So when a much younger friend told me that she thinks the guy she’s been seeing for 3 months is the one, I wrote her a list of questions I think she should ask him. It’s nowhere near exhaustive. It is, however, the list I think addresses a lot of difficult conversations couples struggle with. Here it is, in case it’s useful to anyone else currently looking at a man across a dinner table and wondering whether he’s your person for (hopefully!) the rest of your life.

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0. What is his relationship with his parents? Does he call them because he wants to or because he’ll get a guilt-soaked phone call if he doesn’t? Does he spend time with them because he enjoys their company, or because he thinks that’s what a good son does? Is he financially dependent on them? Have they paid for the car, “helped” with the down payment, covered his health insurance, or maybe gifted him some money? What is the expectation of return on that? How does he speak to his mother on the phone when he thinks you’re not listening?

1. Does he have siblings, and what is the actual family ecosystem? Is there an anointed golden child and a resented scapegoat, and which one is he? If he’s the golden child, you’re about to inherit the resentment of everyone who isn’t. If he’s the scapegoat, you are about to inherit a lifetime of him trying to prove his worth to people who don’t really care about his effort. How do the siblings speak to each other as adults? Is he friends with his siblings?

2. How does his family treat his bhabhi, his jiju, whoever the most recent person to marry into this family is? Who serves whom? Who gets interrupted? Whose plate gets filled first? Whose career is asked about with genuine interest?” Whatever is happening to her is what will happen to you.

3. What did his parents’ marriage actually look like when he was growing up? Who deferred to whom on the small stuff? On the big stuff? Who got to be tired? Who got to be the “difficult” one, and who was expected to deal with it? Who decided how comfortable the dinner table was? Whatever he watched as the primary example of ‘marriage’ for his whole life is what he thinks marriage is.

4. Has he ever been to therapy, and if not, would he go if it was needed? What does he think of men who go? If his answer involves “I just talk to my friends,” “I’m not really the type,” or “I don’t believe in that stuff,” ask yourself how he plans to process his pain when life eventually whoops his ass. The answer is going to be you, and you are not qualified. What then?

5. What is his actual income, and does he know where his money goes? If he cannot tell you within reasonable accuracy what he spends on rent, food, going out, his parents, and savings each month, he is not a financial adult; he is a financial teenager who happens to have a salary.

6. Does he have debt, and how does he treat it? Credit card dues, personal loans, EMIs on things he didn’t need, money owed to friends, money owed to family. Has he ever defaulted on anything? Has he ever been bailed out? Is that person who bailed him out going to expect repayment in the form of influence over your marriage?

7. What is he financially expected to contribute to his parents and siblings after marriage? Has he actually asked? Or is he assuming? Get a number. Monthly remittance, yes or no, how much. Siblings’ weddings: is he expected to fund part of it? All of it? Parents’ medical bills: is there insurance, is there a plan, is there a corpus, or is the plan “we’ll figure it out,” which always means you will figure it out. Is the house in his name or his father’s, and what does that mean for your marriage?

8. What happens when you out-earn him? Has it happened yet? If yes, how did he behave in the week after the money came in? Was he generous and proud, or weirdly snippy about small things? Men can intellectually support equal earning and still end up being turnips about it.

9. Joint, separate, or hybrid accounts? Does he have a thought-through position, or is he assuming you’ll just merge everything because that’s what wives do? Has he considered what happens to your money if you take a career break for children? Does it become his money that he generously shares, or does it remain yours? What’s his view on financial transparency? Full visibility into each other’s spending, or a “we trust each other” arrangement that mysteriously only ever benefits one side?

10. Does he know how to run the admin of his own life? Can he book his own doctor’s appointments, remember when his car insurance expires, file his own taxes, call the plumber, manage his own medication, and sit on hold with the bank? Or does he get a strange, helpless look when any of these things come up?

11. How does he spend on himself versus on you versus on his family? Is he generous with his parents and tight with you, generous with himself and tight with his parents, performatively generous with you in public and weird about it in private? Does he struggle to say no and then complain about it for the whole week?

12. Does he want children, how many, by when, and is any of this actually negotiable? “I’m open to whatever you want” is not an answer. Make him give you a real answer. Then ask what he thinks the first year of a baby’s life looks like in your household and see if his vision and yours are even vaguely similar.

13. If you struggle to conceive, what is his plan? IVF? For how many cycles, with whose money, with whose time off work, on whose schedule? Adoption? Does he genuinely consider it an equivalent to biological children? Childlessness? Can he imagine a full life with you and no children, or will he grieve it for the rest of your marriage?

14. Who is taking parental leave, who is doing the night feeds, who is doing the school run, who is staying home when the kid has a fever? “We’ll figure it out together” is the single most common lie told in pre-marriage conversations, and it always, always ends up with the woman figuring it out while the man takes credit for being supportive.

15. Whose career pauses when something happens, and has he ever, even hypothetically, even for thirty seconds, imagined it being his? If the answer is no, if he has genuinely never considered that he might be the one to step back, then you already know whose ambition is the default one in this marriage.

16. What religion or cultural framework are the kids being raised in, and has he actually thought about it, or is he assuming the default is his? Whose festivals are the “real” festivals in the house? Whose god gets the bigger photograph? Whose grandparents get to take the kids to which ceremonies? Whose mother tongue do the kids learn first?

17. What is his view on hitting children, yelling at children, shaming children, withholding affection from children as discipline? What was done to him, and does he describe it as discipline or as harm? A man who calls his own beatings “necessary” or “what made me who I am” is telling you what he will do to your kids the day they make him angry enough.

18. If you have daughters, will he raise them with the same expectations, the same freedoms, the same investment, same worldviews as sons? Don’t take his word because he’ll say yes. Watch how he already talks about his nieces compared to his nephews.

19. Does his family expect you to live with them after marriage? Has he told them you don’t want to? Has he had that conversation, or is he hoping you’ll either agree or be the bad guy who refuses so he doesn’t have to be? A man who cannot have a hard conversation with his parents on your behalf before the wedding is not magically going to find the spine to do it after.

20. How often will his mother visit, for how long, and who is hosting her? Is it understood that her visits are a joint project, or is it understood that she is his guest who you are expected to feed, entertain, defer to, and not complain about? What happens when her visit, which was supposed to be for a week, becomes a month?

21. What does he do when his family is dismissive of you? It will happen. If it has already happened (and look closely, because it almost certainly has), did he address it in the moment? Address it later in private with them? Address it later in private with you by asking you to adjust, or pretend he didn’t notice?

22. When his mother’s comfort and your comfort conflict, whose side does he choose? The seating at dinner, the temperature of the AC, what to order, where to go for the holiday. Watch carefully.

23. What’s his stance on the visible markers of marriage? Surname change, sindoor, mangalsutra, karva chauth, the performances of wifehood? Is he willing to take on any equivalent markers himself, or is the visible signaling of “married” a thing only one of you has to wear?

24. How does he handle the auntie-uncle pressure circuit? The relentless questions about when you’ll have kids, why you’re still working, why you wore that, why you spoke like that, and why you laughed too loudly? Does he stand between you and it, deflect it, change the subject, or does he go quiet and let you take the hits because “they don’t mean anything by it, just ignore”?

25. Does he defend you in rooms you’re not in? You will never directly know this, but you can figure it out. Does his family seem to think highly of you in ways that suggest he’s been telling them that he thinks you’re the bee’s knees? Do his friends know of your accomplishments, or are they surprised every time one comes up?

26. What does he want his life to look like at forty, at sixty, when the kids have moved out, when his career has plateaued? Has he thought past the wedding at all, or is the wedding itself the imagined finish line? Men who haven’t imagined the long arc of a life tend to be very surprised by it when it arrives.

27. If you got a serious opportunity in another city or country, would he move? Has he ever moved for a woman in his life? Has any man in his family ever moved for a woman? If women have been the ones who relocate for his whole life, you are asking him to be the first man in his bloodline to do it. That is much bigger than you can imagine.

28. Does he support your ambition the same way in public and in private? In public, he is proud, he brags about you, he shows you off, and he is the modern husband. In private, though? Is he still proud, or is there a small, cold voice in his head that tells him he expected something else?

29. How does he describe your work to his friends and parents? Does he get the title right? Does he get the company right? Does he understand what you actually do, or does he describe it as “she works in some media thing” because he never bothered to understand your work?

30. What does he do when you succeed, and what does he do when you fail? Failure is easy to be sweet about because it doesn’t threaten the status quo, and he gets to be the good guy. Success is where men’s real beliefs about their wives emerge, often subconsciously.

31. Drinking: how much? How often? What is he like when he drinks? Have you actually seen his worst? Find a way to see it before you commit.

32. Drugs: historical, current, recreational, dependent? What has he done, what does he still do, would he stop if you asked, and would he resent you for asking?

33. Gambling, including the respectable versions. Crypto positions he refers to as “investments.” Day trading that is actually betting. Sports betting apps. The casino trip with the boys that has happened more than once. FnO ‘just as an experiment’.

34. Porn: what’s his relationship with it? How often, what kind, and has it shaped what he expects sex with you to be? You don’t have to be anti-porn to ask this question. You just have to know what the man you’re sleeping with is comparing you to in his head.

35. Cheating: has he ever cheated? What does he personally define as cheating? Do not assume his definition matches yours. For some men, cheating starts at penetration. For some, it starts with a kiss. For some, with an emotional confession to another woman. For others, a conversation. Find out his definition and whether it is one you can live with.

36. How does his anger come out? Voice raised, doors slammed, things thrown, three-day silent treatments, driving fast on purpose, name-calling that gets walked back later as “just venting”? Every man feels anger. The question is who he aims it at and whether it has ever frightened anyone. Does he think of his anger as something he controls or something that controls him?

37. Has he ever been physical with anyone, ever? A partner, a sibling, a parent, a stranger in a bar, a wall, a door, a punch thrown at the floor? Men will tell you about punching the wall like it’s fine, whatever. It’s not fine.

38. Who are his three closest friends? What are their marriages or relationships like? If his three closest friends are all in marriages where the wife is exhausted and the husband is making jokes about it, you should realize that’s what you’re signing up for too.

39. How do his friends talk about their wives and girlfriends when they think no woman is listening? “Happy wife happy life” jokes, the “permission” jokes, the “ball and chain” jokes, the rolling of eyes at the mention of a wife’s name? Does your man laugh along? Does he push back? Does he actually not associate with men who talk like that in the first place?

40. Does he have female friends? Has he slept with any of them? Is there one in particular he talks about a lot, or maybe one he never talks about?

41. Are his friends happy for him about you? Are glad he’s found you? Or do they seem to be assessing you, waiting to see if you’ll be the cool wife who doesn’t mind the boys’ trips or the difficult wife who does?

42. Does he cook, clean, do laundry, do groceries, change sheets, scrub bathrooms without expecting a medal? Or only when guests are coming? Or only when you’ve cried about it?

43. Does he notice when something needs doing? Or does he wait to be told and then expect credit for doing what he was told? If you are the only one who can see the dust on the shelf, the empty milk carton, the kid’s school form due tomorrow, the wet towel on the bed….

44. What is his standard of cleanliness? How does it compare to yours? And whose standard wins when they don’t match? Does the lower standard get to be the default because raising it would be “nagging”?

45. How does he fight? Voice raised, walks out of the room, stonewalls for hours or days, goes cold, gets sarcastic, weaponizes something you told him in confidence, brings up something from two years ago, apologizes quickly to end the fight without resolving it, actually engages with the substance of what’s wrong? You will fight thousands of times in a marriage.

46. Can he say “I was wrong” without a “but,” “you also,” or a long explanation? A man who cannot apologize without qualifying it is a man who, deep down, does not believe he was wrong.

47. After a fight, who reaches out first? Always you? Always you? Is there a pattern of him waiting, knowing you will eventually crack? That is a tactic, conscious or not, and it works because you let it.

48. Does he hold grudges? For how long?

49. What does he know about himself that he doesn’t like and is actively working on? If he cannot name anything, or if what he names is one of those suspiciously charming things, he is not a man who has honest conversations with himself. You cannot have a real marriage with someone who has no relationship with his interior self.

50. How does he describe his exes? Is there a single ex he speaks of kindly, with whom he simply wasn’t a good fit? Because statistically, you will one day be an ex, and the language he is using for other women is the language he is preparing to use about you.

51. What is the mental health history in his family, including his own? Depression, anxiety, bipolar, OCD, addiction, untreated rage, suicide? None of it is a dealbreaker unto itself, but a man who refuses to acknowledge any of it is.

52. If you got chronically ill, is he the kind of man who stays present, learns the medications, and comes to the appointments? Or is he the kind of man who disappears into work and lets your mother and your sister become your real caregivers while he tells everyone how hard this has been on him?

53. If his parents get sick (and they will), what is the plan, and who is the assumed primary caregiver? Is it understood that you, the daughter-in-law, will be the one taking the lead because you are “better at that sort of thing”? Has he ever, even once, imagined being the primary caregiver to his own parents?

54. Sexual compatibility: have you actually had a real conversation about what you each want, what you each find difficult, what frequency works for both of you, what neither of you will do, and what each of you needs to feel wanted?

55. What does he do when you say no? Does he accept it? Does he sulk, negotiate, ask “why not”, or punish you for the next two days? A man’s response to a small no tells you exactly how he will respond to a big no.

56. How does he speak to people who can do absolutely nothing for him? How does he behave with the waiter, the driver, the watchman, the housekeeper, the call center agent, the auto-driver who took a wrong turn? People treat the powerful well because they have to.

57. How does he and his family treat his mother’s domestic staff, the cook, the maid, the driver they’ve had for years? Are they treated like real people with names and birthdays and families?

58. What does he think a wife is for? Ask him. Watch him try to dodge the question, watch him laugh, watch him give you an answer, watch him ask what do you mean. Press until you get a real one, and then think about whatever he actually said for a few days.

59. What does he think a husband owes to his wife, to his children, to his household, to the project of the marriage in itself? The answers most men give to this are shockingly weak compared to the answers they give to the wife version. Don’t put him in a corner on this one; ask him to take his time and think about what he thinks.

60. Does he believe in an equal marriage in the abstract while expecting a traditional one in practice? He will sincerely tell you he believes in equality, and he will mean it, and he will also be assuming that you will be the one who cooks, plans the holidays, manages the relationships, notices when the child is sad.

61. If one of you dies young, what happens? To the children, to the house, to the money, to the surviving partner? Has he written a will? Is there life insurance? Is there a plan? Is the plan “we don’t need to think about that now”? That is a plan to leave your children at the mercy of his family’s goodwill.

62. If you are both eighty, retired, and falling apart, who is taking care of whom? Can you picture it? Can you picture him gently helping you up the stairs? Can you picture yourself wanting to help him up the stairs? The image either comes easily or it doesn’t.

63. Can you imagine being bored with him? Because the wedding is one day, the honeymoon is two weeks, the early infatuation is two years, and the rest of it, decades of it, is the boring part. The boring part is where most marriages die.

64. Do you like who you are when you are with him? Not who he tells you you are, not who he makes you feel like you could be, not the version of yourself you are performing for him. The you that already existed before he arrived, does she get to stay? Does she get more room, or less?

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The right man will not flinch at a single one of these questions. Actually, untrue. He WILL flinch and he WILL get awkward, but he will push through his own conditioning and stratified worldviews to meet you where you are. He will realise that this is important to you. He will sit with you and answer them, and the answers will sometimes be uncomfortable, and that discomfort will feel like the beginning of a real conversation rather than the end of one. He will be honest about not having all the answers and will take time to think things through instead of pandering to what he thinks you want to hear.

The wrong man will tell you you are overthinking, that you are being intense, that you are ruining something nice by interrogating it. Pay very, very close attention to which of those two men he turns out to be, because that distinction is the entire rest of your life.

Send this to every woman you love who is currently three months in and starry-eyed. Consider it a small act of public service. She'll either thank you or block you, but you might just save a life!

We went home, the meltdown got handled or it didn’t, and we tried again another day, or we didn’t. The logic was simple. If a child can’t handle being out, the child should not be out.

It took me a long time to register how unusual this was. Most Indian children I knew were taught the opposite of this rule. You stop crying because Aunty is here. You smile because the photo is being taken. You don’t make a face at the food because the host is watching. You sit through the long evening because we are not the sort of family that leaves early. You behave because behaving is what good girls do. The whole vocabulary of Indian girlhood is the vocabulary of staying. Adjust. Compromise. Don’t make a scene. Sit nicely. Smile through it.

My parents, for whatever reason, opted out of this. They had decided that the plans could wait, but that a four-year-old having a hard time was not something to wait through. I don’t remember a single instance of being told later that I had ruined an evening. I don’t remember being asked to apologize for the meltdown.

When I notice I’m composing a reply with more heat than the situation actually warrants on social media, I take myself home. When I find myself refreshing a thread I have no real business refreshing, watching the quote-tweets accumulate, I take myself home. When I name-search myself on Reddit and feel the sweet-sick feeling of being perceived unwillingly, I take myself home. When someone in a meeting says something vaguely annoying and I feel myself react in a way that is wildly disproportionate to the offence, I take myself home, which in that case mostly means I excuse myself, walk to the bathroom, and stand at the sink for a full minute before going back.

The principle scales down to the smallest unit of leaving. Sometimes home is just the other side of a door.

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In adult life, taking myself home mostly means logging out. Closing the laptop. Putting the phone face down. Sometimes, literally walking out of the room. Once in a while, it’s just quite actually going home. It is not a refusal to engage. It is just leaving the place where I am no longer behaving like someone I’d want to be.

What has surprised me about this practice is how often the thing I was reacting to was not the thing I was reacting to. Some woman I have never met said something faintly stupid on the timeline and I was about to respond with the stored-up irritation of someone who hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten in five hours, had spent the morning in a frustrating call about something else entirely, and was carrying fourteen unrelated grievances into a tweet that didn’t deserve any of them. I was not pissed off at the post. I was pissed off at fourteen other things and the post was simply where it came out, much like how a leak comes out at the lowest point of the ceiling and not at the place where the pipe is actually broken.

You cannot see this from inside the moment. While you are in the reaction, the reaction feels measured to its cause; the cause feels exactly worth the heat. It is only after you have left the room that you can look back and see how much of what you were about to say had nothing to do with the person you were about to say it to.

This, more than anything else, is why I trust the practice. Not because leaving makes me a calmer or more virtuous person (it doesn’t) but because leaving is the only reliable way I have found for telling the difference between a real grievance and a displaced one. The genuine grievances survive the walk away. They tend to deserve a response that is composed rather than spat. The displaced ones evaporate the moment I am no longer near the scene of the supposed crime. I come back and look at the thing I was about to fight about and I cannot, for the life of me, remember why it had felt so important.

I have, over the last decade, watched the vocabulary of mental health expand into every corner of how women are expected to talk about their lives, and I have watched it do the opposite of what it promised. We were told that this language of boundaries, self-care, holding space, doing the work, showing up, being present, accountability would let us protect ourselves from the demands the world makes of women. What it has actually done is multiply those demands without us realising. To set a boundary, you must first announce it; then you must enforce it; then you must communicate, with appropriate calmness, why it has been crossed and what consequences will follow. To take care of yourself, you must first build the capacity to take care of yourself, which apparently requires a routine, a journal, a therapist, a supplement stack, a morning pages practice, a yoga mat, and a circle of friends with whom you are doing the same work in synchronised parallel. To rest, you must rest correctly, lest your rest become avoidance. The only thing this vocabulary has not given us is permission to simply leave.

Katy Waldman wrote about this a few years ago in the New Yorker: she called it the rise of therapy-speak. Her observation was that the language of mental health had migrated out of the clinic and into the way we narrate ourselves to each other, but that this migration had inverted the function of the language. In the clinic, therapy-speak is supposed to bring you into closer contact with what is actually happening to you. In the wild, it does the opposite. It lets you describe yourself in the third person. It turns a deeply relational and nuanced process into something ego-directed and performed. You don’t say you’re hurt; you say a boundary has been crossed. You don’t say you need to be alone; you say you’re holding space for yourself. The sentence does the work of distancing you from the feeling that produced it. It is a kind of literary anaesthesia.

The deeper problem is that all of this language assumes you will stay. You set the boundary so that you can stay in the relationship on better terms. You hold space so that you can keep being present in the friend’s grief. You do the work so that you can keep doing the work. The fundamentals of contemporary emotional vocabulary are the fundamentals of staying. The option of simply going home is not on the menu, because going home is not productive. It does not yield a better-managed self at the end of it. It does not generate content. It does not produce a story you can tell other women about how you Did The Work.

This is, of course, the same malaise that runs every other part of contemporary female life. Jia Tolentino called it always be optimizing, the regime under which the ideal woman is engineered to look natural while doing the unceasing work of self-improvement, the woman whose leisure is a form of labour and whose labour is described as self-care. Anne Helen Petersen, writing about millennial burnout, observed that the demand to keep working all the time had become the base temperature of an entire generation, the background music of being alive. We define ourselves, she wrote, by the capacity to keep working, and we have lost the capacity to recognise that this is not a feature of us but a symptom of the structure we live inside. The optimization runs underneath everything. It runs underneath your skincare. It runs underneath your friendships. It runs underneath the way you drink water. Of course it also runs underneath the way you are expected to manage your feelings, which is to say: efficiently, in a way that can be put on a podcast or carousel.

For women in particular, this regime is enforced through visibility. Sarah Banet-Weiser, the scholar who has thought hardest about this, calls it the economy of visibility, a system in which being seen has become the end rather than the means, and in which feminism itself has been reorganised around the imperative of women being more visible, not more free. Mary McGill, in The Visibility Trap, makes the same observation in a darker register: visibility, for women, is not a tool we picked up. It is a condition we live inside, and an always-on culture has normalised forms of comparison, shaming, and watchfulness that an earlier generation would have recognised as surveillance. To leave the visibility, even for an afternoon, is to invite the suspicion that you have something to hide, or that you have been driven off, or that you are sulking, or that you couldn’t cut it. It is, in any case, never neutral. There is no clean exit from a system whose first principle is that women must be seen.

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The Indian girl is raised, from approximately the moment she can hold her own head up, on a curriculum of staying. Adjust kar lo. Compromise karna seekho. Thoda samjho. She learns very young that her job in any room is to absorb whatever the room throws at her without producing a visible response. The Matchmaker on Netflix, asking a different girl every week if she is ready to compromise, was not delivering radical content. She was articulating the central instruction of Indian femininity.

This is the exact opposite of the rule my parents made. Most Indian girls are taught that the meltdown is the failure and the audience is the cure: stay in the room, swallow the feeling, don’t make Aunty uncomfortable, smile for the photo, be a good girl, where good is a synonym for absorbed. My parents had decided that the the children, the girls, did not have to tolerate the audience. This was an inversion of a script I did not know I was meant to learn.

The script does not stop at the household. The woman who has been raised to adjust in marriage is the same woman who is told, twenty years later, that she must develop a thick skin if she wants to exist online. The Indian woman who logs off mid-discourse is thin-skinned. The Indian woman who blocks is running away. The Indian woman who simply stops responding is can’t take a joke.This vocabulary makes leaving impossible to do without paying a social cost the woman is then blamed for incurring.

Urvija Banerji wrote a piece for The Swaddle a few years ago called The Price of Fighting Every Feminist Battle. Her argument was that there should not come a point in fighting for our humanity where we have to sacrifice our mental wellbeing, and that staying quieter in our daily lives was sometimes the right way to preserve the energy for the bigger fights. She framed it as a kind of feminist accounting: you cannot spend everything every day. The piece was met, predictably, with the charge that Indian feminists were running away from discourse, which is, I notice, the same accusation a four-year-old in a temple would be facing if she announced she wanted to go home.

The vocabulary of staying, the marriage vocabulary, the optimization vocabulary, the visibility vocabulary, the therapy-speak vocabulary that promised to free us and then trapped us inside a more elaborate cage, is one vocabulary. It assumes that the self is a project, that the project must be continuously visible, that visibility is the proof of the project, and that any movement away from the visibility is a failure of the project. The whole edifice depends on women never going home.

It also depends on us forgetting that going home was always available to us.

Because the thing is, we already have a vocabulary for this. It is older than therapy-speak by approximately two and a half thousand years. The Bhagavad Gita has a line that says, more or less, that only the foolish do not know when to engage and when to withdraw (pravrittim cha nivrittim cha janaa na vidur aasuraah). Devdutt Pattanaik has written that the central tension in Indian thought has always been between pravritti and nivritti, engagement and withdrawal, and that no Indian tradition has ever resolved this tension in favour of one over the other. Both are necessary. The householder and the hermit are both legitimate forms of being a person. Vairagya, the Sanskrit word that gets translated as dispassion or detachment, is not the absence of feeling, it is the discrimination, the viveka, between which feelings are worth your engagement and which are not. Ekanta is not loneliness. It is the positive form of solitude. Kaaya-viveka is the bodily withdrawal that is supposed to precede clarity, not follow from its absence.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, the poet, has a line I keep coming back to. We’re capable of stillness, she writes, even as we gallivant. You can be on a ten-city tour and still be capable of stillness. You can be a public woman and still know how to go home. The Indic tradition has been holding this for a very long time. It just got drowned out by the louder, more profitable vocabulary of constant availability, which wants you to set boundaries about your unavailability while never actually being unavailable.

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I am writing this halfway through my book tour.

The book is The Girls Are Not Fine. The tour is structured the way most Indian book tours are. It is dense, back-to-back, optimised for maximum coverage in minimum time, on the implicit logic that an author on the road is an author generating press, and an author generating press is an author moving copies, and an author moving copies is the only kind of author the publishing industry loves.

I asked, instead of the usual dense schedule, for three cities at a time. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then home. Then three more cities. Then home. Then three more. I designed it carefully. I was, I will admit, a little proud of the design. Look at me, trying to be balanced!

And then, this week, the system did not hold.

I was supposed to be in Bangalore today. I am not. I am at home in Mumbai, because my body simply went down. A stye swelled one eye half shut. My nose started bleeding for no reason. The psoriasis I have spent years managing flared across my skin. I did not decide to take myself home. I was sent home. The body filed the paperwork without consulting me, and the schedule I had been so proud of turned out not to have built in enough, or not the right kind of rest.

I hated it. I did not lie on my sofa in serene communion with my own limits. I lay there furious. Furious at my eye, my nose, my skin, at the city I was not in, at the readers in Bangalore who had signed up, at myself for building a tour I still could not survive. There was no vairagya in it. There was no graceful withdrawal. There was a woman who had written, with some confidence, about the wisdom of going home, being forced to go home against her will and discovering she was just as bad at it as everyone else.

Everything I have said so far about taking yourself home is true, and I stand by it, but it describes the voluntary version. What this week taught me is that the voluntary version is a privilege you lose the moment you need it most. If you do not take yourself home when it is still your decision, you do not get to keep making it your decision. The body takes the decision. And when the decision is taken, it feels like failure, because that is what it is. It is the failure to have left earlier, collected by a creditor who does not care that you were planning to pay.

My parents’ rule, the one I have been building this whole essay on, had a feature I glossed over the first few times I described it. The child did not decide. The child, mid-meltdown, did not raise a hand and calmly request to be taken home. The child was incapable, in that exact moment, of knowing that home was the answer. That is what it is to be a child having a meltdown. The parents decided. The rule existed because the person who needed it could not be trusted, in the moment of needing it, to invoke it. I had rewritten the rule, in adapting it for myself, into something more flattering: I had made myself both the child and the parent, and assumed the parent in me would always catch the child in me in time. This week, the parent was asleep. The child melted down in the middle of the outing. And there was no one external, no actual mother with actual car keys, to make the call before the body made it instead.

I don’t fully know what to do with that yet. I am writing this with one functional eye, so I am not at the height of my analytic powers. But I think what I am trying to say is not take yourself home, it is wise and good. It is closer to: you will go home either way. That is not in question. The only thing in question is whether you go while it is still a decision, with your dignity and your eyesight and your skin intact, or whether you go the way I went this week, resentful and far too late to feel like anything but a defeat.

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The obvious objection to all of this is that going home is just avoidance framed by empowering language.

You can call it vairagya or taking yourself home or strategic withdrawal or whatever Sanskrit-inflected vocabulary pleases you, but in practice it is logging off when the conversation gets hard, blocking when the criticism gets too close to home, leaving the dinner when the conversation turns toward something you don’t want to defend, or just retreating when you’re asked to stand and fight. The Indian woman who adjusts and the Indian woman who can’t take a joke and logs off are two faces of the same conditioning, and the conditioning is to never actually engage. The liberated thing would be to stay in the room.

This objection assumes there is a single thing called the conversation and that all leaving is a leaving of it, undifferentiated. The rooms my parents removed us from were not conversations. They were rooms. Removing the child from the room was not avoiding the feeling. It was attended to in the car, on the sofa, in the bath, at dinner, sometimes for days. What was avoided was the spectacle. The feeling, freed of the audience, was allowed to be the size it actually was instead of it being shrink-wrapped.

This is the distinction the objection refuses to make. Avoidance is leaving so you don’t have to deal with it. Going home is leaving so you can deal with it elsewhere, in a form that doesn’t damage the people in front of you. The first is burying the feeling. The second is relocating it.

You can tell which one you are doing by what comes next. Avoidance is followed by silence, hardening, a rewriting of events to absolve yourself, and a resentment that erupts later somewhere far from its cause. Going home is followed by the laundry and the bath, and either a clearer return or a considered decision not to return. The processing has happened; it has just happened somewhere private, which is where most processing belongs.

The objection is also made selectively, in the direction of women. The man who logs off is busy. The woman who logs off is dramatic. The man who declines to engage with criticism is above the fray. The woman who declines is thin-skinned. This is not an accident. The vocabulary of avoidance has been built around women because women are the ones whose continuous availability the system depends on.

The people who police women’s leaving are almost never the people the women are leaving. The reader who came to my Indore event is not the person upset that I am home on Tuesday. The friend whose dinner I left early is not the one writing essays about how women who leave dinners are avoidant. The actually-affected parties are usually fine. They realised that the version of me they had access to had run out, and they would rather have me at full strength next month than at half strength tonight. The objection is being made by people with no stake in the specific room I left. They object to the principle of women leaving rooms because it threatens an ecosyste, that runs on women not leaving them.

And finally, my parents’ rule had heft. They did not negotiate. They did not weigh whether the meltdown was warranted or whether the child was being reasonable. They did not perform a drawn-out announcement of their intention to leave with apologies to the host and a public processing of the family’s needs. They just left. The version of boundaries contemporary therapy-speak has taught us (announced, negotiated), would have been useless to my parents. It would have turned every meltdown into an argument about whether the meltdown qualified as a meltdown. The whole point of the rule was that it didn’t have to be argued for.

The adult version works the same way. I do not, when I take myself home, sit and adjudicate whether the thread or the meeting or the dinner or event or coffee or pitch has earned my departure. I do not consult my notes on whether a boundary has been crossed. I notice I am no longer behaving like someone I want to be in a room with, and I leave the room. The leaving is the response to the noticing. It is not the conclusion of a long internal court case in which I am simultaneously prosecutor, defence, judge, and jury.

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Women would be less exhausted if they understood they do not have to defend their leaving. It does not require a justification. It does not require a thread of explanation. It does not require a soft-launch on close-friends Stories about how you’re taking some time for yourself. It just requires leaving. The justification, if any, can come later, to the people who are actually owed one, who are almost never the people demanding it.

A child has the right to be removed from a situation she cannot handle without arguing for the removal. That is the part of the rule I have most struggled to translate into adulthood, because the contemporary world insists that adult women earn every removal through documented suffering. I am refusing to earn it. I notice. I leave. I go home. The argument, if there is one, can be had later, on my sofa, with the sister as a witness, in a form that does not require me to win.

I am writing the last sentence of this essay with one eye still half-shut. The rule held. The rule held badly, this week, because I had been a bad steward of it, but it held. I am home. Bangalore will happen, or it won’t. I will go back out, or I won’t. The next time I notice, I would like to leave a little earlier. I would like to not have to be sent. But if I have to be sent, I would like to remember that being sent is also a form of the rule applying.

The car keys come out. Somebody puts you in the car. You go home.

This is, for me, a deeply destabilizing condition. For weeks, I have been a human Gantt chart. Proofread the PDF, approve the A+ page, coordinate 100 PR boxes, schedule the sends, confirm the moderators, draft the email, and send the email. The work was a buffer. It was how I kept the actual fact of the book, that it exists, that it is leaving my hands, that strangers will read it on a Monday morning commute and decide things about it and about me, at a manageable distance.

The buffer has thinned out to nothing. The boxes have started shipping. The book is printed. The launch is at Crossword Kemps Corner at 6:30 PM tomorrow, and no matter how many times I open and close my inbox, there is nothing left to fix.

So I am sitting with it.

The Girls Are Not Fine is a book about what it costs women to want things, to want big, public, ambitious, unapologetic, incredible things. I wrote it because I needed to understand my own life. I wrote it because I kept meeting women who looked like they had everything and felt like they had nothing, and I wanted to know why. The thesis, roughly, is that we are not fine, that we haven’t been fine for a long time, and that the question is what we do with that fact. (To read more about why the book is called what it is, read this excerpt published by Vogue India!)

It is a slightly absurd book to be launching while not fine.

I have been told, by various well-meaning people, that I should “enjoy this moment.” The moment is not enjoyable in the way “enjoy” usually implies. It is not a glass of wine on a balcony. It is more like the bit at the airport where you’ve already checked your bag, and you cannot uncheck it, so you can either spiral about whether you packed your charger or you can find a coffee. I am, for the record, finding a coffee. But the spiraling about the charger is also there, all the time, in the background.

What I keep coming back to is this: I made a book, and tomorrow it stops being mine. I mean it in a literal, slightly horrified way. For two years this book lived in a Google Doc only I had access to. Then a smaller circle of people. Then PRH. Then blurb-givers. Then ARC readers. Each ring out, the book belonged to me a little less. Tomorrow the rings collapse, and it belongs to whoever picks it up.

I do not get to control what they do with it. They will read sentences I rewrote eleven times and not notice. They will read sentences I dashed off in twenty minutes and quote them in their stories. They will misread me on purpose and by accident. Some people will love the book. Some will hate it. Some will not finish it. Some will underline every page.

The book is going to live a life I do not get to be in.

I think that is what I was actually preparing for, all those weeks of tasks. Not the launch, not really. The surrender.

What I know tonight: I love what I made. I am proud of what I made. I do not know if it will sell, by which I mean justify the bet a major publisher made on a 31-year-old writing nonfiction about women and ambition in India in 2026, and I cannot make it. What I can do is show up at Crossword tomorrow at 6:30, in something black, with my hair done, and talk about the book with Shephali and Ankita and Vidhya in front of a room of people who have decided, on no evidence other than my own conviction, that this matters.

That is already more than I had any right to ask for.

If you are coming tomorrow: thank you. If you preordered: thank you. If you are reading this newsletter at all: thank you. The book exists because, somewhere in the last few years, you told me the things I was writing were worth reading. You’ll probably never know which version of you said which thing on which day.

I do, I do, I do, and I carry it in my heart.

See you tomorrow.

H.

What that Bollywood agency was actually doing (though they’d never admit it, obviously,) was pricing a creator business using the only framework they know. Reach as a vanity metric. They have spent two decades in an industry where a star’s value is determined by their last box office number, their magazine cover count, the directors they know, the paparazzi they can hustle, and their PR cycle. They looked at an influencer manager and saw the same thing with a smaller scope of work.

They were wrong. The business my friend built isn’t a contact list. It’s a trust arbitrage. And trust, in 2026, is the only currency in the attention economy that actually converts to sales. You can’t acquire that from a Bollywood rolodex. You can’t manufacture it with a ₹8 crore ad film. You build it by showing up in someone’s phone, in their own language, talking about things they actually care about, consistently, for years. That’s what creators do. The Bollywood agency didn’t understand what they were trying to buy, which is, incidentally, exactly why the industry they come from is in the trouble it’s in.

The easiest way to understand what’s happening is to stop thinking of this as a media shift and start thinking of it as a pricing error. Bollywood is mispricing trust because it still treats attention as the asset and reach as the proxy. Brands are buying that trust inefficiently, paying for borrowed feeling that doesn’t convert the way it used to. Creators, on the other hand, are compounding trust in public, over time, in front of the exact audience that will eventually be asked to buy something. The asset isn’t the content. It’s the relationship the content builds. And right now, that relationship sits with the creator, not the platform, not the studio, and definitely not the agency trying to spreadsheet its way into understanding it.

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Bollywood really wants you to believe this is a rough patch. A few bad films, bad luck, audiences will come back, Bollywood is forever, We Are India, etc. They won’t. Or at least, not in the way they’re hoping.

In 2024, original Hindi films lost ₹1,800 crore at the box office compared to the year before. This was the year Stree 2 happened. The best-performing original Hindi film in years couldn’t compensate for how badly everything around it collapsed. Roughly 70-80% of Bollywood films don’t recover their production and marketing costs. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan cost ₹350 crore to make. It earned ₹111 crore. Akshay Kumar, who built his whole brand on being reliable, on showing up, on delivering the Great Indian Man, gave his eighth flop in ten releases.

People aren’t going to the movies anymore. India had 1.46 billion theatrical admissions in 2019. By 2025 that number was 832 million. Fewer than 150 million Indians go to a cinema even once a year. PVR INOX is closing over 130 screens. The audience didn’t stop loving stories, and consistent rise in OTT subs tells us that. They just stopped caring about the specific people the movie industry decided were worth caring about.

While all of this is happening, while the revenues are falling and the footfalls are tanking, the stars kept demanding more. Star salaries eat roughly 70% of production budgets before filming starts. Karan Johar said it best: “When the budget is 40 crore, you asked me for 40 crore.” Dharma Productions, the studio that basically defined Bollywood cool for twenty years, saw its profits fall 94.5% in one year. Had to sell a 50% equity stake. Meanwhile Maddock Films, which bets on content and not stars, is operating at a 20.9% profit margin.

And then there’s South Indian cinema, which Bollywood keeps framing as competition but is actually just a mirror. South Indian films earned more at the Indian box office than Hindi films in 2024. 31% of what Hindi cinema collected last year came from dubbed South Indian films. Worth noting that this trust collapse is specifically a Bollywood problem, not an Indian cinema problem. South Indian celebrities still move product in a way their Hindi counterparts increasingly don’t, because the movie industry they come from hasn’t broken the same promises. Pushpa 2 alone was 20% of Hindi box office. Aamir Khan actually said it correctly for once: South films do what Bollywood used to do. Big emotions. Mass appeal.

