Most shonen care about things like character development and plot progression. Solo Leveling just doesn’t. The main character has a meaningful level-up at the end of practically every episode after that. He looks like a completely different character between episode 1 and episode 3. He’s gone from a scrawny loser to a fuckboy, he only had to work out for a month, and now he’s also super strong and he’s got a system that tells him everything! From having nothing, he’s killed and reborn into a gigachad, and the anime never makes you think about his emotions or character again. There’s no side character development either. There are no real characters, not really, beyond plot devices, as our main character, who’s absolutely at rock bottom’s basement, just gets everything he ever desired every episode with no suffering whatsoever.

And then there’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, a book series that’s gone strangely viral in the last few years. It’s written by a Rick Riordan for adults (and I say that as a fond Rick Riordan fan from my early teens) and covers a man in a post-apocalyptic world who’s forced to take part in a game show where he has to clear out dungeons to survive, as part of a cosmic reality TV show.

It’s strange that Dungeon Crawler Carl, Solo Leveling and Persona 5 are all popular, despite having come out at different points, and feel culturally relevant today with a force that didn’t really exist when they were released.

It’s also strange that Whoops, GLP-1s and Field Notes are popular at the same time. In their own ways, they’re all a desire for the HUD of a game, a potion, and journal notes.

Anything that’s measured, matters

We’re trained to believe that anything that’s measured, matters. Our routines in school and everything after sever us from ourselves. They let us escape our own thoughts and existential dread, and they put us in a structure with a manual, which, upon following, means you win in that structure. There’s always a way you’re supposed to be living and things you’re supposed to be doing. It’s fully mimetic. Even our desires are.

Your last 15 to 20 years, or maybe your entire life, was a practice of separating yourself from the body and the instinct. You wake up to the sound of an alarm so you can work on somebody else’s schedule, one that was defined in the 20th century for prisons, schools and all educational institutions alike. You eat, and you do everything else, the way it’s supposed to be done. As you get older, you do more of the things you have to do and less of feeling the things you need to feel, or following those feelings through. You try to follow what you must do and what you should do, and knowing what you want to do when you know you can’t follow it only brings unnecessary pain, so you don’t.

That’s why college is a wonderful little time of release and debauchery. It’s freedom with some structure, companions, checkpoints, and a final destination. Graduating is the top of a water park, and from there, there are slides going in all different directions.

Once you’re back in the real world, work becomes numbingly structured, but everything around it becomes hard to enforce. You have free will now, and our relationship with doing things has been shaped almost entirely by external stimulus, accountability and structure.

All that strenuous external regulation leaves us incapable of self-regulating our discipline, emotions, urges, or even feelings. You constantly bite your lip but need a Whoop to tell you your stress score? You go to bed at 4 am but need Whoop to tell you your sleep score is 40? Of course you do, because you don’t wake up and feel things anymore. You immediately open your phone and see the score and your session broken down by sleep stage. Why would you do a one-second check of how you’re truly feeling, whether your eyes feel open, whether there’s a small jump in the way you get out of bed, when you could have a number out of 100?

You have absolutely no fucking time to really think or process your emotions either, because you don’t want to. Why must you sit and think on the commode when you can watch a 45-second cultural breakdown by a guy holding an Apple earbuds microphone and speaking really softly about everything?

Developing self-regulation and self-awareness requires deep introspection, dread, woe, melancholy and inner work. Or, it can be substituted with external crutches that quantify your life’s key areas and your progress without making you feel shit about it.

This underdeveloped sense of self-regulation hits your mental health like a brick once you start working and don’t have a degree to chase anymore. You fall into spirals of doing the same meaningless things every day after work and binge drinking on weekends, and after a few months of this sedation, you wake up one day, all of a sudden, thinking you need a big change. And when you go looking for that change, there’s a manual you already know by heart.

Gaming is the perfect rubric for self-improvement

You start every game as the weakest version of the character. You take on small challenges, you get potions and better gear, and the more you grind, the more XP you get. Big missions and big boss fights give tremendous XP. There’s a path with a final boss and increasing difficulty, and there are trophies along the way. It’s an excellent way to think about your life, because your real life is basically the same.

It gives you familiarity, a system, levers, and certainty that it shall work, what it shall give you, and how it shall improve your life.

Jinwoo might have become stronger, at least fitter and better than his E-rank, if he’d followed his daily routine anyway. But the system forced him to do the right thing, rewarded him rapidly if he did, and punished him immediately if he failed. He surrendered his agency to long-term goals of being, and was enslaved to his long-term desires without any external master. And maybe that’s the dream? Knowing exactly what to do?

Work, of course, reinforces this

All knowledge work is basically looking at qualitative weak signals and making something more concrete out of them. This happens at all levels of abstraction. Your personal productivity is quantified. So is the work of your project or department as a whole, and your company as a whole.

