that says: You don’t need to do anything right now. I already want you.

These are all the things that we forget when orgasm becomes the only plot point. Because not every sexual encounter needs a finale. Some just need time. Or trust. Or trembling.

We turned sexiness into a brand and called it empowerment.

Reclaiming the body was the next step. And it was powerful. We took nudes for ourselves. We bought lingerie not for the male gaze, but for our own delight. We posted photos where we weren’t smiling—we were smoldering. We let ourselves be sexual. Messy. Loud. Soft. Queer. Kinky. Private. Public. Everything in between.

But then something happened. The freedom became a performance.

You weren’t just allowed to be hot—you had to be hot in the right way. Empowered hot. Authentically hot. Radically soft, but still high-res.

And we can trace the evolution of our sex icons through this very shift.

There was Marilyn Monroe, whose breathy voice and soft curves made her the fantasy of men everywhere, yet whose sadness often lingered just beneath the surface. Then Madonna—not just sexy, but defiant. She owned her sexuality, pushed boundaries, made religion and kink dance together in public.

Megan Fox came after—sharp, sarcastic, stunning—hotness with edge, but also forever performing it. And now, we have Sabrina Carpenter—a self-aware, almost winking embodiment of sex appeal. She sings about being seen as sexy, but always with quotation marks. She’s in on the joke. She knows you’re watching.

They’re all part of the same lineage: women who learnt how to package desire into persona. How to carry the weight of collective fantasy while carving out space for control. And yet, in each generation, there’s still a distance. A knowing performance. A beautifully curated silhouette. Not a person you can touch, but a person you can consume.

Yes, there’s a big difference: while the old sex icons were pinned-up, the new ones are self-posed. And yet, in both, you often feel the same thing: aesthetics without depth. Intimacy without touch. We’ve traded mystery for control. But sometimes, in gaining control, we lost a little realness.

And suddenly, pleasure wasn’t just about feeling—it was about signaling. Look how comfortable I am in my body. Look how well I know my needs. Look how in charge I am of my desire.

We stopped being witnessed, and started being watched.

And there’s a difference between those two things. Being watched is performative. It’s an outside-in gaze. But being witnessed is sacred. That’s inside-out. That’s someone staying with you—not to admire, not to analyse—but to be present with you in your full humanity.

Sexy isn’t just about being desired. It’s about being met and seen.

Let’s slow it down for a second. Because sexiness—the kind that makes your stomach flip, the kind that moves something under your ribs—isn’t about being admired. It’s about being met.

It’s when someone looks at you, and doesn’t just want to touch your body—they want to know your body. Know what makes it tense. What makes it soften. What makes it trust.

Like when he doesn’t touch you—not at first. He just looks at you like he’s trying to memorise something you didn’t know you were offering. Like he’s not even trying to get anywhere—just trying to stay here, in the moment—before the moment.

Like when you feel your breath start to change. Not because he’s said anything. He hasn’t. But because something in the air feels heavy in that quiet, suspended way. Like a string pulled taut between you both. Like you’ve been waiting to be seen like this and didn’t realise it until now.

Like when your body picks up on it before your mind does. For once in a long time, you don’t feel rushed. You don’t feel like you’re being taken. You feel… watched, but in the way he watches a sunset. Not to possess it, but because he doesn’t want to miss it.

Like when his fingers finally move toward you, they don’t ask for permission—they listen for it. They hover, hesitate, respond to the way you lean just slightly toward the space between you both. You realise you’ve been holding your breath. So, you let it go.

Like when he touches your collarbone first. Just that. Just a single line of skin he traces like it might tell him something about you that you haven’t said out loud. And you feel your chest rise—not out of nerves exactly, but because something inside you is stretching, softening, unfolding. You don’t say yes. You don’t need to. Your whole body already has. When he finally presses his lips to your shoulder, it doesn’t feel like a move—it feels like a secret. Like a sentence whispered just for you, not to seduce you but to reassure you: I see you. I’m here.

Like when he does finally reach for more, it’s not foreplay. It’s not a beginning. It’s not a means to anything. It’s an answer to a question you didn’t know you’d been asking.

That kind of sex isn’t always loud. It isn’t even always sexy by conventional standards.

But it’s the kind that stays with you. The kind you think about while grocery shopping. The kind that gets you smiling when your mind travels sometime while you’re driving. The kind that makes you feel like your entire self was touched.