The nepotism piece ties all of this together. Over 30 star kids launched since 2015. Most of them flopped. The Archies. Janhvi Kapoor’s 0% success ratio for original Hindi releases in 2024. Most people would rather watch a star kid fail than succeed at this point, not because anyone wishes them ill, but because every failure is the audience saying: we see the game and we’re not playing.

When your product is this visibly rigged, when everyone can see who gets the roles and why, people stop trusting the whole ecosystem. And that trust collapse bleeds directly into endorsements.

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Shah Rukh Khan selling Lux worked because of what Shah Rukh Khan meant. He was the middle-class Delhi boy with no filmy background, no godfather, no unfair advantage, no last name that opened doors. Just hunger and talent and charisma and a face the camera (sometimes) loved. He arrived in Bombay with nothing and became the Badshah. That story was the product. When he vouched for something, it carried the whole weight of that myth- the idea that this country rewards merit, that talent wins, that the dream is real and available and he was proof of it. You weren’t buying soap. You were buying into the promise he embodied.

The nepo era destroyed that foundational myth. It said: actually, last name wins. It said: the dream was always more access-restricted than we told you. And the moment that myth breaks, SRK’s origin story stops feeling like a promise and starts feeling like an exception. The dream curdles. The vouching stops working. The endorsement becomes just an ad. And we have plenty of those already.

Think about the last time a Bollywood star felt like someone you actually knew.

Take your time. I’ll wait.

Hard to place, right?

You can probably tell me their PR narrative, the humble origins story, the transformation arc, the carefully managed relationship timeline, the planted Reddit posts, the Viral Bhiyani placement. You know the version of them that lives in press junkets and magazine profiles and Instagram posts where the lighting is uniformly good and the caption is clearly written by someone else. But you don’t actually know them. And somewhere along the way, you stopped pretending you did. You stopped reaching for that feeling.

I noticed it happening to me in slow motion. I’d watch an interview and clock, almost immediately, which question had been pre-approved. I’d see a “candid” moment and mentally calculate the PR strategy behind it. I’d watch someone cry on a chat show and feel nothing, because I’d seen the same cry on three other chat shows and it had started to feel like a set piece. I’d watch someone look ‘shy’ about a relationship rumour and think, ‘eh, do you have. Movie coming out?’

Now think about the last creator who recommended something to you that you actually bought. Or changed your mind about something. Or taught you something. Or showed you a fun hack that kind of entered your life seamlessly. Or made you feel seen in a way you weren’t expecting from someone you’d never met.

Different feeling entirely.

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It’s not that influencers are more honest. Some (most) of them are completely full of it. The gifted PR packages described as personal favourites, the “I’ve been using this for months” posted six days after the brand deal was signed, the wellness content that is essentially just selling you anxiety about yourself, the curated ‘Pinterest lifestyle’ that’s quite clearly a lie. The audience knows. They always know.

But even knowing all of that, the relationship still works in a way that the Bollywood endorsement doesn’t. Creators are accountable to their audience in a way that Bollywood stars simply cannot be. When a creator posts something their audience hates, they hear about it immediately in the comments, in the DMs, in the quote tweets, in the declining engagement numbers that their next brand deal depends on. The feedback loop is right there, visible, fast and merciless. It keeps them calibrated. Not honest, necessarily, but calibrated. They know where the line is because the line has been drawn for them in real time, repeatedly, by the exact people they need to keep trusting them.

Bollywood stars live inside an ecosystem specifically designed to protect them from that feedback. The PR teams, the interview pre-approvals, the curated access, the mythologising, all of it exists to create, curate, and manage distance. To keep the image intact. To make sure you never see anything that wasn’t meant to be seen. You were buying into the fantasy, and the fantasy required that you not look too closely.

The problem is that in 2025, looking closely is just what we do. We have parasocial relationships with people who post from their actual bedrooms. We watch someone process a breakup in real time. We see the bad skin days and the disagreements with brand managers and brands overreaching and the moments where someone is clearly exhausted and posts anyway because the algorithm punishes absence. We have been trained, by years of this kind of content, to identify intimacy. And once you’ve developed that muscle, the managed distance of a Bollywood star doesn’t feel aspirational anymore.

I think about the Clinic All Clear ad. Virat and Anushka, selling shampoo. It worked because people had a feeling about them; Years of match days, stolen glances, hands held at the airport, magazine covers and a wedding that felt like a national event. You weren’t buying shampoo. You were buying proximity to something you loved. The product was the feeling. But that machine doesn’t produce the feeling anymore. Not for everyone. Not for the generation that matters most to brands right now. They didn’t grow up with Virat and Anushka the way we did. They grew up with someone on their phone at midnight, showing them a skincare routine in bad lighting, getting into arguments in their comment section, recommending a serum they’d actually been using for six months before they mentioned it, who walked them through a crush-situationship-relationship-wegotengagedomg trajectory. That person is who they have feelings about. The kind that converts to sales.

Feelings aren’t transferable. You cannot buy someone else’s parasocial relationship and redirect it toward your product. The brand that paid ₹8 crore for a Bollywood face is paying for a feeling the audience may no longer have. The brand that paid ₹50,000 for a mid-tier creator is paying for a feeling that is very much alive, embedded in a relationship the creator has been building for years, that the audience shows up to voluntarily.

80% of Indian Gen Z trusts influencers over celebrity endorsements.

The last thing I’ll say here, and it’s the thing I feel most strongly about: I would rather patronise a rich influencer who owns their privilege than a Bollywood star performing middle class because they think it will make me like them more. At least the influencer isn’t lying to me about who they are. The performance of relatability is so much more insulting than just being unrelatable. One is a gap. The other is a con. The audience figured this out before the brands did. They always do. The brands are just now starting to follow the money.

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Let’s talk about what a mid-tier influencer actually makes. My case study here is an influencer with 150,000 followers, posting consistently, monetizing reasonably well. She’s not a megastar. She doesn’t have some insane viral moments, maybe a few reels that breached 500k views. She is doing 2-4 brand deals a month at anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹2 lakh per post. She can make ₹5-6 lakh a month on an average month. And, perhaps most importantly, that income has nothing to do with anyone else’s decisions. No producer greenlit it. No director cast her. No box office number validated it. No PR cycle generated it.

Now think about what a Bollywood star’s income actually depends on. A hit. Everything flows from the hit: the brand deals, the appearance fees, the magazine covers, the relevance. The hit determines the fee which determines the brand interest which determines the next hit’s budget. It’s a chain, and every link in it is someone else’s decision. The producer has to greenlight the film. The director has to cast you. The audience has to show up. The critics can’t destroy it opening weekend. The OTT deal has to come through if the theatrical doesn’t. At every stage, someone else holds the key. The Bollywood star is, structurally, dependent on external validation in a way that a creator with 150,000 engaged followers simply isn’t.

This is the thing that is genuinely underappreciated about the influencer economy. It’s not just that the money is good. It’s that the money is decoupled. An influencer’s income is a function of their own consistency. A Bollywood star’s income is a function of other people’s decisions. In an industry that is increasingly making bad decisions, that distinction matters enormously.

Micro-influencers in India deliver engagement rates of 4-8% on Instagram. Mega-celebrities deliver under 1%. The conversion rate gap is roughly 60% in favour of mid-tier creators when reach is comparable. The ROI is 4.2 times higher. And the cost differential is almost comical. A nano-influencer charges ₹500 to ₹5,000 per reel. A single ad film with an A-list Bollywood star costs ₹8-40 crore before you’ve spent a rupee on media. Hindustan Unilever is the number that ends the argument. In FY25, HUL increased influencer marketing spend by 40% while cutting total advertising expenditure. They went from 700 creator relationships to 12,000. Their chairman said it at the AGM: 40% of ad budget now goes to digital. Unilever’s global CEO said it even more plainly: he wants one influencer in every zip code in India. Not one Shah Rukh Khan. One person in each of the 19,000 zip codes across the country who the people in that zip code already trust.

The D2C brands made this move years earlier and have the valuations to prove it. Muuchstac was built entirely through micro-influencer campaigns, zero television, zero Bollywood and was acquired by Godrej Consumer for ₹450 crore. Godrej’s CEO called it the future model. SUGAR Cosmetics built its brand through 20,000 influencer partners, going from 2 products to 450 SKUs. boAt captured 32% of India’s earwear market. Co-founder Aman Gupta was explicit about why: their consumer doesn’t watch TV the way previous generations did. Mamaearth spent ₹744 crore on marketing in FY25, with influencers at the core of that spend, and built a listed company worth thousands of crores in the process. None of these brands were built on a Bollywood face. All of them were built on distributed trust at scale.

The celebrity endorsement isn’t dead, obviously. Virat Kohli’s brand value rose 21% after his 2023 comeback. Shah Rukh Khan’s brand value is not going anywhere immediately. But these are increasingly exceptional cases in an industry where the average is collapsing. The exception is being used to argue against the trend, and the trend is unambiguous. Celebrity-endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads now feature a celebrity at all. 47% of brands now prefer micro-influencers over celebrities and macro creators. The money is moving. It has been moving for a while. The only people who haven’t fully clocked it yet are the ones still pricing influencer agencies like PR firms with a social media tab open.

There's another cost nobody puts in the deck. A-list Bollywood celebrities are genuinely painful to work with, and the pain is a feature, not a bug. The entourage, the green screen requirement, the 30-minute window, the manager who is a nightmare, the creative restrictions that make a live location shoot essentially impossible, all of it is a pricing signal. If you're trying to move from ₹4 crore to ₹6 crore, making yourself harder to access is a legitimate strategy. You're not paying for the performance. You're paying for all the frills around it. And those frills put a ceiling on what the work can actually be. The best ad you can make with someone like that is maybe a 7 out of 10, because you're shooting on a green screen in a studio on their schedule. Meanwhile, a creator with a million followers will show up, have opinions, care about how it looks on their page, and make something better because their audience will judge them for it if they don't.

Think about what Farah Khan represents in the industry. She made Om Shanti Om. Main Hoon Na. Happy New Year. She is not a struggling director looking for relevance. She is someone who sat behind the camera for decades manufacturing the very star power we’re talking about. She choreographed the songs that made Shah Rukh Khan iconic, she directed the films that made Deepika a household name. She understood the machine better than almost anyone. And then she picked up her phone and started making reels about food and her kids and roasting her famous friends, and somehow that content is more engaging than anything she’s produced theatrically in years.

What Farah figured out, consciously or not, is that the thing audiences actually wanted was never the spectacle. It was the person behind the spectacle. The machine was so loud and polished for so long that nobody could hear the actual human being. The moment she stepped out from behind the camera and just started talking, there was an audience immediately there, waiting. They’d been waiting for years. They just had no way to access her.

Farah Khan choosing Instagram Reels over a film set isn’t a retreat. It’s an upgrade. The economics are better. She has a direct relationship with audience, no studio greenlight required, no box office pressure, no press junket where she has to be nice about a film she knows is mediocre. The creative control is better. The feedback is immediate. The shelf life, paradoxically, is longer, because she’s building a relationship rather than launching a product.

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And she is not alone. Look at who is actually crossing over and in which direction. Prajakta Koli went from YouTube to Bollywood and OTT. Bhuvan Bam (26 million YouTube subscribers) is now doing critically acclaimed web series. Dolly Singh went from Instagram comedy to the Cannes red carpet. Kusha Kapila went from satirical Instagram sketches to film roles and reality TV judging. The creators are moving into film and television as a prestige play and as a way of adding range to an identity they already own. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it because they can afford to.

The Bollywood stars going the other direction are doing it for completely different reasons. They need the recurring revenue. They need the direct audience relationship that their film careers used to provide and no longer do. They need a platform that doesn’t require a hit every eighteen months to justify their existence.

Alia Bhatt has a YouTube channel. 1.6 million subscribers. Kartik Aaryan has one. Around 619,000. These are not bad numbers for a regular person. For someone whose face is on billboards across the country, they’re humbling. Ajey Nagar, who started making videos in his bedroom in Faridabad, has 45 million YouTube subscribers. The gap isn’t about effort or even likability. It’s about where the relationship was built. Alia’s audience knows her through films, through a carefully managed public persona, through Karan Johar’s godfathering her, through her amorphous existence- Alia Bhat simply exists. CarryMinati’s audience chose him, repeatedly, over years, for all the good and bad he is. That kind of loyalty has to be earned from scratch.

The other thing that’s broken is the star-making machine itself. There’s no new Shah Rukh Khan because there can’t be. The conditions that produced Shah Rukh Khan don’t exist anymore. He arrived in an India with limited television, no internet, no OTT, no social media, an India where cinema was genuinely one of the few places mass culture was made. He became a fixture because the channels through which fixtureness was created were narrow, and he occupied all of them. Today those channels are infinite. Attention is distributed across millions of creators, thousands of platforms, billions of pieces of content. The kind of singular, total cultural dominance that made the Khans possible is structurally unavailable now.

There is no new bachcha being manufactured. And the ones being launched are being launched into an audience that has more options than any previous generation and is ruthless about exercising them. They don’t have to watch. So increasingly, they don’t. The shelf life of a Bollywood star in 2025 is short and getting shorter. The shelf life of a creator with a genuinely engaged audience is, if managed well, indefinite. Bollywood wants to become Instagram. Instagram has no particular desire to become Bollywood.

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In 2015, influencer marketing was the experimental line item. The thing you tried with 5% of budget while the real money went to the TVC with the Bollywood star and the big media buy. Influencers were scrappy, unproven, and faintly embarrassing to take seriously. You had to convince your big boss that yes, the kid with a front camera can, in fact, sell things. The Bollywood endorsement was the signal that your brand had arrived. It was as much about the brand’s self-image as it was about actually selling anything. That logic hasn’t fully died. It should have, but it hasn’t. There are still marketing teams who greenlight a celebrity deal because it makes the board presentation look impressive, and because nobody ever got fired for hiring Shah Rukh Khan. The institutional safety of the celebrity endorsement outlives its commercial utility by years.

Celebrity endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads feature a celebrity now. 47% of brands prefer micro-influencers over celebrities. 70% of Indian brands are maintaining or increasing influencer spend. The influencer marketing industry is growing at 25% annually while the overall ad market grows at 10-12%. This is a reallocation happening in real time.

The framework I’d give any brand trying to figure out where to put their money is simple. Celebrity is renting a feeling. Influencer is renting a relationship. A feeling is a one-time transaction. You pay for it, it works or it doesn’t, it fades. A relationship compounds. Every piece of content a creator makes within an ongoing brand relationship adds to the trust that the previous pieces built.

Which doesn’t mean celebrities have no role. They do. One celebrity naam ke liye, for the press release, for the board, for the brand equity signal that still matters in certain categories and certain markets. And everyone else in the budget is an influencer. Not just because it’s cheaper, though it is, but because it converts. Because the 4.2x ROI differential is real. Because 60% higher conversion rates are not a rounding error. Because Muuchstac was acquired for ₹450 crore on the back of micro-influencer sales and zero television.

The mistake most brands make when they come around to this logic is that they try to use influencers like they used celebrities. One post. Big fee. Move on. It doesn’t work that way. The product is the relationship, which means the investment has to be in the relationship. You need longer partnerships, genuine integration, letting the creator actually talk about the thing in their own voice rather than handing them a script. The brands that have figured this out are treating creators as evangelists rather than as billboards.

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The agency story I started with is the whole thing in miniature. A Bollywood-affiliated talent house looked at a creator business and saw a cheaper, smaller version of what they already do. They priced it accordingly. What they actually looked at was the future of how trust gets built, distributed, and monetised in this country, and they couldn’t see it because they’ve spent thirty years in an industry that runs on a completely different operating system. They will eventually overpay for something in this space. They always do. They’ll buy the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, or the right thing and then run it using the wrong frameworks. The world will move on.

Somewhere in a brand meeting this year, someone will approve a ₹20 crore campaign built around a face everyone recognises. The film will be shot beautifully. The lighting will be perfect, the edit tight, the music engineered to the nth degree. The media plan will be airtight. It will run exactly where it’s supposed to, at exactly the right frequency, and the numbers will look reassuring in the deck the next morning. The team will post about its success on LinkedIn. People will see it. They just won’t do very much about it.

And on the same day, in the same country, a girl will prop her phone up against a stack of books and film a 40-second video in bad lighting, explaining why she actually uses a product. She’ll ramble a little, correct herself midway, forget a word, laugh, keep going. The comments will fill up before she’s even done replying to the first few. Someone will ask a question she didn’t think to answer. Someone else will say they tried something because of her last video. A few thousand people will buy the product before the campaign even goes live.

No one will write a case study about that second moment. It won’t show up in a board presentation. It won’t feel as controlled or as certain in its success. But if you look closely at what actually happened, at what made someone pause, consider, and then act, it will be sitting there in plain sight, in a video that looked like it cost barely anything.

Grateful to Bhaktee Modgil and P.G. Aditya for feedback!

My book, The Girls Are Not Fine, is now available for preorders! Get your copy here.

I’ve been thinking about marriage the way I think about my career recently. I’m in my thirties. The people around me are either getting married for the first time or, increasingly, getting divorced. The ones who are happily partnered have this ineffable quality of settled energy that I find myself studying the way I study a series C pitch deck: what decisions led to this outcome? What was the initial pitch? What was the founder impetus? What was the key insight? What did they know that the others didn’t? Is it replicable, or was it luck?

I’m not someone who dismisses marriage as a trap or romanticises it as a destination. I think it is a decision, probably the most significant one most women will ever make. I’ve started to believe it deserves at least the same rigour we’re supposed to bring to every other consequential choice in our lives. Not because love doesn’t matter, but because love without discernment increasingly feels like a terrible decision to take.

So I did what I always do when a question is keeping me up at night. I went looking for data.

I reached out to thirty women in my life. The criteria: These had to be women I know but not well enough to know their husbands, they have to be women I look up to, these have to be women I respect, women whose careers I admire, women who seem to genuinely like their husbands when they talk about them, and I asked them two questions. What keeps your marriage alive? And what’s the one lesson about partnership you wish someone had told you before you chose?

I was braced for the Chicken Soup For The Soul kind of advice. Communication is everything. Never go to bed angry. Choose each other every day. Love beats all. All of it true, probably, and all of it useless because it tells you nothing!

When I looked at the patterns, every single woman’s answer collapsed into the same outcome:

Don’t marry a loser.

That was it. Thirty women. Most of them happily married, a few divorced and remarried, a few still married and very honest about how hard it is, some separated. They all arrived at the same place. The whole game, they said, is who you pick. Everything after that is maintenance on a decision that was either the best you ever made or the worst.

I posted a version of this on Twitter, because that is what I do when I have a thesis I want to pressure-test.

The men lost their minds.

I posted the finding before I’d defined what a loser was. The definition was supposed to be this essay and essays take time. And before I got to the definition, men were in my mentions calling me a loser. Telling me I was bitter and alone. Explaining, at some length, that they were not losers. Asking who I thought I was.

I honestly found it genuinely interesting. Not upsetting, because men have said waaaay worse to me, but just interesting. I had posted a word. No context. No criteria. No list of offending behaviours. No call outs. No metrics. Just the word “loser,” attached to the advice not to marry one. And a substantial number of men had looked at that word, decided it applied to them, and reacted accordingly.

There is a whole body of research that explains exactly why this happens (of course there is). Psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson have spent the better part of two decades studying what they call precarious manhood, the idea that male status, unlike female status, is treated as something that must be continually earned and can be revoked. Womanhood is viewed as relatively stable and biological; manhood is a performance with no guaranteed tenure. In studies across 62 nations, Bosson et al. found this belief is effectively universal, varying in intensity but not in direction. The consequence is that men with precarious self-concepts become hypervigilant for anything that could threaten their status, and when threat is perceived, they respond with either aggression or withdrawal, depending on how their masculinity norms were originally installed.

But the most useful piece of research for understanding my Twitter comments section comes from a different tradition. Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden published a landmark review in 1996 identifying threatened egotism (not low self-esteem, but high and unstable self-esteem) as the primary driver of hostility and aggression. The people most likely to react angrily to perceived criticism are not people who feel bad about themselves. They’re people whose self-image is favourable but precarious, and who respond to any potential downward revision with pre-emptive defence. The threat doesn’t even have to be directed at them. The mere existence of a category that could apply is sufficient to activate the alarm.

So when men read “don’t marry a loser” before I had defined what a loser was, the ones who reacted with hostility were not reacting to the content. They were reacting to recognition. Something in the word had already triggered a provocation before any evidence had been presented. The research predicts this to the tee: identity-protective cognition, as legal scholar Dan Kahan has extensively documented, means people don’t evaluate threatening information to find truth. They evaluate it to survive the threat to their self-image. The reasoning comes after the feeling of exposure, and it is almost always in service of dismissal.

I genuinely do not think most of these men were bad people. I think they were scared of a word that seemed to know something about them. And that, it turns out, is extremely useful information about who they are in a relationship.

Back to the research, because the data on what a bad partner actually costs a woman is stark enough that I think it warrants its own section before we get to the composite portrait.

Sociologist Allison Daminger’s 2019 study, published in the American Sociological Review, broke down what she calls cognitive household labour into four stages: anticipating what needs doing, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring outcomes. She found women doing more cognitive labour in 26 of 32 heterosexual couples studied, and that men participated roughly equally only in the decision-making stage, the most visible component, while women dominated the anticipating and monitoring, the invisible preparatory work that happens continuously in the background. Her follow-up research puts the cognitive labour split in heterosexual couples at approximately 80/20. Among queer couples, that gap narrows to roughly 60/40 and doesn’t divide along gendered lines at all, which tells you something important: this isn’t about personality types or natural aptitude. It’s about who was trained by their environment to perceive the cue that a thing needs doing.

Even in genuinely egalitarian marriages, Pew’s 2023 data shows wives spending more than double the hours on housework and caregiving that husbands do, while husbands spend roughly three additional hours per week on leisure.

And then a child arrives, and everything accelerates. Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan tracked dual-earner couples through the transition to parenthood using time diaries rather than self-report surveys (which matters, because when you ask men how much housework they do, they consistently report something closer to 50-50.) The time diaries told a different story. Before the baby, men and women contributed roughly equal unpaid hours. After the baby, women added more than two extra hours of work per day. Men added forty minutes. The perception gap is remarkable. Both men and women believed their contributions had increased equally, which is why you cannot trust a man’s self-assessment of how much he does around the house. He is not lying to you. He genuinely doesn’t know.

The career cost of the wrong partner has been quantified too. Danish economists Henrik Kleven and colleagues tracked earnings trajectories across parenthood and found that women’s employment falls by roughly 25% and earnings by about 33% relative to men’s after their first child, a gap that persists for over two decades. Men’s and women’s earnings track nearly identically before children and diverge sharply after. Sociologist Michelle Budig put a number on the maternal wage penalty: women lose approximately 4% in wages per child, while men receive a pay increase of roughly 6% per child. Mothers are less likely to get called back for jobs, are rated as less competent, and receive wage offers thousands of dollars lower than childless women. Fathers are called back more often than childless men.

This is the stakes of the decision. Not whether he’s nice, not whether he loves you, not whether the relationship feels good right now, not whether your friends think he’s a good guy, not whether he gives you the tingles. Who you choose will determine how much time you have, how much energy you have, whether your career stays yours, whether the ambition you arrived with is still intact a decade from now, or whether it has silently contracted to fit inside someone else’s comfort level.

Okay. Now I can define what a loser is. Because the women I spoke to were very clear that it wasn’t what most people picture.

The loser is not usually the obviously bad option. If he were obvious, women wouldn’t choose him. The loser is recognisable only in retrospect, or to people who know what they’re looking at, or to the friend who’s been with a loser, or to a psychologist (I guess?!) or to the woman who’s spent five years trying to figure out why she feels so exhausted all the time despite nothing specifically being wrong.

The composite definition, assembled from thirty women who have loved it, lived it, left it, or narrowly escaped it, is this: a loser is a man who thinks of marriage as something he is being given rather than something he is building. A man who believes the baseline is that you take care of him, and anything extra he does is a bonus worth remarking upon. A man whose career is a priority and yours is a lifestyle choice. A man who takes pride in what you accomplish but feels no responsibility for what you carry.

He’s not a monster. He often loves you, in the way people love a great vacuum cleaner, in that it make their lives easier. But there’s a particular mode of thinking he cannot exit, one in which he is the protagonist and you are the support infrastructure, and if you try to renegotiate that arrangement, the relationship starts to feel, to him, like it’s being threatened.

A loser is the man who “helps” with the housework, and the verb is the tell. Helps, as if it were your project and he were a generous volunteer. A loser is the man who needs to be asked, every time, because asking is apparently not a skill he has identified a reason to develop. A loser is the man who says he’ll “babysit” his own children when you leave the house, because the language of babysitting assumes childcare is your default responsibility and his is an act of temporary coverage.

In the Indian middle-class context, you are not just choosing a person. You are choosing a family, a set of expectations, and, most critically, a man’s willingness to protect you from the parts of those expectations that aren’t yours to carry. A loser in this context is not just the man who won’t share the housework. He’s the man who is privately supportive but publicly spineless. Who will help you cook dinner for twelve people but won’t tell his mother that hiring a cook is a reasonable thing to do. Who will have an apologetic smile on his face when he throws you under the bus for an obscene familial request and then say something like ‘Yaar, mummy papa hai na.’ Who calls himself progressive but expects you to perform the bahu role on festival days, family visits, and every occasion where his family is watching.

What a good partner does (and I have seen this, it exists) is establish the terms early. He makes clear to his family, before it ever becomes a point of conflict, that his partner’s participation in their customs is her choice and not their entitlement. He doesn’t ask her to call his parents mom and dad. He lets her build her own equation with them, on her own terms. He treats her as his partner, not as someone who has stepped into a predefined role that his family designed before she arrived. That’s not a high bar. But it is one that a surprising number of men cannot clear, because clearing it requires them to occasionally disappoint the people they grew up trying to please, and that, for a certain kind of man, is simply not on the table.

Here is the manifestation of loser that took me longest to understand, because it looks most like love when you’re inside it: the gentle resentment of your success. He’d never say he’s threatened. He’d be horrified at the suggestion. He would probably tell you (and believe himself while saying it) that he’s your biggest supporter. But watch what happens when you’re the one being celebrated. When you get the promotion, the visibility, the recognition, the raise, the LinkedIn kudos, the crappy corporate gift bag. Watch how his energy shifts shape. Watch whether the jokes he makes about your success don’t quite land as jokes, because they aren’t really jokes, are they?

Several women described the same arc: the relationship was good when they were equally matched or when she was slightly behind. It began to corrode when she pulled ahead. A thousand small withdrawals accumulated into a wall she couldn’t see clearly until she was already on the wrong side of it. A 2021 study by Lamarche, Atkinson, and Croft found that men who received low “masculinity scores” in an experimental setting reported less commitment to their romantic relationships. They compensated for feeling inadequate by espousing less interdependence. The resentment and withdrawal aren’t intentional. They are, in the vocabulary of precarious manhood theory, threat responses. This obviously doesn’t make them less damaging. It just explains why you can’t argue your way out of them.

The divorced women told me the hardest part.

You cannot un-loser a man. A loser is a loser until he decides not to be one. You cannot love him into transformation. You cannot patience him into a better version of himself. You cannot out-communicate or out-therapise or out-endure him into change. The women who believed they could (and some of them believed it with tremendous conviction and real love) didn’t fix him. They spent their best years trying, and came out with less of themselves than they’d brought in.

One friend said “I married him thinking he had potential. And I spent seven years confusing potential with promise. Potential is what he could be. Promise is what he’s committed to becoming. Those are not the same thing. You cannot build a life on potential.”

The ones who are genuinely happy (and there are some, more than I expected!) did not luck out. The framing of marital happiness as luck is one of the more damaging stories we tell women. The happy ones chose carefully. They paid attention to data points most people dismiss as too small to matter: how he talked about his exes, how he handled it when things didn’t go his way, how his energy changed when she succeeded, whether he could apologise without the apology becoming a second argument about her behaviour. They trusted their instincts even when the instincts were inconvenient, even when inconvenience arrived after three years of investment. They made a decision with their eyes open, and now they’re reaping the returns on a good early call.

The ones who are divorced all said some version of the same thing too: I knew. Somewhere under all the reasons I had for staying, I knew. There were signs I saw and talked myself out of because I loved him, or because I’d already been with him for years and the sunk cost felt real, or because everyone around me was getting married and I didn’t want to be left behind, or because log kya kahenge? (classic). All of those reasons felt, in the moment, like enough. None of them were.

The research on masculine defensiveness isn’t just an explanation for my X comments section. It’s also a portrait of something genuinely sad. A 2019 study found that men who hold traditional gender ideology and find themselves economically dependent on their partners carry significantly higher physiological stress markers. The body measures the cost of an identity that can’t accommodate reality. A man whose self-worth is so tightly tied to a particular performance of masculinity that any deviation from it registers as existential threat is not, on any available evidence, a man who is having a good time. The loser I described, the man who withdraws when you’re celebrated, who resentfully monitors the gap between your success and his, who needs to be the protagonist in a story that’s increasingly about you, the one who’s a bit of an oblivious numpty, is not a happy person. He is a person whose self-concept is so fragile that it cannot coexist with your thriving.

That is worth knowing. He isn’t doing it to you. He’s doing it to himself, and you happen to be in the way.

So here is the composite advice from thirty women, assembled across thirty separate conversations:

The quality of your marriage will be determined almost entirely by who you choose. Not by how hard you work at it, not by the depth of your love, not by the sophistication of your communication frameworks, not by borrowed lessons, not by hoping for miracles. By who he was when you chose him and who he is willing to keep becoming. Everything else is maintenance on that original decision, and no amount of maintenance can repair a foundation that was wrong from the start. The research across decades, methodologies, and twelve different countries confirms exactly this: the partner variable is structural, not situational.

I’m still thinking about marriage. Still, if I’m being honest, a little scared of it. But this advice has changed how I understand the decision. I used to believe a good marriage was something you built together from whatever you had. I now believe a good marriage is something you protect together, but only if you chose each other well in the first place.

Don’t marry a loser. Everything else follows from that.

My book, The Girls Are Not Fine, is now available for preorders! Get your copy here.

Most things you consume online right now are almost good.

Almost good is not good. It’s not bad, either. Almost good almost clears the bar. Almost good almost gets it.

You know it. You recognise it. “It’s not that we have too much information, it’s that we’ve lost the ability to sit with uncertainty.” “It’s not burnout, it’s a crisis of meaning.” “It’s not about productivity, it’s about presence.” The structure that looks like an insight because it has the shape of one. The setup, the reversal, the landing, the punch, the aha. But when you press on it, there’s nothing underneath. No remainder. No specific mind that had to arrive at it the hard way. It could have been written by anyone. It was, increasingly, written by no one.

This is what almost good actually is: the shape of thinking without the thinking. The outline of a feeling without the feeling inside it.

I’ve been thinking about why, and I think it is this: it is too resolved. It has no remainder. A piece of real creation always has something in it that the maker didn’t fully understand when they made it. A question they were working out by writing it. A feeling they couldn’t name that ended up in the syntax. Real work has a shadow. AI work doesn’t. It is all surface, lit evenly from every angle, and that is what makes it feel like a vessel rather than a thing.

And yet we keep calling it good. Because we’ve been trained our whole lives to treat polish as a proxy for effort. A finished thing meant someone had done the work to get there. That’s not true anymore. AI is genuinely better at completion than it is at the work. It can take something half-formed and make it whole with a fluency that most human writers spend years trying to develop. Which means we’ve done something weird: we’ve made the hard thing easy and the easy thing hard. People today are more able to create a polished product than an unpolished one. We have inverted the difficulty curve.

For this essay, I define grotesque as not just unfinished but monstrous in its unfinishedness. We are not just talking about something in process; we are talking about something in process, and its incompleteness attacks the viewer in one way or another. This creates an aesthetic of provocation. The idea is not just incomplete; it is almost offensive in its incompleteness. It feels like a titillation, as if I shouldn’t be watching this at all. I shouldn’t be watching this uncompleteness at all, but I get to. It feeds into a larger voyeuristic want of a user who is fatigued by the polished and complete.

Now, if we keep this definition of the grotesque at the centre of this argument, we ask ourselves: can you manufacture the grotesque?

Theoretically, you can. AI can create rough drafts for you. AI can create the flubs for you. AI can create all the things that would imply the process. Imperfection can be generated as part of the process. I’d argue that as you generate things on AI, the first drafts are often quite horrible, but are they grotesque, as defined by this essay? I don’t think so. The problem with the grotesque and the titillation and the voyeurism that the grotesque creates is that it has a very ineffable quality. There is something deeply human about it, which means that you either recognise it or you don’t, and you either project it or you don’t. It’s a binary. There is no halfway house between the grotesque and the not-grotesque.

That creates a class of creators who are ineffably human in their quality, but it also creates an entire class of creators whose opacity makes us deeply suspicious of their outcome generation.

I like to look at Brandon Sanderson, live-streaming himself, figuring out a plot problem in real time, getting it wrong, reversing, getting it wrong again. The audience is watching him think rather than watching him perform having thought. Another artist who defines what the grotesque looks like in practice is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin doesn’t know why something works until it works. He says so. He is so honest about his own lack of certainty that the absolute lack of artifice becomes the marker of credibility. These people understand, whether consciously or not, that the finished thing carries a lesser weight of proof. The proof has to live somewhere, so now the proof has moved upstream into the mess.

Compare them to creators who are almost hermetically opaque, who only post finished work and describe their output in mystified terms, like it came to them in a dream. A few years ago, that read as artistic, almost spiritual. Right now, it reads as deeply suspicious. Not because opacity is new. Artists have guarded their process fiercely for years. But because the stakes of that opacity have changed.

I now question opacity, not because of opacity unto itself. There are artists who are fundamentally opaque, and that opacity is the context of their art (take Banksy). I question the opacity of artists who have the capacity to show us the background of their work and choose not to, because then I wonder: what are they hiding? Is it just a process, as I would have assumed ten years ago, or is it more?

I started creating on the internet when I was 14 years old. I don’t recommend it, but it means that there is almost 16 years of what I think of as digital provenance.

There are people who have followed me for ten years, some for more. They have come in and out of my life. They have followed me, unfollowed me, followed me back again. That’s perfectly fine, because they have seen my process evolve. That is accidental trust. I never intended it to be a proof of existence, but it is now a proxy for faith in my process because they have seen me build it in real time around them. They have seen me be wrong. They have seen me be embarrassingly confident about things I later had to walk back. They have seen the bad writing and the better writing and the bad writing again. That history is a timestamp. Proof of prior existence. It functions now as provenance in a way I never planned for and could not have manufactured.

My provenance is embarrassing. It is a 16-year-old writing poetry on Ask.fm that she thought was profound. It is the Facebook statuses I cannot delete, and I would not delete them even if I could. It is the first essays that were trying too hard, the opinions held with too much confidence, the phases, notably, the activist phase, the startup phase, the I-have-figured-out-investing phase. All of it is somewhere on the internet, indexed, searchable, occasionally screenshot and sent to me with a laughing emoji. That archive is not curated. I did not build it as a trust strategy. It is just the residue of a person figuring herself out in public over a very long time. And that residue is now, weirdly, one of the most valuable things I have. Not because it is good. Because it is real, and because nobody would bother to fake sixteen years of being publicly mediocre on their way to being occasionally good.

Now I look at someone who starts creating today, with no 15 years of provenance behind them, and I genuinely don’t know what happens there. Can trust even be built in this era? Is it possible to create the same faith that somebody who has been creating for 30 years has earned? I honestly don’t know. Because trust takes time, and time is now a deeply complicated variable. AI has compressed the time to output. So the new creator is stuck in a genuinely strange question: Do I put out output fast enough to stay visible? Do I go slower and hope that slowness reads as intentionality? Does being slower elicit trust, or does it just mean fewer people find you?

Access was democratised. It is easier than ever to arrive at output. It is easier than ever to arrive at a finished product. But the act of building trust remains the mainstay of very few. It’s either people who can show their process compellingly enough to compress the timeline, or people who have simply been around so long that their provenance does the work.

The person this hurts most specifically is not a vague “new creator.” It is the 22-year-old from a small town who is genuinely talented, who has something real to say, who did not have the access or the safety or the platform to figure herself out publicly when she was younger. She arrives now with better tools than I had at 14, honestly. But no provenance. And she is trying to build trust in an environment that has seen too much almost good to extend it easily. The barrier to entry for creative credibility is higher now than it has ever been, precisely because the barrier to entry for creative output has never been lower. That gap, between how easy it is to make something and how hard it is to be believed, is where a whole generation of creators is currently stuck.

There is a concept I harp about called founder lifetime value. It doesn’t ‘exist’, per se, I just made it up.

How many times can you make a mistake, recover, and keep it from becoming the permanent story about you? The answer, almost always, is a function of runway. Financial runway, yes, but also social runway. The founder who went to IIT and whose father knows three partners at the fund gets more attempts. More iterations before one bad call defines him. The founder who scraped in from nowhere gets fewer. Sometimes just one.

I think the same is true for creators. The grotesque requires runway. It requires the security of knowing that one bad piece of work will not become the headline. That the audience will hold it as a data point in a larger story about you, not as the story itself. And that security is not evenly distributed.

A woman with an established platform posting a shitty first draft reads as vulnerable and humanising. The same shitty first draft from a creator without that platform or provenance reads as not ready. The grotesque is a luxury. Transparency is a class position.

Nothing made this clearer recently than what happened to Pujarini Pradhan, who creates online as lifeofpujaa. She is a woman from a small village in East Midnapore, West Bengal, who builds her following by discussing books, films, and feminism in English, from her home, in a cotton saree, no metropolitan apartment in the background. Nearly seven lakh followers. Brand deals with Netflix and Audible. And then, almost on cue, the accusations: industry plant. Fake. Too polished for someone like her.

Too polished. For someone like her.

The argument, such as it was, collapsed quickly. She had an agency for brand deals, which is completely standard, and she shot and edited her own content. But the accusation itself reveals the specific trap that a creator from a background with no history of being taken seriously faces. She was suspicious precisely because she succeeded. Her consistency read as evidence of a hidden hand. Her brand deals read as incongruous with her setting. Her fluent, accented English read as something that needed to be explained. When she said “they were fine with me until I started earning money” she is right. The mess was fine. The success was the problem.