If you’re in marketing or strategy especially, you know this better than anyone. You’ve been in a meeting where you were asked to track and systemise something you were doing purely based on vibes. Vibes signal uncertainty, and the corporate system prefers predictable, quantifiable mediocrity over uncertainty, because the perceived risk is too high. Eventually the tension of holding onto your vibes-based work melts away, and you actually quite like the dashboard when it goes up and you have a perf review around the corner.

So you go to the dashboards

And so, outside of work too, you go to dashboards and calendars and Whoops and gamified life apps.

This is incredibly comforting short-term, and it helps you systemise quite a lot.

There’s something quite techno-humanist about this. Everything about us was mystical until a few centuries ago. We’ve now largely solved human physiology, and we’ve made a lot of progress on laying the foundations of mental health and establishing causal relationships between your past and your present trauma and identity. This is all phenomenal work, shedding light on what was once mystery. Are we this close to eliminating all mysticism about the human body? Physiologically speaking, it should be solved in the next 10 years. Psychologically speaking, you don’t really care, do you? Everything you want out of the body, its cognitive utility, its physical attraction, the upside it gives you in social dynamics and the workplace, can now be summoned on command using tiny little pulses.

The olden people just figured these things out instinctively, without needing a clear explanation. They did the thing and built conviction over their personal experience.

Your conviction, on the other hand, is completely murdered, because you don’t think you have the time to dilly-dally, especially when life is so short and you must achieve everything you need to in the next five years.

Back in the 1940s, if you were a bodybuilder, you were just that, a bodybuilder. The ability to be a polymath was scarce, especially for a non-elite who was worried about his everyday things. Your day would start at 6 or 7 am. You would travel for an hour, work, come back, get your groceries, eat, drink, go to sleep and repeat it all over again.

Today, you can get your groceries and your meals prepped in advance. You can measure every single calorie and macronutrient that goes into them while doing a high-tech job, still making it for padel at 7 am, and prepping for a Hyrox on the weekends. It is, technically speaking, feasible to have it all. You need to play some Tetris with a calendar, but you could make it work. At the very least, you log on to Instagram or Twitter and you see the people making it work. You see the investment banker friend of yours from college who’s now 10 times better than you, and you see people on Twitter who genuinely seem like they have 50 hours in a day. For the first time, you see a technical possibility of having it all across all areas of life, and you feel the desire to reach exactly towards that.

Today’s competitiveness happens on all fronts at the same time, far beyond the economic or the professional. It is no longer desirable to be a potbellied man making six figures wherever you live. You must now also have the social and the physical cachet to feel complete.

The life app is the biggest frontier

This all culminates in one super app, coming in the next decade. It will have everything you do at work, and everything you do personally, down to how you spend each second of your time. It will track everything, including your health vitals, what you do and how frequently. It will let you set milestones and define the key areas of your life, and it’ll give you a perfectly structured HUD and routine and, fuck it, even a health bar, if Zuck cracks AR glasses by then, which increasingly seems to be the case. And it will have a genie, an AI layer that ingests all of this and talks to you whenever you need.

Strictly speaking, the tech needed for this super app is 99% there. It just needs a concerted effort and large funding to gamify your whole life.

There’s no game where Kratos goes to herd cattle

I’ve played God of War and watched Solo Leveling, and interestingly, while you’re the incarnation of agency and act out the main character’s will, you don’t really get to decide or make choices. When you start God of War, you don’t choose whether you should kill Ares. The path is set, and you merely walk the path the game has already chosen for you. This is changing in modern games, because they foresaw this much earlier than me, but there’s still no game where you can forgive the entire Greek pantheon as Kratos and go herd cattle instead.

Games are great because there’s an external destination, and reaching it helps you be part of a story, and you take what you need out of it. There’s also a submission that this story is all you will have, and that this is indeed your story. Somewhere along the line, you must acknowledge that you never chose to play this game, and you play it anyway, unknowingly. You accepted somewhere along the line that if you’re going to play this game, and play it this way specifically, without retiring into the woods, you want to win.

Submitting your entire life, based on a few mimetic desires, to an external system will inevitably kill serendipity and judgement in your soul. You’ll be left an actor of desires that, once completed, will leave you with the same hollowness.

Outro

Julia Child was 36 when she ate her first proper French meal, a sole meunière in Rouen, on the day she landed in France with her husband in 1948. Before that she’d been an advertising copywriter and a typist turned researcher for the OSS during the war, and by her own account she couldn’t really cook. That one meal floored her. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, spent years failing and fussing in her Paris kitchen, and more than a decade later co-wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking and ended up on television, teaching America how to make an omelette. Nobody would’ve put cooking on her dashboard. There was no quest for it, no score, no five-year plan. She wandered into a restaurant hungry and followed the feeling all the way through.