Not just your clit. Not just your hips. But your being.

The thing we need to admit more publicly: The worst sex isn’t bad—it’s empty.

This is the part we rarely talk about. The worst kind of sex isn’t the kind where someone uses the wrong move or forgets your safe word. It’s the kind where you’re technically being touched, orgasm out loud—but feel utterly invisible.

It’s the kind where they say all the right things, hit all the right spots, make you come even—but still, you leave feeling like something inside you was missed. Because they didn’t meet you. They met your body. Your performance. Your silhouette. But they didn’t feel the moment where you hesitated. They didn’t notice when you stopped breathing. They didn’t slow down when your mind left the room for two seconds. It’s when you feel like he enjoyed the sex, but didn’t really enjoy you.

That’s what makes sex spiritual. Because sex is where we risk being seen in our entirety. And when that risk is met with real presence—something shifts. In you. In them. In the space between you both.

Maybe we don’t need more sex content. Maybe we need more sex honesty.

More stories about the first time someone cried during sex, and it was okay. More stories where the orgasm didn’t happen, but the connection did. More stories where we paused, and nothing felt ruined. More stories about that one time someone was so passionate and their head hit the wall, where the two ended up laughing until they cried.

Because sex doesn’t need to be spectacular. It needs to be true. We’ve learned how to say yes. Now maybe it’s time we learn how to say: not yet, but please stay?

The kind of sex we’re craving might not even look like sex at first. It might look like long conversations. Or brushing someone’s hair. Or standing in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the quiet between you swell into something electric.

It might not involve penetration. Or orgasm. Or roles. It might just be: I see you. I’m following the rhythm of our conversations. I want to feel how it feels to touch your skin. I want to see where this is going.

The kind of touch that says: you don’t have to be anything but here. The kind of touch that doesn’t try to excite you—it just meets you.

Because at the end of the day, we’re not trying to be good at sex. We’re trying to feel like someone stayed long enough to know us. And when that happens—truly happens—there’s nothing more erotic than that.

Cover image: The Lovers, René Magritte, Paris 1928. Oil on canvas. MoMA © 2025 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Magritte’s The Lovers shows two people kissing, but their heads are shrouded in cloth—making the moment intimate yet distant. It captures the paradox of closeness without true connection, suggesting that even in love, people can remain emotionally hidden or unknowable to each other. The painting leaves us questioning whether the barrier is self-imposed, societal, or something deeper about the mystery of human intimacy.

Somewhere along the rise of ChatGPT and machine-generated everything, a curious little witch hunt began: the witch hunt to identify which writings are written by humans or by bots. And like many others, they use proxies as identifiers; i.e., the punctuation marks they supposedly overuse. And leading the lineup is—surprise, surprise—the em dash. Yes, this dash: —.

This hunt has gone nuts—especially on LinkedIn: “Too many em dashes. They must’ve used ChatGPT to write.” This piece of punctuation, once beloved for its rhythm and style, has now become a red flag. A sign that a paragraph didn’t come from a person, but a bot fingerprint.

There’s quite an irony there: this isn’t the first time the em dash has been treated like a threat. Long before AI entered the room, the em dash was already under attack—by academics and self-proclaimed purists who saw it as too informal, too creative, too much like actual human speech.

It wasn’t “serious” enough for “serious” writing, and the em dash wasn’t allowed to breathe. It was seen as indulgent, unnecessary, or… a stylistic rebellion!!! The audacity! It didn’t belong in the “formal” writings, they said. The audacity!

So we took it back. Essayists, novelists, critics, or like me, writing rebels—we reclaimed it. Not because we didn’t know the rules, but because we knew exactly when to break them. We used em dashes to pause, to pivot, to control how our ideas moved. And just as it became a part of legitimate, accepted style, here comes a new wave of judgment—this time disguised as tech-savvy scepticism.

The target hasn’t changed. Only the excuse has.

Here’s why I refuse to give it up to the bot: The em dash gives writers back their voice—at their pace.

It’s a power move. We live in a culture where readers are obsessed with skimming, scrolling, and speeding through text. And in that speed, em dashes demand attention. It slows the reader down. It redirects their focus. It punctuates not just the sentence, but the thought behind it.

And more importantly, it lets the writer speak in breath.