This is the impossible position: she could not afford to be grotesque, because grotesque requires the audience to already believe in you enough to watch you recover. And the audience had decided before she started that someone from where she came from did not have that kind of credit with them. She had no runway. So every stumble was a verdict, and every success was suspicious.

This is who the democratisation paradox actually hurts. It is the creator who comes from a background where being taken seriously was never the default. Where the margin for error was always thinner. Where one bad take, one inconsistency gets read not as process but as proof of what the audience already suspected. You cannot show your mess when your mess is all the evidence some people need to dismiss you.

So when I say that visible process is the new credibility, I also mean that it is so much easier to say if you are someone who already had the credibility to begin with.

Let’s talk about the word authenticity. We accuse people of not being authentic. We say authenticity is what draws viewers in. But is authenticity not also a form of curation? It is curation done specifically with the intent of projecting an image of relatability. The authentic self you perform online is still a performed self. The difference is just in how well you’ve hidden the performance.

When I think about what authenticity actually looks like in practice, one of the most interesting cases to me is Becca Bloom. She is openly a billionaire. She does not pretend otherwise. And you would think that would be a problem, because your average billionaire is not particularly well-liked, and there is nothing organic about a billionaire. But people love Becca Bloom. They welcome her. They engage with her. Because she puts up a performance of authenticity so convincing that the billionaire part becomes almost incidental. No billionaire is going out of their way to do brand deals. She is. And we don’t question it too much, because she comes across as amiable, accessible, and easy to consume. That is authenticity as technique.

And this is where the real problem is. Because if authenticity is curation, and curation can be learned, then authenticity can be faked. The manufactured mess. The curated unfinishedness. The aesthetic of someone who is figuring it out. We are going to get very good at this, and audiences will sense it, and the cycle will tighten until even rawness requires verification.

There is also the trap inside the trap. The minute you know your rough draft is public, it isn’t really a rough draft anymore. The musician posting her flubbed take made an editorial decision about which flub to post. The writer sharing her cutting-room floor curated her cutting-room floor. I am writing this essay knowing it will be read, and that knowledge is shaping it in ways I cannot fully account for. The second you introduce an audience, you introduce a performing self. And what you’re showing is not your process but your process’s public-facing representative, which is a different thing.

I have been thinking about this personally. When I was younger, my parents had a rule: if it is not something you could discuss in the living room with your family, don’t post it online. I have more or less kept to that for 16 years. Does that make me inauthentic? I don’t know. I edit and curate what I put out in the world. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more suspicious of who consumes me online. I’m fairly convinced that among the people who do, there is a large, vocal part that consumes me out of jealousy or envy. It’s not the kind of audience I would choose if I could choose. But I can’t curate my audience. So I control the variable I can, which is me. Is that authenticity? Is it strategy? I genuinely don’t know where one ends and the other begins, and I’m not sure the distinction matters as much as we pretend it does.

So what is actually left? If the finished product is gameable, and the process is gameable, and authenticity itself is gameable, what isn’t?

I think it is irresolution. But a very specific kind of irresolution. Performed irresolution always ends with a lesson. It says “I don’t know” and then three sentences later it knows. It cashes out into a take because that is what the algorithm rewards and what the audience came for. Genuine irresolution ends without knowing. It doesn’t resolve because there isn’t a resolution yet. AI is structurally incapable of genuine irresolution because it always knows where it is going, even when it is pretending not to.

Genuine irresolution also has stakes. When you don’t know something and that not-knowing has actual consequences for your life, it reads differently than not-knowing as aesthetic. The person who is genuinely uncertain about whether to leave a marriage sounds different from the person performing uncertainty about their “journey.” You can feel the difference even if you can’t name it.

And genuine irresolution is particular. It is not “I don’t know what success means anymore” that is performed. It is “I don’t know whether the version of me that finishes this book is someone I am going to like” that is specific. The more universal the uncertainty, the more suspicious I am of it. Particularity is the tell. The detail that is too strange and specific to have been generated. The thing that could only have come from one mind in one life at one specific moment.

Which is maybe what we are actually looking for, underneath all of it. Not authenticity. Not process. Not the grotesque. Just evidence of a located mind. A particular mind with a history and stakes in what it is making. Not trying to be all minds or the most optimised mind. Just this one, here, now, working something out, and genuinely unsure how it ends.

I could not have written this book if I hadn’t spent 16 years creating a map to myself in public. I earned an audience, and now I am leveraging that audience to sell a book, and I am aware of exactly how that sentence sounds. I am also aware that there are people who would call me an influencer for it, and there are times I want to say, “But I’m not an influencer, I’ve been writing seriously for years, there’s a difference.” And then I stop, because does that distinction actually matter? Or is it just me doing the thing this whole essay is about? Curating which version of my credibility you’re allowed to see.

What I know is this: I don’t think I could have written this book at 22. Not because I wasn’t capable of the thinking, but because I hadn’t yet accumulated enough public becoming for anyone to trust that the thinking was mine. The book exists because the provenance existed first.

And that is what this essay is actually about. Not me. But the question of what it means to be a creator in a world where you are incentivized to bleed not just for the art but for the distribution. It is already so hard. There is no money in it. There is so much luck involved, ugly and arbitrary luck. What does it mean to be a creator in an era where even that luck has to be manufactured by a machine, and if you are not good enough at operating the machine, the machine will penalise you for it?

I do not have a lesson here. What I have instead is a harder question than the ones we usually ask about authenticity, process, or AI. It is not just what feels real anymore. It is who gets to look unfinished in public and survive it.

Because that privilege is not evenly distributed. Some people get to show the mess and have it read as depth. Some get to fail in public and have it folded into a larger story about talent. Some get to revise themselves in front of an audience that has already decided they are worth waiting for. Other people get one bad draft, one awkward video, one slightly off note, one stupid statement online, and it becomes proof that they were never serious to begin with.

This is not about whether AI can imitate the rough draft. It can. Not whether authenticity can be performed. It can. But whether, in a culture this suspicious and this saturated, a new creator can still build the kind of trust that used to emerge slowly and accidentally, over time. Whether a person without provenance can still become more than almost good.

Maybe that is what we are actually defending when we talk about art, or writing, or voice, or process. Not purity. Not even originality. Just the right to become in public without being destroyed by it.

The Girls Are Not Fine, published by Penguin Random House India, available 30th April 2026 everywhere books are sold :)

This cover is a piece of my heart- I wanted it to be bright and wonderful because the women I know and love are bright and wonderful despite, well, everything.

It took us so many iterations to get here, but I’m so happy. It feels exactly like the inside of my head :)

(Comment below or respond to this email and I’ll send you the preorder link!)

You’re in a room with a billionaire who could buy your entire current (and probably future) net worth as a rounding error, and he’s talking about MBAs the way people now talk about Blackberry phones- with the mild, almost affectionate contempt reserved for things that made sense once and don’t anymore. You’re nodding. Your phone is in your pocket, and on it, if you opened it right now, is a screenshot of an admit letter to an MBA program you’ve been dreaming of attending for the last 4 years.

You don’t open your phone. It sits like a stone on your chest, and for a minute, you struggle to breathe.

Ambition in your twenties is weird. The gap between the thing you’re working towards and the thing that actually matters has a way of revealing itself at the worst possible moment. You spent years building toward something, and somewhere between the application and the admit, the goalposts have shifted. You arrived at your destination, but the people you were hoping to meet have left. They’re on stages, laughing about how your long-awaited inflection point doesn’t count anymore. Your ambition is now their punchline.

A few years ago, Vogue UK ran a piece asking whether having a boyfriend was embarrassing now, and the reason it spread the way it did was that it articulated something awkward: that wanting the expected thing had started to feel embarrassing.

The MBA is getting the same treatment. And so is everything else you were told to want. The title, the package, the relationship, the five-year plan. There’s a phrase for what this generation is collectively experiencing right now, and it’s not burnout, it’s not a quarter-life crisis, it’s not anxiety, though it can look like all three. It’s destination fatigue. The exhaustion of having followed directions carefully, arrived where you were told to arrive, and found that the people you were trying to impress had already moved on to somewhere else entirely.

The MBA is just where destination fatigue is most visible right now. It’s the most expensive destination to reach, and the most public one to question

In 2024, approximately 23% of Harvard MBA graduates were unemployed three months after commencement. At Indian business schools, placement figures that used to be the entire point of the marketing have gotten harder to locate on annual reports. Surveys put nearly half of MBA graduates in India as unplaced in their graduation year.

These are the programs that were supposed to translate your ambition into something the market could reliably process. Unfortunately, the market itself has stopped being reliable.

Here I should tell you something about myself, because it’s relevant: I went to Lady Shri Ram College, and later to Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar, and I have no illusions about what those names did for me or what doors they opened without me having to knock. I am an absolute beneficiary of institutional access.

What I’m interested in is not whether credentials matter. Of course they do. What I’m interested in is this specific, strange moment where the credential that was supposed to remove uncertainty has started, itself, to feel uncertain.

What do you do when the translation service you were depending on to navigate a new language breaks down when you’re still mid-sentence?

Srishti Gupta, who is the director of the Masters program at Tetr, described traditional management education to me as “a socially acceptable pause button.” Pausing is a fantastic thing to do, in my opinion. The issue is that you need to know you’re consciously pressing pause. I think that a lot of people who go into MBA programs don’t. That ambiguity was, of course, part of the appeal. The degree was designed to absorb uncertainty: it gave you access to institutional infrastructure while you figured out what your future looked like, and then created a pipeline to that future by throwing structured resources at you.

What’s broken now isn’t the desire for that access. It’s the outcome of the access itself. The MBA still absorbs uncertainty. What it no longer reliably does is resolve it.

Most of us come from backgrounds where credentials are a proxy for permission. If you didn’t grow up surrounded by founders or family friends who casually raised capital at thirty, the MBA was the door that the world had agreed to leave unlocked for people willing to work hard enough to reach it. It offered a seductive premise: one of a correct sequence. If you followed it, the world would make space for you. You may not get everything. But you will land a job that your parents could brag to your relatives about.

That promise mattered enormously. For first-generation professionals, people switching careers from backgrounds that would get filtered out by ATS resume scanners, people for whom a name-brand admit was the first credential they had access to, people who didn’t come from access or privilege, the MBA carried a satisfying heft.

I have never done an MBA. What I have done is spend years making choices I then had to explain at length. I have written the LinkedIn posts. I know the particular mental gymnastics of making a decision and then immediately constructing the story that makes it make sense to other people. And I know the exhaustion of explaining yourself so many times that you can’t quite remember why you took the said decision in the first place.

Shahrose Bhat, who has spent years working directly with young people as they navigate what they want to build and who they want to become, noticed the shift not in rankings but in the questions students were asking. “Earlier,” Shahrose said, “the question was which brand name opens doors. Now, it’s what can I actually build?” He’d watched high-performing students turn down elite admits to go somewhere where outcomes mattered more than logos.

This is not a rejection, I think. It’s a renegotiation to demand access to proof.

“Proof of work” has become the dominant frame in the language of anti-credential ambition. It’s the idea that seriousness is no longer asserted in advance, but inferred backward from what you’ve already built. It’s the residue that real work leaves behind.

Sarthak Kaul, who leads program delivery and outcomes, put it plainly: over sixty percent of resumes look identical now. Titles without numbers. Frameworks without evidence of decisions made when something was actually at stake. What distinguishes a candidate, he told me, is clear ownership.

It makes obvious sense because credential inflation is real and pretty simple: when a signal becomes widespread, it stops being distinguishing. An MBA once placed you inside a small pool; now it places you inside a very large one, all the people you share the pool with speak the same language, learn the same frameworks, and have completed variations of the same assignments, studied vaguely the same cases. Scarcity creates value. The MBA is not scarce.

But “proof of work” has developed its own performance problem. The hustle content, the polished martyr-founder LinkedIn, the I quit my job and built this from a notebook in Bali post. This aesthetic of productive struggle has become exactly as formulaic as the credential it claims to replace. Except it’s harder to see through, because at least the MBA is still giving you a real credential. The “building in public” performance, on the other hand, can look indistinguishable from real building from the outside, while being substantially nothing.

More uncomfortably, the proof-of-work credential carries its own gatekeeping problem, just a less visible one. The twenty-three-year-old whose parents can cover rent while she tests a business idea has a fundamentally different relationship to “early contact with consequence” than the one for whom a failed venture means having to move back home and fend off marriage talks. I learned so much from that failure is a sentence that only sounds profound when there’s a safety net underneath it. When there isn’t, the failure is just a failure, and the lesson is a material cost

This is where the time I spent at Tetr comes in.

The program works like this: students are placed in real operating environments. Shanghai, then Dubai, then Madrid. They build actual ventures. They work with real suppliers. Deals collapse. Teams fragment. Their investment money can run out. The consequence is real.

Tarun Gangwar, Co-Founder at Tetr, told me that the program was built around a specific observation: that most education systems are optimised to produce people who are very good at being students. Excellent at reading a room, figuring out what’s being asked for, and delivering it. Which is a useful skill, he said, until you’re in a situation where nobody is asking for anything and where you have to generate the question and the answer simultaneously. “We wanted to build an environment where the default mode of operating was initiative, not response.” That’s a harder thing to teach than any framework. It might be impossible to teach in a classroom at all. So they stopped using classrooms as the primary unit.

Here’s what makes it structurally unlike anything I’ve seen in business education: grades are replaced by revenue. Success at ‘assignments’ is generating revenue, and if you couldn’t, explaining why. The faculty aren’t (just) academics with research portfolios; they’re CXOs, operators, founders, and practitioners. These are people who have made the wrong hiring decisions, rebuilt supply chains under pressure, and have honed a sense of taste and judgment that doesn’t come from a syllabus. Learning happens through the friction of trying to sell something to a customer who does not care how good your thesis was.

Ayush Jain, who works on curriculum design at Tetr, described what most programs do as teaching people “how to sound right before they’ve had to be right.” That sequence, he said, matters more than we admit. And that is fundamentally what a traditional MBA does, right? A key feature of mid-management is articulation arriving before accountability.

One student I spoke to, twenty-two, sharper than she was letting on, described the moment she stopped thinking of what she was doing as learning. She was in Dubai, mid-negotiation with a supplier who’d changed payment terms overnight. Full prepayment or no stock. She had five hundred dollars and one viable sales window that week. “There’s no framework for that,” she told me. “There’s just: what are you willing to live with?”

What struck her wasn’t the decision itself or whether it was correct. It was the sense of honesty that came with it. “Everybody stopped posturing,” she said. “When something real is on the line, no one performs anymore. You’re all just trying not to make the wrong call.”

Several students from the first cohort of the undergraduate program have gone on to raise funding for the ventures they started during the program. These are businesses that existed before they graduated, with customers and revenue already attached to their names when they walked into any room. Others have been hired directly by the operators and CXOs who taught them, not through a placement process but because those people watched them work under pressure for months and made an offer. Amitoj, Head of Careers of the Undergraduate Program, told me the career conversations look different too. “They don’t come in asking what opportunities are available,” he said. “They come in with a track record. The conversation starts in a completely different place.”

Sejal Srivastava, from Tetr’s founding team, calls this the difference between intellectual risk and real risk. “In a classroom, the downside is interpretive,” she said. “You can be wrong and it’s just an interesting lesson to learn. Here, the lesson is financial, reputational, real. You can’t hide inside good arguments.”

I believe her. I also believe this might not be the best thing for everyone. There is a real psychological cost to being wrong early and publicly, and that cost is not equally distributed across temperaments, financial situations, or family expectations. Students who come from environments where a public failure carries family-level weight are not in the same program experientially as students for whom a failed venture becomes a war story they tell at their Series A fundraise celebration. Tetr is filtering for a specific relationship to uncertainty. That filter is not neutral, and the program is most effective when it acknowledges that rather than papering over it.

Jessica Varghese, who works closely with Tetr students on their student experience, told me the thing she hears most isn’t a fear of failure. It’s a fear of irrelevance. It’s the fear of realising the world has been moving without you while you were inside a seminar room arguing about a case study from 2014. Failure feels temporary, she said. Irrelevance feels permanent.

I think this is the real truth underneath the MBA anxiety, more than the placement stats or the credential inflation. Students aren’t just calculating financial return. They’re asking whether the path moves them closer to the person they’re trying to become. The return on self is slowly becoming the new ‘return on investment’. A degree structured around deferred contact with consequence can’t always make a promise of that return.

The MBA was always a bet on a particular kind of future. You delayed. You invested. You trusted that what came out the other side would give you legitimacy to navigate the world you want to be a part of. That bet worked when the future was stable enough to bet on. It works less well when industries reorganise faster than syllabi update.

Ambition still exists as concretely as it always has. What has altered is the tolerance for delay in the presence of ambition.

And there are two genuinely different kinds of people trying to navigate this, who need genuinely different things, and we do both of them a disservice by pretending the paths are the same.

The first person uses the MBA well. They know exactly what they need it to do. They’re making a specific career switch, targeting a narrow set of organisations that recruit through predictable pipelines, or they want structured time to think without immediate consequence, which is a legitimate want. They don’t want an MBA that changes their life. They want a degree that makes it easier to live in the one they have.

The second person is incapable of walking a straight line.

This person has usually already tried the straight line. They took the internship, got the return offer, sat in the first year of the job and felt the low-grade dread of being good at something they don’t care about. Or they watched someone two years older do exactly what they were planning to do and felt, looking at that person’s life, not inspired but warned. They want to know what they’re actually made of before someone else decides for them.

These people are smart. Restless. Increasingly aware that what the MBA is optimised to deliver isn’t quite what they want. They want proximity. Friction. They want to find out whether their instincts hold before the stakes are so high that being wrong is no longer something you can recover from publicly. They are not walking away because the MBA is beneath them. They’re they’re because they suspect it might not be enough, or worse, that it might give them the illusion of growth without facilitating any.

Rayan Irani, who works with Tetr students through their operational phases, told me the hardest adjustment isn’t technical. It’s psychological. Students keep looking for the right answer. They’ve been schooled, literally, in the production of correct answers on demand. Eventually they realise there isn’t one. There is only the decision they can live with, given the constraints they have and the information they don’t, and the willingness to own it when it turns out to be wrong.

The geographic structure is designed to accelerate this realization. Dubai compresses speed through go-to-market pressure and sales windows that close whether or not you feel ready. Shanghai confronts students with the humbling enormity of supply chains and negotiations that they have to learn how to do in real-time. Madrid adds brand, culture, customer psychology.

Dubai teaches you that speed is a skill, not a personality trait. Shanghai teaches you that your assumptions about how business works are largely assumptions about the West, and that finding out otherwise while a supplier is changing terms on you is not a comfortable classroom. Madrid teaches you that customers are not rational, that brand is not an afterthought, and that the gap between what you think you’re selling and what someone is actually buying can be the difference between a business and a hobby.

Ayush described the three-city structure not as a curriculum decision but as a deliberate destabilisation. “Every time a student starts to feel settled, like they’ve figured out how things work, we move them,” he said. “The feeling of having figured it out is usually the moment right before you stop learning.” The discomfort of arriving somewhere new, of having to rebuild your operating assumptions from scratch, is, he argued, the whole point. Most education tries to reduce that discomfort. Tetr is trying to raise your tolerance for it.

Moving through these three contexts trains what I’d call contextual adaptation: not just global exposure in the résumé sense, but the ability to notice which of your instincts travel across markets and which collapse the moment your underlying assumptions change. That is not a minor skill to develop at twenty-two with money on the line.

Verdicts are, I think, what got us into this rhetorical mess. The “MBA is dead” crowd needs it to be dead so their alternative looks more attractive. The “MBA is eternal” crowd needs it to be eternal so their investment looks more secure. Both are defensive. Neither is quite telling the truth.

Here is what I actually think: the MBA has moved from default to decision. From the structure that stands behind you to the structure you have to stand behind. A traditional MBA could hold many kinds of ambition without asking you to specify which one you were carrying. That elasticity is mostly gone. The MBA now works best when you know what you’re using it for, and that requirement for clarity is exactly what makes it feel, to people who don’t yet have it, slightly exposing.

If what you want is coherence, which might look like a bridge through a career switch, or time to think without immediate consequence, the MBA can still do that. There is genuinely no shame in wanting the structure. Most of us have wanted exactly that at some point and just called it something else.

If what you want is proximity to industry, early contact with consequence, feedback that arrives before you’ve finished theorising, the chance to find out whether you can actually operate before the stakes are unrecoverable, then the sequence has to change. Responsibility has to arrive earlier. The learning has to happen inside the pressure, not in preparation of it.

Tetr is built for the second group. The students I spent time with weren’t anti-education. They were, if anything, more hungry to learn than most. They just wanted to learn the way it actually teaches them what happens when something real is at stake. They wanted genuine consequences for getting it wrong.

There’s an obvious question I’ve been skirting, and I want to answer it directly: if the MBA is the wrong call and building is the point, why not just go build your thing? Why pay for a program at all?

It’s a fair question. Most people who say “just start” are talking to someone who already knows what they want to start, already has a co-founder or a network or a family situation that makes failure something you can bounce back from, or someone who already has enough context about how businesses actually work that the first six months won’t be entirely wasted on avoidable mistakes. That person exists. She is not the majority. The majority of twenty-two-year-olds who want to build something don’t yet know what, don’t have the market exposure to make an informed bet, and don’t have anyone in their corner who has done it and will tell them the truth when they’re wrong. “Just start” is genuinely good advice if you have all of those things. It is moderately useless advice if you don’t.

What Tetr is offering isn’t a replacement for starting. It’s a compressed, structured version of the first two years of starting. You start with capital, with real markets, with peers who are in it alongside you, with practitioners who will tell you when your thesis is wrong before you’ve spent eighteen months on it. You still get the credential at the end, which matters in contexts where credentials still matter. But you arrive at that credential having already shipped something, having already been wrong and having faced consequences for it. The question isn’t Tetr versus just building. It’s Tetr versus building alone, without structure, without feedback, and without the peers who are also building right next to you and will notice if you’re coasting.

The embarrassment around MBAs is a signal. It’s the LinkedIn post that keeps getting longer and when you’re watching someone two years younger than you ship something real while you’re still in a seminar room preparing to be ready. It’s your ambition telling you that the path you’re on and the person you’re trying to become are not quite moving in the same direction.

The billionaire in that room wasn’t wrong, and neither are you for wanting what you wanted. The problem was never the destination. It was that the map was drawn by people who’d already arrived somewhere else and handed it to you without mentioning that the terrain had changed. Destination fatigue doesn’t mean you stop moving. It means stop moving toward things you chose at twenty-one because they seemed like the right answer to a question the world has stopped asking.

The gap between where you are and where you actually want to be is real, and what fills it is entirely up to you.

Some people will close it with structure. They’ll seek a degree that gives them the bridge they need. That’s a real answer and a legitimate one.

Some people will close it by stepping into something before they feel ready, which is to say, immediately. By choosing the environment that doesn’t protect them from finding out what happens when their decisions have real consequences. By deciding that the most important thing they can do right now is accumulate contact with reality and not the simulation of it.

Tetr exists for the second group. It is not for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is for the person who read this essay and felt, at some point, that they were being described. The person who is tired of making choices they are supposed to make and wants to start making ones that feel aligned to their idea of growth. The person who doesn’t want to spend two years preparing for the real world and would like to find out, now, what they’re actually made of.

If that’s you: the capital is real, the markets are real, the teammates are real, and the question — what are you willing to live with — is the only one that has ever mattered.

The next cohort is open. Find out if it’s for you at www.tetr.com.

I’ve been fortunate to get access to some of the most impactful startups in the country through my writing, and I’m so excited to extend that privilege to you! Once a month, you will receive a deep dive into an incredible Indian startup via my A Week Inside…series.

You’ve seen it. Lips slightly parted. Eyes wide with appropriate warmth. Head tilted just enough to signal humility. A smile that says “I know, can you believe it?”. I have been making this face for so long that I sometimes catch it in photographs and can no longer tell if it’s a performance or if it has simply become my face. The face of a woman receiving something in public.

I am grateful, sometimes overwhelmingly grateful for the people who read what I write, for the editors who took chances, for the investors who listened, for the bosses who offered mentorship, for the people who’ve offered me witness. Gratitude lives in me as something real. I return to it when I’m alone with myself, and it doesn’t look like the face. It looks like fierce joy.

That’s not what this essay is about.

This essay is about the other thing. The performance. The ritual. The very social tax that women pay, over and over and over, for the crime of receiving something they deserved. The tax that is not collected in money but in public deference.

How the Tax Works

You earn something. A book deal. A seat at the table. A platform. A title that took years to grow into. And then, before you can fully inhabit the thing you earned, you must pay for it. In the public enactment of humility that signals to everyone watching that you know, you really know, that you could not have done this alone.

Men receive. Women thank.

I have watched men walk into rooms they were given and immediately begin rearranging it for their comfirt. I have watched women walk into the same rooms and immediately look for whom to acknowledge. The disturbing part is not that gratitude is expected. It is how swiftly and personally ingratitude is punished. The woman who receives without visible deference is not read as confident. She is read as uncouth. As someone who has forgotten her place, gotten above herself, failed to understand the terms of the arrangement. The backlash is not really about her attitude. It is about what her attitude implies- that maybe she deserved this, and if she deserved it, the people around her weren’t being generous at all. They were just recognising something that was already true. And that is intolerable. Because it removes their role in her story.

High-power individuals smile when they feel like smiling. Their positive expression correlates with actual positive emotion. Low-power individuals smile regardless of how they feel. For them, the smile has no relationship to internal state. It is an obligation. Replace smiling with gratitude, and the mechanism of the tax becomes clear: women are not expressing thankfulness. They are performing it. And the performance is compulsory and has nothing to do with how grateful they actually are.

This is also why the tax is psychologically expensive. There is a difference between feeling an emotion and staging it. Displaying feelings you don’t have is associated, across decades of research, with burnout and dissatisfaction. You know the feeling. You’ve stood at a podium or in an interview or across a dinner table, performing gratitude and feeling something drain out of you. That drain is the tax being collected.

The group most socially required to perform gratitude is also the group that actually experiences it most genuinely. Research consistently finds that women report higher trait gratitude than men, are more willing to express it, and derive more psychological benefit from it. The emotion is real. The performance is demanded of the people least in need of the reminder to feel it, and exempts the people for whom gratitude is apparently too threatening to their sense of self to produce. So we perform the thing that is already in us, on command, for an audience that is checking to make sure we haven’t forgotten our place. And men feel nothing, and no one asks them to.

Whose Capital Is It?

When a woman performs gratitude, she is not expressing a feeling. She is generating capital for whoever is positioned as her benefactor. Her visible thankfulness becomes their symbolic capital: proof of generosity, evidence of good judgment, confirmation that they were the kind of person who recognised something before everyone else did. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this mechanism. Gratitude, he wrote, creates “durable obligations” that function as social currency, binding the receiver to the giver in ways that accrue value for the giver far longer than the original act warranted. Your thank you is their asset. Your deference is their prestige. And you are left holding the achievement, which is now slightly less yours than it was before you started thanking people for it.

This is why the backlash against ungrateful women is so disproportionately personal. It is not really about manners. It is about asset protection. A woman who receives without performing gratitude is not just being rude, she is refusing to generate the capital that her success was supposed to produce for the people around her. She is keeping the whole story for herself. And that is a kind of theft, in the logic of the tax: you were supposed to share the narrative of your own achievement, and you didn’t.

Research on what happens when women succeed without performing communality is remarkably consistent. They are rated as less likeable, more hostile, and less worthy of future support. Not less competent. Less likeable. The punishment is social, not professional, which makes it harder to name and easier to sustain. And the remedy, when researchers tested it, was the communality signal: provide information that the successful woman is warm, is a mother, is grateful, and the penalties disappear. Public gratitude, then, is not a nicety. It is armour. Women perform it not because they are told to but because they have learned, through accumulated experience, what happens when they don’t.

In India, this tax has a name. Ehsaan. The word sits at the intersection of kindness, favour, and obligation. It describes the bond created when one person does something significant for another. Unlike “thank you,” which is transactional and complete, ehsaan is open-ended. It does not expire. You carry it. And in a culture structured around collective obligation and family honour, the debt of ehsaan falls most heavily on women who are expected to feel it toward the families that raised them, the husbands who married them, the in-laws who accepted them, the industries that gave them a chance. Gratitude is not just interpersonal. It is cosmological. You owe the universe, expressed through every person who ever did anything for you, and the appropriate response is a lifetime of performed thankfulness.

Indra Nooyi became CEO of PepsiCo in 2006. On the night she found out, she drove home to tell her family. Her mother sent her out to get milk. When Nooyi returned, her mother told her: “When you enter this house, you’re a wife and a daughter and a daughter-in-law. Leave that crown in the garage.” When she visited India afterward, neighbours came to congratulate not her but her mother for having raised her so well. The achievement was routed back through the family system. Nooyi herself later reflected that she believed a man in her position would have been given more room to simply inhabit his success, that men seem to be allowed to celebrate their work without being constantly reminded of their responsibilities elsewhere. The crown was always in the garage. The question is only whether you put it there yourself or whether someone takes it from you at the door.

What strikes me most about this is the efficiency. The tax does not need enforcers. It does not need explicit instruction. Women police each other, police themselves, pre-emptively perform the gratitude before anyone has asked for it, because the alternative has been made clear enough. We build someone else’s capital before we have even finished counting our own.

The Compounding

The tax is not flat. It is regressive. The more you achieve, the more theatrical the thanks must become, and the more the story of how you got there gets rewritten to foreground everyone except you.

Researchers gave participants an identical case study about a successful venture capitalist. Half read it with the name Heidi. Half read it with the name Howard. Howard was respected and well-liked. Heidi was rated as equally competent but significantly less likeable. She was selfish, political, not someone you’d want to work with. The achievements were identical. The feedback was not. What this study captures is not just bias against women but the specific mechanism of the tax: success in a woman reads as something taken, not earned. And something taken requires justification. The justification is gratitude.

Studies also find that among high-achieving women, feelings of fraudulence do not diminish with success. Sixty-three percent of female executives report grappling with imposter syndrome, and crucially, the feeling grows with the achievement. The higher you go, the more convinced you become that you have somehow ended up somewhere you don’t belong, that the room will figure it out eventually, that the appropriate response to being in the room at all is a kind of permanent, low-grade apology enacted through visible gratitude. Imposter syndrome, ultimately, is the psychological interior of the gratitude tax.

I have a platform. A large one, built across fifteen years of sitting alone and writing things and putting them into the world and doing it again and again, through the years when no one was reading and the years when a few people were and the years when it finally became something with a shape and a name and a following. I built it the way you build anything- slowly, through accumulated labour, through countless unpaid hours, through the discipline of showing up when it felt pointless. And then a point came when the platform opened doors, when it became a reason for people to want to work with me, to offer me things, to take my calls.

And the thing I have noticed is the implication that follows me into those rooms. The suggestion that the opportunity is a product of the platform and the platform is a product of luck, and therefore I should be, fundamentally, grateful. That I am an influencer who “gets opportunities” because of her following, as though the following descended from the sky fully formed, as though fifteen years of labour produced it through some passive, ambient process that required nothing of me. As though I happened to an audience rather than built one.

A man with an equivalent platform would be called a founder. He would be described as having built something, as having identified a gap, as having executed with vision. The platform would be evidence of his capability. For me, it is reframed as circumstance, something I was handed, or fell into, or only benefited from. And because it is circumstance rather than achievement, the appropriate response is gratitude. To whom? To the algorithm, I suppose. To the audience that chose to show up. To the universe that was kind.

This reframing is not accidental. It is the compounding of the tax at work: take a woman’s achievement, locate the luck within it (because luck exists in every achievement, including men’s) and then elevate the luck until it becomes the primary explanation. She didn’t build the audience. The audience found her. She didn’t earn the opportunity. The opportunity opened up. She didn’t write the book that got published. She had a platform that made the book publishable. In each case, the woman is subtracted from the story of her own success, and a benefactor (circumstance, timing, luck, the kindness of others) is installed in her place. And then, naturally, she should be grateful to the benefactor.

The compounding means there is no level at which the tax stops being collected. A study tracking women across 103 countries found that 87% reported being penalised for their achievements at work. Not despite them, but because of them. The Tallest Poppy Study called it by its folk name: tall poppy syndrome, the cultural impulse to cut down whoever grows too visibly. It is not that women are punished for succeeding. It is that they are punished for succeeding without sufficient acknowledgment that they had help. The poppy is not cut for being tall. It is cut for appearing not to have noticed how much water it was given.

When Women Refused

In May 2019, the actress Constance Wu learned that Fresh Off the Boat, a show she had been the lead of for five seasons, a show that had made her career, had been renewed for a sixth. She tweeted her frustration. Not at the show, not at the cast, not at anyone in particular, just a flicker of disappointment that the renewal would interfere with another project she had been hoping to pursue. The internet responded as though she had committed an act of violence. She was called ungrateful, a diva, a disgrace to Asian American representation. She was told she should be thanking the show on her knees. She was told she didn’t deserve what she had. What the public did not know, and what Wu revealed years later in her memoir, was that she had been sexually harassed on set by a senior producer for years. The tweet was not ingratitude. It was an eruption from someone who had been performing gratitude for a workplace that had been actively harming her. Constance Wu attempted suicide in the aftermath of the backlash. She retreated from public life for three years. She later wrote: the message she received, with total clarity, was that she had not been grateful enough for the opportunity to be abused.

Anne Hathaway won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013 and became, almost simultaneously, the subject of a coordinated cultural hatred so intense it was given a name: Hathahate. Her crime was not ingratitude in the traditional sense. It was enthusiasm. She was too visibly delighted by her own success, too earnest in her acceptance speeches, too transparently pleased to be there. She prepared for her speeches, which was reported as evidence of calculation, inauthenticity, trying too hard. When she tried to be warmer and less polished, she was accused of performing warmth. When she was polished, she was accused of being cold. There was no version of publicly inhabiting her own achievement that was permitted. Roles dried up. She later reflected that she had spent years believing the hatred was about something she had done, something fixable, some miscalibration in her public presentation. It wasn’t. It was about the fact that she had not seemed sufficiently surprised to have won. She had not made the face.

Katherine Heigl had the temerity, in 2008, to publicly observe that the film Knocked Up was “a little sexist.” She also withdrew herself from Emmy consideration that year because she felt the writing had not given her enough to work with. It was an opinion that, coming from a man, would have been called professional standards. Coming from her, it became the founding document of a reputation. “Difficult.” “Ungrateful.” “Not a team player.” The escalation, as she later described it, was swift and total: a few candid opinions became ingratitude, ingratitude became difficulty, difficulty became unprofessionalism, and unprofessionalism became un-hireable. She was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood for the better part of a decade. Her co-star Ellen Pompeo vindicated her publicly in 2022: Heigl had been right, Pompeo said, and if she had said the same things today, she would have been celebrated as a pioneer. She was simply ahead of the moment. The tax, when Heigl refused to pay it, was collected with interest.

The most recent controlled experiment in this space is Rachel Zegler versus Jacob Elordi. Both made dismissive comments about franchise films that had launched their careers. Comments that, in substance, were essentially identical. Elordi called the Kissing Booth films “ridiculous” and said openly that he had not wanted to make them. The response was warm: he was praised for his honesty, his self-awareness, his willingness to evolve beyond his early work. Zegler made similar comments about the original Snow White and was savaged. Ungrateful. Disrespectful. Did she not understand what the role had done for her? Same behaviour. Same basic sentiment. The gender changed and the verdict reversed. A man who owns his success completely, including the parts he doesn’t like, is admired for it. A woman who does the same is punished for it.

I want to include Kangana Ranaut here, and I want to be transparent about something first: I find her politics genuinely repugnant. When Ranaut called Karan Johar the flag-bearer of nepotism on national television in 2017, the backlash that followed was not primarily about what she said, which was, by most reckonings, accurate. It was about the fact that she said it at all. That she, an outsider from Bhambla, Himachal Pradesh, someone who had clawed her way into an industry that had not wanted her, would sit across from one of its most powerful gatekeepers and refuse to perform the gratitude that her presence in that room required. She did not make the face. She was tone-policed, accent-policed, talked over, and dismissed. The Wire noted at the time that much of the harshest criticism came from women within the industry, women who had paid their own version of the tax and found her refusal to pay it threatening. That is the efficiency of the system. It does not even need men to enforce it.

What connects all of these women is not ingratitude. Not one of them was actually ungrateful. What connects them is a single moment of failing to perform thankfulness at the required register. And in each case, the response was the same: not criticism of the specific thing they said, but a totalising verdict on their character. Difficult. Ungrateful. Got above herself. Forgot where she came from. The language is always the same because the offence is always the same. They kept the story of their own success for themselves. And the tax, when you don’t pay it voluntarily, is collected by force.

The Book Launch, The Acknowledgements, The Platform I Built

My book comes out in April. I have been writing it, in some form, for years, and in its current form, the form that has a cover and a publisher and a launch date and a ten-city tour, for the better part of two years. It is a book about Indian women and the systems that constrain them. It is, in the way that all honest books are, also a book about me.

At some point in the writing process, I had to write the acknowledgements. This is, in theory, a simple task: thank the people who helped you make the thing. In practice, writing acknowledgements as a woman with a public platform and a history of saying what I think is an exercise in extraordinary complexity. Because the acknowledgements will be read. Not warmly, necessarily, but carefully, by people looking for evidence of one thing or another. Who did she thank? How effusively? Did she thank the right people? Did she seem grateful enough, or too grateful, or grateful in the wrong direction? The acknowledgements are, in miniature, the tax. A public ledger of your debts, calibrated for an audience that will audit them.

I wrote mine knowing they would be audited. I wrote them carefully and honestly and with real feeling for the people in them, but and I also wrote them with one eye on the performance, which is to say I wrote them as a woman who has learned what happens when you leave something out, or phrase something wrong, or seem insufficiently moved by your own good fortune. The real gratitude and the performed gratitude sat next to each other in the same document, and I could not always tell which was which. That is perhaps the most corrosive thing the tax does: it contaminates the genuine feeling. You cannot always find the border between what you actually feel and what you have learned to perform, because you have been performing it for long enough that the performance has shaped the feeling.

The launch circuit is its own version of this. There is a mode I go into, and I can feel it activating like a gear shift, when I am in public-facing book-launch mode. I become warmer, more accessible, more visibly moved by things. I perform enthusiasm at a register I don’t always feel. I thank interviewers for having me, thank audiences for coming, thank booksellers for stocking it, and thank the whole apparatus of literary culture for existing in a way that allowed my book to enter it. This is, partly, genuine. I am genuinely glad. But it is also partly the tax, the understanding that a woman launching her first book must be visibly grateful for the privilege of being taken seriously, must not seem to have expected this, must make the face.