They are going to the gym at rates that would embarrass every generation before them. Ozempic has achieved a cultural penetration usually reserved for religions and sexually transmitted diseases. Plastic surgery numbers are at all-time highs, and not among the rich demographics you’d expect, but the young and the ordinary and the desperately, frantically normal. On TikTok, which has replaced the public square in the same way that a tumour replaces an organ, teenage boys discuss mewing and canthal tilts and bonesmashing with the fervour and jargon-density that’s only summoned when 2 intellectuals argue their idea is 0.1% different than their opponent’s. Look ma, the boys are arguing about jawlines, and bone-smashing. My jaw, though unsmashed, has been metaphorically while my tongue holds back from stupidly asking - how the fuck did we get here?

Why now

The why now is the part that interests me. You could attribute the whole thing to vanity and be done with it. Every generation discovers the mirror, every generation finds new ways to be tedious about their own reflection and hide the mirror in their attics. Except that vanity doesn’t explain the fervour and it doesn’t explain the timing, which coincides so neatly with two other developments that the coincidence starts to feel structural rather than accidental.

RIP monoculture

The first development is the death of the monoculture, which has been diagnosed so many times by so many essayists that diagnosing it has itself become a kind of monoculture, a shared experience in an era supposedly devoid of them. The New Yorker published a piece called “The Summer of Nothing” which argued that there is no longer a cultural event that everyone participates in, no album, no show, no discourse, just an infinite micro-publics each with their own canon and their own status games and their own absolutely ironclad conviction that their particular island is the mainland. TikTok’s algorithm has shattered collective attention into ten million shards and then ground each shard into a finer powder and then blown the powder into the wind.

Every niche is large enough to be a city and too small to be a civilisation (of course, barring MAGA and Taylor Swift). The shared references that once allowed strangers to recognise each other as members of the same tribe have largely evaporated, which means that the entire apparatus of cultural signalling — the books you’ve read, the films you’ve seen, the opinions you hold — has become hopelessly, irretrievably noisy. There are too many signals and the result is that intellectual and aesthetic identity, the kind that used to be legible across a room, now only works within your particular micro-public, which defeats the entire purpose.

Free ideas

The second development, which is related to the first in ways that are either obvious or subtle depending on how much credit you want to give me, is that ideas became free. Not cheap. Free. Gratis. Libre. Available at a speed and scale that makes the Gutenberg revolution look like a minor efficiency improvement of the pamphlet industry. You used to have to read Nietzsche to have an opinion on Nietzsche, which meant reading Nietzsche, which meant sitting with prose that was deliberately, almost sadistically difficult, for months, and failing, and going back, and failing differently, until something calcified in you that you could reasonably call a worldview. The people who read Nietzsche, thus, – either in earnest or out of sunk cost fallacy – would quote Nietzsche all the time. Just the fact that you read it and engaged with it and had a critical opinion on it meant you went to the library and read its dusty pages and cursed your own stupidity and tried to decipher this text that was harder to decode that ancient hieroglyphs.

That friction was the entire point. It was the cost that made the signal valuable, in the same way that a degree used to signal not just knowledge but the willingness to endure four years of tedium in its pursuit. The friction is gone. You can ask ChatGPT to summarise the Ubermensch and it will do so in the time it takes to blink; you can ask it to explain the will to power like you’re five years old and it will do that too, without judgement, because the machine has no concept of what it means to have earned an idea, any more than a photocopier understands the book it’s reproducing.

But even the lax shameful act of typing a question into a box requires a shred of curiosity, a faint muscle-memory of intellectual initiative, and so naturally we have moved past it.

You don’t even have to remember the right thing to say.

Meta’s smart glasses will feed you context in real time at a dinner party, so you can nod along to a conversation about Foucault without ever having opened Foucault. Cluely’s founder used the app on dates, its whispered what to say, what reference to drop, which opinion to perform.

I find it genuinely difficult to decide whether this is the most dystopian thing I’ve ever heard or simply the logical endpoint of a process that began when the first human being rehearsed a compliment in front of a mirror. Roy Lee, who built the thing, called reputation “a thing of the past,” which is the kind of statement that is either idiotic or prophetic. If we learn anything from history, the two can be true at the same time.

So here we are.

Ideas are free. Culture is fragmented. Opinions are costumes you change between rooms. You know what you’re going to say on the date and you know what you’re going to say in the group chat and neither version is more or less true than the other because the concept of a true opinion has become structurally incoherent when your opinion can be replaced in thirty seconds by a better one generated by a machine that has read everything ever written and understood none of it.

The much-discussed, much-mocked figure of our culture, The performative man, emerged because the spiritual cost of performing authenticity dropped to zero, and in an economy of signals, anything that’s free is worthless.

We’ve gone post-discourse offline, which is not the same as post-opinion. Everyone still has opinions, in the same way that everyone still has a navel, but the opinions have become ornamental in the social sense of helping you navigate a party without embarrassing yourself. You don’t wanna have discourse, not an amicable one anyway. You’d either agree away or fight to make a point about who you are. Everyone assesses the ROI of an argument before engaging and almost nobody engages because the return is nil and the opinion wasn’t really yours anyway, it was suggested by a feed and reinforced by a bubble and could be swapped out by tomorrow’s feed without your noticing.