Commas suggest flow. Periods close doors. But the em dash opens space. It lets something linger. It allows two thoughts to coexist without hierarchy—because sometimes, one idea leads to another, not logically, but emotionally.

Because here’s what I’ve been thinking: I don’t think the em dash only serves grammar. To me, it also serves voice. It lets writers shape rhythm. And in doing so, it flips the power dynamic of the page.

Because when you use an em dash, you're saying this sentence moves on my terms. This moment unfolds in my cadence. You’re reading this on my time now. Not yours. You may be reading it, but I get to dictate the pace of it.

Style? Quirk? You can call it that. But isn’t that authorship? Control?

I’ve always loved my em dashes, but now I use them as an act of rebellion—against the grammatical tyranny! Against the bots!

Here’s the part that makes the em dash witch hunt so lazy: AI didn’t invent the em dash. It mimicked it. Because we trained it on the best of human writing.

The machine didn’t reach for the em dash out of instinct—it reached for it because it learnt from our sentences, our paragraphs, our essays. The bot is imitating the voice I was talking about. And voice often includes the em dash.

If anything, the presence of em dashes suggests the influence of real, expressive writing. And the absence of it is what reads flat. That’s what feels sterilised, generic, lifeless.

So when people say “em dash equals AI,” they’re not revealing some hidden pattern. They’re just showing they don’t read widely enough to recognise how many brilliant, undeniably human writers have wielded it with purpose—Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, Hemingway — the writers who used the em dash not because they lacked precision, but because they demanded it.

This is the level of absurdity we’ve reached: in our panic to appear human, we’re cutting out the most human tools in our writing toolbox. We’re simplifying our voices, smoothing out our quirks, avoiding the rhythm and pauses that make our words feel like ours—just so someone doesn’t accuse us of sounding too much like a bot. So, it’s not enough for GenAI to flatten creative content, humans, too, contribute to the flattening of creativity in our paranoid policing thereof in the age of AI.

How. Frickin. Ridiculous.

So, hell no. I’m not going to flatten my style for someone else’s paranoia. And I’m sure as hell not going to erase the one mark that lets me set the pace.

Let the machine write in clean, neutral, structure-perfect form. I’ll take the messy breath—the rhythm—the dash.

It’s a choice. And it’s mine.

Then comes the cascade of hype—

“Have you tried custom GPTs?”

“Did you see the shift from multimodal to omnimodal?”

Or at the very least: “Can you make it write like Taylor Swift meets McKinsey?”

It’s sad. It’s insulting.

Because this is what expertise in AI has been reduced to: how well you can phrase a request to make a machine perform. As if real knowledge is about tweaking inputs, not questioning impact. As if the revolution is about tips and tricks, not systems, power, ethics, and harm. I feel ashamed—not of my work, but of what people expect it to mean.

Yes, AI is advancing; but mostly, it’s advancing capitalism.

Over the past five years, we’ve seen wave after wave of so-called breakthroughs: from GenAI to agentic AI, each rollout wrapped in sleek UX and sold as a leap forward. But peel back the press releases and you’ll find the same old engine: productivity, speed, convenience. Capitalism with a “neural” net.

Corporate marketing and tech media have sold us a dream: a future where you can do more, faster, and with less effort. Now you can code, design, write novels, contracts, essays—entire lives!—in minutes.

And the most seductive part is that it’s all framed as “democratisation.” Skills and talents, suddenly accessible to all. It sounds noble.

And I’m not saying it’s entirely false. There is potential. But we need to ask: Who’s crafting this narrative? Who’s repeating it the loudest? Is it everyday users justifying their addiction to tools they can’t unlearn? Or product teams convincing themselves they’re liberating the world—while cashing in on its exhaustion?

Are these systems really designed to close gaps? To uplift the marginalised? To redistribute power? To alleviate poverty? To save the planet?

Please. Spare me the pitch deck.

My expertise isn’t Prompt Engineering—so stop with the nonsensical questions already.

When people introduce me as an AI expert, it’s not about how to coax better outputs from a chatbot, but how these systems reshape society. Not better prompts, but deeper patterns. Not time-saving hacks, but human costs. Cultural costs. Social costs.

You might assume I’m the first to jump on the hype train. I try the tools, yes. But I’m also the first to step back and ask: What is this doing to us? How does it change how we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us?

Let me tell you what research has shown so far.