The implication (and it is always an implication, always deniable, always wrapped in something that sounds like a compliment) is that I should be grateful. That the book exists because I got lucky with an audience, and the audience was generous enough to make me publishable, and therefore the appropriate response is a kind of permanent thankfulness to the ecosystem that produced the opportunity. I should be grateful to my followers. Grateful to the algorithm. Grateful to the moment. Grateful to everyone except myself, because myself is not a comfortable place for a woman’s success to live.

I am tired of being grateful for things I built.

What It Would Mean to Simply Receive

I am not arguing for ingratitude. The absence of performed thankfulness is not the answer any more than performed thankfulness is. What I am arguing for is the right to receive as if you were always going to.

This is a version of receiving that men do, largely without thinking about it. Taking the room. Sitting down fully in the chair. Not scanning immediately for who to acknowledge, not pre-emptively softening the fact of your success with visible humility, not performing surprise at your own arrival. Simply being there, as though there was where you were always headed, as though the thing you earned was always going to be earned by you. This is not arrogance. It is, I think, the appropriate relationship to your own work. You did the thing. The thing produced a result. You are now in the room the result opened up. You belong here. You were always going to be here.

Women are trained out of this relationship so young and so thoroughly that reclaiming it feels like arrogance even when it is not. The feeling of entitlement to your own achievements has been so thoroughly associated with bad women, difficult women, women who forgot their place, that many of us have learned to experience our own success as a kind of gift rather than a result. And gifts require thank-you notes. Results do not.

The philosopher David Graeber, writing about debt, made an observation that I have not been able to shake: gratitude, unlike financial debt, can never be quantified or discharged. A financial debt has a number attached to it. You can pay it off. You know when you’re done. Gratitude has no such mechanism. It is open-ended in the way that ehsaan is open-ended — it creates a permanent relationship of obligation that the receiver can never fully exit. And this is, he argued, one of the primary mechanisms through which hierarchies reproduce themselves: not through force, but through the cultivation of debts that can never be repaid, that keep the debtor in a permanent posture of deference toward the creditor. The tax does not just cost you something in the moment of paying it. It keeps you in debt. It is designed to.

What would it mean, then, to simply receive? Not to be ungrateful, but to feel gratitude on your own terms, without converting it into a public performance calibrated for an audience that is checking to make sure you haven’t gotten too big for yourself? To write the acknowledgements from the inside rather than from the outside? To walk into the room you earned and rearrange the furniture, just a little, just to see what it feels like to be someone whose arrival is the point?

I think it would feel frightening for a while. I think it would feel like arrogance, because we have been taught that a woman who receives without performing gratitude is arrogant. I think it would feel like ingratitude, even when it isn’t. I think there would be a period of recalibration between the thank you that comes from inside and the thank you that comes from fear.

But I think, on the other side of that recalibration, there is something that has been missing from every public success I have watched women navigate and every public success I have navigated myself: the simple experience of having earned something and knowing it.

The book comes out in April. I wrote it. I am not surprised it exists. I am not overwhelmed by my own good fortune. I am not, most of all, grateful to anyone for the fact that it is real.

I am glad. That’s mine. The rest can wait.

Unfortunately, we’re the guests, not the hosts. And we’re so thrilled to be invited that we haven’t stopped to ask who’s cooking, what’s in the food, or whether the house we’re dancing in could collapse on us.

Let me give you one number that tells the whole story. India now accounts for roughly 19% of the global user base for leading AI apps, more than the United States. Our AI app downloads grew 207% year-on-year in 2025, the highest growth rate of any major economy on the planet. And our share of global AI app revenue? One percent.

India’s relationship with AI right now is the relationship of the world’s most enthusiastic consumer with a product that was never designed for them. The tools we’re adopting were built by American companies, trained on American data, designed for American use cases, and optimised for American users. That they work at all in India is a testament to the brute-force generality of large language models. That we’ve mistaken “works at all” for “works well” is a testament to how badly we want to be part of this moment.

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The Wrapper Economy

Let’s start with what India is actually doing with AI.

The honest answer, if you look past the press releases, is: we’re integrating. We’re plugging APIs into existing products. We’re building thin layers on top of foundation models that someone else trained, with data that someone else collected, to solve problems that someone else defined. We’re a wrapper economy, and we’ve gotten very good at pretending that wrapping is building.

This isn’t a dig at the startups. I get it. When OpenAI gives you an API that can do in seconds what would have taken your team months to build, the rational move is to use it. The entire Indian IT services industry was built on this exact logic- take what the West builds, implement it cheaper and faster, capture the arbitrage. It worked for decades. It made Bangalore what it is.

When you’re an IT services company, you understand the technology. You can see the code. You can modify it, adapt it, learn from it and eventually build your own version. The knowledge transfer, however slow and imperfect, happens. You start as an implementer and you can, if you’re ambitious, become a builder. This was the promise of Indian IT, and to some real extent, it delivered.

With AI, the dynamics are inverted. When you wrap an API, you don’t own the model. You don’t own the training data. You don’t own the research that produced the capability. You don’t understand (and I mean this literally, because nobody fully does) the failure modes, the biases, the blind spots. You can’t peek under the hood. You can’t reverse-engineer your way to understanding. The API is a black box by design, and your access to it is conditional on someone else’s pricing decisions, someone else’s terms of service, someone else’s strategic priorities.

You’re building a business on a foundation you can’t inspect, can’t modify, and can’t replicate if the API pricing changes tomorrow or the provider decides your use case is no longer supported. We saw early versions of this when OpenAI changed its pricing and a dozen Indian startups had to frantically rework their unit economics overnight. That was a preview.

And yet, this is what we’re celebrating. X number of AI startups in India. Y amount of funding. Z percent growth in adoption. The numbers are real. The progress is an illusion.

People will say: This is how it always starts. India started as an outsourcing destination and built Infosys, TCS, Wipro. We started by implementing someone else’s technology and built world-class capability. Give it time. The wrappers of today will become the platforms of tomorrow.

Maybe. But I’d note two things. First, the knowledge transfer dynamic is fundamentally different this time (more on that in a moment). And second, of the roughly 10,000+ AI companies worldwide, only about 15 are working on foundational models. India’s Sarvam AI was selected in 2025 to build the country’s first sovereign LLM under the IndiaAI Mission. That’s one company, selected by the government, in a country of 1.4 billion people. It’s a start. It’s nowhere near enough.

The IT services path worked because the knowledge was transferable. You could learn Java by writing Java. You could understand enterprise architecture by building enterprise systems. The learning was embedded in the doing. With AI, the doing, wrapping an API, teaches you almost nothing about how the underlying model works. You’re not learning by building; you’re learning by consuming. The skill you’re developing is integration, not invention. And integration is a commodity.

I spend a lot of time looking at early-stage startups, and I’ll be honest, the Indian AI startup ecosystem right now feels like a gold rush where everyone’s selling shovels they rented from someone else. The pitches are confident. The TAM slides are enormous. The underlying innovation is, in most cases, a prompt and a prayer. There are exceptions, of course. Companies doing genuinely interesting work on Indian language processing, on context-specific applications, on infrastructure that matters. But they’re outnumbered ten to one by wrappers wearing the costume of invention.

Building on top of someone else’s intelligence is not the same as building intelligence. And the longer we confuse the two, the deeper the dependency gets.

Someone will argue that wrappers are a feature, not a bug: that distribution comes first, and distribution creates data, and data eventually becomes models. In theory, yes. In practice, distribution doesn’t automatically translate into usable training data, especially in India, where consent is vague, privacy norms are uneven, data is fragmented across languages and formats, and the incentives push companies to collect what’s easy, not what’s representative or safe.

Worse, without Indian benchmarks and evaluation frameworks, more usage just means more unmeasured failure at scale. And even if distribution does generate valuable data, the value doesn’t magically stay here unless we own critical infrastructure (models, compute, datasets, evaluation, deployment rails), we’re still feeding someone else’s flywheel.

The investment numbers make this painfully clear. India’s share of global private AI funding stood at less than one percent in 2024. The companies building the models we depend on, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, raised over $86 billion in 2025 alone. India’s entire AI startup ecosystem raised $1.34 billion. We’re not in the same conversation. We’re not even in the same building.

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The Context Problem

Every major foundation model in production today was trained primarily on English-language data, primarily from Western contexts, primarily reflecting Western assumptions about how the world works. It’s just what happens when the people building the models live in San Francisco, and the training data comes from the internet as they experience it.

So when these models get deployed in India, and they are getting deployed at scale, in healthcare, in education, in financial services, in agriculture, they carry those assumptions with them.

A medical AI trained overwhelmingly on Western clinical data doesn’t know how diseases present differently in South Asian bodies. It doesn’t account for the fact that an Indian patient’s relationship with a doctor, with disclosure, with treatment compliance, with the role of family in medical decisions, is shaped by a completely different set of cultural forces. It doesn’t know that a prescription that makes sense in a country with robust insurance might be financially catastrophic for someone paying out of pocket. It doesn’t understand that when a woman in rural India describes her symptoms, she may be using language that doesn’t map to the clinical terminology the model was trained on, not because she’s imprecise but because her framework for understanding her own body was built in a different knowledge tradition.

An education AI trained on American pedagogical frameworks doesn’t understand that a kid in Tier 2 India isn’t just operating in a different language, they’re operating in a different epistemological universe. The way they learn, the way they’ve been taught to learn, the role of rote memory, the relationship with authority and questioning, none of this is in the training data. When an AI tutor is “patient” and “encouraging” in the way a California edtech company imagines patience and encouragement, it may be completely misreading the dynamic of what a 14-year-old in Lucknow actually needs.

A financial AI that’s been trained on Western market structures doesn’t understand the informal economy, the role of gold as savings, the way credit works in a joint family system, the trust dynamics that make certain financial products land and others fail. It can give you technically correct advice that is practically useless for the person receiving it.

And yet we’re deploying these tools. Fast. At scale. Because the adoption numbers are exciting and the alternative, building context-aware AI from the ground up, is slow, expensive, and doesn’t fit on a pitch deck.

The AI we’re consuming was trained on a world that doesn’t look like ours, and we’re pretending the gap doesn’t matter because the outputs look smart. They’re fluent. They’re confident. They’re convincingly wrong in ways that are very hard to detect unless you know what to look for.

And most consumers don’t know what to look for. Which brings us to the scariest part.

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The Literacy Gap

This is perhaps the thing that worries me most.

India leapfrogged into the smartphone era. Hundreds of millions of people went from no internet to a supercomputer in their pocket in the span of a decade. The result was extraordinary: UPI, Aadhaar, the digital public goods revolution. But it also created a massive literacy gap. People who could use the tools couldn’t evaluate the tools. They could tap and swipe and transact but couldn’t necessarily tell the difference between a legitimate app and a scam, between actual information and misinformation, between a product that served them and a product that extracted from them.

The consequences of that gap are still playing out in misinformation epidemics on WhatsApp, in digital fraud, and in the exploitation of data from populations who never meaningfully consented to its collection.

We’re about to replay this exact dynamic with AI, but at a higher level of abstraction and with higher stakes.

When ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the AI tools people are increasingly relying on gives you an answer, do you know what it’s drawing from? Do you know what it can’t access? Do you know the difference between a confident hallucination and a genuine insight? Do you know when it’s reflecting actual knowledge versus pattern-matching its way to something that sounds right?

Most people don’t. And honestly, most people shouldn’t have to! In an ideal world, the products would be designed to make these limitations transparent. But they’re not. They’re designed to seem authoritative, because authority drives engagement, and engagement drives adoption, and adoption is the metric everyone’s chasing.

In India, this gap is compounded by language, digital literacy levels, and the sheer speed of adoption outpacing any kind of consumer education. It’s just not possible to balance them. We don’t have the regulatory infrastructure. We don’t have the media literacy ecosystem. We don’t even have the vocabulary in most Indian languages to talk about what AI is doing and where it falls short.

I think about this with women especially. The women I write about, the women who read this newsletter- ambitious, navigating complex lives, juggling seventeen roles with inadequate support. AI is being marketed to them as the great equaliser. The assistant they never had. The tool that will finally reduce the mental load. And it can do some of that, genuinely. But it can also do something more insidious: it can become another authority that they defer to without questioning, another voice that sounds confident and is sometimes catastrophically wrong, another system that extracts their attention and data while promising empowerment.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot through the lens of what I call #SheAIT- the question of what it would look like if AI tools were actually designed to reduce women’s mental load rather than just increase their productivity. Because those are different things. Productivity tools assume you know what needs to be done and just need help doing it faster. Mental load is the invisible work of figuring out what needs to be done in the first place- the tracking, the anticipating, the remembering, the emotional labour that never shows up in a task list. Most AI tools are adding to the pile of things women need to manage, not reducing it. And because these tools weren’t designed with this distinction in mind, because, unsurprisingly, the teams building them don’t experience mental load the way women do, the gap persists even as the marketing promises otherwise.

I’ve watched women in my own circles use AI to draft difficult emails, plan meals, research symptoms, navigate bureaucratic processes — and I see how quickly the relationship tips from use to dependence. How the question stops being “is this right for me” and becomes “the AI said.” How a tool that was supposed to save time becomes another thing to manage, another output to quality-check, another source of information to integrate into an already overcrowded decision-making process.

We have adoption numbers. We have pitch decks. We have ministers announcing AI missions. What we don’t have is a population that can critically evaluate the AI tools it’s increasingly dependent on. And the people building those tools have zero incentive to close that gap, because an uncritical consumer base is, from a business perspective, ideal.

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What We’re Not Building

So what should India be building?

Not more wrappers. Not more “AI-powered” apps that are really just a text box connected to GPT-4 with a Hinglish prompt. Not more products that treat India as a market to be captured rather than a context to be understood.

India should be building the things that are genuinely hard and genuinely ours.

Language models that aren’t just translated English but actually understand how Indian languages work- the code-switching, the register shifts, the way meaning is constructed differently across languages, the fact that a single conversation in any Indian city might move through three languages in as many sentences and the AI needs to keep up without flattening that richness into English-with-extra-steps.

Evaluation frameworks that can test AI performance against Indian realities, not just Western benchmarks. If your AI health tool gets a 95% accuracy score on an American test set and you’re deploying it in Maharashtra, that number is meaningless. Where are the Indian benchmarks? Who is building them? Who is funding them? This is the unsexy, infrastructure-level work that no one wants to do because it doesn’t produce a demo you can show at a conference. But without it, we’re flying blind and deploying powerful tools and measuring their performance against someone else’s reality.

Consumer education infrastructure, not as a nice-to-have, not as a CSR checkbox, but as a core component of any AI deployment at scale. If you’re putting AI in front of a hundred million Indians, you owe them more than a terms-of-service page in English. What would it look like if every AI product deployed in India was required to include a plain-language explanation of what it can and can’t do, in the language its users actually speak? What if AI literacy was part of the school curriculum the way basic computer literacy was a generation ago? These aren’t radical ideas. They’re obvious ones that nobody’s implementing because they don’t show up on a growth chart.

Regulatory thinking that goes beyond “copy the EU” and actually grapples with what AI governance looks like in a country of 1.4 billion people at wildly different levels of digital sophistication. The EU’s AI Act is thoughtful, but it’s designed for a fundamentally different context with higher baseline digital literacy, stronger institutional infrastructure, smaller and more homogeneous populations. India’s AI governance needs to be Indian.

And most importantly, India should be building a culture of critical consumption. Not anti-AI because I’m not a doomer, and I think these tools are genuinely powerful. But critically pro-AI. A culture that asks: who built this, what data did they use, what does it get wrong about my context, and what am I not seeing?

We don’t have that culture yet. What we have is a culture of dazzled adoption, where the speed of uptake is treated as proof of readiness.

It’s not. Speed of adoption without depth of understanding is just a faster way to become dependent.

NASSCOM’s own AI Adoption Index tells the story in miniature: India’s enterprise AI maturity score moved from 2.45 in 2022 to 2.47 in 2024. Two years of breathless AI hype, and the needle barely twitched. Eighty-seven percent of Indian enterprises remain stuck in the middle stages of AI maturity. We adopted the tools. We didn’t develop the capability.

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The Agentic Turn

I think there’s actually cause for optimism, but only if we’re willing to think differently about what “using AI” means.

There’s a term floating around tech circles right now: “agentic AI.” In the technical sense, it refers to AI systems that can take actions autonomously. Not just answer questions but actually do things. Book a flight. Write and execute code. Manage a workflow end-to-end. It’s one of the buzzwords of 2025, and like all buzzwords, it’s being used to sell a lot of things that don’t deserve the label.

But I want to reclaim “agentic,” not as a description of what the AI does, but as a description of what the user does.

Because right now, most people interact with AI passively. They type a question, they get an answer, they accept it. The model is the agent; the user is the audience. This is how these tools are designed to feel: effortless, frictionless, magic. You don’t need to understand how it works. You just need to ask.

American users of AI chatbot apps spend 21% more time per session and log 17% more sessions per week than Indian users. We download more but engage less deeply. We’re drive-by consumers.

This is exactly the wrong posture for a country consuming AI tools that weren’t built for its context.

Being “agentic” as a user means something fundamentally different. It means treating AI not as an oracle but as a tool, one that requires skill to use well, judgment to use wisely, and critical distance to use safely. It means learning to prompt with precision, to interrogate outputs, to understand enough about how these systems work to know when they’re likely to fail you. It means being the driver, not the passenger.

The difference between someone who uses Google and someone who is good at using Google is vast. The first person types a vague question and accepts the top result. The second understands how search works. They know about operators, they know how to evaluate sources, they know what Google is optimising for and how that shapes what they see. They know that the first result isn’t necessarily the best result. They know how to dig. Same tool, completely different relationship with it.

AI requires this same shift, but at a much higher level of sophistication. Because the failure modes are less visible. A bad Google result is obviously bad because the link is broken, the source is sketchy, the information doesn’t match. A bad AI output is often beautifully articulated, supremely confident, and subtly, devastatingly wrong. It’s the intern who writes a perfect memo with the wrong numbers. It reads well. It sounds authoritative. And if you don’t independently verify, you’ll make decisions based on fiction.

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What Agentic Actually Looks Like

At the individual level, agentic AI use looks like understanding the toolset, not in a “learn to code” way, but in a “learn to drive” way. You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car, but you do need to know what the brakes do, when the fuel is low, and what that weird noise means. With AI, this means understanding the basics: what a language model is, what it can and can’t do, why it hallucinates, what “context window” means and why it matters for your output. This is not arcane technical knowledge. This is basic literacy for the century we live in.

It means treating prompting as a skill. The gap between a naive prompt and a skilled prompt is the gap between a useless output and a genuinely useful one. This isn’t about memorising tricks. It’s about understanding that you’re not having a conversation, even if it feels like one. You’re giving instructions to a pattern-matching engine, and the quality of your instructions determines the quality of the output. Specifying context. Giving examples. Telling the model what not to do. Iterating instead of accepting the first draft.

It means making critical evaluation a habit. Every AI output should be treated as a first draft written by a confident intern who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Some of it will be brilliant. Some of it will be subtly wrong in ways that are hard to catch. Your job is to know the difference, or at least to know when you can’t tell the difference, which is when you need to verify through other means.

And maybe most importantly, it means knowing when not to use it. There are things AI is extraordinary at, and there are things it shouldn’t be trusted with. Knowing the boundary and being willing to do the slower, harder, human thing when the stakes are high enough is a form of mastery, not Luddism. The most agentic thing you can do sometimes is close the tab.

For an Indian user, being agentic also means actively compensating for the model’s contextual blind spots. It means knowing that when an AI gives you dietary advice, it’s probably thinking in terms of Western nutrition science and Western grocery stores. It means knowing that when it drafts a business email, it’s defaulting to American professional norms that might land differently in your context. It means developing the habit of asking: What is this tool assuming about me that isn’t true? That’s a higher bar than what’s expected of an American user interacting with a tool designed for their context. It’s also a more powerful skill to develop, because it generalises. Once you learn to question one tool’s assumptions, you can question anything.

At the ecosystem level, agentic looks like Indian developers and entrepreneurs treating Indian complexity not as a bug to be patched but as the design constraint that drives innovation. The messiness of Indian languages, markets, and infrastructure isn’t a problem to be solved with a better wrapper. It’s the problem space that could produce genuinely novel AI approaches if we stopped trying to fit ourselves into Silicon Valley’s frameworks.

It looks like consumer education as infrastructure. Schools, media, government, basically everyone who touches the public, treating AI literacy not as a tech issue but as a civic one. The same way we (eventually, imperfectly) built public understanding of how to use the internet, how to evaluate news sources, how to protect personal data. Except faster, because the stakes are higher and the adoption curve is steeper.

And it looks like demanding more from builders. Both foreign and domestic. If you’re deploying AI in Indian healthcare, prove it works on Indian patients. If you’re building an education tool for Indian students, show me the evaluation framework that tests for Indian educational contexts. If you’re wrapping an API and calling it an Indian AI product, be honest about what you’ve actually built and what you’re renting. And if you’re an investor funding Indian AI, and I say this as someone who has spent years in the early-stage ecosystem, stop rewarding adoption metrics and start asking about contextual accuracy. How well does this thing actually work for the people it claims to serve?

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The House

I know how this piece sounds. It sounds like I’m saying India is behind, India is failing, India needs to wake up. And in some ways, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

But I’m saying it because the opposite narrative, the one that dominates right now, that India is booming, India is adopting, India is the next great AI market, is more dangerous than pessimism. It’s the sound of an entire country consuming a technology it doesn’t understand, built by people who don’t understand it, and calling the whole farce innovation.

The stakes aren’t abstract. They’re in the healthcare recommendations that don’t account for Indian bodies. The financial advice that doesn’t account for Indian markets. The educational tools that don’t account for Indian classrooms. The government deployments that move fast because the technology is exciting and move wrong because the evaluation was absent. They’re in the small business owner in Surat who trusts an AI-generated contract because it looks professional. They’re in the student in Patna who submits AI-generated research and doesn’t know the citations are fabricated. They’re in the farmer in Telangana who follows AI-generated crop advice that was optimised for Iowa.

Every one of these is a trust problem. And trust, once broken at scale, is very hard to rebuild.

I don’t think this is settled yet. India has the talent, the scale, and frankly the necessity to become genuinely agentic with AI. We need to be not just using it, but shaping it. The developers are here. The problems worth solving are here. The users who could become the world’s most sophisticated AI consumers are here, because the gap between what AI offers by default and what they actually need is so wide that closing it requires a level of critical intelligence that Silicon Valley’s core users have never been forced to develop.

I keep coming back to UPI (and yes, I know, every Indian tech essay is legally required to mention UPI). UPI worked because India didn’t try to copy Visa’s homework. It looked at the problem- how do you move money in a country where most people don’t have credit cards- and built something genuinely new. Something that was native to the context, not imported and adapted. The result wasn’t just a better payment system for India; it was a payment system the world now wants to learn from.

That’s what agentic looks like at the national level. Not “Indian AI” as a brand exercise. Not “Made in India” as a label slapped on a wrapper. But genuine innovation born from the specific, messy, complicated reality of what India actually needs from this technology, which is not the same as what America needs, or Europe needs, or China needs.

But none of that happens automatically. It happens when we stop confusing adoption with understanding, when we stop celebrating wrappers as innovation, and when we start treating AI literacy not as a nice-to-have but as essential infrastructure for a country that’s betting its future on a technology it hasn’t yet learned to question.

The party is great. The music is loud. The adoption numbers are fantastic.

But somebody should check who built the house.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it, especially if they’re building in AI, deploying AI, or investing in AI in India. The conversation needs to shift from “how fast are we adopting” to “how well do we understand what we’re adopting.” That shift starts with us.

Swipe. Swipe. Dead baby. Swipe. Cute dog. Swipe. Swipe. Woman crying about AI deepfakes being sent to her family. Swipe. “Drawing boundaries doesn’t make you a villain” and “you are not responsible for other people’s reactions to your healing.”

Really? No shit.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem: journal prompts for your inner child (my inner child is a dumbass, but thank you), somatic stretches to release trauma from your hips (I’m sure my psoas is holding thirty years of repression but I’m not convinced a Instagram yoga flow is going to fix it), breathwork to regulate your nervous system, and a persistent implication that if you are still struggling, you probably just haven’t found the right modality yet. Have you tried tapping? Have you tried cold plunges? Have you tried journaling?

Journaling always helps, apparently. Sometimes I don’t have the energy or the words. Sometimes I open the notebook and stare at it and nothing comes out because the feelings are not structured. They do not have a beginning, middle, and an insight at the end. They’re just there. Unprocessed. Inconvenient. The blank page doesn’t judge me, but I judge myself for having nothing to offer it. Weren’t feelings supposed to be writable? Isn’t that what all the prompts promised?

Have you tried asking for help?

I have tried asking for help. Sometimes what comes back is another carousel. Sometimes it’s a recommendation to try EMDR, or a podcast episode, or a reminder that I should really look into somatic therapy. Sometimes it’s “I hear you” followed by silence. Sometimes it’s a list of resources offered with the gentle finality of a case being closed. Sometimes it’s not help at all, it’s a referral to the concept of help, which is not the same thing.

The carousel keeps spinning. Another pastel slide. Another gentle serif font. Another phrase that sounds like wisdom but dissolves the moment you try to hold it. You are not your thoughts. You are worthy of love. Healing is not linear. These are not insights. These are refrigerator magnets. They ask nothing of anyone except the person reading them.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome

The thing is, these slides aren’t wrong. Drawing boundaries isn’t villainous. You’re not responsible for everyone else’s reactions. Sure. Fine. But somewhere between the slide and the soul, something got lost. The goal became: how quickly can you package your pain into something legible? How efficiently can you box and sort and sift yourself into something palatable?

I’ve caught myself doing it. A friend calls, mid-crisis, and I’m halfway to offering her a borrowed diagnosis before she’s finished her sentence. I’m already categorizing: attachment style, trauma response, nervous system dysregulation. I’m trying to speed up the process of understanding what’s difficult, as though naming it faster will fix it faster. As though the point is the label and not the person.

Why am I DSM-ing you?

I miss feeling sad. Not burnt out, not emotionally dysregulated, not anxiously avoidant — just sad. I don’t know how to describe my own misery in my own words anymore. My mouth has been stuffed with catch-all phrases that abstract the gnarly stuff into convenient little social ziplocks. I pick them up one by one, sniff from them, and present them to others like I’m being helpful. The feelings have been taxonomized so thoroughly that I’ve lost access to the raw material underneath. Every emotion arrives pre-labelled. Every struggle comes with a framework already attached.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome. I can’t just sit with someone and say “yeah, this sucks, let’s be sad together.” No. I must diagnose, suggest, solve. I must make it legible. I must make it a problem with a solution, because that’s what support looks like now. Feeling with someone isn’t enough. You have to offer them a framework. You have to demonstrate that your presence is useful, productive, moving things forward. Otherwise what’s the point of you?

Just suck on it, I guess

I should be clear: I’m not outside this. I am the carousel version of a friend. That’s all I have to give right now. I barely have space for my own feelings, so the idea of holding someone else’s is exhausting. So I do what I’ve learned to do. I cut emotions into smaller and smaller slices. I meal-prep my capacity to care. I freeze it into little cubes of therapy-speak and offer them to the people I love, silently praying they won’t expect me to thaw anything out. Just suck on it, I guess. It’s all I have.

Here. Have some validation. Have an “I hear you.” Have a “that sounds really hard.” Have a gentle suggestion that you might benefit from talking to someone. Someone else, to be precise. Someone professional, someone whose job it is to hold the weight I cannot. I love you. I mean it. But I am handing you to a system because I cannot be a system for you.

This is what we’ve been trained to do. Somewhere in the last decade, the vocabulary of therapy escaped the clinic. Words that were meant to help someone make sense of their inner life in a protected setting became the default way we talk about emotions everywhere. Instagram slides. Group chats. Dating profiles. Performance reviews. First dates. Breakup texts. The language spread so fast and so thoroughly that we barely noticed when it stopped being a tool and started becoming a test.

The Escaped Langauge

It happened gradually, then all at once. First it was just therapists talking to patients. Then it was self-help books, which had always borrowed clinical language but kept it contained. Then it was podcasts, millions of hours of intimate conversation about attachment and trauma and nervous systems, available to anyone with earbuds and a commute. People started listening to other people’s therapy. They started learning the vocabulary without the context, the interventions without the relationship, the insights without the slow work of arriving at them.

Then it was Instagram, where complex psychological concepts got flattened into slides and carousels and infographics designed for engagement. Attachment theory became a quiz. Trauma became an aesthetic. Healing became content. The algorithm rewarded simplicity, so the ideas got simpler. The algorithm rewarded engagement, so the ideas got more provocative. “You were parentified” became a way to explain any difficult childhood. “That’s a trauma response” became a way to explain any difficult behavior. Everything became diagnosable from the outside by people who had never met you.

Then it was everywhere. The language seeped out of its original container and flooded the culture, and now we’re all swimming in it, whether we asked to or not. We use clinical terms in casual conversation. We diagnose strangers on the internet. We speak about our own minds with the detached authority of people who have read the Wikipedia page but not the textbook.

Now we are all fluent. We know what it means to be triggered, to have boundaries, to be doing the work. We know how to identify our attachment styles and name our trauma responses. We speak of nervous systems and emotional regulation and inner children with the confidence of people who have read the right threads. This fluency has become a marker of maturity. If you can describe your damage clearly, if you can name it, historicize it, link it to a pattern, you are taken seriously. You are granted patience. People nod. People stay. If you can’t, if you are messy or inarticulate or stuck in a loop, people get uncomfortable. You’re seen as feral. Unprocessed. Not yet ready for polite company.

The language is supposed to give us insight. But what it often gives us is a performance requirement. There is now a culturally approved way to suffer. You are expected to be self-aware quickly, to explain yourself clearly, to reassure the people around you that this will resolve. Pain is permitted, but only if it is boxed up. Only if you can narrate your own healing arc while you’re still in the middle of it.

Compression, not healing

This is how a vocabulary that claims to expand empathy ends up shrinking it. We gain better words, but we lose tolerance. We become excellent at describing pain and worse at enduring it in other people. Language starts replacing presence.

No one is taking responsibility because no one can. So much of what we’re feeling, the precarity, the exhaustion, the sense that the ground keeps shifting, comes from systems we were never meant to survive on our own. The economy, the algorithms, the pace, the constant ambient dread. The cost of living that keeps climbing. The job market that keeps tightening. The news cycle that keeps delivering fresh horrors. The platforms that keep us engaged by keeping us anxious. These are not personal problems with personal solutions. But there’s nowhere else for them to go.

So we hand them to each other. And then we feel guilty, because we know it’s too much. We know it’s inhuman to expect a friend to metabolize what an entire system has produced. So we self-edit. We shrink the ask before we even make it. We pre-package our distress into something manageable because we know no one has the capacity for the full unprocessed weight of it.

This is what the therapy-speak is actually for. It’s not a language of healing. It’s a language of compression. It lets us make our pain smaller, easier to hand off, and less likely to overwhelm whoever receives it. We’re not learning to feel better. We’re learning to take up less space while we feel bad.

And the compression works in both directions. We shrink our own pain to hand it over. And we shrink other people’s pain to receive it. A friend says she’s struggling, and I find myself, almost automatically, translating her experience into something I can manage. Oh, that sounds like burnout. That sounds like an anxious attachment pattern. That sounds like you need to set better boundaries. I turn her into a case study because a case study has an endpoint. A case study doesn’t require me to feel alongside her. It just requires me to offer the right framework and move on.

The goal is no longer understanding. The goal is containment. Keep the feeling bounded. Keep it from spilling over. Keep it from asking too much of anyone, including yourself.

This isn’t an accident. Systems are designed this way.

Holding someone is expensive. It takes time that could be productive. It creates friction. It resists efficiency. And worse, it creates implication. Once you stay with someone’s pain, you become responsible for it. You might have to adjust expectations, extend timelines, acknowledge that something is wrong. You might have to change. Institutions are trained to avoid this. It’s safer to offer resources than involvement. It’s safer to point toward a tool than to stay.

This is why companies offer wellness programs instead of reducing workloads. Why they give you resilience training instead of structural change. Why they hand you a mental health day instead of sustained flexibility. These gestures signal care without redistributing anything. They address symptoms while protecting the system that produces them. You are sent away to regulate, journal, meditate, and return once you’re easier to deal with.

Think about it: every corporate mental health initiative is designed to make you better at surviving the conditions, not to change the conditions themselves. You get a meditation app, not a manageable workload. You get a webinar on stress management, not a conversation about why everyone is stressed. You get an Employee Assistance Program with six free therapy sessions, not a restructuring of the expectations that made you need therapy in the first place. You get a mindfulness workshop, not time to actually rest. The institution gets to say it cares. You get to feel like the problem is yours to fix. The system remains untouched.

This is the genius of it, really. By turning systemic problems into personal wellness opportunities, institutions offload the cost of care onto individuals while taking credit for providing support. The company didn’t burn you out, you just didn’t use the meditation app enough. The workplace isn’t toxic, you just need to work on your boundaries. The expectations aren’t unreasonable, you just need to get better at managing your stress. Every solution points inward. Every failure becomes yours.

And this logic is seductive, because it offers a feeling of agency. If the problem is your regulation, you can work on it. If the problem is your boundaries, you can set them. These are all things you can do alone, in private, without anyone else having to adjust. That’s the appeal. It lets everyone else off the hook. It’s so much more convenient to have a million individuals working on themselves than to have one system admit it’s broken.

But when you fail, you fail alone too. If you burn out despite the meditation app, that’s a personal failure. If you can’t regulate despite the resources, that’s a you problem. The system gave you tools. What more do you want?

The same logic has crept into how we treat each other. Holding someone means tolerating a mess without knowing when it will end. It means you can’t exit by saying “I tried to help.” Advice allows exit. Presence does not. So we reach for frameworks instead. It lets us feel supportive without having to reorganize our time, expectations, or emotional bandwidth. We get to feel like good friends while still protecting ourselves from the inconvenience of actual involvement.

And of course, this lands differently on women.

Women aren’t just encouraged to manage their feelings, they’re expected to manage the room. Emotional regulation isn’t a personal skill; it’s a job requirement. Smooth the conflict. Anticipate the reaction. Absorb the discomfort. Read the mood. Defuse the tension. Do it invisibly, or you’re not doing it well. Do it while also doing everything else. Do it while smiling.

So when the culture tells women to “do the work,” it doesn’t arrive as support. It arrives as confirmation. You were already supposed to be doing this. Self-awareness isn’t a tool for women; it’s a baseline expectation. Fall below it and you’re failing at your role. You are not a woman in pain; you are a woman who has failed to manage her pain correctly.

Men get to have circumstances. Stress. Pressure. A hard quarter. A difficult project. A lot on their plate. Women get pathologized. The same anger that makes a man “passionate” makes a woman “unregulated.” The same tears that make a man “honest” or “vulnerable” make a woman “unprofessional” or “emotional.” The same exhaustion that makes a man “overworked” makes a woman “unable to cope.” We are permitted to struggle only if it doesn’t show. Hurt, but stay pleasant. Heal, but make it invisible. Fall apart on your own time, and come back put together.

Even boundaries operate unevenly. Women are constantly told to set boundaries, but we’re also expected to manage the emotional fallout of those boundaries. You can say no, but you’d better say it gently. You can draw a line, but you’d better explain yourself for doing so. You can protect your energy, but you’d better make sure no one feels rejected by your protection. You can refuse, but you’d better do the emotional labor of making the refusal palatable. The boundary is yours; the cleanup is also yours.

Be self-aware enough to regulate, but warm enough to not seem cold. Be boundaried enough to protect yourself, but accommodating enough to not make anyone uncomfortable. Be healed enough to function, but not so healed that you stop being useful to everyone else’s emotional needs. Be autonomous, but remain available. Be strong, but stay soft. Be less, but also somehow more.

This is why women are so tired. Not because self-reflection is useless, but because it’s demanded endlessly while nothing else changes. Awareness is expected to compensate for everything. Insight instead of relief. Understanding instead of adjustment. Clarity about what’s wrong instead of anything actually getting fixed.

We become extremely good at naming what’s wrong. And then we are left alone with it.

The Fly in a Beartrap

I keep thinking about what it would mean to opt out of this. To stop performing emotional fluency. To be allowed to struggle without having to narrate my own healing arc. To just be sad, without someone asking what I’m doing about it.

But opting out isn’t really available, is it? The performance requirement isn’t just cultural pressure, it’s tied to how people decide whether to stay. If I can speak the language, if I can demonstrate insight, I get patience. If I can’t, I get abandoned. The fluency is protection. The compression is survival. I learned these things because not learning them had consequences.

The very skills that make us visible to others are the same skills that keep us from being fully held. We learn to translate our pain into something manageable, and then we wonder why no one stays long enough to see the unmanageable parts. But we hid those parts. We had to. Because we knew, correctly, that the unmanageable parts were too much to ask for. We pre-emptively protected everyone else from the full weight of us, and now we’re lonely in a way we can barely articulate.

The loneliness is strange because it exists alongside connection. We have friends. We have people who care about us. We have group chats and check-ins and people who ask how we’re doing. But the connections feel thin. They feel conditional. They feel like they depend on us staying within certain bounds. Being honest, but not too honest. Being vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. Being in pain, but not for too long, and not in a way that asks too much of anyone.

So we become very good at being easy. We pre-emptively apologize for our own needs. We offer reassurance before anyone asks for it. I’m working on it, I know this is a lot, I don’t expect you to fix it, I just needed to vent, sorry to dump this on you. We make ourselves small before anyone can ask us to shrink. We manage other people’s discomfort at our own pain. We perform okayness even when we’re not okay, because not-okayness has costs. We have learned, through experience, that people stay longer when we are easy to be around.

And this works, in a way. People do stay. But they stay with the managed version. The version that has already been processed enough to be palatable. And somewhere underneath, the unmanaged version sits alone, wondering if anyone would stay for that too. Suspecting, probably correctly, that they wouldn’t.

And then we feel lonely, and we don’t quite understand why, because weren’t we doing everything right?

What the hell is a conclusion?