We are severed from ourselves not just at work, where performance has always been the price of entry, but at house parties and on dates and in front of our families, which is new, or at least more.

And so, the body.

The body is stupid and slow and cannot be prompted. It is sixty percent water and one hundred percent indifferent to your ambitions. It demands eight hours of unconsciousness every day – a third of your life surrendered to a process neuroscience still cannot fully explain – and if you refuse, it will hallucinate on your behalf. It requires you to consume the dead flesh of other organisms (yes even spinach is dead flesh for it grew and lived) multiple times daily, then spends four to six hours dissolving it in acid, a process so energy-intensive that your body diverts blood from your brain to do it, making you literally stupider after lunch. Your heart has beaten billions of times by the time you die and never once asked for a performance review. Your skeleton replaces itself every ten years. You are not the same body that started reading this sentence, not really, and yet you are still the same body that ate too much last Thursday. The body is said to be a temple but feels more like an inheritance you can’t liquidate. It takes months to change and years to master and will betray every lie you’ve told about your discipline within five seconds of removing your shirt.

When intellectual signals became cheap, opaque, and non-universal - the only universal connection that remains with the fellow man is that of our DNA, which has remained largely unchanged relative to civilisation.

You might be sitting with a right-winger in utter silence but your necks move at the sight of a beautiful woman just the same.

I write this as a fat man, which gives me the clarity of the excluded, the cold objectivity of someone looking through the restaurant window; when I see a person in good shape I don’t merely find them attractive, I experience something closer to awe. Their body is the visible residue of months or years of showing up to a place they did not want to be and doing something they did not want to do. In a world where every other signal of character has been counterfeited and debased, the disciplined body remains stubbornly, almost defiantly expensive. You cannot prompt your way to a six-pack. You cannot summarise your way through a marathon.

Or can you.

Ozempic does to the body exactly what ChatGPT did to ideas. It collapses the cost, it eliminates the friction, it gets you to the destination while abolishing the journey, and in doing so it destroys the signal that made the destination worth reaching. If being in shape once proved discipline, Ozempic proves only that you had a prescription, which proves only that you had insurance, which proves only that you had a job. It also proves you had the agency to get to the destination using all the resources you could when you finally gave up on trying to do it with willpower.

The injection does for your waistline what the chatbot does for your conversation: it produces the output while gutting the process that gave the output meaning. What I find most revealing about the current moment, *nobody cares*. Or rather, everyone cares in the abstract and nobody cares in practice, because our every instinct has been shaped by optimisation. If there is a hiking trail through a protected forest leading to a summit, he will happily hire gunmen and an armoured truck to bulldoze a road through the woods, because the summit is the only legible output, the summit is what gets photographed, the summit is what gets posted.

As a response, Strava screenshots and marathon finish-line photos have metastasised across every timeline; the flex has shifted, subtly but decisively, from “I am fit” to “I earned this,” which is a defensive move, a pre-emptive strike against the suspicion that you didn’t earn it, that you Ozempicked your way there, that your body, like your opinions and your taste and your dinner-party Foucault, is just another performance with the seams showing.

People are now signalling effort alongside achievement because they sense, correctly, that achievement alone has been debased. And naturally that signalling of effort will itself become a performance, will itself be counterfeited, will itself require a new and more expensive proof, and the cycle will only move forward like the hands of a clock.

Hotness is the last survivor of shared values when monoculture dies

You cannot agree with anyone on anything except for attraction to the physical body an agreement we’re only a part of because our biology refuses to change.

I don’t know where this ends. Perhaps the next scarce signal will be something even harder to counterfeit, but I suspect that whatever it is, someone will find a way to automate it, and then someone will find a way to fake having done it the hard way, and then we’ll need a new signal, and on and on, an infinite regress of authenticity and its simulation, until the question of who you actually are, underneath the optimised body and the prompted opinions and the curated taste and the performed effort, becomes not just difficult to answer but structurally meaningless.

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I’m reading the book Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino - a feminist lens to culture and internet shaping womanhood as a whole. I do this on the weekend sitting on a green embroidered mat under the shade of trees in Bangalore’s Cubbon Park - the city’s primo place for working Gen-Zs to touch grass, post Instagram stories, and feel like the main characters they’ve told they are.

But of course, *I’m not like them* and I show this rebellion quietly to myself by not clicking a picture of the fact that I’m doing this. Maybe I’m doing this because I deactivated Instagram a month ago and can’t cash the picture for social capital. 6 months ago, the trend of *The Performative Male* flooded my entire feed. The performative male is the quintessential 21st century man, and comes about a decade after the MeToo movement’s inception. Once elite women of all cultures over the world captured the internet, there was a new discourse around female safety and gave some much needed rejuvenation to the feminist movement in the 21st century. It fractured the 2 genders and started an offline running conversation between men. Some men sincerely defended the #NotAllMen narrative in real life, some proudly reposted stories of their wokest female friends. The male feminist is a rare breed, and even rarely represented - until then - on the internet. But you wanted the woke female baddie who came with her progressive views and independence because it made for more interesting partners. Abs weren’t enough anymore and men hypothesised that substance, surely, would help them become the man a feminist thought was a unicorn.