In hiring, AI systems penalise women more than men. Résumé screeners built on historical data reward masculine-coded language and penalise women for equivalent experience. Men who take time off to be caregivers—are punished even more harshly, reinforcing the notion that caregiving is incompatible with ambition. Women exit the workforce not by choice, but because the systems—automated or not—push them out.

In dating, AI doesn’t just reflect biases, it also amplifies them. Black women and Asian men receive the fewest matches across platforms. Older women are penalised more than older men. Non-binary users are forced into binary categories. Fem-presenting profiles are hypersexualised, while masc-presenting ones are rewarded for “stability.”

At work, AI doesn’t improve conditions for people; but rather intensifies them. Burnout is scaled under the guise of optimisation. Labour is no longer valued for thoughtfulness, only for throughput. And in creativity, the theft is subtle, but pervasive. Artists and writers are scraped, mimicked, and repackaged without consent. When OpenAI models mimic Miyazaki’s style, they don’t do so to honour it but to flatten it. The philosophy, the brushstroke, the cultural context— all gone. So, is it the case that what we call “creative augmentation” is often just cultural erasure?

And there’s more behind the scene: the invisible labour. The Kenyan data workers labelling toxic content for less than $2 an hour. The energy-hungry servers sucking up water in drought-prone regions. The carbon footprint of training a single model exceeds that of five cars in their entire lifetime.

These are the real costs behind the frictionless interfaces.

And no, I’m not talking about the users. I’m talking about the system that demands it. Because when productivity becomes mere survival, there’s no room to question.

Let me be clear: I’m not against AI. I believe AI can be used for good. But not like this. Not in a world where the loudest voices are shielded from the harms. Or where the biggest companies profit from “open” models while quietly consolidating power. Or where entire industries are redesigned for output, not outcomes.

And no, this isn’t some kind of a metaphor: “Just like any other tool, a knife can be used to cook good food or kill.”. Because the harm isn’t just in how we use it. It’s also in why we’re forced to.

Yes, some users don’t stop to think. But let’s be clear: it’s not always out of carelessness. For many, it’s because they can’t afford to. They’ve been pulled into the churn: pressured to produce more, optimise more, perform more. More. More More.

And with AI, they’re not the empowered. Rather, they’re the exploited even more.

And we’re not talking about the early adopters tech companies that parade around in keynote slides. They’re the invisible backbone of the system—overworked, overwhelmed, and clinging to shortcuts just to survive. Because when you’re racing the clock just to make rent, “efficiency” isn’t really choice. It’s their lifeline.

And then there are the creators, caught in a loop they never consented to: using GenAI to predict trends, to make content, to outdo the content GenAI made possible. Is it creativity or is it a crisis? Because it seems to me like a game with no finish line. Who, exactly, are we racing against?

Please don’t ever mistake it as personal choices (unless they have the agency to make the change, like the ol’ Sams and Zacs). But we should never blame only the individuals for overreliance on AI. Agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped by structures, and those structures are systemic, corporate, and designed.

Unfortunately, AI wasn’t built for those with time to think. It was built to serve those who don’t. And the people most dependent on it are not the elite—they’re the overworked, the under-resourced, the chronically stretched. Being able to opt out of the AI grind is a privilege. More time means you can think. More money means you can delegate. Freedom from the system is, itself, a luxury.

And that’s why this isn’t an individual problem—it’s a collective one.

Next time you meet me, don’t ask me about prompts, ask me this: “How might we take back power within the agency we still own?”

I’m not here to make you better at using AI. I’m here to ask why we keep using it without asking hard questions.

If you take one thing away from this, let it be this: in the age of AI, don’t just ask what you can do with it. Ask what you’re willing to lose for it. And who you’re becoming when you stop questioning it.

As someone knee-deep in the field, here are five things I urge you to reflect on:

1. Use ≠ Wisdom

Just because something is new—or popular—doesn’t mean it’s necessary. Ask: What problem is this solving? Who decided that’s the problem?

2. Convenience has a cost

Every shortcut is built on someone else’s time, energy, dignity, or land. If it feels too easy, ask who’s paying for that ease.

3. Access ≠ Equity

Just because more people can use the tools doesn’t mean power is being shared. Ownership still matters. So does intention. So do the rules that get baked into the system.

4. Output ≠ Impact

Short-term results often hide long-term consequences. Just because something “works” now doesn’t mean it builds a better future. True impact considers not only what’s produced, but what it produces in return.