I don’t know what the alternative is. I’m not going to pretend I have a framework for care that isn’t broken, or that I’ve figured out how to hold people without rationing myself. I haven’t. I’m still handing out frozen cubes. I’m still flinching when someone’s pain looks like it might require more than I have. I’m still reaching for the carousel language because it’s the only language I know, and because the silence underneath it is terrifying.

I catch myself, sometimes, mid-sentence, offering someone a framework when what they needed was just for me to stay. I hear the therapy-speak coming out of my mouth, and I don’t know how to stop it. It’s become the default. It’s become the only way I know how to show I care, even though I suspect it’s also a way of keeping my distance. The language lets me be helpful without being present. It lets me give something without giving myself.

But I know something has been lost. I miss the sadness that was just sadness. I miss being able to say “this is hard” without immediately being asked what I’m doing about it. I miss the version of friendship where presence was enough, where you could just be in it together, undefined and unresolved, and that counted as something. Where you didn’t have to perform progress. Where you could fall apart without someone trying to help you put the pieces back together. Where being held didn’t require you to first prove you were holding yourself.

I think I miss being allowed to not be okay without it becoming a project. Without it becoming a problem I’m supposed to solve before I’m allowed to bring it to anyone.

I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t have a call to action or a five-step framework for reclaiming authentic emotional connection. I don’t have a carousel slide that fixes this. That would be too easy, and also too ironic.

I just have this: the suspicion that healing was never supposed to be something you do alone in order to become easier to be around. That care is not a resource to be optimized. That sometimes the point is just to stay. Just to witness. Just to sit in it together without anyone having to be fixed or improved or moved along.

I don’t know how to get back to that. I’m not sure we can get back to it. Maybe we have to build something new, something that doesn’t exist yet, something without a name or a framework or a content strategy.

But I know we’re not going to therapy-speak our way there.

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let’s start with the Emerson of it all, because it’s embarrassingly easy, especially if you live on the internet, to develop a persecution complex the moment there’s friction. Sometimes I’m wrong. Often, I’m careless. Sometimes I say something that lands badly because I put it badly, or because I’m writing from a place of privilege, or because I’m trying to be snappy and I overdo it, and I end up sounding like an idiot. If you put your thoughts in public, people get to push back.

What I want to describe is not this contradiction. It’s what happens after the contradiction, the moment where an innocuous (albeit stupid) post stops being a post and becomes an object other people can pick up and use. It stops being something you said and starts being something you represent. It becomes an informal little moral Rorschach test. People don’t respond to the words; they respond to the version of you those words allow them to conjure. And once that conjuring begins, the ritual goes out of hand quickly- it’s hard to control ghosts once you’ve brought them to life. You can almost feel the crowd deciding what the story is going to be, not because everyone coordinated, but because everyone is responding to the same incentive. Online, “sounds sure” gets mistaken for “is true.” It’s the finality of the tone that does it. If you can flatten a whole person into a verdict and declare it, you get the likes, you get the retweets, you get to feel like you “said it.”

This is where my recent Twitter situation ended up. The trigger was a tweet that was, at minimum, clumsy. The tone was wrong, framing wrong, incredibly underthought. I understand why it irritated people. If I could write it again, I would write it differently, and I’m not saying that to pre-empt criticism so much as to prevent the conversation from getting stuck in the boring binary of “HK is innocent” versus “HK deserved everything.” I’m not trying to litigate the original offence in any case. The part that scrambled my head wasn’t even the (well-deserved!) initial pushback; it was how quickly the pushback stopped being about the tweet and started being about my character, my life, my motives, my supposed history, and then, because the internet is bored and imaginative, about a bunch of things that never happened. If you’ll forgive the strange metaphor, I felt a bit like a cigarette being passed around at a house party. By the sixth or seventh person, no one knew who lit it, whose lighter was used, or if someone accidentally burned themselves on it.

I understand the social contract of visibility. I benefit from being visible; I like writing; I like being read; I like having opinions and putting them where people can argue with them. I’ve gotten opportunities and money and access because people know who I am. I’m not going to act like I stumbled into public life and now I’m shocked there are consequences. But I also don’t think we should pretend that every dogpile is “accountability” just because it uses the vocabulary of socially sanctioned morality. There is a difference between criticism and a crowd deciding you are contemptible and then reverse-engineering the moral language that makes contempt feel like it is a public good. There is a difference between “that was wrong” and “this person is rotten.”. That difference is what I want to write about, not because I’m a special snowflake this shouldn’t happen to (honestly, it should), but because it’s a pattern I keep watching happen, and once it happens to you, you understand that something else is going on under the language of ‘principled disagreement.’

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The hatred comes first

There’s a theory of the internet that says pile-ons happen because people care about justice, and sometimes that’s true. Real harm exists. People with power do awful things. Communities need norms, and norms need enforcement. Callouts can be corrective, and sometimes the only reason certain patterns of abuse get interrupted is because of public consequence. I’m not claiming all outrage is fake, or that “accountability” is a myth invented by bored people who like fighting. I’ve seen the other side too, where everyone lets a bad actor keep acting badly because it’s inconvenient to confront them. I’m not nostalgic for a kinder, gentler world where no one is ever criticized. That shit was not actually kinder or gentler!

But I think online pile-ons have specific contours that make them so…strange? Unsettling? We don’t arrive at condemnation by thinking. We condemn, and then we go looking for the reasons that make it feel principled. Unfortunately, it’s not as theoretical and easy to understand when you’re the person being discussed like a case study (LOL).

Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology basically argues that we don’t usually reason our way to moral judgment; we have a fast, intuitive reaction, and then we come up with the reasons that make the reaction feel principled. This is not a particularly flattering thesis, yeah? It basically says that a lot of our “ethical clarity” is just a gut feeling and “I think this might be true” stacked together under a trench coat. It suggests that what we experience as careful moral thought is often post-hoc storymaking; our brain scrambling to produce a narrative that makes what we already feel sound like it was always obvious.

There’s an old set of experiments in psychology that elaborate on this phenomenon. They give people a scenario that triggers immediate disgust, and then they remove all the obvious reasons you could cite for why the scenario is wrong. The classic one is consensual incest between adults, written in a way that eliminates coercion and harm. No pregnancy, no trauma, no social consequences, everyone involved is fine. People still instantly say it’s wrong, which is fair enough as a gut reaction; it’s a squirmy scenario. The interesting part is what happens next.

When the researcher asks participants to explain why it’s wrong, and then refutes their reasons one by one based on the details of the story, people don’t update their moral verdict. They get stuck. They reach for different reasons. They flail. They eventually say something like “it’s just wrong,” usually with a lot of indignation. The feeling stays even after the explanation collapses, which is the point: the feeling did not come from the explanation. The explanation came from the feeling.

That’s the piece I think we underestimate when we talk about pile-ons as if they’re purely rational reactions to wrongdoing. A lot of the time, the collective feeling arrives first: disgust, contempt, the little thrill of taking someone down, the adrenaline of being in a group that has agreed upon who the villain of the day is. And then the moral reasoning gets constructed around that feeling to make it feel like a rational conclusion. This is also why the reasons can get so slippery. If you’ve already decided someone is contemptible, you can find a reason that fits. If one reason stops working, you can find another. If the original offence is small, you can expand the story until it feels appropriately criminal. If you need the person to be worse than what you can prove, you can start using suggestion and insinuation. And because everyone else is doing it, it feels not as much ‘you’re being cruel’ and more like you’re participating in community hygiene.

This is where the apology discourse becomes a bit silly. People talk about wanting responsibility as if the repair is the point, like if the person apologized “properly,” the mob would be satisfied, and everyone would go home. But that’s not how it works once a pile-on becomes a spectacle. An apology can’t become repair if repair isn’t what people actually want. If the real reward is the feeling of righteous contempt, then an apology is just new material to add to the list of crimes committed. It becomes proof that you were guilty. Or proof you’re manipulative. Or proof you’re weak. Or proof you’re only sorry you got caught. It doesn’t matter which one; the interpretation will be selected to preserve the emotional verdict, because preserving the verdict is the point. You can almost feel the story protecting itself. You can almost feel the crowd needing you to stay “bad,” because if you became “human,” the whole structure would collapse into something much more awkward: a group of people who enjoyed being mean.

There’s also a scaling problem that makes this worse. A single person being outraged at you can be reasonable, proportional and even helpful. But outrage is an emotion that mutates as it multiplies. When thousands of people do it at once, it stops looking like answerability and starts looking like a swarm. There’s research that describes this as the “paradox of viral outrage”: condemnation that seems morally appropriate in isolation starts to read as bullying when it becomes viral, and the scale can actually generate sympathy for the person at the center of it.

This is the part where the story often has to escalate, because once the response looks disproportionate, the mind needs the target to deserve it. The punishment begins to outgrow the crime, and the only way to make that feel consistent is to inflate the crime.

So the allegations multiply. “This tweet” becomes “this pattern.” “This pattern” becomes “this is who she is.” And once the crowd is in that register, rumours are a sharper tool in the arsenal. They don’t have to be true to be useful. They just have to feel plausible inside the framework of the story that’s already been agreed upon. They fill in the gaps. They make the punishment feel earned. They turn the discomfort of “are we overreacting?” into the relief of “no, actually, she’s worse than we thought.”

I’m not saying this to absolve anyone of anything, least of all myself. This time, I think I did deserve it.

I’m saying it because I think the sequence matters. If hatred comes first and reasons come later, then the confidence with which someone can list their reasons isn’t necessarily proof of their rightness. Sometimes it’s proof they’ve had time to stew and build a case. Sometimes it’s proof they’re enjoying the act of building it. Sometimes it’s just proof that the press secretary is good at her job.

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After the verdict: when context stops working

The strangest part of a pile-up isn’t even the anger. It’s the confidence! It’s genuinely incredible how quickly people move from “I didn’t like that” to “I know exactly who you are.” And once that certainty takes hold, language stops functioning normally. Context stops functioning normally. You learn very fast that you cannot “clarify” your way out of a story people are enjoying telling. You cannot “explain” your way out of captured imaginations. You cannot “be reasonable” in a room that is trying not to be reasonable. Which sounds obvious when I type it, but it is genuinely hard to accept when you’re inside it, because it goes against the childish, stubborn part of you that still thinks: if I can just say the right thing, this miscommunication will clear up.

What actually happens is… the story sets into a concrete shape that’s nothing you asked for. And after that, nothing you do gets read on its own terms. People aren’t asking “what did she mean?” anymore. They’ve already decided what you mean, and now they’re just collecting things that match. That’s when the digging starts. Old tweets, screenshots, jokes, captions, anything that can be pulled out and held up like “see?” And it’s not “see what she said,” it’s “see who she is.” Once you’re in that zone, everything becomes fair play. A joke becomes a tell. A clumsy sentence becomes “this is how she always is.” The details don’t even have to agree. They just have to keep you pinned.

This is where “tone” becomes a weapon. The tone you wrote in becomes your personality. Your personality becomes your intent. Your intent becomes your crime. People will tell you what you meant with this serene confidence that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time, because you’re sitting there thinking, I literally wrote it. I know what I meant. But then you realize: what you meant is irrelevant once you’ve been assigned a role. You’ve been cast. Now people are reacting to the character. And the character is much easier to hate than the reality of a person who said something poorly and maybe meant something different and maybe has blind spots and maybe also isn’t a cartoon villain.

And then there’s the word that does the most heavy lifting in these moments: “pattern.” “Pattern” is magical because it makes everything sound principled. It takes a bunch of scattered moments, some real, some stretched, some fully imagined, and it weaves them into something that feels like a hard-earned insight instead of vague irritation. It’s saying “I’m not being petty, I’m being perceptive.” And sometimes that’s true! Sometimes pattern recognition is literally how you protect yourself from people who keep doing the same harmful thing. But online, “pattern” is also what people say when they’ve found enough screenshots to support the feeling. The screenshots don’t have to prove anything. They just have to look like they might, in the way that lets other people nod along and go, “yeah, that tracks,” which is basically the internet’s version of due process.

The rumour part is what I can’t stop thinking about. When someone is already decided to be bad, rumours aren’t rumours. It’s more like “Of course.” “Yeah I heard that too.” “This explains everything.” And once a rumour has that kind of emotional usefulness, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. It matters if it’s compatible. That’s why the stories get more baroque over time. They’re being refined for narrative satisfaction. Each new claim isn’t meant to inform; it’s meant to justify. It’s meant to make the existing level of rage feel earned and valid. It’s meant to make the punishment feel proportionate. If the punishment is already huge, then the crime has to be huge too, even if you have to build it out of rumours and inference and “my friend said.”

I keep coming back to how normal this feels to the people participating. That’s the scariest part. It doesn’t look like cruelty to them. It looks like community. It looks like doing the right thing. It looks like being on the correct side. It looks like “we’re holding someone accountable.” And because it looks like that, nobody has to sit with the truth underneath it, which is: some part of this is fun. Some part of this is relieving. Some part of this is about power. If the target is rotten, then your contempt becomes moral. If the target is dangerous, then your aggression becomes protective. If the target deserves it, then you don’t have to examine the part of you that enjoys watching someone get humiliated.

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Why “I just don’t like her” isn’t enough anymore

One of the weirder shifts of the last few years is that “I don’t like her” is no longer considered a complete thought. It reads as suspicious now, like you’re confessing to something childish. You’re supposed to have a better reason. You’re supposed to be able to justify it in a way that sounds grown-up and principled and socially useful. Dislike has to be upgraded into something that looks like public service.

And I get why. “I don’t like her” is silly. It forces you to admit that you’re having a human reaction to a human being, and human reactions are often petty, jealous, defensive, and inexplicable. Not the kind of thing you want to claim, especially to an audience that is always scanning for hypocrisy. So we do what we always do: we clean it up. We launder it. We turn it into morality.

There’s actually research that basically backs up this intuitive difference between plain old dislike and the kind of hate that shows up in online pile-ons: hate isn’t “stronger dislike.” It’s dislike that’s been moralized. People don’t feel negatively; they feel righteous about the negativity. The moral framing is the whole point, the thing that makes hatred feel like a virtue rather than a vice. And once you notice that, you start seeing it everywhere: the way criticism escalates from “I didn’t like that tweet” to “this person is harmful,” “this person is dangerous,” “this person should not have a platform,” as if disliking someone isn’t valid unless it can be justified as harm reduction.

This is where the internet gets to do its favourite magic trick: taking a feeling and turning it into a test. Because if disliking someone is framed as moral discernment, then liking them becomes morally suspect. Supporting them becomes complicity. Not joining in becomes endorsement. The emotional reaction spreads outward and recruits other people, not into agreement, but into performance. You’re not allowed to think someone is a dick; you’re expected to demonstrate that you, too, can recognize the dickishness, and that you, too, are on the correct side of it. “I don’t like her” becomes “I’m a good person.”

There’s a term psychologists use, moralization, for the process where something that used to be a preference becomes a value. Where “I don’t like this” turns into “people shouldn’t do this.” Where a personal reaction becomes an obligation and then, eventually, a kind of purity ritual. Rozin and colleagues wrote about this years ago, and what’s striking is how closely it matches what we see online: once something becomes moralized, people feel licensed to censure it, and they also start recruiting reasons to support their position. Not because the reasons caused the moralization, but because the moralization makes the reasons feel necessary. It’s like your brain and your community both agree that “just a feeling” isn’t enough, so now you need a case file. You need a story. You need a reason that will stand up in public.

Which means the internet becomes a place where a huge amount of emotional life gets disguised as ethics. Envy gets disguised as structural critique. Personal irritation gets disguised as activism. A desire to punish gets disguised as reckoning.

The most common example is how quickly “this annoyed me” becomes “this is unsafe.” “Unsafe” is one of those words that started as a serious descriptor and now gets used like a particularly cheap garnish. Sometimes it’s accurate. Sometimes it’s saying “I felt something and I don’t want to assess it.” Sometimes it’s “I don’t like the power dynamic here” without having to admit the underlying feeling is envy or intimidation or social comparison. It’s turning discomfort into authority. It lets you treat reaction as evidence.

And honestly, who wouldn’t want that? It’s exhausting to admit you’re being petty. It’s much easier to say, “This person is bad.” Once they’re bad, your feelings don’t need interrogation. They need expression. Once they’re bad, your cruelty can be reframed as boundary-setting. Once they’re bad, you don’t have to deal with the more complicated possibility: that you dislike them for reasons that have nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with you.

This is also why pile-ons can feel so… gleeful, even when everyone is insisting they’re doing something serious. Morality gives people permission. It’s the permission slip that says: you are allowed to be harsh, you are allowed to be contemptuous, you are allowed to strip someone of complexity, because this isn’t you being mean, this is you being right. And once a crowd gets that permission slip, it’s very hard to take it away, because taking it away doesn’t challenge a behaviour, it challenges an identity. It asks people to consider that they might have been enjoying something ugly.

So the moralization has to stay intact. The target has to stay bad enough to justify the scale of the response. Dislike has to stay dressed up as duty. And that’s why the story escalates. That’s why rumours “track.” That’s why people keep saying “pattern.” It’s not only because the internet is cruel. It’s because the internet is full of people trying to experience their emotions without taking responsibility for them.

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Why it feels so good to be part of the crowd

Pile-ons are fun for the people participating! A very solid “guilty pleasure,” the way it’s fun to gossip, the way it’s fun to be in on something, the way it’s fun to feel like you have power over a situation that has nothing to do with you. And you can watch people working very hard to deny this to themselves in real time, because admitting it would collapse the story. If it’s fun, it can’t be purely righteous. If it’s fun, then maybe we are not ‘protectors’, maybe we’re also enjoying the spectacle. If it’s fun, then the line between “good people calling out bad behaviour” and “crowd enjoying cruelty” gets blurry, and blurriness isn’t very convenient!

And then there’s the social reward, which is honestly the bigger drug than the cruelty itself. A pile-on gives you instant belonging. You don’t have to build intimacy with people, you don’t have to earn trust, you don’t have to be interesting. You just have to pick a side. You post the right reaction, in the right tone, and you get the little hits: likes, retweets, replies, “exactly,” “this,” “drag her.” It’s a tawdry version of community, but it still feels like community. It tells you you’re safe inside the group. It tells you you’re safe today, because you’re pointing at the correct person.

I think this is why pile-ons always have a performative edge. Even when the original criticism is valid, the swarm quickly turns into a stage. People aren’t expressing disapproval; they’re auditioning. They’re trying to write the dunk that gets screenshotted. They’re trying to be the voice that sets the framing. They’re trying to be seen by the in-group as a person who gets it, who has the right politics, the right instincts, the right moral disgust. And once you’re on that stage, the incentives get ugly fast, because subtlety doesn’t win. Nuance doesn’t travel. The thing that travels is the most confident, most contemptuous, most final version of the judgment.

This is also where envy and resentment sneak in. A public target is usually someone with something: attention, perceived influence, perceived money, perceived access, perceived ease. Which means a pile-on becomes an opportunity to rebalance status, to pull someone down to a level that feels less threatening. There’s a whole thing in social psychology often called tall poppy syndrome- the impulse to cut down someone who’s visibly thriving because their thriving makes you uncomfortable. The justification is usually framed as fairness, or humility, or answerability, but the emotional core is simpler: “why does she get to have that?”

This is also where privilege accusations become a favourite weapon, not as analysis, but as delegitimization. If she’s succeeding and I dislike her, then her success must be illegitimate. It’s the rhetorical crowbar you use to pry someone’s status away.

The last payoff is that participating in a pile-on can make you feel morally superior. You get to be part of a moment. You get to locate evil, stupidity and badness outside yourself, and then bond with other people around the shared act of rejecting it. It’s purity culture with better distribution and branding. And the reason it feels so good is because it solves, temporarily, the exhausting modern problem of not knowing whether you’re a good person. If you can hate the right person, you don’t have to sit with your own ambiguity.

The impossible response

Being the target of a pile-up isn’t “getting criticized.” It’s getting shoved, very abruptly, into a game where every move you could make has already been pre-interpreted, and not in a generous way. You don’t get to respond like a normal person responding to a normal misunderstanding, because the room you’re responding into isn’t behaving like a room full of individuals; it’s behaving like a single organism with a script, and the script has three lines for you: if you explain, you’re defensive; if you apologize, you’re manipulative; if you stay quiet, you’re arrogant. Pick one. Choose your fighter. Either way, you’re still the villain of the day.

Your first instinct is to clarify, not even because you’re trying to “win” but because you still have this stubborn belief that language is supposed to do something. You think: I’ll just say what I meant, I’ll name what I got wrong, I’ll add the missing context, and surely the temperature will drop by a few degrees, because that’s what happens in real life. Except online, clarification isn’t clarification.It’s a refusal to take responsibility. It’s you trying to talk your way out of consequences. Half the people reading aren’t even reading for meaning; they’re reading for posture, for tone, for whether you sound sufficiently bowed. So you end up with this insane situation where the more precise you try to be, the more people act like you’re doing a lawyerly dance, and you start sounding guilty purely because you’re trying not to be misunderstood.

Then you think, okay, apology. Because apology is the approved ritual. It’s what everyone demands with this intense confidence, as if the only reason mobs exist is because people aren’t accountable enough, and once you offer the correct amount of reckoning, everyone will stand down. But apologies online are content. They get screenshot. They get quote-tweeted for “tone.” They get audited for missing clauses. And if you’re careless, you end up apologizing to the loudest interpreter of your words rather than to the people you actually affected, which is such a weird position to put yourself in, because now you’re responding to a version of your intent that doesn’t belong to you. It’s not “I’m sorry I did X,” you’re saying “I’m sorry you think I did X,” except you have to phrase it in a way that doesn’t sound like “I’m sorry you think,” because that gets called a non-apology, and suddenly you’re playing this stupid semantic game in public while the actual situation gets farther away from you.

So you go, fine. Silence. Let it blow over. Don’t feed it. And then silence gets its very own story attached to it, because of course it does. Silence becomes proof you don’t care, or proof you think you’re above criticism, or proof you’re “hiding.” And the funniest part is how quickly the internet can turn into a mind-reading machine. If you block people, you’re thin-skinned and censorious. If you don’t block people, you’re letting harm happen in your mentions. If you log off, you’re running away. If you stay on, you’re centering yourself. If you make a joke, you’re flippant. If you don’t make a joke, you’re grim and self-serious. Every option becomes evidence of the worst possible intention, because once someone is committed to a story about you, your behaviour is no longer behaviour; it’s “signals.” You can’t be a person fumbling through an unfortunate moment. You have to be a character committing to a plot.

And then something small and humiliating starts happening in your head. You start rereading your own words to pinpoint your faults. You keep thinking you’ll find it, like there will be one obvious line where you can go, ah, yes, that’s what they’re reacting to, and if I correct that line, the whole thing will become normal again. You scroll your own tweets like they’re evidence in a case you didn’t know you were on trial for. You start pre-empting interpretations before they arrive. You start writing imaginary replies in the shower, the one paragraph that will finally make everyone go “oh, fair,” even though you already know the paragraph doesn’t exist. The most embarrassing part is how earnest this urge is. How badly you want there to be a fix that involves you being articulate enough, humble enough, clear enough, human enough, so that the world feels less crazy.

But the pile-on isn’t really a misunderstanding that can be corrected. It’s momentum. It’s a bonding event. It’s a hundred people trying to write the definitive caption under your face, and the best caption wins. So you find yourself watching strangers narrate your motives back to you with this confidence that makes you feel insane, because it’s not an argument with what you said anymore; they’re arguing with what they think you “are,” which means you’re no longer allowed to be inconsistent, or clumsy, or half-formed, or learning in public, or any of the things we supposedly tolerate in humans. You’re either redeemable or irredeemable, and the crowd usually decides that early, and then spends the rest of the time acting like it was a conclusion reached through careful analysis.

This is why people disappear after they get dogpiled, and I don’t mean “disappear” in the dramatic influencer way where they take a week off and come back with a better content strategy. They stop posting, they stop sharing, they stop taking risks, they stop being visible, because at some point, your name stops feeling like yours. It becomes a thing other people pass around, reshape, improve for drama, repeat like trivia. It doesn’t even have to be accurate to become sticky. It has to be repeatable. And once it’s repeatable, it’s real enough to ruin your week, your reputation, your relationships, your ability to sit in a room without wondering who saw what and believed what and decided what about you without ever speaking to you.

The most irritating part is that the whole experience also tempts you into your own version of moral laundering. It makes you want to frame yourself as purely misunderstood, purely victim, purely innocent, because that’s the only role the internet really understands on the other side of this: either you’re the villain who deserves it, or you’re the saint who was wronged. And I don’t want to write this essay from either costume. I can be wrong, and people can be right to criticize me, and the pile-on can still be its own beast with its own incentives and its own ugliness. Holding all three is inconvenient. It’s not tweetable. But it is what it is.

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What to do instead

This is not an answer, and if I pretended it was, it would be just another way of claiming clarity, which is kind of the whole problem. But I do have a few rules I try to follow when I’m the one being piled on, and also when I’m the one tempted to join a pile-on, because that temptation is real and pretending you’re immune to it is how you accidentally turn into the exact type of person you hate.

The first rule is boring and annoying: I don’t read everything. Not because I’m above it, not because I’m “protecting my peace,” not because I’m spiritually evolved, but because my brain is extremely suggestible when it’s stressed. If I read two hundred strangers confidently describing my motives, my brain will start offering up those motives as plausible, even when they’re nonsense. If I read ten different versions of what “everyone is saying,” I will start believing that “everyone” is a coherent entity with a stable opinion, when actually it’s just a loud subset of people performing for each other. You don’t realize how much your mind craves social consensus until you’re watching a fake consensus being manufactured around you in real time. So I limit exposure. There is a point past which data stops being information and becomes contamination.

The second rule is that I try not to negotiate with the internet in public. This is the hardest one for me, because I love words, and the idea that words won’t save you makes me sad. But once the verdict has set, you’re dealing with a spectacle. Clarifying starts to look like pleading. Defending starts to look like doubling down. Apologizing starts to look like an insincere performance. So when I do respond, I try to respond once, plainly, to the people who are actually affected or actually engaging, and then I stop.

The third rule is the one I wish the internet understood: I keep the critique at the size of the offence. This is true whether I’m the one being criticized or the one criticizing. If someone says something clumsy, I try to treat it as clumsy. If someone is being careless, I try to treat it as careless. I try not to do that thing where I reverse-engineer someone’s soul from a screenshot. There are people in this world who are genuinely malicious, and there are people who are genuinely harmful, and there are people who should not be protected by “benefit of the doubt” because they have proven, repeatedly, what they are. But most people online aren’t those people.

The fourth rule is: I don’t confuse moral language with moral action. This one is for me as much as anyone else. Calling someone “harmful” is not harm reduction if it’s just a way to get social approval for being mean. Declaring someone “unsafe” is not community protection if there’s no protection happening, you’re just escalating a mob. Even when criticism is valid, the performance layer creeps in so quickly. If I’m not willing to be accountable for what I’m doing, if I’m not willing to say “I’m angry” or “I’m hurt” or “this feels unfair” or “this reminds me of something personal,” if I’m only willing to speak in the language of righteousness, then I’m probably laundering something. And if I’m laundering something, I’m not as pure as I’m pretending to be.

The fifth rule is that I take the conversation offline when it matters. If I actually harmed someone, I’d rather speak to the person than to the crowd. If someone is criticizing me in good faith, I’d rather talk like actual people rather than trade statements like rival PR teams. The internet encourages you to keep everything public because publicness is the currency, but publicness is also what makes repair impossible. Repair requires privacy and time and the option to be awkward without it becoming another piece of content. This doesn’t mean everything should be hidden. It means that “public consequence” and “private repair” aren’t synonyms, and treating them like the same thing is why everyone ends up stuck in these endless loops of performative repentance and performative punishment.

And finally, the rule that keeps me from turning into a cynic: I don’t let the crowd become my compass. When you’re visible, you can start making decisions based on the general temperature of your mentions, and you don’t realize it’s happening until you look up and you’ve become a person who is always pre-flinching. You start writing around the mob. You start rounding off your edges. You start only saying what you know will be approved. And then you wake up one day with a platform you built by being yourself, and you don’t recognise yourself.

So the best “what to do instead” I have is: refuse to shrink, but also refuse to harden. Don’t become the kind of person who thinks every contradiction is persecution, and don’t become the kind of person who needs other people to be morally reprehensible in order to justify your contempt. Try to keep your criticism specific. Try to keep yourself honest. Try to keep your humanity intact.

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In Closing

Emerson’s line is still the one I want to hold onto, partly because it’s true and partly because it’s humiliating. It is genuinely vulgar to treat every contradiction as persecution. Being disagreed with is not a tragedy. Being criticized is not a human rights violation. Sometimes you say something stupid and the appropriate consequence is that people tell you it was stupid, and you take the L, and you write better next time.

But the reason I started with that quote is that it makes room for a second truth without letting me slip into martyrdom. You can accept contradiction as part of the deal and still acknowledge what a pile-on is. You can be accountable for your clumsiness and still refuse to pretend that every dogpile is justice. You can admit that the internet has built a very effective machine for converting ordinary dislike into moral certainty, and then using that certainty to license cruelty at scale.

I signed the social contract of visibility. I like being read. I like writing in public. I like having opinions that people can argue with. I’ve benefited from attention in ways that are real and material and I’m not going to play innocent about that. But I didn’t sign up to be turned into a communal object every time I misstep, to have my intent rewritten by strangers, to have rumours become “pattern,” to have contempt dressed up as civic duty and then handed back to me as if it’s good for my soul.

Maybe this is just the price. Maybe this is the tax you pay to be a person with a platform, and if you don’t want it, you should log off, go private, write in your diary, live a quieter life. I’m not even saying that’s wrong. I’m saying: if this is the price, then we should at least be honest about what we’re paying for. Because “accountability” is too easy a word for what’s often happening. It flatters the crowd. It hides the pleasure. It absolves the cruelty. It turns the mess of envy, insecurity, boredom, genuine principle, genuine harm, and genuine group psychology into a story where everyone is a hero, and the target is a lesson.

And I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks she’s persecuted whenever she’s contradicted. But I also don’t want to live in a world where contradiction automatically metastasizes into moral prosecution. If nothing else, I want to keep one truth: sometimes you don’t like someone, and that is not the same thing as them being a horrible person.

It’s ok to just dislike someone. It’s perfectly ok.

2:17 AM, somewhere in Loop Health’s distributed medical operations. Dr. Priyadarshani’s night shift team is three hours into their watch when the message comes through. A Zepto employee in Gurgaon, awake after his shift, worried about his father’s chest pain. His father is in Patna, 1,100 kilometers away, and doesn’t speak English.

The medical advisor responds in 27 seconds. They can, because they have context: they can see the father’s blood pressure medication from last month’s consultation, the ECG from his company-facilitated health checkup six months ago. They know this family. The MA switches to Hindi, walks through the symptoms. The chest pain started after dinner. Radiating? No. Sharp or dull? Dull. Any sweating? Yes, but it’s humid in Patna.

The doctor, reviewing in real-time, makes the call: likely gastric, but given the sweating and history, safer to check. They coordinate with a hospital in Patna, share the father’s medical history, arrange for an ECG on arrival. The son gets the location, the admission process, what to tell the auto driver. The father goes. It’s gastric. He’s home by 4 AM with antacids and peace of mind.

This interaction, with a parent in hometown, child in metro city, doctor in the cloud, care delivered seamlessly, happens hundreds of times every night through Loop. It’s healthcare that didn’t exist in India five years ago. And it’s the answer to a question most companies don’t even know they’re asking: What if employee benefits actually worked?

Loop Health’s audacious mission reads like something a consultant would dismiss as unrealistic: Add 20 healthy years to India’s workforce. When they announced it, the benefits industry smirked. Insurance is about covering catastrophe, not extending life. But after a week inside Loop Health, watching their infrastructure hum at 2 AM, reading their data on India’s hidden health crisis, understanding what they’ve built over eight years, that mission starts looking less like aspiration and more like inevitability.

Part 1: The Great Budget Leak

“When we started, we thought we were fixing insurance,” Ryan Singh, co-founder and COO at Loop Health, tells me. “Eight years later, we realized we were fixing something much deeper, the fundamental mismatch between what companies spend on health and what employees actually receive.”

To understand Loop’s bet on the future, you need to understand how Indian employee benefits became a ₹30,000-per-head exercise in wishful thinking. Ryan maps it across four generations, each solving yesterday’s problem while creating tomorrow’s crisis.

Generation 1 (1990s-2000s) was never about health at all. It was tax optimization through a ‘benefits program.’ HRA, LTA, and conveyance allowances had one goal: minimizing tax burden, not keeping people healthy. Healthcare meant basic hospitalization insurance, something you hoped never to touch. Companies structured salaries to save money; employees got coverage they’d only use in a catastrophe.

Generation 2 (2000s-2015) introduced the illusion of choice. TPAs entered, offering flexibility: pick your sum insured, choose co-pay levels, add parents. But flexibility only meant choosing how much hospitalization coverage you wanted, not what care you could access. An employee could select between a ₹3 lakh and ₹5 lakh hospital cover, but their therapy needs, their diabetes medication, their parents’ cataract surgery, all remained out-of-pocket.

Generation 3 (2015-2024) was the digitization wave. Beautiful enrollment portals, instant e-cards, mobile apps that made picking insurance as smooth as ordering food. Companies bolted on wellness vendors ; like Cult.fit memberships, mental health app subscriptions, diagnostic discounts. “By 2020, our clients had an average of six different benefits & wellness vendors,” Ryan recalls. “Employees had six apps, six passwords, six places to remember what they’d signed up for. Utilization sat at 10% because the only time benefits actually worked was if you were hospitalized.”

The numbers tell the story Ryan’s too kind to spell out. This is corporate India’s greatest magic trick. Companies spend ₹20-30K per employee annually on benefits. Only 10% of employees will be hospitalized and get a meaningful benefit, potentially ₹2-5L depending on their sum insured. The other 90% of employees don’t realize any value. They end up spending ₹10-15K out of pocket on the care they actually need: therapy sessions at ₹2,000 each, quit halfway because they can’t afford more; maternity scans and supplements adding up to ₹50K that insurance won’t touch; diabetes monitoring that costs ₹1,000 monthly but isn’t “treatment” enough to claim.

This isn’t a vendor problem or a technology problem. It’s a design problem. The entire system was built for catastrophic coverage, not care.

Loop’s Workforce Health Index, the first report to merge behavioural data with lab test reports across cities, genders, roles and industries, revealed the depth of this crisis. They plan to release this annually, tracking India’s workforce health evolution year by year. The findings were damning: 78.6% of professionals under 30 are Vitamin D deficient, affecting everything from immunity to mental health. 40.6% of women aged 31-40 are clinically anemic during their peak career years. 37.2% show abnormal glucose metabolism. One in five women has PCOS, a condition that affects fertility, metabolism, and mental health, yet most insurance policies don’t acknowledge it exists.

“We kept calling these ‘wellness issues,’” says Ryan. “But that’s like calling a broken leg a ‘mobility challenge.’ These are medical conditions destroying productivity, happiness, and yes, eventually creating the expensive hospitalizations insurance does cover.”

The bitter irony? Companies desperately want healthier employees. CFOs watch insurance premiums rise 20% yearly. CHROs field complaints about benefits nobody uses. But they keep buying the same broken product because the alternative, rebuilding benefits from scratch, seemed impossible.

Until Loop Health spent eight years making it possible.

Part 2: The Infrastructure Years

The revelation came from a simple observation. “Fifty percent of our employees don’t work in the city they grew up in,” Ryan explains. “They have no family doctor. They navigate healthcare through Google, WhatsApp forwards, and whoever their colleague saw last week.”

This was a baseline infrastructure problem. And solving it would take something the Indian benefits industry had never attempted: building actual healthcare delivery, not just paying for it.

The six-year build started with a controversial decision. While competitors were aggregating wellness vendors and building prettier insurance portals, Loop Health hired doctors. Not to review claims or deny coverage, but to actually treat patients. “We pay our doctors’ salaries and bonuses for keeping our members healthier,” Ryan emphasizes, “Their only job is keeping members healthy. Every hospitalization prevented is a win, not lost revenue. We’re on the side of the patient and payer, not the fee-for-service providers who want to maximize revenue per bed.”

Building their own medical team meant building an entire medical operation. Electronic Medical Records that connected every family member’s health history. Training protocols ensuring consistent care whether the doctor was in Bangalore or Bihar. Clinical workflows that could handle everything from a midnight fever consultation to long-term cancer navigation.

Dr. Mihir Shah, one of Loop’s doctors, explains what this infrastructure enables: “A 64-year-old woman consulted me for worsening diabetes. She’d seen me eight months earlier. In a busy OPD, she’d be a new case. But I could see her EMR instantly and her allergies to certain skincare products stood out. Her palm swelling wasn’t from diabetes; it was an allergic reaction to a new moisturizer. That’s continuity you can’t always get in a hospital.”

The infrastructure means catching strokes at 2 AM. Dr. Mihir recalls a recent night consultation: “The son said his 70-year-old father had a headache. But on video, I saw slurred speech, facial drooping. Those are stroke signs. No medication could help, they needed emergency care immediately. Virtual care has boundaries, and recognizing them saves lives.”

“There was a moment,” Piyush Gupta, Head of Product, recalls, “when a CHRO asked us, ‘Wait, you built an entire EMR system? You trained your own doctors?’” That was when clients started understanding the moat Loop Health had constructed.

The infrastructure includes partnerships that took years to build: diagnostic labs providing instant results and lower waiting periods for Loop members, Tata Memorial Centre partnership for cancer second opinions and navigation, direct deals with mental health providers that lower the ₹3,000-per-session market rate. Each partnership integrated into Loop’s platform, creating what the industry calls “health assurance”, not just covering illness but actively preventing it.

“Our Electronic Medical Records system brings together IPD and OPD claims data, records from chats, consultations, and labs,” Ryan explains. “It creates a complete picture of the member and their family for our clinicians to give personalized care over time. Our doctors not only remember you better, but can help you stay in touch. We’re able to give automated nudges when your prescription runs out or your follow-up consultation is due.”

Consider what this means practically. When an employee messages about their parent’s recurring headaches, the Loop doctor can see the family’s cardiac history, note the father’s hypertension medication, and recognize a pattern that suggests investigation. They order tests through the app, cashless at a partner lab. Results come back showing early markers. The doctor explains them the same day, refers to a neurologist, and follows up weekly. All of this happens before anything becomes an insurance claim.

“We’ve built tools for HR teams to manage everything from enrollment to endorsements,” Piyush explains. “But the real infrastructure is invisible. It’s the clinical protocols ensuring quality, the data systems tracking outcomes, the operational excellence making 24/7 care possible.”