Jia Tolentino writes about individuality and how much of it is shaped by performance. There’s a constant feedback loop of who you want to be, how you show it, and how people react to it. In the age of social media, she argues, performance has gotten much easier and far more disconnected than it used to be in the 20th century. You can now, for a brief hour, put a blanket on patchy grass and prove to the world you’re a reader who likes cozying up with a book on the weekends. From what I hear, it makes for an excellent Hinge prompt too.

The disconnect from who are and how we want to be perceived is clearly encapsulated by The Performative Male. Men knew exactly which of their friends spouted Joan Didion at the sight of the first red-haired girl they’d find - and how they were no better as partners in any meaningful way of how they treated women in real life. Hence the performative male was known by men and women alike. Unlike most trends of the internet, there was something deeply uniting about this trend. Women wanted to be more wary and men wanted to finally call out their peers for not being true to who they were. The entire internet was mocking the epitome of male performance in today’s culture. Ironically, this was much like the father looking down on his son after having shaped them into who they are. Like the mother who fought for her daughter’s education but then scorned at her not obeying her in-laws in the way they had to. The system creates you. And as soon as you acknowledge the system and play by its rules, you’re mocked still.

This has bred anti-performance. A chronically online dude like me who actually liked reading was suddenly too self conscious to do so. I did everything in my power to prove to myself that I’m not merely performing at this stage of the world, online or offline. I was me, I was real, I had real interests, and wanted to not feel like an actor.

There’s a growing faction of my generation who agrees with me. Who drops a big chunk of their salaries on the weekend to go to a fancy place and then not click a picture of the food, because it’s cringe. There’s also the fair-skinned, skinny woman who doesn’t wear makeup intentionally to make a point to the world, and more so to herself. You want to perform just enough to be accepted by the system, but god forbid you’re on the extreme ends of the bell curve and get noticed in the wrong light. How daunting we’ve made social interaction, where we create social signals and every few years we mock them out of fashion.

You could talk about the past in centuries, or decades in the 1900s. Fashion trends were in for years on end. Beverage and tobacco brands would enjoy their respective cultural waves for years on end. But now, talking about a decade feels shallow. Because so much happens at the same time, a paragraph or a few dozen arbitrary objects - bell bottoms for the 70s, the walkman in the 80s, the pager in the 90s - cannot even begin to sum half a year, let alone 5. The New Yorker’s piece on ‘The Summer of Nothing’ alludes to the hyper-personalisation of culture to extent that the mainstream doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t have to listen to this summer’s song because Spotify will make a personalised mix just for you. You don’t have to watch Game of Thrones because Solo Levelling - a manhwa - has just as big a social community that for the moment you’re doomscrolling, the trend feels real and all-encompassing.

Social media has fastened cultural loops of what’s in and what’s out. You could try to maximise social capital and end up a laughing stock of cringe. You can quit the internet and quit the game altogether. Or you can be someone like me, who aches for being a part of something bigger, and drive yourself crazy for trying to toe the line between what’s culture appropriate. Of the any 3 paths, winning comes to neither.

Why? Writing like me is never satisfactory. My monologues are nowhere as poetic as Savannah Brown’s. My prose lacks depth. I have no sense of rhyme and meter. While I may never be as great as any of them, ever, I still hold a thought dear to myself. One thing every decent writer has talked about is finding their own voice. Some find it in their adolescence out of sheer brilliance. Some work to the bone for it. I’m certainly not in the first category. But hey, I know a bunch of really good writers in the second one.

Benjamin Labatut, the writer of When we cease to understand the world, has arguably produced one of the best works of literature till date. I’ve never seen a book that reads as if you’re on a trip. It’s like Nyquil on paper. It took him a lot of time. I know writers who wrote 10 flop books by the time they were 30, only to have their 11th be a critically-acclaimed bestseller.

This process in the writing world is usually known as paying your dues. But no one really talks about this as much as they should. What does it mean to pay your dues to a craft? How do you make a tangible sacrifice to the abstract? When do you know if you’ve done enough? Clearly not through numbers. There’s no magic formula or a hidden number shared amongst a cult of the world’s best writers. But it’s still the most perpetuated sound advice given to young writers. Put in the work, pay your dues, start with the next one.

When you compare it with the objectivity of other professions, you almost never get any clear action steps. And I think lately, I’m beginning to understand why. Most jobs require some amount of creativity and ingenuity, but a big chunk of the job — still — remains repetitive to a fault. A bunch of Redditors have programmed workflows to completely automate their WFH jobs for months without anyone getting a single hint about it. Writing, or art, on the other hand, is on the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. It’s about taking your unique perspective and reinventing a part of the language to fit it in.