5. Before you praise, ask who profits

If AI makes your life easier—at whose expense? And if it doesn’t serve you—then what, or who, is it really serving?

Literacy shouldn’t be about keeping up with updates. It should be about holding space for discomfort. It’s about refusing to mistake speed for wisdom. And above all, it’s about choosing agency over automation.

Cover art: Venus with a Mirror, Titian, c. 1555. Retrieved from the National Gallery of Art Open Access.

❗Note: While this article focuses on heterosexual relationships for clarity, the cultural dynamics of consent—and the importance of affirmative consent—apply across all genders and sexualities.

We rarely talk about the quiet moments. The ones where something doesn’t feel right, but nothing looks really wrong. Where no one screams, no one runs, and yet, someone walks away feeling hurt, confused, and unsure if what just happened was okay.

When we talk about sexual violence, we tend to picture the extremes—a stranger in the dark, force, fear, and a clear villain. But in reality, harm often lives in the in-between’s. In relationships. In silence. In assumptions. And often, no one names it. Not her. Not him. Not even the culture around them.

But we need to start naming it. Not to point fingers, but to understand. Because in that gray space between intention and impact, too many people—especially women—have learnt to swallow their discomfort while trying not to upset the balance. And too many men have been told that as long as no one says “no,” they’re in the clear.

This piece is about that middle ground. About what happens when we rely on silence instead of clarity. About how culture has made it easier to assume than to ask, to proceed than to pause. It’s about why we need a different standard—and why that standard is affirmative consent: where real consent is about getting a “yes,” rather than the absence of a “no.”

We’ve been taught to hear men louder than women.

Society has always made more room for what men want. For their needs, their frustrations, their desires. Boys are taught early on to go after what they want, to try again if they don’t get it. Girls, on the other hand, are taught to be kind. To accommodate. To keep the peace.

This plays out subtly, but constantly. At dinner tables where girls are told to serve first. In schools where boys interrupt and girls apologise. And in bedrooms, where what a man wants is often assumed, while what a woman wants is unclear—even, sometimes, to herself.

Digital culture, with all its promises of progress, has amplified this imbalance. Between double ticks and unread messages, rejection has become something we ghost rather than say. Women, conditioned to soften their refusals, now exit quietly. Instead of asserting boundaries, we disappear—hoping distance will do the work our voices were never taught to carry. And men too, brought up in this same silence, often interpret that retreat as confusion rather than clarity.

So when we talk about consent, we need to stop treating it like a technical rulebook and start looking at it for what it really is: a cultural problem. One that trains men to expect access and women to doubt their own agency.

Most women aren’t taught to say “no.” They’re taught to figure out how to endure.

Consent is not as simple as “she didn’t say no.” Most of the time, she’s not sure if she can. Or should. Or if it’s even valid to feel what she feels.

Sometimes, she’s there, but her body isn’t. She was in the mood earlier, but something shifted. Maybe she’s tired. Maybe she’s emotionally checked out. Maybe she just doesn’t feel safe anymore—but not unsafe enough to make a scene. So she goes quiet. He doesn’t stop. She blames herself for not stopping him.

Other times, she knows she doesn’t want it—but feels like she can’t say so. Not because he’s threatening. But because he’s sweet. He loves her. And she’s in love. He’s been stressed, and she doesn’t want to add to that. Saying no feels selfish. Saying yes feels easier. So she says yes, and then spends the night wondering why she feels hollow.

Or maybe she avoids it. She turns away. She fakes sleep. She delays, hoping he’ll get the hint. But he thinks she’s teasing. Playing hard to get. So he keeps going, convinced she wants it too.

Or maybe she was the one flirting earlier. Touched his arm. Initiated the kiss. But now that it’s going further, she realises this is as far as she wants to go. She tries to pull away. He looks confused. Upset. Maybe even a little hurt. She feels responsible for that. So she gives in.

And then there’s the version that happens in long-term relationships: where she says yes, again and again, not because she wants to—but because she believes, and truly believes that it’s her responsibility. This is much more common in countries like Indonesia or India, and many others, where marriage is treated like a claim of ownership, a shift from independence to being the property of someone else. Where signing a marriage certificate is assumed to be a signing of a lifetime of consents. Sad, isn’t it, to see women being used to disempowerment, internalised to a point she doesn’t know any other alternative?