Part 3: The Psychological Unlock

So how do you increase utilization for a product that hasn’t innovated in three generations, that employees dismiss as a “hidden cost” or “kuch toh hai insurance wagerah, pata nahi“?

The breakthrough Loop leaned on was psychological. “Insurance is usually a hidden cost,” Ryan explains. “An employee has no idea how much their employer is spending on their healthcare. The moment you introduce a wallet, that changes.”

The thought process is simple: take the company’s existing ₹30K benefits budget and split it. ₹20K goes toward smarter insurance design. The remaining ₹10K becomes a visible healthcare wallet that employees control. Same budget. Smarter allocation.

This core innovation is what they call HealthFlex.

“When employees see that wallet, they realize their company is contributing for their family every year, and can now spend it on things their family can really benefit from,” Ryan says. “Psychology-wise, that feels very different. In feedback, employees tell us things that basically mean: you’re more transparent, I can see the value, I can literally put a number to an emotion of ‘my company cares about me.’”

“We didn’t get that on day one,” Ryan admits. “We came to that consensus after a few iterations and a lot of research.”

The wallet revealed unexpected behavioral patterns that took time to understand. “On the bundles and utilization side, we learnt a bunch of things the hard way,” Ryan explains. “One big insight: in corporate insurance, caring about your parents is a primary driver. I might not need insurance today, but my parents definitely need it. Same with very clear life events. My parents needing proper cover, my fiancée going in for delivery, a planned surgery. These are short, high-stakes events where people want proper help.”

“When we created some of these benefits as purely digital programs, they didn’t pick up. People don’t fully trust only-online programs for critical stuff. They care much more about in-person care in those moments.”

The purchase insights around maternity bundles made that super clear. “Almost all the maternity bundles were being purchased by men, not women,” Ryan discovered. “For male partners, these digital offerings looked high-value. But when a woman sees the same, because it’s very virtual and not very tangible, she might not value it the same way.”

This insight led Loop Health to completely rethink their approach. “We understood that with bundles and cohorts, it’s all about last-mile conversion and real-world value. The next step for us in maternity, for example, is to actually find the right partner and make the benefit more tangible and usable, so utilization goes up.”

The data showed distinct employee cohorts, each with different healthcare needs:

Unmarried professionals under 30 worried about mental health, their parents’ preventive health needs, and fixing the vitamin deficiencies wreaking havoc on their energy. The sandwich generation (35-45, young kids, parents with real disease burden) faced a different crisis entirely. “They’re burned out with dual care responsibilities,” Dr. Priyadarshani observes. “They forget to take care of themselves. Especially women, juggling postpartum recovery, household responsibilities, work pressure, and often friction with extended family about medical decisions.”

“We also saw that only specific cohorts really invest and purchase benefits from the wallet,” Ryan notes. “A large chunk of purchases comes from unmarried males between 25-30 and married folks above 35. Some cohorts hardly purchase anything, for example, women under 25 or under 30. The way we read that is: there just aren’t enough benefits that feel genuinely valuable for those cohorts.”

Dr. Mihir sees how the wallet changes medical conversations: “When patients know they have budget for preventive care, they ask different questions. It’s not ‘Can I afford this test?’ but ‘Should I do this test now?’ That psychological shift from scarcity to choice changes healthcare decisions fundamentally.”

“So behaviorally,” Ryan concludes, “the wallet journey for us now is: make the employer spend visible so it feels like ‘my’ money, structure bundles around real high-stakes use cases, and then go deeper into individual cohorts, understand what they value, and partner accordingly. That’s how we’ve been trying to move the wallet from just a financial construct to something that actually changes utilization and perception.”

Part 4: When Care Gets Real

The stories that matter don’t appear in pitch decks. They surface in Dr. Priyadarshani’s logs, in the medical team’s Slack channels, in the moments when Loop’s infrastructure meets human crisis.

Take Arjun (name changed). Thirty-five, high performer, recently married. Then his performance cratered. Stopped responding to managers, to teammates, to HR. When they finally reached him, someone else was on the phone, informing them Arjun was on a building ledge, planning to jump.

“The HR team called our salesperson, who immediately connected them to our medical team,” Dr. Priyadarshani recounts. “We got a counselor on the phone within minutes. They talked him down, arranged an immediate in-person session in Gurgaon that evening. We saved a life. We even approached and counseled his family.”

But here’s what weighs on Ryan: “Arjun still needs ongoing therapy. Weekly sessions, medication monitoring, regular check-ins. That’s not a one-time intervention. That’s continuous care. This person needs 24x7 care available to him. His company was spending ₹30,000 per employee per year on benefits. We came and helped, but we want to do more. And to do more, we need your help as HR leaders.”

Then there’s the everyday miracle of early detection. Loop’s case study from Druva Software, tells one such story: routine health checkup data flagged concerning markers that led to early cancer detection in an employee who felt fine. The Loop doctor called, explained the urgency without causing panic, and arranged immediate specialist consultation. The cancer they caught and treated early would have progressed significantly within months.

Dr. Mihir shares another pattern he’s noticed: “I’m treating entire families now. A young woman came to me with prediabetes after a routine health camp at her company. But I already knew her parents, both diabetic. I’d mapped the family’s metabolic patterns across generations. That context meant we could focus on prevention immediately, not wait for disease to develop. A hospital doctor could reach the same conclusion, but they’d need to start from scratch. I had the story already written.”

“That’s where Loop Health becomes ‘the doctor in the family,’” Dr. Mihir continues. “Over time, you stop seeing individuals in isolation and start caring for patterns, habits, and risks that run through households and across generations.”

The most profound moments come in crisis navigation. Dr. Mihir recalls counseling an eight-month pregnant woman whose baby was breech, cord wrapped, low amniotic fluid. “Her OB recommended C-section. She was devastated because her family expected a natural delivery. We spent 40 minutes talking. Not pushing her toward or away from surgery, but explaining the medical reality clearly. She needed to make peace with the right decision, not the expected one. In situations like these, ethical care means respecting beliefs, but not at the cost of withholding clarity.”

The chronic cases reveal the system’s silent power. A Dengue patient, platelets dropping daily, messaging Dr. Priyadarshani’s team with each report. “Traditional insurance would cover hospitalization if it got bad enough,” she explains. “We monitored daily, adjusted treatment, kept them stable at home. They never needed admission.”

Dr. Priyadarshani’s team handles the sandwich generation’s unique burden daily. “Our MAs and doctors have access to the entire medical history of patients in an EMR. This becomes easier to navigate existing issues and help out the entire family at large. For example, if there’s a family of 5, employee (female), spouse, father, mother, one child, their consultation, medical, blood test history gets stored in updated real time. So if 4 months later the father, whom we assume is diabetic, comes in for a consult, the doctors already know which medicines he is consuming, when was the last test, etc. This ensures uniformity, consolidation, and most importantly, every family has a doctor in their family.”

Part 5: The Cracks and Edges

Loop Health’s infrastructure is impressive, but honesty demands acknowledging where it strains. The cracks appear not in the technology but at the intersection of India’s digital divide and healthcare’s inherent complexity.

“The first month with a new client is when the truth reveals itself,” Piyush explains. “On paper, everything always looks smooth. The client proudly walks in with a modern HRMS, the right people allocated, and an eager promise that ‘integration will be simple.’ But the moment we begin, the real story surfaces. Their product team is buried in other priorities. Approvals move slower than anyone expected. A clean API turns into an S3 bucket workaround. Technology is never the barrier; readiness is. So we step in, adjust the plan, sit with their teams, rewrite expectations together, and build momentum inch by inch.”

“Blue-collar workers often don’t have official email IDs,” Dr. Priyadarshani admits. “Even logging into the app becomes a challenge. The app is in English, but they’re comfortable in regional languages. They message us in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and we translate and respond in their language, but it adds friction.”

The language barrier goes deeper during consultations. “When a factory worker needs a gastroenterologist who speaks Kannada, we might not have that specific specialty in that specific language available immediately,” she explains. “So our Medical Advisor joins the call, translating between doctor and patient. While we make sure nobody is left unheard, it does create a bit of a bottleneck because it adds one more step to the process.”

Piyush shares a moment of painful clarity: “A CHRO once told us, ‘You solved complexity but created paralysis.’ Their employees had beautiful options, but sometimes froze at decision time. Insurance is still a foreign language, and even smart employees can’t translate co-pays into real-life impact. This insight led us to build a recommendation engine that would act like a friend who knows your history, your family, and your risks.”

The virtual care model, for all its convenience, has natural boundaries. Dr. Mihir knows these boundaries intimately: “A middle-aged man called with chest pain, hoping for medication to get through the night. On video, he looked clammy, uncomfortable. Chest pain is where virtual care stops. You need an ECG, physical exam. I sent him to emergency. At the hospital, they found a cardiac event in progress. Sometimes the hardest decision is saying, ‘This needs to be seen in person.’”

Dr. Mihir also handles the modern challenge of information overload: “The question I get asked most is about these newer diabetes medicines everyone’s talking about as weight-loss drugs. Patients have Googled everything, seen celebrities’ results. What they ask isn’t ‘what is this drug?’ but ‘Doctor, can I take this?’ or ‘Will it work the same way for me?’ Google can’t answer that. These are judgment calls, not search results. People aren’t looking for Google to give answers, they’re looking for a doctor to say, ‘This makes sense in your case, and this doesn’t.’”

“Building a secondary and tertiary care network is a massive undertaking,” Ryan acknowledges. “Our investors are aligned and this is in our plans. We do suggest where to go, but providing data-informed suggestions that are rock-solid reliable, along with discounting, priority access, and quality control, these are the practical challenges. It’s just a question of when to pull the trigger.”

Part 6: Generation 4 And What Comes Next

“If I could kill one industry practice tomorrow,” Piyush says, “it would be the idea that everyone should get the same plan. This model was born when workforces were small, homogeneous, when benefits were compliance, not care. Today, it actively holds companies back. A young team ends up paying for maternity coverage they won’t use for years. A team with aging parents struggles with insufficient support. No one feels seen.”

Enter Generation 4: healthcare that shapeshifts around individual need. Not paternalistic (company decides everything), not purely transactional (employee alone in the market), but something new- employer-funded, employee-directed, Loop-delivered. This is what Loop calls “health assurance,” a category they’re creating because “insurance” no longer captures what they’re building.

The early results suggest something is working. Benefits enrollment jumped from 60% to 85% with HealthFlex implementation at Zepto. Employee complaints about benefits dropped significantly. Ola, BluPine, Livspace, Sharechat, Leadsquared, companies across sectors are seeing employees actually use their benefits before they’re sick enough to need hospitals.

“One client came in fully convinced their workforce couldn’t care less about benefits,” Piyush recalls. “Then enrollment opened. Within hours, employees were choosing plans reflecting their lives in intimate detail. A young couple expecting a baby chose maternity support. A mid-career employee added dental coverage she’d postponed for years. The same employees labeled ‘disengaged’ were making thoughtful decisions because someone finally spoke their language.”

The moment clients truly understand arrives without much fanfare. “A client sees their claims dashboard and notices how many cases closed without friction,” Piyush explains. “They see 97% satisfaction and pause. But the real turning point comes when they experience how the entire claims journey feels different. Each user has a dedicated claims advisor who knows their story. Our AI quietly checks every uploaded document for completeness, alerting both advisor and user instantly if something’s missing. The advisor calls, explains what needs fixing, and resubmits before the claim gets stuck. That’s when clients say, ‘This isn’t insurance support anymore. This is healthcare infrastructure.’”

“In 2030,” Ryan envisions, “employees will be excited for benefits enrollment because they’ll get what their family actually needs. I get the right insurance plan for myself and my family, basis our life stage and annual needs. The idea that we used to have one-size-fits-all benefits through our employer will seem really outdated. When I have a symptom or condition, I have a family medical concierge that will help me triage symptoms and get the right intervention. When I switch employers, I’ll be able to port my benefits. I’m in control of my medical records and can seamlessly move from one healthcare and insurance partner to another.”

But Ryan also acknowledges the operational challenge: “You have to be operationally excellent to execute this business. We work across and integrate with multiple insurers, TPAs, labs, radiology centers, wellness vendors. We have lots of customer endpoints: a mobile app, enrollment portal, clinical video calls, prescriptions, in-hospital claims assistance. It takes a healthy dose of customer obsession and deep respect for operational rigor and persistence to do what our teams do every day, and I’m really proud of them for that.”

Closing: The Morning After

6 AM. Shift change in Dr. Priyadarshani’s team. The night team hands over: hundreds of chats, dozens of consultations, 3 crisis interventions, 1 early cancer marker flagged, prescriptions renewed, 1 life saved from suicide. The day team takes over seamlessly because they can see every conversation, every prescription, every concern from the night.

“We’re proud because we’re the first point of contact,” Dr. Priyadarshani says. “Patients trust us. They believe we’ll help. And we have, thousands of times.”

The logs tell stories the benefits industry doesn’t track. An elderly woman in Mysore, alone at midnight, needing emergency care. The MA coordinating with the hospital, sharing locations, arranging consultations, ensuring doctors were ready when she arrived. Following up the next morning to check she’s okay.

“We work 24/7, 365 days, irrespective of weekends and festivals,” Dr. Priyadarshani reflects. “Yes, burnout happens. Maintaining response times, sitting for long hours, lonely night shifts. But as a medico, as a Medical Advisor, we have our own ways to cope up. We convert this lack of human interaction to conversations on huddles. It’s like another family where you discuss patients of professional life to patients of personal life. And I am proud to say that, for us everything comes second. First, the patients.”

Dr. Mihir captures what’s different: “If I went back to traditional practice tomorrow, I’d miss the time and freedom to really hear my patients. Every Loop consult is at least 20 minutes. Patients can fully explain concerns, ask questions, understand treatment without feeling rushed or worrying about costs. I’d also miss how easy it is to involve the right experts together. For a diabetic patient, I can bring in a nutritionist instantly; for a musculoskeletal case, a physiotherapist. But mostly, I’d miss the proactive approach. We’re not just treating problems after they happen; we’re helping prevent them. That human connection, the time, guidance, continuity, is what makes the difference.”

What genuinely surprised Dr. Mihir after joining Loop was the scale of the silent crisis: “People in their late twenties and thirties with central obesity, early insulin resistance, borderline cholesterol, poor sleep, high stress, almost no physical activity. Add vitamin B12 and D3 deficiencies, brushed aside as ‘minor’ but contributing to fatigue, poor concentration, long-term problems. In hospitals, we meet patients after damage occurs. Here, I see how routine screening and early intervention change trajectories before disease sets in. A small shift toward proactive healthcare can significantly change someone’s health and even their longevity.”

This is healthcare that operates on a different logic. Not “is it covered?” but “what do you need?” Not “submit and wait” but “let’s solve this now.” Not “your employer provides insurance” but “you have a doctor in your family.”

In a country where healthcare meant hospitals, where benefits meant hoping you never used them, where 50% of workers had no family doctor, Loop built something that shouldn’t exist: care that’s always there, never overwhelming, constantly learning what you need.

Their mission, adding 20 healthy years to India’s workforce, once seemed impossibly ambitious. But when you watch their infrastructure hum at 2 AM, see employees choosing mental health support over unused insurance, witness families navigating health crises with actual navigation support, you realize they’re not trying to revolutionize insurance.

They’re building the doctor India never had. The one who knows your family. Who answers at 2 AM. Who catches things early. Who treats budget waste as a moral failure, not a business model.

“Just offering wellness perks creates the illusion of proactive care while leaving chronic disease, diagnostics, and mental health unmanaged,” Ryan says definitively. “They serve more as a checkbox that the company is doing preventative health.”

The future of care in India might not be about better hospitals or cheaper insurance. It might be about never needing them in the first place. One wallet, one platform, one medical team at a time.

I’ve been fortunate to get access to some of the most impactful startups in the country through my writing, and I’m so excited to extend that privilege to you! Once a month, you will receive a deep dive into an incredible Indian startup via my A Week Inside…series.

Not lying, to be clear. Everything I’ve shared has been true. The books, the ideas, the strange connections I draw between things that don’t obviously belong together. All real. But also selected. Arranged. The version of me most likely to make you lean in.

You might subscribe to my weekly reading list. Every Saturday, I bundle together the most interesting things I encountered that week, write little annotations, draw threads between them. People tell me it makes them feel smarter. They screenshot my takes and send them to friends. I love that. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. There’s a specific pleasure in being someone’s source- the friend who always knows about the thing before it becomes a thing, the one who reads the weird stuff so you don’t have to. I built that on purpose. It wasn’t an accident.

Recently I was reading something genuinely strange and wonderful, and I don’t even remember what, which is part of the point, and my first thought wasn’t wow. It was how do I describe this in a way that makes me sound like the kind of person who finds things like this?

I wasn’t reading anymore. I was scouting. The book had become raw material for a future performance of having read it.

This happens more than I’d like to admit. I watch a film, and somewhere around the forty-minute mark, I start composing the tweet. I have a genuine emotion and immediately begin translating it into something shareable, something that will resonate, something that earns its place in the feed.

Susan Sontag saw this coming decades ago, writing about photography. The camera doesn’t just record experience, she argued. It changes the nature of experience itself. You start seeing photographically. The tourist isn’t really looking at the cathedral; she’s looking at the picture of herself looking at the cathedral. The frame precedes the seeing.

I don’t carry a camera everywhere. I carry something worse, an internalised audience. The frame is always up. The seeing is never just seeing.

The experience had become secondary to the narration of the experience. I was auditioning for my own life. And I was so very good at it.

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The Economics of Interesting

I didn’t become this way by accident. Being interesting takes a lot of work, and it also works.

It opens doors that stay closed for people who are merely competent. It gets you into rooms where decisions are made, onto lists you didn’t apply for, into DMs from people you admire. The interesting person gets the speaking invitation, the podcast interview, the “you should meet my friend” introduction that changes everything. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve been the beneficiary.

The internet has made this an explicit requirement. Before, you could be privately fascinating- the dinner party guest everyone wanted seated next to them, the colleague who made meetings bearable. Now, fascination is scalable. You can be, sometimes have to be, interesting to thousands of people who’ve never met you. And that interestingness compounds. Followers attract followers. The screenshot gets shared. The algorithm notices you’ve been noticed and notices you more.

There is a well-worn term for this- personal brand. I remember when it first entered the lexicon, around 2008 or so, and how embarrassing it sounded. Your brand? Like you’re a soft drink? A sneaker? The language felt borrowed from a world that had nothing to do with actual personhood.

By 2015, personal brand was startup advice. By 2020, it was career necessity. The cringe faded, or we just got used to it, and the language of marketing colonised the self so gradually that we stopped noticing we’d been occupied. Now, everyone has a brand whether they cultivate one or not. The only choice is whether you manage it deliberately or let it be managed by accident.

I understood this early. Not consciously, but in the manner you understand any economy you’re trying to survive in. I understood that my ideas were currency, that my references were signals, that the way I synthesised disparate things into unexpected wholes was a kind of value I could trade on. So I got better at it. I learned which observations resonated, and which ones didn’t. I developed a sense for the interesting-shaped hole in any conversation and became adept at filling it.

Guy Debord called it the society of the spectacle. He was writing in 1967, long before any of this existed, and yet he saw it clearly: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” He was talking about mass media, about advertising, about the way images mediate our relationship to reality. But he was also describing something more intimate, the way we become spectacles to ourselves. The merger of being and appearing. The inability to experience something without simultaneously representing it.

This isn’t a confession of some shameful inauthenticity. I genuinely am curious. I genuinely do read widely and think in connections and care about ideas. The performance wasn’t a lie, but it was an optimisation. I was taking the most interesting parts of myself and turning up the volume, letting the rest fade into background noise. The girl who watches reality TV and cries at dog videos and sometimes goes weeks without a single original thought, she was still there, but she wasn’t the product.

And the product was good. I won’t pretend otherwise. The interesting version of me built a career, an audience, a reputation. She got me out of rooms I wanted to leave, and into rooms I wanted to enter. I’m not ungrateful. I’m just tired.

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The Cost You And I Pay

The tiredness is hard to explain because it doesn’t look like anything from the outside. It’s not burnout in the way people usually mean. I’m not exhausted from overwork or crushed by deadlines. I sleep fine. I meet my commitments. From the outside, I look like someone who has it figured out.

Byung-Chul Han calls it the burnout society. The exhaustion isn’t coming from external demands, from a boss or a system pressing down on you. It’s coming from inside. We have become, he says, “entrepreneurs of ourselves,” and the entrepreneur never rests because the business is never done. The project of self-optimisation has no endpoint. You can always be more productive, more visible, more interesting. The tiredness I feel isn’t laziness or weakness. It’s the logical destination of turning yourself into a project that can never be completed.

When you’ve optimised for interesting long enough, every experience starts to arrive pre-formatted. I’ll be walking through a market or sitting in a waiting room or overhearing a conversation and I can feel the processing begin. How would I describe this? What does this connect to? Where does this fit in the larger tapestry of things I’ve been thinking about? The moment hasn’t finished happening and I’m already packaging it for later.

I went to NAAR for the new year. Beautiful, delicious, disorienting, everything I wanted. And I remember standingin the washroom, struggling to take in the (insane) view from the washroom, genuinely moved by something I couldn’t name, and within seconds I was composing the caption. Not even for Instagram specifically, just for the generalised audience that now lives in my head. The one that’s always watching. The one I perform for even when I’m alone.

That audience that used to feel like company. That now feels like surveillance.

The research on this is still emerging, but what exists is grim. Studies on self-presentation and social media find a consistent pattern: the more we curate, the more exhausted we become, but the exhaustion doesn’t stop the curating. It’s not a behaviour we can simply decide to quit. The performance becomes structural. We don’t know how to experience things without the frame anymore. One study found that people who took photos of experiences remembered the visual details better but the experience itself worse. The camera ate the moment. The documentation displaced the living.

There’s a loneliness to being known for your taste. People approach you with a certain expectation. They want the version of you that’s always finding things, always synthesising, always a little ahead of the curve. And you deliver, because that’s the transaction, that’s what you’ve promised. But the delivery requires constant vigilance. You can never quite relax into not knowing, not having a take, not being the one with the interesting observation. The role doesn’t have an off switch.

I’ve started to notice what I edit out. The ordinary pleasures that don’t fit the brand. The books I read that are simply fine. The days where nothing interesting happens, where I’m just a person moving through hours without insight. Those parts of life have started to feel like failures. The gaps in the content calendar, missed opportunities to be fascinating. I’ll catch myself feeling guilty about a weekend where I didn’t encounter anything worth sharing. As if living without producing evidence of living is somehow a waste.

The other cost is subtler and I’m only starting to understand it. When you perform curiosity long enough, you stop being able to tell the difference between genuine interest and the performance of interest. I’ll pick up a book and I genuinely can’t tell if I want to read it or if I want to be the kind of person who’s read it. Both feel identical from the inside. The wanting has collapsed into the wanting to be seen wanting.

This is what Debord meant when he said the spectacle isn’t just something we watch, it’s something we become. The image doesn’t just represent life; it starts to substitute for it. And once the substitution is complete, you can’t find your way back to the original. You don’t even remember there was an original.

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The Difference

Interesting is something that happens in other people. You can’t feel your own interestingness, you can only infer it from reactions, from the lean-in, from the screenshot, from the “you should write about that.” It’s a quality that exists entirely in the space between you and an audience. Remove the audience and the interesting disappears. The category simply stops applying.

Interested is different. Interested is something you actually experience. It’s the absorption, the forgetting of time, the thing that happens when you look up from a book and two hours have passed and you haven’t once thought about how you’ll describe it later. Interested doesn’t need a witness. It completes itself.

Simone Weil wrote about attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity. But she meant something very specific. Not the kind of attention that takes notes, that processes, that asks “what can I do with this?” She meant attention that empties the self. Receptivity so complete that you disappear into the looking. The object of attention fills the entire frame because there’s no part of you leftover to be observing yourself observing.

I read that years ago and thought I understood it. I didn’t. I thought attention meant the thing I was already doing: reading carefully, noticing patterns, making connections. But that’s not what Weil was describing. She was describing a kind of attention that doesn’t produce anything. That doesn’t have an output. That isn’t, in any sense, generative. You don’t come away with material. You come away changed, or you come away with nothing, and both are fine.

I’ve been confusing these for years. I thought my job was to be interested in things and then share that interest with others. A clean pipeline of input, processing, output. But somewhere along the way, the output started to shape the input. I began selecting what to be interested in based on what would be interesting to share. The curiosity became a sense of usefulness. It was still real, but it was also optimised, which meant it was no longer entirely mine.

This sounds like a humble brag, I know. Poor me, I’m too interesting, people pay too much attention to my carefully curated thoughts. But that’s not quite what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is that I built a machine for generating interestingness and then the machine started running me. The part of me that used to wander, genuinely wander, without destination or purpose, got recruited into the project of being someone worth paying attention to. And wandering with a purpose isn’t really wandering at all.

I think about the difference between a window and a mirror. Interesting is a mirror. You’re always seeing yourself reflected in the other person’s reaction, adjusting, calibrating. Interested is a window. You’re looking out at something that has nothing to do with you. The self recedes. You’re just there, in the presence of the thing, not thinking about how you look in relation to it.

The novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt put it this way: “To be truly interested in something, you have to be willing to be bored by it.” She meant that real attention includes the dull parts, the longueurs, the stretches where nothing is happening. It means staying with something past the point where it’s yielding content. Most of what I read, I abandon the moment it stops being useful. The moment I’ve extracted what I need. That’s not interest. That’s mining.

I miss being a window. I’m not sure I remember how.

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The Unpostable Life

There are things I love that I’ve never told you about.

I love watching amateur cooking videos on YouTube, the badly shot ones where someone’s auntie is making dal in a pressure cooker older than me while yelling instructions at a camera she clearly doesn’t trust. I’ve seen hundreds of these. They have never once made it into a reading list.

I reread the same three comfort novels every year. They’re not particularly good. They’re not even particularly interesting. They’re just mine in a way that doesn’t need to be explained or defended or positioned as a quirky contrast to my otherwise highbrow taste. I’ve never mentioned them because they don’t fit the curation. They’re just ordinary pleasure, and ordinary pleasure doesn’t have a hook.

I like sitting in my car after I’ve parked, sometimes for twenty minutes, listening to the end of a song or a podcast or sometimes nothing at all. Just sitting. No thoughts worth capturing. No insights emerging. Just a person in a stationary vehicle, delaying the transition back into someone who has things to do.

I cry at those videos where soldiers come home and surprise their dogs. Every single time. I find them on purpose sometimes, when I need to feel something that isn’t complicated. This is arguably embarrassing. It doesn’t signal anything interesting about my interior life. It’s just a naked sentimentality that I’ve never figured out how to frame.

These are the parts that don’t make the cut. Not because they’re shameful but because they’re ordinary, and ordinary has no currency in the economy I’ve been trading in. The interesting person has interesting tastes, interesting hobbies, interesting ways of relaxing. She doesn’t just sit in her car. She doesn’t watch aunties make dal. She doesn’t cry at dog videos like everyone else on the internet. Or if she does, she makes it a thing. She writes about it, ironises it, finds the angle that makes it interesting again.

I’m tired of finding the angle.

Researchers have documented how authenticity itself became a genre- the messy bun, the “no makeup” makeup, the casually tossed-off caption that took forty-five minutes to write. We got so good at performing genuineness that the performance became invisible even to us. The “authentic self” we present is still a presentation. It’s just a presentation that’s learned to hide its seams.

I think about Elena Ferrante sometimes. The novelist who refuses to appear. No author photos, no interviews, no readings, no public self at all. Just the books. She called publicity “a garbage disposal” and refused to let her personhood become part of the product. Critics have called it a gimmick, a marketing strategy, but I don’t think that’s right. I think she understood something the rest of us are only starting to grasp: that the author becoming interesting is a threat to the work staying interesting. That the public self cannibalises the private one. That some things can only survive by staying hidden.

I’m not Ferrante. I don’t have that discipline, and I definitely don’t have that faith that the work can stand alone, that I don’t need to be there selling it with my presence, my takes, my carefully curated interestingness. But I understand the impulse now in a way I didn’t before. The appeal of being nobody. The freedom of the unpostable life.

There’s a version of me that exists only in private. The one who doesn’t know things, who hasn’t read the important book, who has no take on the current discourse because she didn’t even notice there was a discourse. The one who sometimes goes entire weeks without a single thought worth sharing. She’s not performing anything. She’s not even really paying attention. She’s just there, existing, unburdened by the need to be witnessed.

I like her. I don’t let her out much.

Zadie Smith wrote about quitting social media, and what struck me wasn’t the quitting itself but how she framed it. Not as a moral stance, not as a rejection of the platform’s politics or ethics, but simply as self-knowledge. “I’m the wrong personality type,” she said. Some people can hold the tension between public and private, can stay present while being watched. Others can’t. Knowing which one you are isn’t failure.

I’m still figuring out which one I am. Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m someone who can stay public but needs to protect certain rooms. Needs to keep some doors closed. Needs to let some pleasures stay ordinary, unframed, unshared.

The dal videos. The same three novels. The dog coming home to the soldier. The car after it’s parked. Mine.

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The Harder Question

So what am I actually saying here? I’m not quitting the internet. I’m not abandoning the reading list or deleting my accounts or retreating into some performative silence that would itself be a kind of performance. I’m still going to have takes. I’m still going to share them. The machine I built isn’t one I’m ready to dismantle, and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could.

But then what is this? What changes?

Part of me wonders if it’s even possible to stay public and stay present at the same time. The audience changes things. It has to. The moment you know someone is watching, you become someone who is being watched, and that someone is never quite the same as the one who exists unobserved. Maybe the corruption is built in. Maybe the best I can hope for is to be aware of it, to hold it lightly, to not mistake the performance for the whole.

But that feels like a cop-out.

I’ve noticed something about the burnout confessional as a genre. It has become, itself, content. The “I’m stepping back” post. The “I’ve been doing some thinking” essay. The performed exhaustion, the carefully crafted admission of struggling, all of it feeding the same machine it claims to critique. Even vulnerability has been optimised. Even this essay risks becoming that- another piece of interesting content about the exhaustion of producing interesting content. The snake eating its tail, but plating it for Instagram before it does.

I keep thinking about writers I admire, the ones who seem to produce from some deep interior place, who write like no one is watching even though thousands of people are. I used to think they were simply more talented, more authentic, more immune to the pressures that shape the rest of us. Now I think maybe they just got better at protecting something. Some chamber of the self that doesn’t get shown. Some room where the work happens before it becomes work that’s seen. They found a way to keep the window open even while the mirror was running.

The poet Mary Oliver lived this way. Famously private, allergic to self-promotion, she spent most of her life in relative obscurity before becoming one of the most beloved poets in America. She didn’t build a platform. She built a practice. Every morning, walking in the woods with a notebook, paying attention to things that would never trend, writing poems about geese and grasshoppers and the ordinary astonishment of being alive. When asked about her process, she said something I think about constantly: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Not attention as content generation. Attention as a spiritual practice. Attention as a way of being in the world that has nothing to do with being seen.

Or maybe they’re performing too, and they’re just better at it than I am. Maybe the authentic voice is always a construction, and the only difference is how visible the seams are. I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve started to want something different. Not instead of what I have. I’m not trading one identity for another. But alongside it. A life that isn’t entirely legible. Thoughts I don’t complete. Experiences I let dissolve without capturing them. The freedom to be uninteresting sometimes, to be ordinary, to have nothing to report.

It sounds simple. It’s not. The muscle memory runs deep. Even now, writing this, I can feel myself shaping it. Is this vulnerable enough? Is this too vulnerable? Does this land? Will this resonate? The audience is in the room. The audience is always in the room. I don’t know how to make them leave.

Maybe I start by admitting they’re there.

Have you heard of the “observing ego?” It’s the part of the self that watches the self, that maintains a slight distance even during intense experience. It’s supposed to be healthy, a sign of integration, the thing that keeps you from being completely swept away by emotion. But I wonder if the internet has hypertrophied this function. The observing ego has become the performing ego. It doesn’t just watch and reflect. It curates and broadcasts. The distance that was supposed to protect us has become the distance that alienates us from our own lives.

How do you collapse that distance? How do you get back inside your own experience?

I don’t have an answer. But I have some hunches.

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The Shift

I don’t have a transformation to offer you. No five-step programme for recovering from interestingness, no morning routine that rewired my brain, no revelation that changed everything. That would, anyway, be another performance. The performance of having figured it out, which is maybe the most seductive performance of all.

What I have instead is something smaller. A reorientation. A slight turning of the head.

I’ve started letting things go. A book I loved that I didn’t tell anyone about. A thought that came to me in the shower and dissolved before I could capture it. A whole Tuesday where nothing happened that was worth narrating. I used to feel a low hum of guilt about these, a sense that I was wasting material. Now I’m trying to see them as something else. Proof that I still exist when no one is watching. Proof that there’s still a me that isn’t made of content.

There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy that I’m only now learning to articulate. Secrecy is about hiding something shameful. Privacy is about choosing what to share. For years I conflated these. If I wasn’t sharing something, it felt like I was hiding it, which meant there must be something wrong with it. But that’s not right. Some things aren’t hidden. They’re just held. They belong to you in a way that doesn’t need to be proven by making them visible to others.

The dal videos aren’t a secret. The comfort novels aren’t shameful. The crying at dog videos isn’t something I need to ironise or explain. They’re just private. They’re the rooms in my house where guests don’t go. Not because the rooms are dirty, but because some spaces are just for living in, not for showing.

I’ve also started paying attention to what interests me when no one’s looking. Not what I want to be interested in, not what would be interesting to be interested in, but the actual texture of my attention when it’s left alone. It’s different than I expected. Softer. Less impressive. More prone to the ordinary and the sentimental and the genuinely uncool.

It’s harder than it sounds. The instinct to capture is so deep now that resisting it feels almost physical. I’ll have an experience and feel my hand reach for my phone and have to consciously stop, consciously stay in the moment, consciously let it be unrecorded. Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I don’t. The muscle memory is patient and I am only starting to build the counter-muscle.

I’ve started experimenting with what I think of as attention hygiene. Small practices, nothing dramatic. Not sharing something for forty-eight hours after I encounter it, to see if it still matters when the dopamine of novelty has faded. Keeping a google doc that isn’t for anything. No essays will come from it, no tweets, no reading list annotations. Just observations that dead-end. Thoughts that go nowhere. The stuff that would get cut from the highlight reel.

Reading things I know I’ll never reference. Watching films I’ll never review. Having conversations I won’t reconstruct later for someone else’s benefit. It sounds simple but it’s a kind of training. Teaching myself that experiences can be complete without being captured. That the tree can fall in the forest.

There’s a version of curiosity that isn’t about accumulation. I’m trying to find my way back to it. The kind where you look at something and don’t immediately think about what it means or how it connects or what you’ll do with it. You just look. The thing is itself and you are yourself and for a moment the transaction is complete without anyone else needing to witness it.

I used to think being interested was the input and being interesting was the output. The natural flow of a mind engaging with the world and then sharing what it found. I don’t think that’s wrong exactly, but I’ve started to wonder if the arrow can point the other way. If sometimes you have to protect the input from the output. If the sharing, done too automatically, starts to shape and eventually starve the thing it’s sharing.

I want to be interested in a way that doesn’t need to become interesting. I want to read without scouting. I want to think without drafting. I want to let some things stay half-formed, unresolved, not ready for an audience, maybe never ready for an audience. I want to have experiences that don’t become stories.

I want to sit in the car a little longer.

This essay is a contradiction, I know. I’m telling you about wanting to stop telling you things. I’m making my desire for privacy public, performing my exhaustion with performance. The irony isn’t lost on me. Maybe that’s the last thing I need to accept, that I can’t write my way out of this. The writing is part of the trap. The window becomes a mirror the moment you describe the view.

But I’m going to try anyway. Not to stop being interesting, I don’t think I know how to do that, and I’m not sure I want to. But to hold it more loosely. To let there be a gap between the experience and the narration. To remember that I exist even when I’m not producing evidence of existing.

Weil wrote that attention is a form of prayer. I’m not particularly religious, but I think I understand now what she meant. There’s a way of being present that doesn’t take. That doesn’t extract. That doesn’t turn the moment into material. It just witnesses, and the witnessing is enough.

I’m not there yet. I may never be. The audience is still in the room. But I’m learning to let them wait. Learning that not everything needs to be served. Learning that some attention is just for me. Formless, purposeless, unremarkable.

To be, sometimes, just a person in a stationary vehicle.

Listening to nothing.

Going nowhere yet.

He paused for a second, like he was deciding whether to be polite or accurate. Then he said, almost casually: Man. You’re someone I’d date. But you seem really high maintenance.

A few years ago I would have flailed. I would have performed chill. I would have rushed to reassure him that I’m easy, low-effort, not like that, not a problem, not too much. Anything but the thing he’d just named. I would have shaved down the truth right in front of him, like it was embarrassing to take up space. And I would have left the conversation with that familiar, sour aftertaste: why did I make myself smaller again?

But this time, I just sat with it. Smiles at him. Let the words hang in the air. And in that silence, I realised something funny: he wasn’t wrong. Not in the way he meant it, but in the way that matters.

Yes. I am high maintenance. Not because I need constant proving, but because I have grown up in a life that has been, quite literally, maintained. I have been loved in ways that built who I am today.

The Lexicon of Diminishment

Before we go any further, let us talk about what high maintenance actually means when it is lobbed at a woman. It is a warning label, a disqualifier, a way of saying: you ask for too much. Not too much of anything specific, mind you. Just too much in general. Too much attention. Too much care. Too much consideration. Too much presence in the relationship, you are supposedly sharing equally.

The terminology belongs to a broader vocabulary designed to pathologise women who have standards: gold digger, drama queen, high maintenance, demanding, needy, clingy, too much. These words share a common function - they reframe reasonable expectations as character flaws. They turn wanting things into a kind of greed. They suggest that the correct amount of needs for a woman to have is, conveniently, zero.

Consider how rarely men are described using this vocabulary. A man who expects his partner to cook, clean, manage the household, remember his mother’s birthday, and be sexually available on demand is simply a man with standards. A woman who expects emotional reciprocity and consistent effort is high maintenance. A man who wants his shirts ironed is particular. A woman who wants her feelings acknowledged is needy. The asymmetry is built into the language itself.