The good writers imitate the greats. The greats create things from scratch. What does it take to be great, though? Is it something that you have to be born with? Or is it something that can be nurtured as a skill over time? There’s a huge debate about this. The work of a true genius feels effortless, groundbreaking, and paradigm altering. The work of a seasoned one never quite gets the same concentration of fame, barring a few. A clear observation can be made. Creative output is rewarded in different hierarchies. When the quality feels the same, the next metric of superiority comes to speed, which isn’t right.

In fact, I would argue that a seasoned professional who has earned his bones, will almost always contribute to the field more than a genius who may burn too bright and quick. The savants get humbled at every turn of their journey, which is what drives them to find companions, and generally be more empathetic to the young enthusiasts who are starting out in their shoes. Their overall impact, then, becomes dispersed from their literary work to the overall, intangible impact that they have on the craft.

Another thing about savants, they start detaching themselves from the outcome after a point in time. They become engrossed in the act of creation of itself. So much so that they become a kind of indestructible stoic when it comes to their work. A lot of them lead lives of unwavering discipline amidst the strife of daily life. Some of them start writing early in the morning while the others write on every napkin and a scrap paper when the inspiration strikes. Showing up everyday becomes a part of their identity, it becomes who they are and the art starts manifesting itself through their identity itself.

While losing yourself in your work completely may not be the antidote to a happy life. Losing track of time while doing it, is a realistic aim all of us can have. What am I learning from all of this? I’m slowly telling myself that the outcome may not get better for weeks, months, and years to come. In these moments, I like to remind myself of the feeling that I feel right now. My fingers racing to the next letter as my legs sit still as I try to make sense of an internal anxiety that I’ve been carrying for the longest time. Most of my writing time is spent like this, in complete calm, quiet, and one-ness with myself. Even if I don’t make a bestseller one day, I think chasing this feeling is more than worth it. For the rest of my life.

Skip to now, I am the exact opposite. All I have to offer to the world is capitalistic impact. I don’t make art anymore, I don’t change lives, I don’t know how to protect my personal space, I don’t even know how to take care of my own finances. I’ve lowkey been whining about every important aspect of my life. I don’t think that I give linear and serious thought to — anything, really. I am scared of change. I don’t know if I have any control over how my life is flowing, and how it’s impacting other people. Which is why, the thought of being older is ghastly. It’s inhumane. Unwarranted. I wish I could stay at this age forever, at least until I have it figured out.

I don’t know if my life’s trajectory so far has been something I’d call good or bad. It has a mix of both and I don’t know if there’s a dominant one? Every good thing has resulted in a sacrifice or a bad thing. Every bad thing in turn has had a nice silver lining in the form of a lesson or a learning. Even my faulty relationships. Both of them have taught me about how I’m not ready to date, yet. At least not until I work on myself. And they’ve given me a lot of cherish-able memories that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.

The air around being 25

I’ve always been of the opinion that who you are at 25 defines who you will be for the years to come. I know it’s not true and that people change, grow, and everything. But being 25 means that I’m done with at least a third of my life. Will I have anything to show for it? Will I be proud of who I will become? Or will I look back on irreparable mistakes? Will I be a lonely, desolate, pretentious creature that no one likes hanging out with? I have no clue. But that’s how I envision it, at least. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly improve as a human being.

But at the same time

I know I will have gotten a better hang of this adulting thing at the end of it. I definitely like to think I would have traveled to more places and met more amazing, brilliant people. I like to think that I might have gotten a handle on my physical fitness till then, and maybe repaired my relationship with my parents, to some extent. At least to the extent that it stops me from repeating negative behavior. I don’t know if a lot of it will come true. I don’t know if any of it will. But it’s good to acknowledge it, and maybe start looking at things from a constructive angle rather than a destructive one.

And maybe,

Being 25 may not be that big of a deal in the first place. I hope i dont turn into one of those rigid 25 year olds who is set in their ways and becomes radically lopsided in his opinions as I grow older. I hope I keep the same open mindedness and the willingness to look foolish in public. I think, at the end of it, that’s all that really matters.

Why are you insisting on writing in the first place? You know it doesn’t always come from inside of you. You know you say born creative talent is a myth because you don’t have one.

You know this is too impersonal. This sounds like a robot wrote it. Heck, would’ve been better if a robot had written it, it wouldn’t mess up as much as you do.

You know this one is too personal. Don’t you know how to strike a balance? Your personal life is pathetically boring and basic and no one wants to listen about. You’re living in delusion as if this will help. Nothing helps.

Is this how you begin an article? Is this how you create a compelling begin? This isn’t the way to make a narrative. This. is. just. sad.

Is this how you’re gonna structure the article? Sometimes you really don’t put in any effort, do you? This doesn’t read well. There’s a typo. That’s a grammar error. That’s subjective and too digressive. This is too verbose. Fix it.

Is this how you’re trying to end this piece? You’ve opened a hundred different tangents and followed up with neither of them. I don’t see you getting better at all, even after all this practice. You’re wasting your time in this pointless charade.

This is not what you call writing. This is not what anyone calls writing. This helps no one.