These stories aren’t rare. They are the quiet, private truths many women carry. Not because their partners are monsters, but because our culture makes it hard for anyone to name these moments for what they are.

Most men don’t realise it either. And that’s the danger.

This is not about villainising men. It’s about showing how much harm can happen without anyone meaning to cause it.

Most men aren’t told to pause and ask. They’re told that if she doesn’t resist, it’s fine. That if she said yes once, she’ll say yes again. That desire is a chase, and persistence is romantic.

But the truth is, when your partner goes quiet, when her body stiffens, when she stops responding—something is wrong. And continuing despite those cues doesn’t make it passionate. It makes it one-sided.

And no one wants to be someone who causes harm unknowingly. But until we change the culture, men will continue to mistake discomfort for consent—and women will continue to carry the emotional weight of sex they never truly agreed to.

Digital communication doesn’t help. We’re now burying our heads deep in texts, memes, and swipes, and we’re all getting worse at saying what we mean—especially when it matters. We avoid tough conversations by muting threads. We misread signals filtered through emojis. And when it comes to intimacy, we carry those same habits into physical spaces, mistaking withdrawal for confusion instead of refusal.

The orgasm gap is the canary in the coal mine: It’s not about bad sex; it’s about sexual entitlement.

Let’s start with the number, shall we: in heterosexual sex, men orgasm about 95% of the time. Women? Less than 50%.

This isn’t just about “bad sex.” It’s about a culture that centers men’s satisfaction and treats women’s pleasure as extra credit. If it happens, great. If not, she’ll survive.

But when he finishes and rolls over without checking in, when she fakes it just to end the encounter, when he notices she isn’t into it but continues anyway—what exactly is that?

Sexual negligence becomes coercion when we stop caring whether the other person is actually engaged. When we overlook discomfort because we’re focused on completion. When we take what we want without checking if the other person is there with us.

There’s a very fine line between someone not caring if you're uncomfortable and someone actively ignoring that discomfort. And there’s a very fine line between bad sex and violation.

The core issue here isn’t technique. It’s entitlement. The assumption—often unconscious—that men are owed sex. That a woman’s arousal is secondary, and her “yes” is implied unless she yells otherwise.

Too often, men are taught that sex is something to be earned. A reward. A sign of success. A way to prove something. And when they don't get it—especially when they think they were close—they feel cheated.

That frustration, even when unspoken, is heavy. And women carry it. They internalise it. They wonder if they led him on. They feel guilty for “changing their minds.” They take responsibility for the mood, for the rejection, for his emotional spiral.

So next time, they don’t say no. They say yes—just to keep things light. To keep him happy. To keep the night going.

That’s not consent. That is culture doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Affirmative consent is how we begin to undo this

Affirmative consent doesn’t mean asking every five seconds. It means creating a shared experience where both people truly want to be there—and know the other person wants it too. It’s not awkward. It’s not robotic. It’s human. It’s mutual.

And it means noticing. Being thoughtful. It means listening—not just to words, but to energy, to body language, to hesitation. It means understanding that a partner’s desire is not assumed. It’s something we earn through care, not pressure. And that way, the burden is also on men to be mindful. To read between the lines.

And while some countries have started to write this into law—Sweden, Spain, parts of the U.S. and Australia—laws alone won’t change behavior. Culture will. And in culture, the deepest punishments aren’t legal. They’re social. They’re emotional. They’re the quiet feelings of regret, confusion, shame.

That’s why we need to raise boys and girls who understand that just because something isn’t criminal doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful.

We need a culture where sex isn’t something you take—it’s something you share.

We start young. And we start honest.

We teach kids that desire is not a guarantee—it’s a conversation. We teach that someone changing their mind is not a betrayal, it’s a right. We teach that it’s okay to ask. It’s caring to ask. We teach that pleasure should be mutual, and silence is never a substitute for a “yes.” We teach that your partner's enjoyment is not a bonus. It’s the whole point.

And we start by modeling it ourselves. By practicing it. By unlearning the scripts we were handed. Because no generation will get it right unless the one before shows them how.

Affirmative consent isn’t a legal issue. It’s a cultural one. And if we want a generation of people who experience sex with safety, joy, and care—we need to make it the norm, not the exception.

It’s time we move from “no means no” to “yes means yes.”

Because it’s the bare minimum.

Subscribe now