The manosphere has industrialised this vocabulary. Online communities united by opposition to feminism have created elaborate taxonomies of female worth: high value versus low value women, the hierarchy of Stacys and Beckys, the endless calculation of sexual market value. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, these communities share core beliefs that women are driven primarily by greed and sexual manipulation, that feminism has created a society biased against men, and that traditional gender hierarchies need restoration. The Red Pill ideology, borrowed from The Matrix, positions itself as an awakening to truth: the supposed reality that women are fundamentally deceptive, ‘hypergamous’, and unworthy of trust.

The UN Women explainer on the manosphere notes that this content is gaining significant traction: according to the Movember Foundation, two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. The effect is not theoretical. Academic research on manosphere communities found that their shared ideology reduces women to three primary motives: to deceive and manipulate men, to satisfy their own sexual needs promiscuously, and to trade sex for power. Women who have standards , who ask for effort, commitment, or care, are automatically suspect. The acronym AWALT (All Women Are Like That) is used to dismiss any evidence that individual women might differ from the stereotype.

The vocabulary extends beyond the manosphere into mainstream dating discourse. The ‘high-value woman’ discourse, which appears on TikTok and Instagram with billions of views, often reproduces the same reductive framework it claims to subvert. Both the Red Pill men and the high value women content creators agree on one thing: dating is a marketplace, and your worth can be calculated. They just disagree on who is overvaluing and who is underselling.

The manosphere’s language of female classification is not actually that different from mainstream dating culture. It is just saying the silent part out loud. When a woman is called high maintenance in casual conversation, she is being assessed against the same invisible rubric. The ideal woman is supposed to be hot but not vain, sexually available but not promiscuous, successful but not intimidating, present but not needy. She is supposed to have needs that are somehow met without anyone having to meet them.

The Mythology of Chill

Gillian Flynn gave us the definitive diagnosis of this phenomenon in Gone Girl. The Cool Girl monologue has echoed through a decade of cultural conversation, and for good reason. It named something women had been performing without language for it:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer... Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.

The Cool Girl does not exist, of course. She is a projection, a fantasy of a woman with no interior life that might inconvenience anyone. Flynn’s sharpest observation was not about the men who want this woman. It was about the women willing to perform her: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.

And Flynn did not let women off the hook. The Cool Girls, she wrote, are even more pathetic than the men fooled by them because at least the men think they are dating a real person. The Cool Girl knows she is performing a fiction, knows she is erasing herself, and does it anyway. The question Flynn leaves us with is: why? What makes the performance worth the self-annihilation? And more importantly: what would happen if women just stopped?

Studies on emotional labour in relationships consistently find that women do the majority of what sociologists call emotion work, the task of managing feelings, maintaining connection, smoothing conflict, and ensuring relationship harmony. One study found that even in couples who described their relationships in the language of equality, none achieved actual equality; the women gave more and received less emotional nurturing than their partners.

The concept of emotional labour was first defined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983 to describe the work service industry employees do to manage their emotions for customers. But the term has since expanded to capture the invisible work women do in relationships: anticipating needs, managing schedules, remembering birthdays, initiating difficult conversations, smoothing over conflicts, tracking everyone’s emotional states. This work is largely invisible precisely because it is done well. You only notice its absence when relationships start to fray.

The chill girl is just the romantic version of this unpaid labourer. Research shows that women are socialized to prioritize relationship harmony over personal needs, to accommodate rather than assert, to be liked rather than respected. The cool girl is just that socialization dressed up in a crop top, saying I’m so chill while internally screaming into her pillow.

The pressure to be chill starts early and compounds over time. Relationship therapists note that women are told to be confident but not bossy, assertive but not needy, supportive but never high maintenance. Being chill becomes a survival strategy; a way to avoid rejection, criticism, or being labelled difficult. But it comes at a cost: suppressed opinions to avoid being too intense, minimised needs to appear easygoing, relationships that feel fundamentally unequal.

The situationship epidemic has made this worse. When relationships exist in deliberate ambiguity, asking for clarity becomes a violation of the unspoken rules. Women are automatically viewed as obsessed if they simply ask what someone wants; emotional detachment and being chill with whatever become survival strategies rather than authentic preferences. In situationships, the chill girl performance becomes mandatory. To ask where this is going is to be too much. To want commitment is to be needy. To have feelings about how you are treated is to be crazy.

The result is a generation of women performing low maintenance so convincingly they almost believe it themselves. Almost.

The Philosophers of Full Selfhood

The feminist philosophers saw this coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s central insight in The Second Sex was that women are made, not born. Femininity is not natural or innate, it is a condition of socialisation. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, she wrote. The becoming includes learning to accommodate, to efface, to shrink one’s desires into whatever shape will cause the least friction.

De Beauvoir was particularly sharp on how this plays out in love. She observed that women are taught to define themselves through their relationships to men rather than through their own projects and pursuits. Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.

The trap de Beauvoir identified is that women are encouraged to seek transcendence (meaning, purpose, self-realisation) through love and through men, rather than through their own projects. This makes love not a meeting of equals but a form of self-abandonment. The woman in love, de Beauvoir wrote, loses herself in the beloved, makes herself an object rather than a subject. She waits. She adapts. She becomes what he wants rather than what she is.

She dreamed of something different: On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself - on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Joan Didion approached the same territory from a different angle. Her 1961 essay On Self-Respect remains one of the most precise diagnoses of what is lost when we perform versions of ourselves to gain approval. Self-respect, she argued, has nothing to do with the approval of others and everything to do with the ability to face yourself honestly. Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.

Didion’s essay begins with a failure, her failure to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a college student, and uses it as a jumping-off point for examining the difference between genuine self-regard and the desperate need for external validation. The lesson she learned from that disappointment was that there was no such thing as automatic approval, that the world would not organize itself around her expectations simply because she existed. This was, in its way, liberating. Once you stop expecting validation, you can start building something real.

Didion’s crucial observation was that without self-respect, we become trapped in an exhausting performance: To do without self-respect is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings. The singular power of self-respect, she wrote, is that it frees us from the expectations of others and gives us back to ourselves.

But what happens when we try to find ourselves and find no one home? Didion’s warning echoes across the decades: Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. The chill girl who has spent years performing a version of herself that does not exist may eventually realize she has no idea who she actually is.

bell hooks brought love itself under examination. In All About Love, she argued that we have been taught a distorted version of love, one that centres power and control rather than mutual care. hooks defined love not as a feeling but as an action: the will to nurture the spiritual growth of oneself and another. By this definition, relationships characterised by domination, manipulation, or neglect, no matter how intense the feelings involved, are not love at all.

hooks was particularly incisive about how women confuse love with self-sacrifice. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.

hooks identified what so many women learn too late: The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. This is not narcissism. It is foundation-building. It is understanding that you cannot receive from others what you withhold from yourself.

The Data Does Not Lie

Here is where the research gets interesting. Women who have standards - who are, by the reductive vocabulary of dating culture, high maintenance - actually fare better.

According to research from the American Sociological Association, women initiate approximately 70% of divorces. This trend appears even more pronounced among college-educated couples. The most common reasons women cite for divorce include emotional and verbal neglect, unequal distribution of household and emotional labour, and simply that their needs were not being met. Notably, many husbands reported being completely surprised by their wife’s dissatisfaction. More than 25% said they were blindsided by the divorce request.

This blindsiding speaks to a profound communication gap, or perhaps more accurately, a listening gap. Many men in these studies described themselves as good providers who worked hard to ensure financial security, focused on what they assumed to be their primary role. But their wives were not asking for bigger houses. They were asking to be seen, heard, and partnered with. The disconnect between what men thought they were providing and what women actually needed is a case study in how gendered expectations distort relationships.

Women who initiate divorce report higher levels of well-being after the separation, despite often facing greater financial challenges. Research from Kingston Business School found that women who divorced were much happier than their male counterparts, even accounting for the negative financial impact. The explanation offered: Women who enter into an unhappy marriage feel much more liberated after divorce than their male counterparts.

But why?

Women are more likely to seek professional help during and after divorce. They are more likely to build supportive networks. They are less likely to rely on substances to cope and more likely to turn to experiences that enrich them. Men, by contrast, often show a persistent reliance on marriage for care and companionship, hence the higher rates of remarriage among divorced men. Studies consistently find that marriage extends more health and longevity benefits to men than to women, suggesting that men have more to lose when marriages end.

Perhaps most telling: research shows that in unmarried couples, men and women end relationships at equal rates. It is specifically in marriage that women dominate the exit. As Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld noted, this supports the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable. Marriage as an institution, it seems, has been slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality.

The emotional labour research tells a similar story. Women in heterosexual relationships consistently report doing more emotion work than their partners. Remembering the appointments, managing the social calendar, noticing when something is wrong, initiating difficult conversations, managing everyone’s feelings during conflict. A 2016 survey found that 75% of women would rather be alone, successful, and happy than in a relationship where they are not happy, compared to 58% of men.

The conclusion writes itself: women with standards who are willing to enforce them end up happier, even when the short-term cost is walking away. The high maintenance label is a scare tactic. The data suggests it should be a goal.

The Architecture of a Full Life

I grew up rarely being told no where it mattered. Not spoilt in the bratty sense - though also that! - but spoilt in the sense that my wanting was taken seriously. Study what you love. Change your mind. Take the risk. Start again. Become someone else. My life was not built around shrinking my desires into something manageable. It was built around making space for them to exist.

That kind of upbringing rewires you. It teaches you that your life is yours.

And I grew up watching love done in full sentences. Parents who loved each other with the kind of devotion that does not require an audience, does not need proof, does not keep score. The kind of love that shows up in choices, in plans, in loyalty, in the shape of a shared life, even when things were impossibly hard. When you have seen that up close, you stop confusing intensity with intimacy.

So I grew into a woman who does not experience care as a rare event. I have a village. A big one. It is not theoretical. It is practical. It calls. It checks in. It remembers. It pulls up. It celebrates without turning it into a competition. It holds my joy like joy is allowed to be loud, and my grief like it is allowed to be real.

My life, in other words, is already full. It has momentum. It has weight. Work I care about. Friendships that steady me. Family that makes me feel held even when I am being difficult. Routines that keep my mind from eating itself. Small pleasures I have built on purpose. And a kind of pleasure in my own company that I had to fight for, earn, defend.

So yes, when someone arrives, they are not entering empty space. They are entering a home. A home with furniture I chose carefully, with windows I learned how to open, with corners I softened myself. You have to be an exceptional person to make me want to rearrange it. You have to add, expand, widen, make me want to shift the bones of what already holds me up.

That is the part people do not like, because it removes the romance of winning a woman who is lonely. If I am loved well already, you cannot impress me with crumbs. If I am supported, you cannot confuse me with inconsistency. If my life is rich, your effort has to be real, not loud, not grand, not performative. Real like consistency. Real like repair. Real like showing up twice, the same way, without being asked.

The Economics of Desire

There is a reason the language of maintenance comes from machines, not from people. High-maintenance cars require expensive parts, regular servicing, and specialised mechanics. The implication when applied to women is clear: you are a costly investment with uncertain returns. The calculus is explicitly transactional - what do I get for what I put in?

This framing reveals something crucial about how we have been taught to think about relationships. The high-maintenance accusation assumes that love is a zero-sum exchange, that every need met by a partner is a debit from some invisible account, that the ideal relationship is one where you get maximum output for minimum input. It is the language of efficiency applied to intimacy, and it is fundamentally dehumanising.

But consider what the term actually describes when stripped of its judgment: a person who knows what they need and communicates it clearly. A person with standards they are willing to articulate. A person who will not pretend to be satisfied with less than they require. In any other context, we would call this self-awareness. We would call it emotional intelligence. We would call it healthy.

The low-maintenance woman, by contrast, is celebrated precisely for her lack of demands. She is easy. She is simple. She is no trouble at all. But what does that actually mean in practice? It means she swallows her disappointments. It means she does not ask for things to be different. It means she has learned that her needs are inconvenient and has preemptively minimised them. The low-maintenance woman is often not actually low-maintenance at all. She has simply internalised the work of managing her own unmet needs so thoroughly that it has become invisible.

We are raised in a culture that explicitly trains women for self-abnegation, where the highest compliment for a woman is often that she adjusted well, where maternal sacrifice is elevated to religious status, where asking for oneself is considered selfish and unfeminine. The cool girl here is just the Western packaging for something our grandmothers would recognise immediately: the good woman who wants nothing, needs nothing, causes no trouble.

The economics of desire only make sense if you believe that meeting someone’s needs is fundamentally costly rather than fundamentally rewarding. But anyone who has been in a genuinely good relationship knows that caring for someone you love is not a drain, it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. The effort you put in comes back transformed. The problem is not that some women require too much care. The problem is that some men experience any care requirement as excessive.

The Threshold, Not the Type

High-maintenance is not a personality type. It is a threshold. A line. It is what happens when you stop negotiating against yourself. It is what happens when you stop treating your needs like they are embarrassing and start treating them like information.

Most women are not low maintenance. They are under-loved and over-adapted. They have been taught that being chosen is about being easy, and that being easy is about having no appetite. No needs, no boundaries, no preferences that might inconvenience someone else. So they become fluent in self-erasure. They call it maturity. They call it being cool, even while it hollows them out.

Becoming high maintenance starts in a very unsexy place: you stop auditioning. You stop sanding down your edges so someone can hold you without getting hurt. You stop laughing when something feels wrong. You stop saying it is fine when your body is already tallying the cost. You let the discomfort exist long enough to actually learn what it is telling you.

Then you build a life that does not feel like waiting. Not a busy life. A full one. Friendships you do not abandon the second a man texts. Work you respect. Money habits that make you feel safe. Rituals that belong to you: morning walks, a gym routine, Sunday calls with your people, a savings rule you do not break, a home you are proud of. A life that says: I am not here to be picked. I am here to be lived.

When your life is full, you become harder to manipulate, not because you are cold, but because you are not starved. Attention stops being intoxicating when you are already seen. Mixed signals stop being exciting when you know what steadiness feels like. You stop chasing potential like it is a personality trait. You stop dating almost. You start noticing what someone consistently makes you feel: small or steady.

You also stop romanticising confusion. You stop calling anxiety butterflies. You stop thinking maybe is a mysterious love language. You stop confusing obsession for devotion. You start preferring the kind of love that is repetitive in the best way: ordinary, sturdy, slightly boring, deeply safe. The kind of love that does not spike your cortisol before it kisses you.

And you start guarding your peace like you have paid for it. Because you have. You paid for it with lonely nights and hard conversations and the humiliating work of learning yourself. With therapy or gym or prayer or whatever stitched you back together. With choosing yourself when it would have been easier not to.

The Question That Changes

At some point, the question changes. You stop asking, Will he choose me? and start asking, Does he fit into the life I have built?

A relationship is not a prize. It is a choice. And you are allowed to want a beautiful one, one that matches your standards, your pace, your dignity. One that does not require you to betray yourself to keep it.

bell hooks wrote that Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. She was talking about systems, but she was also talking about the micro-negotiations of everyday partnership. The relationship where one person’s comfort always trumps the other’s needs. The dynamic where stating a preference becomes making demands. The love that requires you to shrink to fit inside it.

We are living in a moment where those conditions are finally, unevenly, emerging. Women have unprecedented access to education, work, and financial independence. We can build lives that do not require marriage for survival. And increasingly, we are using that freedom not to avoid relationships but to demand better ones.

The manosphere sees this as a crisis. They interpret women’s rising standards as evidence of corruption, manipulation, hypergamy run amok. They have built an entire mythology around the idea that women with expectations are fundamentally broken. The irony is that their ideology often makes its adherents less, not more, attractive as partners. Research on former Red Pillers shows that many left because the ideology made them worse at relationships, not better.

But maybe what they are actually witnessing is women refusing to perform gratitude for the bare minimum. Maybe what looks like too high standards is just what happens when women have options. The real crisis, perhaps, is not that women want too much. It is that some men want relationships without the work of deserving them.

The Invitation

If that word, high maintenance, is supposed to scare me into being easier, it is about ten years late. I have outgrown the urge to be digestible.

This is not about becoming cold or closed off or impossible to please. It is about understanding that your standards are not obstacles to love. They are directions to it. They are information about what you need to feel safe, seen, and held. And anyone who treats that information as a burden has already told you something important about what they are offering.

The chill girl performance was always a losing game. You carve yourself down to be easier, and then you are chosen for a version of yourself that does not exist. You maintain the performance until you cannot, and then you are accused of changing, of being different from who you seemed. The mask always slips eventually. Better to never put it on.

Didion wrote about the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. That is what self-respect gives you: the capacity to care deeply about what matters and release what does not. To know that not everyone will choose you and to understand that this is not a failure, it is a filter. It is the mechanism that ensures the people who stay are the ones who actually want what you are actually offering.

So here is my invitation to anyone who has spent years performing chill to be loved:

Stop. Just stop.

Build a life that is full without a relationship at its centre. Cultivate friendships that feel like home. Find work that engages you. Create rituals of pleasure and rest. Learn what you need to feel safe, and practice asking for it out loud. Become the kind of person who does not abandon herself the second someone shows interest.

And then, from that fullness, decide who you are willing to rearrange the furniture for. Notice that the question has changed. It is not Does he like me? It is Does he enhance this life I have built? It is not Am I too much? It is Is he enough?

If you are in your high-maintenance era, where love has to match the life you have already built, welcome. Stay as long as you like.

And send this to the friend who keeps shrinking herself for men who have not expanded at all.

We are not doing that in 2026.

Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

- Joan Didion

It’s not because I’m not looking. I’ve seen a lot of consumer AI products this year (and liked and used plenty of them) and I still haven’t found a single one I can hold with conviction through the next few platform releases. The demos are strong. The teams are sharp. And yet my brain keeps doing the same thing: it simulates the next OpenAI/Anthropic update and asks, “Okay, what survives?”

The best way I can describe the feeling is: this is the new version of “what if Google makes this?” except the iteration cycle is so fast that it’s stopped being a distant platform risk and started being a near-term product risk. It’s not “someday they’ll copy you.” It’s “they’ll ship something adjacent in the next few quarters and it’ll land in a surface with hundreds of millions of users.” That compresses the time window in which standalone consumer apps can become defaults. And in consumer, the only real moat is being the default.

So I’m writing this as a confession and a working framework. A heuristic I’m using to filter “cool app” from “durable company” in a market where features get commoditized on contact. This is still WIP. But I’d rather have a WIP filter that keeps me honest than fake certainty that gets me attached to the wrong kind of product.

The Threat Model

Here’s what’s forcing the bar to move.

The old platform risk was “Google will copy your app.” That threat took years to materialise. You’d notice them watching, then they’d clone a feature, then they’d slowly starve you out through distribution. You had time.

The new platform risk is faster and more structural. The assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are becoming the starting surface for how people use the internet. And once that happens, whole categories don’t get copied in the old sense. They get reclassified. What used to be a standalone product becomes “a thing you can do inside the assistant.” The moment your category becomes an in-assistant capability, your product stops being a destination and starts being a choice. In consumer, being a choice is often the beginning of the end.

You can see the platform direction in plain sight. OpenAI is building a platform layer inside ChatGPT that treats third-party functionality as first-class. It introduced “apps in ChatGPT” and an Apps SDK, moving those apps into an internal directory where users browse, search, and run them without leaving the assistant.The assistant becomes the hub, everything else becomes a module.

This is what I mean by “default interface.” In the old internet, you started with a browser and went somewhere. In the assistant-native internet, you start with a prompt and the somewhere is optional. The assistant can answer, fetch, generate, and increasingly act through apps. When you can order food, build a playlist, pull files, or perform a workflow as an in-surface action, the user’s baseline changes from “open my app” to “ask the assistant.” The user doesn’t decide to use your product. The assistant decides whether to route to it.

And the platforms are actively closing distribution escape hatches. WhatsApp is the most brutal example. Meta’s WhatsApp Business API policy changes mean general-purpose assistant-style chatbots are expected to be blocked from operating via WhatsApp after January 15, 2026, specifically the kind of open-ended “ask me anything” bots people were using to access ChatGPT or Copilot inside WhatsApp. If your consumer wedge was “we’ll live inside messaging,” that’s a reminder that you don’t own that surface.

So the threat model has two reinforcing layers. First: product bundling. The assistant expands from “answer box” to “action hub” via apps, directories, SDKs, and native modes, turning entire standalone categories into in-surface features. Second: distribution control. Even if you find a surface where users already are, the platform can change policy and decide what kind of bot is allowed to exist there.

This is why “we’re building a better flow” is such a fragile consumer AI pitch right now. The flow itself is not scarce. The model is a commodity substrate. The workflow logic is increasingly replicable. And the distribution advantage belongs to whoever controls the starting surface. When all three are true, the standalone app has to answer a more foundational question: why does this workflow deserve its own destination, rather than becoming a built-in capability of the default interface?

A lot of good consumer AI products are going to die for reasons that will feel unfair to their builders. They won’t die because they’re bad. They’ll die because they’re optional, and optional products get murdered by defaults. It’s the same story as browser toolbars and early mobile utilities and a thousand other consumer patterns, except the loop is faster now because the platform can ship new behavior weekly and instantly place it in front of a massive installed base.

So when I say I’m struggling to form conviction, this is what I mean. I’m not struggling to find products that work. I’m struggling to find products whose value doesn’t get reclassified into “a thing the assistant can do” the moment the platform decides it should.

The New Bar: “What Stays True After the Clone?”

I now try to evaluate every consumer AI product as if the platform has already shipped the clone.

What if the assistant gets a new native mode that covers seventy percent of what you do? What if the user can do the thing without leaving the default surface? What if the novelty spike that helped you acquire disappears because the baseline moved? After that happens, what remains true?

That’s the question. Not “is this impressive.” Not “would I use it.” Not “does it have a billion-dollar market.” What remains true after the platform ships the adjacent capability and makes it a default?

We keep mistaking differentiation for defensibility. We confuse “we’re better” with “we’re hard to replace.” In a market where the substrate improves weekly, “we’re better” is a temporary state. It might even be a short-lived one. Defensibility has to be something that doesn’t evaporate when the substrate gets cheaper, more capable, and more integrated. This is why “we’ll ship faster” keeps sounding weak to me as a moat argument. Speed only works when you’re racing another team with comparable distribution and comparable defaults. In consumer AI, you’re racing an entity that can change the baseline for everyone just by shipping inside the starting surface.

In consumer AI, the model is not the product. The model is the commodity substrate, the electricity. It will continue to improve and diffuse and show up inside everything. You can’t build a consumer moat on the assumption that your model access will be uniquely powerful forever. So when someone pitches me “we’re the best model for X,” I translate it to: “for the next few months, we’ll have an advantage in quality.” That might be enough to get started. It is not enough to justify conviction.

The product is what you own around the model. The part that compounds even if the model becomes interchangeable. The part that stays sticky even if the assistant ships a new native workflow.

This is where consumer AI splits into two species. The first is the “answer product,” an interface that helps you get a response. Ask → answer → done. Those products can grow quickly because conversion is easy. They can also die quickly because nothing accumulates.

The second is the “accumulation product.” It doesn’t just answer. It captures, stores, organizes, and builds up a user’s life into a structured state and artifacts. It’s a place, not a moment. These products don’t win because the model is smarter. They win because leaving becomes annoying.

If you want to sanity-check which one you’re looking at, don’t look at the demo. Look at what’s left behind after a week of use. Is there anything valuable sitting inside the product that makes it easier to continue than to start over somewhere else? Is there a growing “mine-ness” to the experience?

If the answer is no, the product is betting its entire future on being a better prompt wrapper. And prompt wrappers are exactly what platforms are designed to absorb.

What You Actually Have to Own

Once you accept that the model is the commodity substrate, the “consumer moat” conversation stops being about intelligence and starts being about ownership. Not ownership in the abstract “we own the customer relationship” way that every deck says. Ownership in the literal sense: what part of the user’s behavior do you control, what part of their life do you accumulate, and what part of the distribution path is actually yours versus rented.

The only answers I’ve found that don’t collapse under scrutiny fall into five buckets.

Surface. In consumer, where the user starts is destiny. If the user has to remember to open your app, you’re already at a disadvantage, not because your app is bad, but because consumer behavior isn’t a courtroom. People don’t reward the best argument. They reward the default. The products that feel defensible tend to sit on a surface the user already touches constantly: the keyboard, the camera, the inbox, the browser, the creation canvas, the OS defaults. If you don’t own a surface like that, you need something that acts like one, a channel where you are the default entry point, not a nice-to-have destination.

A fragile product is an app you open when you remember it exists. A more inevitable product is a layer you trip over daily because it’s attached to a behavior you can’t avoid.

State. A lot of consumer AI products feel like they’re building “memory,” but most of that memory is just elevated chat logs. The default assistants are also moving toward memory, so the bar has to be higher: are you accumulating state that is structured and actionable, and does it meaningfully change what the product does?

There’s a world of difference between “it remembers I like Korean food” and “it knows my dietary constraints, my weekly routine, the meals I’ve already cooked, what ingredients I have at home, what I’m trying to optimize for, and it turns that into a plan that gets executed inside my life.” The first can be copied. The second requires a system, a living model of the user that’s more like a graph than a transcript.

State becomes defensible when it’s coupled to action. If your “state” can be exported and imported without loss, it’s not really state. It’s a file.

Artifacts. Consumer users don’t stay because you’re smarter. They stay because their stuff is there.

Think about why people stayed on early creation tools, not because the tools were magical, but because the documents, drafts, designs, playlists, and project histories accumulated. The product became the home for work that mattered. Leaving meant losing the library.

In AI, artifacts are what turn “useful” into “sticky.” A product that generates outputs and lets them disappear is training users to churn. A product that turns outputs into a library (templates you’ve built, styles you’ve refined, collections you’ve curated, a record of what you’ve made) creates switching costs that have nothing to do with model quality.

You can see the failure mode in “AI apps” that are basically disposable output machines. They make something cool. You screenshot it. You share it. You never return because there’s nothing accumulating. The product is a moment, not a place.

Contrast that with products where leaving feels like moving houses. If you’ve built up a library of templates, saved work, personal presets, an evolving body of projects, the product doesn’t need to be the smartest brain. It needs to be the safest home for what you’ve made.

Identity. When capability converges, consumer choice becomes emotional. People pick what feels like them.

This isn’t “brand” in the billboard sense. It’s the product’s personality: its defaults, its tone, the way it responds, the implicit worldview baked into its choices. Some products become the calm one, the professional one, the private one, the one that feels safe for your weird 2am thoughts. Once a user adopts a tool emotionally, switching stops being a rational decision. They don’t shop for alternatives. They stop looking.

This is also why general-purpose assistants are both powerful and limited. They can’t be everything to everyone and also feel intimate to someone. They can’t be universally acceptable and also be deeply identity-aligned for a niche. The products that win on identity offer a relationship with the user’s self-concept and that’s hard to replicate at platform scale without sanding off the edges that made it feel personal in the first place.

Identity moats often live in territory the big platforms will approach cautiously. The more intimate your product becomes, the more it pulls you into questions about emotional reliance, vulnerable users, and content the platforms don’t want their default interface answering at scale. “Shouldn’t” can be a moat, when it’s paired with responsible product design.

Compounding Distribution. In consumer AI, acquisition is not the hard part. Novelty acquires. The hard part is staying power. A lot of consumer AI companies look like they’re winning because they can buy users cheaply or go viral for a week. Then churn arrives and you realize you weren’t building a business; you were surfing a X trend.

The only distribution that matters long-term is distribution baked into the product’s outputs and behaviors. Social loops where creation leads to sharing, and sharing leads to new users. Collaboration loops where teams, couples, friend groups pull each other in and create retention through coordination. Community loops where belonging creates both acquisition and stickiness. Embedded loops where the product reappears without you begging for attention, because it’s integrated into the workflow. Content loops where the product naturally generates things that are searchable, discoverable, and continuously bring in new demand.

If the distribution plan is “we’ll run ads,” I treat that like a warning. It can work in stable categories where retention is genuinely high and the market doesn’t get commoditized weekly. In consumer AI, if you’re paying for attention without a compounding loop, you’re funding an experiment that may never settle into habit before the baseline shifts again.

You don’t need all five. Most products won’t. But you need at least one to be unreasonably strong, and ideally two reinforcing each other. Surface plus state is powerful. Artifacts plus identity is powerful. The fragile products are the ones that have none of these and are trying to live entirely on “we’re a better answer box.”

The North Star: Build What They Can’t, Won’t, or Shouldn’t Build

Even if you nail product craft, even if retention is decent, even if you find a wedge, you can still get deleted by a platform move that isn’t even hostile. It’s just the platform doing what platforms do, expanding the default interface and reclassifying behaviors. If you accept that as baseline, the goal shifts. You stop trying to build something they could build better eventually, and you start trying to build something they either can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t build.

“Can’t” is where most people overestimate themselves. Everyone says “they can’t do this because we have domain expertise,” and then you look closer and the “domain expertise” is basically a curated prompt and a nicer UI. That’s not a can’t. That’s a not-yet. A real “can’t” usually comes from ownership of non-linear, real-world workflow and state- stuff that’s annoying to integrate, hard to maintain, and deeply specific.

“Won’t” is less about technical difficulty and more about incentives. The platforms are chasing massive, horizontal markets. They’ll build the general version of everything. But they’re often unwilling to build very specific, operational, niche products because it fragments the experience and complicates positioning. This is where “small market” can actually be a feature if the market is small to them but large enough for you, and if the workflow is frequent enough to create habit and accumulation.

“Shouldn’t” is going to matter more than people are comfortable admitting. There are product categories that big platforms will approach cautiously because the reputational downside is asymmetric. Companion experiences are the obvious one: they can be incredibly sticky, but they pull you into questions around emotional reliance, minors, and safety. When you’re the default interface, you don’t get to be edgy with intimacy at scale without backlash.

The entire AI companion space has been pulled into public scrutiny. Character.AI has faced heavy criticism and legal pressure; Replika has faced allegations around targeting vulnerable users. From an investing lens, if you want to build a companion product, you cannot be naive about safety posture. You’re not shipping “engagement.” You’re shipping a relationship simulator. The best companion companies will look less like growth hacks and more like trust-and-safety companies with a kinky product layer.

The Humane story is also instructive here, not because hardware is inherently doomed, but because it’s a blunt reminder that “new surface” bets are unbelievably hard when you don’t achieve default status fast enough. Humane’s AI Pin shutting down and being sold off to HP is the extreme edge of consumer surface risk: if you don’t own distribution and you don’t become inevitable, the market doesn’t give you time to iterate into inevitability. Consumer doesn’t reward ambition. It rewards being where people already are, or becoming the place they can’t stop returning to.

Three Archetypes That Can Survive Bundling

When I compress this into something I can actually use on a random Tuesday when a founder sends me a deck, I keep coming back to three shapes.

Companion / Identity Products

This is the archetype that looks frivolous to “serious people” right up until you see the retention curve. It’s not an assistant. It’s a relationship-shaped product: a personality, a ritual, a place where the user is outsourcing company, reflection, affirmation, even intimacy. If you build this well, you don’t compete on raw capability; you compete on attachment. The user doesn’t come because the model is smartest. They come because the product feels like theirs, and because the interaction sits close to identity and emotional routine, the same psychological territory where switching costs are irrational.

This is both the most defensible and the most dangerous archetype. The big platforms can absolutely build companions technically. The reason I think this can be a “shouldn’t” moat is that doing it at scale drags a general-purpose brand into a risk profile it doesn’t want. When you’re the default interface, you don’t get to play fast and loose with intimacy, minors, mental health, and emotional dependency without attracting regulatory heat and reputational blowback.

From an investing lens, this archetype forces a very specific kind of seriousness. If you want to build a companion product, you cannot be naive about safety posture, age gating, moderation, and what you’re optimizing for. You’re not shipping “engagement.” You’re shipping a relationship simulator. The opportunity is real because relationships are sticky, but the failure mode is not “churn,” it’s backlash.

Capture Products

Less sexy in conversation but far more structurally sound. You own an input surface or a capture habit, camera, voice, keyboard, clipboard, screenshots, notes, receipts, and you use AI to turn scattered reality into structured state and artifacts. The product isn’t “answers.” It’s the pipeline from messy life to organised memory, plus the downstream outputs that become a library.

A food-tracking app that uses your camera to log meals and builds a structured picture of your diet. A voice-notes app that transcribes, tags, and organises your thoughts into a searchable second brain. A receipts app that photographs purchases and turns them into categorised spending data. These capture systems where your life accumulates, and leaving means losing the record.

The archetype extends into creation tools when the creation surface itself becomes the capture layer. Canva’s direction with Magic Studio is instructive: AI features embedded across the visual creation surface, so the user’s behaviour is not “go ask an assistant” but “make the thing where I always make things.” The user’s designs, templates, brand kits, and project history accumulate inside Canva. AI accelerates what they’re already doing, inside a home they already own. That’s capture-as-creation: the product becomes the place where work lives, not a momentary tool you visit.

The obvious pushback: can’t the default assistants also become capture tools? They can try. But capture is harder to bundle cleanly because it’s not just “generate.” It’s permissioning, integration, storage, organisation, retrieval, collaboration, export, and reliability across months. It’s the boring bits of plumbing that make state real. The assistant can do a lot in a single session. It’s much harder for it to become your system of record without becoming bloated, brittle, or invasive.

Outcome Products

This is where you pick a specific high-frequency behavior and you win by producing a measurable result reliably, and not just by sounding smart. It’s less “talk to me” and more “get me to the finish line.” The best outcome products are almost anti-chat. They take the model and hide it inside a workflow that ends in something you can count: lessons completed, workouts done, money saved, leads generated, habits built, language fluency improved.

Duolingo is a good example of what outcome-native looks like in an AI era. Duolingo Max added features like “Explain My Answer” and “Roleplay” powered by OpenAI, but the product is still fundamentally an outcome engine: it’s built around streaks, progression, lessons, and habit formation. The AI is not the product. The product is the system that keeps you showing up, measures your progress, and makes leaving costly because your history and momentum live there. The assistant can roleplay with you too, but it doesn’t automatically give you the architecture that turns practice into adherence over months. Outcome products win by owning the loop, not by owning the best model.

This archetype is also where a lot of “better ChatGPT for X” companies should probably evolve if they want to survive. If your thing is studying, don’t be an answer box, be a measurable study system. If your thing is fitness, don’t be a plan generator, be the place where workouts are executed, logged, adapted, and reviewed. If your thing is travel, don’t be an itinerary writer, be the place where bookings happen, updates land, preferences accumulate, and trips become a library.

I think Outcome might actually be the most underrated of the three archetypes. Companion gets all the thinkpiece attention because it’s provocative. Capture gets respect because it sounds like SaaS. But Outcome products, where intelligence is hidden inside a loop that produces measurable results, might be the most defensible because they’re the hardest to unbundle back into a chat interface. Duolingo works precisely because you don’t want to “chat with an AI about Spanish.” You want to complete the lesson, extend the streak, see the progress bar move. That loop ownership is genuinely hard to replicate in a general-purpose assistant.

So when I look at consumer AI now, these are the three shapes I’m pattern-matching for. Companion is identity-first and survives via attachment, but it comes with serious trust and safety obligations, and it may benefit from the fact that big platforms “shouldn’t” go all the way there at scale. Capture is habit-first and survives via state and artifacts, because it becomes the home for a user’s life or work and leaving is logistical pain. Outcome is result-first and survives via loop ownership, because it turns intelligence into adherence and measurable progress rather than clever conversation.

Everything that’s basically “better ChatGPT for X” is guilty until proven innocent. If your product is a nicer answer box, your destiny is to become either

• a tile inside the default assistant’s surface, or

• a churn machine that lives off novelty until the baseline catches up. You can still build a business in either scenario, but you’re not building a moat.

The Scorecard

When I’m trying to decide whether something is a company or a very well-designed demo, I can’t stay in theory. Theory makes everything sound plausible. You can defend anything with enough adjectives. So I force myself into a scorecard that’s deliberately hostile to “but the UX is nicer.” It assumes the platform is going to keep expanding its default surface. It assumes distribution can be taken away overnight if you’re building on someone else’s rails. It assumes that “we’ll ship faster” is a tactic, not protection, because the platform can ship slower than you and still win if it ships to the starting surface with a built-in distribution advantage.

These are the fifteen questions I now try to answer before I let myself feel excited. If a product can’t survive fifteen minutes of honest interrogation, it definitely won’t survive the next platform cycle.

Surface & Distribution

1. Where does the user start their day, and are you already there, or are you asking them to remember you exist?

2. If you removed all paid marketing tomorrow, what organic loop would still bring new users next month?

3. What happens to your product if the platform you’re distributed through (App Store, WhatsApp, the ChatGPT plugin directory) changes its policies or buries you?

4. Is your distribution channel one where you set the rules, or one where you’re a tenant who can be evicted?

5. Does using your product naturally create something shareable, searchable, or referable that brings in new users without you asking?

State & Artifacts

6. What’s left behind after a week of use, and would migrating it to a competitor feel like moving houses or exporting a spreadsheet?

7. Is your “memory” actually structured state that changes outcomes, or is it just chat logs with a longer context window?

8. Do artifacts accumulate inside your product in a way that makes the next session easier, faster, or more personalized than the first?

9. If a user asked to export everything and take it elsewhere, how much would break or become useless outside your system?

10. Does your product get meaningfully better for the individual user over three months? Not through model improvements, but through accumulated personal context?

Defensibility & Moat

11. If the foundation model company ships seventy percent of your functionality as a native mode next quarter, why do users still come to you? What remains uniquely true?

12. Is your defensibility based on something you’ve built, or on something the platforms haven’t gotten around to yet?

13. Which part of your product sits in the “can’t / won’t / shouldn’t” zone for the model vendors, and is that a durable position or a temporary gap?

14. What would it cost OpenAI or Anthropic in focus, complexity, brand risk, or organizational willpower to do what you’re doing, and why would they choose not to?

15. In three years, if your company is successful, will you have built compounding assets (data, workflows, network effects, trust) or will you still be racing to stay ahead of the next model release?

The scorecard isn’t asking “is the product good?” Plenty of good products fail in consumer because “good” is not the same as “default,” and “default” is the only moat consumer has ever truly respected. It’s asking whether your product is becoming a place where a user’s life accumulates, or whether it’s a moment they visit when they remember.