Delete this.

I’ve been trying to change up some of my habits, one at a time. And it’s so. freaking. hard. It rationally never made sense to me until I did some revision on mainstream neuroscience.

From what my simple mind comprehended,

There’s 2 main forces at play in your brain: the neocortex and the limbic brain. Your neocortex is responsible for reasoning and logic. Your limbic brain is more driven by emotions, focusing on memories and what makes you happy in the shorter run.

You’re basically run by 2 constantly bickering voices that make peace with each other sometimes.

Your limbic brain is wired to expect a positive feeling — or the perception of a positive feeling — at the end of your bad habits.

You drink, you get intoxicated, it makes you feel happy momentarily. So you do it again. And again. And then once a week. And before you know it, you’re a depraved alcoholic looking for an excuse to pour a drink.

Your neocortex keeps things in check and calculates for delayed gratification. But as the day goes by and you spend your cognitive energy on everyday intense tasks, your limbic brain starts to take over slowly.

That’s why most people binge eat at night, why they drink every other night — they simply do not have the energy left anymore.

There’s no lesson here, just a thought. In case you’ve tried to quit on things before, you may have felt guilty and self-destructive before. Be a little gentle with yourself. Your brain tries to keep you happy, even if it may not make you happy later. Your failure does not indicate impossibility. With small, constant, atomic changes, you can get where you want to be. It’s gonna take a lot of failure but hey, everyone fails. Get up, get back at it.

Never read them for motivation

Reading for motivation is like mental masturbation. External motivation to change your life is a scam.

Simon Sinek spoke about the power of ‘Why’ in his book, “Start with Why.” When you start on a new venture with a strong internal resolve, you’re bound to figure out how to do it and what resources you need. All in all, you can only make a lasting change in your life if you have a solid internal resolve behind it.

If you’re looking for motivation in a self-help book, it’ll fizzle out and you’ll almost never get anywhere. Read them for knowledge, for insights, for case studies, for action plans, never for motivation.

It’s not a full-course meal

Imagine your favourite fiction book. Recall your favourite character, your favourite chapter, your favourite scene description.

You can’t do most of this with a self-help book.

Fiction books are a world in themselves and they need to be read cover to cover to get the complete essence of the story. The objective is for you to immerse yourself in a new world.

Self help books are different.

Some of them are trying to drill down the same point in different manners. So, 3 chapters in, you might think

“I’m reading the same fucking thing over and over again”

That’s when you switch from reading to scanning the further pages and the chapters till you find a page that captures your interest again.

I’ve read 300-paged self help books and only found 1 sentence worth taking away.

And yet, it’s a fruitful exercise. You never know if that’s the different perspective you needed to make a change in your strategy.

TLDR: Leave the book if it’s being repetitive, move on to the next one.

Be very clear about what you want

I got interested in habit formation in 2019. So, I read The Power of Habit. It made it very clear that habits were quite important but made no change to my life. I got no insight into how to make habits, which is what I’d wanted all along.

Skip to 2021, I read Atomic Habits. That was a game changer. The book was written simply and had notes, action points, even templates that you could copy and replicate in your own life.

I’d known my WHY since a long time. What I really wanted to know was a HOW.

Don’t buy any self help book of its popularity. Don’t look at the bestseller list and add it to your cart. This is my framework to find the books I’d really like:

1. What do you want to learn about? (Ans: Habits)

2. Why do you want to learn about this? (Ans: Build positive habits to improve my personal and professional life)

3. What is the current biggest challenge you’re looking to solve with a book? (Ans: I have been trying to build good habits but always forget/miss out on them in a week. I want to build long-lasting habits.)

4. Which part of the Golden Circle are you looking for? Are you looking for a WHY(perspective on why this might be important in helping you improve your life), a HOW(a framework and set of tested rules that produce favourable results), or a WHAT(Which aspects to build first, where to focus your energy after knowing your why and your how)?

With clarity of thought, understand if you want a book with an overview or more of a how-to guide or a bunch of nice case studies that you can modify and apply to your personal use cases.

Lastly, Books won’t fix your life

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

Don’t be that horse.

Your baby sibling growing up from being a toddler to a fully-functional human being. Seeing a young couple having the most wholesome coffee date. Seeing someone passionately talk about their hopes and dreams. Logging off a bit earlier than usual. Seeing a constellation and getting the name correctly. Being drunk in a cab at 2am only to listen to sad Bollywood songs with your friend. Waking up without a hangover. Warm lighting in your room. Your first big purchase of your own money. Your art. You.

I have. I look back on how empathetic and perceptive I was back as an adolescent. Not anymore. It’s just work talk, sharing memes, and following up with people from another city. Has the world made me more apathetic over the years? Or did I do it unwittingly?

I don’t know what’s going with my friends, my family, and it doesn’t bother me either. Fuck it. Fine. I’ll admit it. It bothers me a lot. I used to have the best first conversations on text before, I don’t anymore.

The unbecoming of a great texter

I’m a HORRIBLE texter. I even struggle with replying to emails on time. After typing away on my semi-functional keyboard all day, doing it again over a 5 inch screen is a nightmare.

4-hour calls? I’m game. Sign me the hell up.

3 follow-up texts? Nope. *Uninstalls WhatsApp immediately*

But, it didn’t happen over night.

I had a thriving life before COVID. Not a worry in the world. I didn’t know what responsibilities were. Day drinking on a Tuesday? I’m your guy. A concert on the same night? Let’s go. Exploring a new bistro on the other side of town? See you in 2 hours.

As you’ll notice, all of it happened offline. WhatsApp merely became an event management tool. Everyone that I spoke to, I did in person. I think that’s when the decline began. Because I was still in touch with EVERYONE, I never noticed it.

COVID and emotional drain

COVID hit me like the a truck. It displaced my entire life. I had nothing going on the career front. No clarity. No vision. No ambition. What did I do? I slept a LOT (with a copious side serving of Ludo King, Among Us, and Batman)

The entire world was falling sick around me, left, right, and center. I even lost some people close to me. I don’t think I ever quite processed it until 2021, when shit actually hit me.

Everyone around me was suddenly thriving, getting into great things, building cool projects and there I was. A complete, utter, depressed, failure. That’s when I embraced the deep end to completely focus on work.

When I started working, texting became a lot more than just texting. It became a chore. It became a communication skill. Ugh. Between all the “Hey, how are you?”s and the “I’ll send it positively by EOD,” things changed all of a sudden.

Skip to now

Now that the charm of overworking has worn off, I’m slowly learning things about myself. I sacrificed a lot of things in the last year, maybe more than what I should have. I’m slowly taking inventory of everything else that fell apart.

This is my attempt at acknowledging what I left behind, and reclaiming it, one small text at a time.

I was very unhappy during my adolescence for one reason. I felt like I couldn’t control anything in my life. Hence, I had high hopes from college. I wanted to rebel. Do everything my way. I was looking at taking extreme control of my life. I wanted to call the shots. I wanted to control my environment in its entirety.

That obviously didn’t happen because life is a fine mess where you can’t even get your size in a t-shirt you like, let alone your dream routine or your dream life. So, the biggest unlearning was — you can’t control shit.

Your environment is a product of a billion different decisions that change in a dynamic manner. One moment you’re traveling to the hills and the next you’re stuck in your home for the next year because China is evil and COVID is deadly.

All you can control, if you’re lucky, is how you react. Your brain’s feedback loops run on autopilot and leveraging neuro plasticity is a long, hard game of training yourself like a dog being taught to salivate at the ring of a bell.

You’ve got to be your own Pavlov. Your habits — good or bad — are built from your surroundings and complex reward systems. All you can control, is your own mind. You can choose to have a clear goal and then consume information accordingly.

You can never change something its entirety, especially not right away. All you can do is put in your 0.1% that compounds over days and weeks and months to see some distinguishable change.

Working hard is a process of learning to make task lists, being gentle with yourself, trying to focus, putting your phone away, setting up macros to streamline things, and establish clear cut-off times.

And about a 10000 different things.

Your life, much like Rome, isn’t built in a day. It’s a glorious summation of your past. Just like your future is going to be a glorious summation of who you are today, and what you choose to do in the coming months.

The antidote to unhappiness and lack of control is not radical shifts. On the other hand, the solution is miniscule, everyday things in form of acceptance and improvement. While I don’t crave for control as much anymore, I do crave for introspection, acceptance, and small, doable things I can revel in. I hope it does the job.

The last 5 years of a dystopian social media culture is fundamentally toxic. Social media, fads, and conforming to great marketing efforts has destroyed attention spans, cognitive abilities, and one very important thing.

Creativity.

The end of young artists

50 million people joined the creator economy in 2022.

Young children aspire to be YouTubers over being an astronaut. Our generation is choosing content creation over truly hard endeavors like STEM and artistic explorations. Short-lived fame is more tempting than long-term, positive, impact on the world.

However, content creation is fundamentally not bad. It’s a great pass-time. It can even help you find your beloved brands and reduce perceived risk while buying.

But content creation is being polluted by an algorithm that favors conformity over creativity.

There are so few young artists that break the algorithm and manage to work it out in one way or the other. While their recognition is a fruit of tons of hard work and pain-staking experiments over months, content creation is different.

It’s hard, yes. But, it’s formulaic. It requires research, great euro-centric features, and keeping up with trending formats to stay fresh and a blood sacrifice to Meta.

But boy, is it a money machine.

Being a content creator is extremely lucrative in a capitalistic world. I’ve seen young artists try to break into different fields for all the wrong reasons. While authenticity isn’t rewarded at the same level anymore, it’s a lot more fulfilling than learning to create an NFT for a pump-and-dump project.

While you cannot topple the system, definitely try to keep your spark alive. Have your own garage workshop to keep experimenting in the pursuit of trying to be authentic. This is mine, I hope you find yours too.