That difference sounds subtle. It is not subtle in practice. Moment-products live on conversion and novelty and churn. Accumulation-products live on compounding and inertia and “my stuff is here.” The first kind can look like traction in the short term. The second kind is what turns into a business you can hold through turbulence.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying consumer AI is uninvestable. I’m not saying every consumer AI company will fail. I’m saying that the old heuristics, ie “great UX + faster shipping + slightly better outputs”, don’t produce conviction in a market where the baseline moves weekly and the default surface is actively trying to swallow workflows. The bar has to move. And the new bar is: does this product stay true even after bundling, because it doesn’t just answer, it accumulates?

So my filter is simple: if the platform ships 70% of your core functionality tomorrow, do users still come to you because they have to, not because they remember to?

If yes, you’re building something real. If no, you’re building a prompt.

And prompts are free.

This week’s reading kept circling around a different proposition: that the systems we navigate, whether markets, cities, platforms, or families, are shaped by forces we can’t see and often can’t name. The compounding of early advantages, the laundering of status through taste, the way a technology designed without you will eventually be used against you.

The most striking version of this came from an essay on Delhi’s elite. The argument: what we call “sophistication” and “taste” is really just algorithmic head start. The urban upper-caste kids who were online in the 2000s built up a decade of data that Meta and Google now use to push curated content. Everyone who came later is playing catch-up, not because they lack intelligence or ambition, but because the algorithm has a longer memory of someone else. Caste, laundered through vibes. The memo about Mokobara luggage and matcha and pickleball went out years ago and you just weren’t on the list.

Invisible structures don’t announce themselves. They present as merit, as taste, as the natural order. The VCs who insist they can identify billion-dollar companies at seed stage aren’t lying, exactly, because they believe it. But the essay on power law this week points out the category error: you can’t reverse-engineer a lottery winner by analysing the ticket before the draw. The power law is a system property, not a selection tool. Treating it as predictive rather than descriptive leads you to fund the obvious (the same LLM layer, the same quick-commerce model) while the actual outliers slip past looking like black car services for rich people or websites for couch-surfing.

Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books, asks the question that haunts all of this: does knowing help? Can insight produce change? Her essay traces psychoanalysis from Freud’s Vienna to Fanon’s Algeria, through Reich and the sex-pol movement, through Judith Butler and the war on “gender ideology.” The answer she arrives at is uncomfortable: probably not. Insight is necessary but not sufficient. The gap between describing the world and changing it is not bridged by better descriptions.

And yet we keep describing. This week: Japan as a preview of American decline, not a cultural quirk. Women’s scepticism of AI as pattern recognition, not technophobia. The grief of never becoming a grandparent, except the “grief” is about having to parent the children you were hoping to spoil. A divorce essay that refuses to name villains because the pressure to produce clean narratives is itself part of the violence. Indian wedding rituals traced back to colonial trade routes, the marigold arriving from Mexico via Portuguese traders and becoming, within a few centuries, indispensable to Hindu ceremony.

Even TikTok, finally cleaving itself from ByteDance- the structural change took years of political theatre to produce. The mechanics were always clear. Oracle gets 45%. The narrative had to catch up.

What does it mean to navigate systems you can’t fully see? To play games whose rules are written in a language you’re still learning? To know that the map is not the territory, and that the mapmakers had a head start?

Let’s find out.

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1. The Impossible Patient London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/amia-srinivasan/the-impossible-patient

The standout piece of the week: a 10,000-word essay delivered as the first of this year’s LRB Winter Lectures, tracing the return of psychoanalysis to left political thought.

Srinivasan’s argument is layered. The unconscious never left the scene because it sets the scene. But there’s renewed interest in Freudian vocabulary as a diagnostic tool for the current moment: why do people support authoritarian strongmen? Why does the war on “gender ideology” generate such libidinal intensity? Why do Israeli citizens perform self-defeating operations under the sign of “safety”?

The essay moves through Freud’s Vienna (where psychoanalysis was born of political retreat after the collapse of liberal hegemony), through Reich and the sex-pol movement, through Fanon’s psychiatric hospitals in Algeria, and lands on the question that haunts all politically-inflected psychoanalysis: can insight produce change?

Freud’s answer was that it could, for individuals, through the therapeutic encounter. But politics doesn’t offer the controlled conditions of the analyst’s couch. When you diagnose someone politically, when you suggest their Zionism is trauma, their transphobia is projection, you’re met not with working-through but with resistance. The knife cuts both ways.

Srinivasan finds hope in organising rather than analysis: the praxis of Ella Baker, the craft of having “hard conversations” that aim not at insight but at collective action. The psyche, she suggests, can flow from action. Sometimes you become the subject who can stand up by simply standing up.

What I got out of it: The distinction between knowing the world and changing it is older than Marx, but Srinivasan’s formulation is the sharpest I’ve read in years. The essay is also a corrective to the therapeutic turn in politics: the belief that if we just understood one another better, things would be fine. They wouldn’t. Understanding is necessary but not sufficient. At some point, the work of organising has to begin.

2. Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like Drops in the Ocean — Ellie

Drops in the Ocean

Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like

One of the more bizarre and traumatic incidents in Japanese pop culture was when music group AKB48’s Minami Minegishi publicly shaved her head in penance for breaking a band rule…

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6 months ago · 4063 likes · 258 comments · Ellie

The argument: Japan isn’t a cultural quirk. It’s a preview. The “weirdness” that Western observers attribute to Japanese culture is actually the downstream consequence of economic structures that America is now replicating.

The timeline: Japan’s bubble burst in 1991. The “Lost Decade” became the Lost Decades. Wages peaked in 1997 and haven’t recovered. Irregular employment (the gig economy by another name) became normalised. Dating requires disposable income, a stable schedule, and housing privacy, all of which became scarce.

The parallels to America are point-by-point. Evil jobs (ブラック企業) that enforce unpaid overtime and surveillance? Amazon drivers denied bathroom breaks. A loneliness epidemic and collapsing birth rates? Check. Convenience food as a substitute for home life? Sysco slop. Parasocial relationships replacing actual intimacy? Influencer culture monetising the same emotional deprivation that idol culture does.

In a functional society, basic human milestones are incentivised. In late-stage capitalism, they become financially punishing. The incentive structure flips. What should be rewarded is penalised, and what should be discouraged becomes adaptive.

What I got out of it: The essay resists the “Japan is weird” framing and asks instead: what structural conditions produce this weirdness? The answer turns out to be familiar. The lesson for Americans is that the Japanese didn’t choose atomisation and parasociality. They adapted to an economy that made real connection logistically impossible.

3. Why Women Aren’t Swooning Over AI Like Men Are The Noösphere — Katie Jagielnicka

The Noösphere

There's a Reason Women Aren't Swooning Over AI Like Men Are

The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our …

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6 months ago · 5272 likes · 289 comments · Katie Jagielnicka

Women have 22% lower odds of using generative AI than men. Only 31% of Anthropic’s users are women. The standard explanation is exposure and training, since women are underrepresented in STEM. But the Harvard study finds the gap persists even when women are explicitly given opportunities to learn AI tools.

Jagielnicka’s alternative explanation: women are paying attention. The first time many women encountered AI was through deepfakes, as non-consensual sexual imagery overwhelmingly targeting women and girls. By the end of 2020, 95% of deepfake videos were sexual, 90% featured women. Tools explicitly built to “nudify” women are freely available. Harassment campaigns against women are automated.

Beyond the abuse cases, there’s the systemic bias. AI recruitment tools recommend men over women for higher-paying jobs, even with identical qualifications. AI chatbots advise women to ask for lower salaries. Healthcare AI downplays women’s symptoms. When asked to generate an image of a “manager,” the models produce men.

And there’s the double bind: women who use AI are judged as less competent than men doing identical work. A recent study found that female engineers faced a 13% competence penalty for using AI assistance, compared to 6% for men.

The conclusion: women aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-smart. They see the cracks in the techno-optimist fantasy because the technology was built without them.

What I got out of it: The essay reframes “women don’t like technology” as “women accurately perceive when technology doesn’t like them.”

4. Reasons Why You Will Never Make It in Delhi Karthika’s Substack, Karthika Rajmohan

Karthika's Substack

Reasons why you will never make it in Delhi

Delhi is the opposite of the American dream. When America promises you that the only thing between you and success is hard work, Delhi owns its power structures with panache. Delhi makes no pretence of judging people purely on merit. Job interviews ask you for your father’s occupation. Landlords want your parents’ identity proof. Neighbour uncles ask yo…

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6 months ago · 86 likes · 34 comments · Karthika Rajmohan

Delhi sells a feudal dream: a “bevvy of help” to tend to your every need, body men to carry your lunchbox, maids to hand you coffee. But who actually gets to live that dream? Rajmohan identifies three barriers to entry.

The first is money, obvious and widely acknowledged.

The second is what she calls “Urban Savarna Soft Power” (USSP): the unspoken memo about what’s cool. Mokobara luggage. Matcha. Pickleball. The algorithm delivers these signals to those already in the know. But who gets in the know?

The answer, Rajmohan argues, is caste by another name. The urban upper-caste kids who were online in the 2000s built up a decade of data that Meta and Google now use to push curated content. The algorithm has their “base.” Everyone who came later, after the 2016 Jio data democratisation, is still catching up. What we call “taste” and “sophistication” is really just algorithmic head start.

The third barrier is genetic lottery: generational wealth, pre-independence zamindari status, and bureaucratic lineages. No amount of USSP acquisition will get you past this wall.

The aspiring class, having mastered USSP, sheds whatever liberal values they picked up online and immediately adopts feudal signifiers. They refuse to enter the office without their man Friday. They won’t serve guests without full-time help. The cycle reproduces itself.

What I got out of it: A brutally clear-eyed dissection of how class works in India, and how the algorithm, far from being neutral, launders caste through “taste.” The essay is specific to Delhi but the mechanism generalises.

5. The Book That Remade America Arc Magazine, Daniel Oppenheimer

Arc Magazine

The Book that Remade America

This is an excerpt of the book Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (2019) by Daniel Oppenheimer. This excerpt was published on Thursday, December 18 in Arc Magazine…

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5 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Arc Magazine and Daniel Oppenheimer

Norman Podhoretz, who died this week at 95, was the last of the New York Intellectuals and the last of the original neoconservatives. This excerpt from Oppenheimer’s 2016 book traces how Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir Making It, and its brutal critical reception, reshaped his politics.

Making It was supposed to be a literary act: an honest account of ambition. But Podhoretz was savaged by friends and colleagues. He retreated, drank more, grew depressed. And then he began to reconstruct what had happened.

The reconstruction: the book wasn’t primarily literary. It was political. A “Yes” to success and ambition, but more meaningfully a “No” to the emerging radicalism of the late 1960s. The critics weren’t responding to the book’s literary failures; they were punishing his dissent.

This reframing, from wounded author to principled contrarian, became the template for Podhoretz’s later career. He’d been shown that the liberal intelligentsia couldn’t tolerate deviation. He reorganised himself around the fight.

What I got out of it: A case study in how rejection can become identity. Whether Podhoretz’s reframing was accurate is less interesting than the fact that it was generative- it gave him something to fight for. The essay is also a useful reminder that neoconservatism didn’t emerge from nowhere; it emerged from specific wounds and specific rooms.

6. When Does a Divorce Begin? The Yale Review, Anahid Nersessian https://yalereview.org/article/anahid-nersessian-divorce

A personal essay structured around a book review that never quite happens. Nersessian was asked to review recent memoirs and novels by women, but what she writes instead is about her own divorce, or rather, about the impossibility of writing honestly about a marriage ending.

The essay opens with epigraphs about love, lying, speech, and silence. Epigraphs, she notes, are “envious”. A residue of wishful thinking, a way of signalling what the writing might have been. They’re also fake-outs. The real thing toddles in, uncertain.

The details are precise: she wore a white cotton nightgown from the Marché aux Puces on her wedding day. She told her therapist she wasn’t afraid to get married because she could always get divorced. She didn’t hide her ambivalence from her husband, and this hurt him very much.

The essay weaves through Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, through the experience of losing custody of mutual friends, through the strangeness of watching the shared condition of marriage dismantle itself overnight.

What I got out of it: The essay is elliptical and refuses resolution, which is the point. Divorce doesn’t have a clean beginning or end. The narrative pressure to produce one, to identify villains, to explain, is itself part of what makes the experience so disorienting.

7. The Rise of Grandfamilies The New York Times — Catherine Pearson https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/magazine/grandparents-families-children-kids.html

A reported piece on a phenomenon that doesn’t fit any of the available narratives: nearly 2.7 million grandparents in America are now primary caregivers for their grandchildren. Not babysitting. Not helping out. Parenting, because their adult children can’t.

The reasons are various and grim: addiction, incarceration, mental illness, economic collapse. The opioid crisis is a through-line. In New Mexico, 8% of all children are in kinship care arrangements, more than double the national average. The report from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation found that drug addiction is the biggest driver.

Kinship caregivers receive a fraction of the support that licensed foster parents get. Foster parents receive monthly stipends, Medicaid coverage, and ongoing case management. Grandparents who step in to keep their grandchildren out of the system get almost nothing. No TANF if their income is too high, no food stamps, no subsidised childcare. Many are on fixed incomes. Many burn through retirement savings. Many return to work in their 60s and 70s to make ends meet.

The emotional weight is compounded by the circumstances. These grandparents are grieving their own children, watching them struggle with addiction or sit in prison, while simultaneously raising the next generation. They carry guilt, anger, exhaustion. They navigate school systems that have changed beyond recognition, help with homework on devices they don’t understand, manage the trauma their grandchildren carry from disrupted early childhoods.

Grandfamilies save the government an estimated $10.5 billion annually by keeping children out of foster care. The thanks they get is a bureaucratic maze and means-tested programs designed for different circumstances.

What I got out of it: The framing of “grandparents raising grandchildren” as heartwarming obscures the structural failure underneath. These aren’t families choosing multigenerational living for its benefits. They’re families absorbing the fallout of systems that don’t work, and receiving almost no support for doing so.

8. Guests of Honor Orion Magazine https://orionmagazine.org/article/guests-of-honor/

A lyrical meditation on the botanical elements of Hindu wedding rituals, the turmeric, the marigolds, the paddy stalks, the bael patra, and the colonial trade routes through which some of them arrived.

The marigold, ubiquitous in Hindu ceremony, came from the New World only a few centuries ago. “Mary’s gold” arrived via Spanish and Portuguese traders. It’s now a cliché: strings of marigold draped across pillars, thrown at the bride and groom as they circle the ceremonial fire. But the reminder is useful: rituals that present themselves as “ancient” and “timeless” are in fact edited, adapted, hybrid.

The essay moves through Goddess Lakshmi’s footprints drawn in rice powder, through the paddy stalks that symbolise harvest abundance, through the Gandharva marriage of Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam, a marriage performed without rituals, in the forest, where the heroine is described as “delicate as a newly-opened jasmine.”

What I got out of it: A reminder that even the most “traditional” ceremonies are layered with history, trade, and adaptation. The marigold came from Mexico. The ritual absorbed it. Tradition is not stasis; it’s slow-motion editing.

9. The Map Is Not the Territory: Why VC Misunderstands the Power Law Alphanome.ai https://www.alphanome.ai/post/the-map-is-not-the-territory-why-venture-capital-misunderstands-the-power-law

The argument: venture capital treats the power law as a selection mechanism when it’s actually a system property. Returns are dominated by a tiny percentage of winners, that’s true. But you cannot reverse-engineer a lottery winner by analysing the ticket before the draw.

The consequences of this misunderstanding: VCs demand that startups look like giants on day one. They build TAM models showing $10 billion outcomes. They flood capital into “consensus” bets. And they miss the actual outliers, which rarely look like fund-returners at the time.

Uber was a black car service for rich people. Airbnb was for people who couldn’t afford hotels. Coinbase was for bitcoin hobbyists. These companies were passed over precisely because they didn’t fit the template.

The alternative: VCs should be farmers, not snipers. Plant seeds in fertile soil (uncapped markets) with hardy DNA (great founders). You can’t predict which tree will block out the sun, but the forest will produce one.

What I got out of it: A useful corrective to VC mythology. The power law is real, but using it as a selection tool is a category error. You’re not identifying winners; you’re constructing narratives about why something might be big. Those narratives tend to converge on the obvious, which is precisely where the returns aren’t.

10. TikTok Agrees to Deal to Cede Control of US Business TechCrunch, Lucas Ropek https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/18/tiktok-agrees-to-deal-to-cede-control-of-u-s-business-to-american-investor-group/

The long-anticipated structural change finally happened: TikTok has reached a deal to cede a substantial portion of its US operation to American investors. Oracle, Silverlake, and MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based AI investment firm) will together own 45%, while ByteDance retains nearly 20%.

The closing date is January 22, 2026. The new entity, “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC”, will oversee data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurance.

The deal parallels the language in Trump’s September executive order. It’s the culmination of years of political pressure, national security hand-wringing, and legislative theatrics.

What I got out of it: A reminder that political theatre and structural change operate on different timelines. The TikTok saga produced endless takes about sovereignty, censorship, and geopolitics. The actual resolution is a joint venture with Oracle.

11. Get Ready for AI Media The AI Ad Economy, Debra Aho Williamson

The AI Ad Economy

Get Ready for AI Media

AI is becoming a media channel faster than anyone expected…

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6 months ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Debra Aho Williamson

The prediction: 2026 is the year AI platforms join the media plan. Just as social media went from a $1.2 billion afterthought in 2007 to a $300 billion channel today, AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot are becoming advertising destinations.

The numbers: ChatGPT is on track to reach 1 billion weekly users by the end of 2025, just three years after launch. For comparison, Facebook took more than eight years to reach 1 billion monthly users.

Google is already showing ads in AI Overviews. Microsoft’s Copilot has ads. ChatGPT has been testing app suggestions that looked suspiciously like promotions (OpenAI pulled the feature after backlash). The pattern is clear: AI is becoming a discovery channel, and where discovery goes, advertising follows.

The strategic implication: brands will need to optimise for AI visibility across five fronts: content marketing, websites, listings platforms, social channels, and community/review sites. The same game that SEO played with Google is about to be replayed with LLMs.

What I got out of it: The piece is useful for anyone thinking about marketing in the next few years. But the larger observation is structural: AI companies need revenue, and advertising is the obvious answer. The user experience will change accordingly.

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There’s a line in the Srinivasan essay I keep returning to: “The will to greater and greater theoretical mastery can itself be a form of resistance to the real work of practical transformation.”

It’s a warning to academics and intellectuals, primarily. But it generalises. We love to map the territory. To name the power law, the USSP, the algorithmic caste system, the libidinal investment in genocide. Naming feels like knowing. And knowing feels like doing.

It isn’t.

Fanon learned this in Blida-Joinville, treating French torturers and Algerian rebels in the same hospital. He understood, psychoanalytically, that colonialism was mutilating everyone, the colonist and colonised alike. The insight was accurate. It was also useless as a guide to action. When the Algerian revolution came, it came through violence and politics, not therapy. Fanon joined the FLN. He didn’t offer the French servicemen a second session.

But here’s what stayed with me: even Fanon kept writing. The Wretched of the Earth was dictated in the final months of his life, while he was dying of leukaemia. He knew that insight alone couldn’t produce liberation. He also couldn’t stop trying to articulate what liberation might look like. The diagnosis and the struggle weren’t opposites — they were in tension, and he held the tension until the end.

Maybe that’s the thing. The essays this week aren’t maps that will get you where you’re going. They’re more like weather reports: useful for knowing what you’re walking into, not for walking itself. The Delhi essay won’t get you past the third barrier. The Japan essay won’t rebuild American third places. The AI essay won’t make the algorithm treat women fairly.

But they do something else. They name the fog. And sometimes, when you’re in the fog, that’s not nothing. It’s the difference between thinking you’re lost because you’re stupid and knowing you’re lost because the terrain is genuinely hard to navigate.

The Srinivasan answer to “what comes after insight?” is organising: the craft of conversation, the practice of collective action, the willingness to believe that the psyche can follow the body. Ella Baker, travelling through the American South in the 1940s, understood something the theorists didn’t: you don’t change someone’s mind and then ask them to act. You invite them to act, and the acting changes the mind. “We’ve both got good dresses.”

I think about that in the context of the AI scepticism essay. Women aren’t avoiding AI because they don’t understand it. They’re avoiding it because they understand it fine and the cost-benefit doesn’t work. What changes that calculus? Not better explanations of how transformers work. Not reassurances that bias is being addressed. The calculus changes when the actual risks shift, when the tools stop being used against them, when the systems are designed with them in mind.

That’s not insight work. That’s power work. And power work is slow, collective, and often invisible. The opposite of the solo genius hitting on the billion-dollar idea.

The VC essay makes the same point from the other direction. The power law is real, but using it as a selection tool is cope. You’re not identifying winners; you’re constructing narratives about why something might be big. The actual outliers didn’t look like winners at the time. They looked weird. The pattern recognition that VCs pride themselves on is precisely what screens them out.

So what do you do? You plant seeds. You tend soil. You accept that you can’t predict which tree will block out the sun, only that the forest will produce one. It’s an argument for humility, for diversification, for resisting the narrative pressure to have already figured it out.

Which brings me back to the divorce essay, and the wedding essay, and the grandfamilies piece. All of them, in different ways, are about the violence of premature closure: the demand that a marriage produce a clean story, that a ritual present itself as timeless, that a generation’s choices be legible as either virtue or betrayal.

The marigold came from Mexico. The ritual absorbed it. The grandparents raising their grandchildren didn’t choose this, they’re absorbing the fallout of addiction and incarceration and economic collapse, and the system that should support them offers means-tested programs designed for different circumstances. The divorce has no beginning because the pressure to name one is itself part of what makes divorce so disorienting.

Maybe the honest position is: we’re in the middle of something. The systems are shifting. The sediment is still settling. The maps we’re drawing will be obsolete by the time they’re printed.

In the meantime: read the weather reports. Name the fog. And then, because knowing isn’t doing, find someone to organise with.

Until next week.

And because it is small, it becomes a perfect site for punishment.

The moment the wanting appears, the courtroom convenes. Not a dramatic courtroom, just the familiar panel of internal voices. Do you need it. Is it sensible. Wouldn’t something cheaper do. The questions carry the same rhythm as your well-meaning elders, which is why they get to wear the costume of virtue.

This internal jury is rarely about the money. It’s about the permission.

A woman’s shopping cart can feel like a confessional box. Not because she’s buying anything scandalous, but because wanting itself still feels like something that requires explanation. You add the item. You stare at it. You perform the ritual pause that pretends to be prudence, though it is often closer to fear. And then you do what modern prudence looks like: you open another tab.

The original sits there with the infuriating calm of a thing that knows exactly what it is. The dupe appears with eager helpfulness: same look, same vibe, half the price, no guilt. It is framed as intelligence. As maturity.

But what it is really offering is innocence. A way to exit the moment without being indicted by your own desire.

You can have something nice, it whispers, as long as you don’t look like someone who expects nice things.

The dupe is not simply cheaper. The dupe is simpler. It arrives with an alibi pre-attached. It lets you want without fully owning the wanting, lets you participate in pleasure while still performing restraint. It lets you keep your self-image intact: sensible, grounded, not that kind of woman.

When you choose it, you feel relief. You have solved the problem. You have been good.

Later, you will discover the particular cruelty of “fine.” Fine is functional. Fine is defensible. Fine is not what you wanted. The strap doesn’t sit right, the hardware looks too shiny, the colour pulls slightly wrong in daylight. Nothing is technically broken, which means you can’t even be righteously angry. You can only feel, in small recurring pulses, that dull recognition: this isn’t it. This isn’t the feeling I came here for.

But you keep using it. Because the most humiliating thing about settling is admitting you settled.

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The Alibi

“It’s basically the same.”

You hear it in dressing rooms and Sephora aisles and group chats, in the small pause before someone hits “place order.” It sounds like a shrug. But it turns desire into a decision you can defend.

Because “basically the same” is not a claim about material. It is a claim about character. It means: I’m not the kind of woman who needs the real thing. I’m not dramatic, I’m not wasteful, I’m not trying too hard. Don’t audit me.

The audit is always implied. This is why women pre-emptively narrate their purchases even when nobody has asked. The story is rarely “I wanted it.” The story comes dressed in justification. “It was on sale.” “I’ll use it constantly.” “I’ve been thinking about it for months.” The point is not the argument itself. The point is to signal that you are responsible enough to be left alone.

Listen to the way women talk after buying something nice. The voice changes. Drops, or laughs, or adds “don’t judge me” so reflexively it functions as punctuation. There is a particular laugh women use when they are about to confess something they expect to be punished for. They will deploy it even among friends who adore them, even in rooms where no one is keeping score, because the habit is no longer about whether anyone is actually judging. The habit is about the possibility of judgment, and possibility is enough to shape a life.

Men do not do this. Men buy expensive things and call them hobbies.

Sometimes the alibi is external. It’s not “I bought it” but “my husband got it for me.” “It was a gift.” “I had credit card points.” The object remains the same, but the math shifts when you can attach the purchase to a system outside yourself. You did not choose yourself; someone else sanctioned it. Someone else can be held responsible if anyone decides to make a fuss.

In India, there is a specific performance attached to any comfort that is not shared. We are permitted to be generous, dutiful, sacrificial. We are not permitted to be self-indulgent, which is often just another word for self-directed. The difference between spending on a mother’s health checkup and spending on your own massage. One earns applause. The other invites questions. Same money, different verdict.

So the dupe becomes the safest way to keep the comfort while keeping the halo.

Even the language around dupes is moral. “Smart buy.” “Steal.” “Worth it.” It’s framed as rebellion against an expensive, greedy world, but for women it is more often submission. The compromise you make with the invisible presence standing behind you, ready to comment on your taste, your priorities, your seriousness.

And “basically the same” is a survival tactic. It is how you acquire something and still remain the kind of woman people leave alone.

But alibis do not feel like joy. They feel like relief.

Relief is the feeling of getting away with something. Relief is not satisfaction. It is the sensation of staying within bounds, of not being scolded. This is why the dupe begins disappointing you almost immediately. Not because it is always bad (some dupes are excellent), but because the purchase was never really about the object. It was about the performance: I am sensible. I am good. I am not too much.

When you buy something as a defence, you end up living with a defence. And a defence makes a life smaller.

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The Economy of Guilt

Who profits when women feel guilty about wanting things?

The dupe industry is not an accident. It is a market that has learned to arbitrage female shame. Scroll through Instagram and you will find an entire ecosystem devoted to “affordable alternatives”. Accounts with millions of followers whose entire value proposition is helping women avoid the psychic cost of buying what they actually want. The language is cheerful and sisterly. Why spend ₹50,000 when you can get the same look for ₹3,000? The implication is that wanting the original was foolish, a little embarrassing, a mark of poor financial hygiene.

The influencer who shows you the dupe is not saving you money. She is saving you from judgment and monetizing the rescue. Affiliate links, brand partnerships, sponsored posts; there is real revenue in helping women feel virtuous about settling. The guilt is the product. The dupe is just the delivery mechanism.

Brands understand this too. The mid-market is now designed with dupes in mind. A luxury house releases a silhouette; within weeks, the fast-fashion supply chain produces a version close enough to satisfy the want but cheap enough to evade the guilt. The original sells to women who have made peace with their desires; the copy sells to everyone still negotiating.

And so a woman finds herself standing between two nearly identical objects, one of which costs ten times more than the other, and the market has arranged things so that choosing the cheaper one feels like intelligence rather than loss. She is being congratulated for her practicality when what has actually happened is that an industry has found a way to convert her self-doubt into margin.

The economy of guilt extends beyond products. Consider the financial services marketed specifically to women: the savings apps with pink interfaces, the investment platforms that emphasize “safety” over growth, the retirement calculators that frame ambition as risk. The pitch is always the same. We understand that you’re nervous, that money feels complicated, that you need hand-holding. The underlying assumption is that female financial anxiety is natural rather than cultivated. That women are constitutionally more risk-averse, rather than systematically taught to be.

There is money in keeping women uncertain. Uncertain women buy dupes. Uncertain women accept the first salary offered. Uncertain women stay in jobs and relationships that are “fine.” Certainty is expensive, not because it requires wealth, but because it requires you to stop being profitable to the people who benefit from your hesitation.

The machinery is visible once you know where to look. A woman searches “best leather bag under 10,000” and the algorithm takes note. Now she will be shown dupes for months. Her feed will fill with “look for less” content, with “dupe alerts,” with cheerful women holding two objects side by side and asking can you even tell the difference? The question is rhetorical. The answer is supposed to be no. But the real answer, that one of those objects was chosen and the other was settled for, is never part of this dialouge.

What interests me is the tone. Dupe culture is never pitched as compromise. It is pitched as cleverness, as a way of beating the system, of being too smart to be fooled by branding. The woman who buys the original is implicitly positioned as a sucker, someone who fell for marketing, who lacks the critical thinking to see through the scam of luxury. The dupe buyer, by contrast, is savvy. She is a researcher. She has done the work.

But this framing serves the market, not the woman. It turns a limitation into an identity. It makes settling feel like winning. And it ensures that the next time she wants something, the same internal negotiation will begin, because she has now built a self-concept around not wanting the real thing.

The guilt has been converted into pride.

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The Class Question

The dupe trap, as I am articulating it, is not primarily a story about economic constraint. It is a story about psychological constraint, the kind that operates even when, perhaps especially when, a woman could afford the original.

This distinction matters because collapsing them is dishonest. For a woman genuinely stretched between rent and groceries, choosing the cheaper version is not a failure of self-permission. It is math. The dupe, in that context, is not a trap but a tool. A way of participating in the aesthetics of a life you cannot yet afford, without derailing the life you are trying to build. There is dignity in that. There is even pleasure in it: the resourcefulness of making do, the creativity of finding alternatives, the satisfaction of not being excluded from beauty simply because beauty is expensive.

The trap I am describing is different. It is what happens when a woman can afford the thing she wants, and still cannot let herself have it.

This is a middle-class affliction, in the specific sense that the Indian middle class has a tortured relationship with comfort. We are close enough to scarcity to remember it, close enough to wealth to see it, and caught in a strange purgatory where spending on yourself still feels like tempting fate. The money might be there, but the permission is not, because permission was never granted by the previous generation, and so it does not feel yours to grant yourself.

I have watched women with robust salaries and healthy savings agonize over a ₹5,000 purchase as though it would bankrupt them. The agony is not about the five thousand rupees. It is about what spending it means, that you have become someone who expects things, that you have drifted from your origins, that you are no longer the kind of person your family raised you to be. The money is there. The story will not allow it to be spent.

And so middle-class women develop a particular virtuosity: spending freely on others while starving themselves. The generous daughter, the dutiful wife, the thoughtful friend, always able to find budget for someone else’s comfort, always hesitating at her own.

There is a version of the dupe trap that has nothing to do with what you can afford and everything to do with what you believe you deserve. And that belief was installed long before you ever had a salary.

The confusion between these two situations, genuine constraint and psychological constraint, is part of what makes the trap so effective. A woman who could afford the original will tell herself she is being “practical,” borrowing the language of necessity to disguise what is actually happening: a failure of permission. She will say “it’s not worth it” when what she means is “I’m not worth it.” She will say “I don’t need it” when what she means is “I don’t trust my own wanting enough to act on it.”

And because the dupe exists, she never has to confront this directly. The dupe lets her have something without having to decide she deserves it. The dupe lets her participate in wanting without fully committing to the want. It is a hedge against her own desire, a way of saying yes and no at the same time.

This is why more money does not automatically solve the problem. I have seen women’s salaries double and their spending guilt remain perfectly intact. The money changes; the story does not. The internal committee still convenes. The same questions still arise: Who do you think you are? Why do you need this? Wouldn’t something simpler do?

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Fine as Inheritance

Watch a mother take a daughter shopping and you will see the curriculum. Not in what is said but in what is modeled. The way the mother handles price tags, the small shake of the head, the redirection toward something “more practical.” The daughter learns that wanting is a negotiation. That the technically-true statement we can’t afford it often means something closer to we don’t do that.

This is how “fine” becomes hereditary.

A mother who has spent decades adjusting to in-laws, to scarcity, to a husband’s moods, to her own deferred ambitions, teaches adjustment as survival. She does not mean to limit her daughter. She means to protect her from being seen as demanding, from wanting things the world will not give easily. The lesson is delivered as love. It is received as permission denied.

And so women learn to appraise their own desires the way customs officers appraise luggage: what are you carrying, where did you get it, do you have documentation? By adulthood, most women do not even notice they are doing it. They simply experience their own wanting as already-filtered, already-reduced, pre-approved for passage.

The Indian daughter inherits a specific version of this. She inherits the notion that comfort must be earned through suffering. That you cannot want ease until you have paid sufficient dues. She inherits the idea that her parents did without, and therefore she should feel guilty about having. She inherits the mathematics of scarcity even when scarcity no longer applies: we saved so you could have, which curdles into how dare you have without saving.

The guilt is the inheritance. The dupe is just where it shows up at checkout.

Women also police each other. The friend who raises an eyebrow at a purchase. The sister who asks “how much?” in a tone that is already a verdict. The colleague who praises you for being “so low-maintenance,” which is a compliment that functions as a fence. These are women who have made their own peace with deprivation and cannot watch someone else exit the contract without feeling betrayed.

This is the inability to witness another woman’s freedom without experiencing it as a judgment on your own captivity. And so women keep each other small, not out of cruelty but out of a shared wound that has never been named clearly enough to heal.

The only way out is to recognize the inheritance for what it is, as someone else’s scarcity, someone else’s rules, and to decide, deliberately, that you are not obligated to carry it forward. This is harder than it sounds. It can feel like arrogance. It can feel like you are abandoning the women who came before you.

But continuing their deprivation is not loyalty. It is just more deprivation.

The most insidious part is that the inheritance often skips a generation before revealing itself. A woman whose mother sacrificed everything will sometimes rebel. Will spend freely, will refuse the old guilt, will declare herself free. But then she has a daughter. The old programming resurfaces, not as a conscious philosophy but as a flinch. She finds herself saying the same things her mother said. Do you really need that? We have things at home. Maybe for your birthday.

And so the inheritance continues, not through explicit teaching but through a thousand small moments. A raised eyebrow. A redirected hand. A “let’s look at the sale section first.” A tone of voice that signals you are asking for too much without ever using those words. The daughter may not remember any single incident, but she will carry the sum of them into every store, every negotiation, every moment of wanting for the rest of her life.

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What Men Get to Call It

Consider, for contrast, what happens when a man wants something expensive.

He wants a watch. The want is not filtered through a jury; it is simply declared. He researches. He compares. He discusses it with other men who also want watches, and these conversations are not confessional; they are hobbyist. The watch is an interest. The interest is a personality trait. The purchase, when it comes, is an investment: in quality, in craftsmanship, in something that will last, possibly appreciate. No one asks him to justify the wanting. The wanting is already justified by the fact of his wanting it.

Or he wants a bike, or a gaming rig, or a single malt collection, or a cricket subscription that costs more per year than most women spend on skincare. These are hobbies. They are passions. They are the things that make life worth living. The language available to men for their discretionary spending is expansive and unapologetic. It assumes that a man’s pleasure is a legitimate expense.

Now watch what happens when a woman wants something equivalent.

She wants a bag.A bag is not an investment; it is a vanity. It is not a hobby; it is a shopping habit. It is not a passion; it is a weakness. The same amount of money that would make a man a connoisseur makes a woman a spendthrift. The same research that would make him discerning makes her obsessive. The same pleasure that would make him interesting makes her shallow.

This is not about the objects. It is about whose desire is allowed to be expensive.

Boys are socialized early into the legitimacy of their wants. A boy wants a video game and the household adjusts; the purchase happens or it doesn’t, but the wanting itself is not pathologized. A girl wants something and she is already being taught to broker: maybe for your birthday, maybe if you do well in exams, maybe a cheaper version. The boy learns that wanting is natural. The girl learns that wanting is conditional.

By adulthood, these lessons have calcified. Men spend and call it investment. Women spend and call it guilt. Men buy and display. Women buy and hide the price tag, or cut it off and bury it in the trash so no one sees the evidence.

I am not arguing that men are free from financial anxiety, or that male spending is always healthy. I am arguing that the frame is different. A man’s expensive purchase is presumed rational until proven otherwise. A woman’s expensive purchase is presumed frivolous until she successfully defends it.

And so women become very good at defence. They become lawyers for their own desires, preparing briefs, anticipating cross-examination. They learn to want in ways that come pre-argued. They learn that the wanting itself is not enough. There must also be a case.

The dupe is what happens when you get tired of making the case. It is a plea bargain. You plead guilty to wanting, and in exchange, you get a reduced sentence.

There is something else worth noting: the way male spending is narrated after the fact. A man buys an expensive watch and the story is about the watch. Its movement, its history, its craftsmanship. The object is allowed to be interesting in itself. A woman buys an expensive bag and the story is about her. Her values, her priorities, whether she is “that kind of person.” The object becomes evidence in a character trial.

This is why women over-explain their purchases and men simply have them. A man’s want does not need to be translated into reason; it is accepted as reason enough. A woman’s want must be processed through a kind of moral customs before it is allowed to exist in peace.

The effect, over time, is that men develop a fluent relationship with their own desires while women develop a suspicious one. Men learn to want. Women learn to want with asterisks.

The Audience

The most intimate form of surveillance is the kind you cannot see.

It is not a person. It is a presence. The composite of every comment ever made about women and money, women and vanity, women and their priorities. It assembles itself from relatives and strangers and advertisements and that one colleague who once said “must be nice” in a tone you still remember. It does not need to be in the room because it has taken up residence in your head.

This is the audience women perform for when they shop.

You can be entirely alone, ten minutes into an online scroll, and still feel watched. Still hear the possible remarks. Still perform the small preventative theatre of clicking away from the thing you want toward the thing you can explain. The audience does not need to speak because you have learned to speak for it. You have internalized its voice so thoroughly that its judgments feel like your own thoughts.

Social media has democratized the comment section. Now every woman with any visibility at all understands what it feels like to have her choices dissected by strangers who believe female pleasure is a public resource, subject to public approval. Post a photo and wait for the audit: where is that from, how much did it cost, is that real, must be nice, some of us have real problems. The comments are never really about the object. They are about the woman’s right to have it without apology.

Even women with no public profile absorb this. You do not need to be an influencer to understand that the world has opinions about women who look satisfied. You learn it from observing what happens to other women. The backlash, the scrutiny, the strange resentment that attaches to female contentment. And you adjust. You make yourself less visible. Less satisfied. Less.

A woman who is visibly pleased with herself is treated as a provocation. This is why the dupe becomes a form of camouflage. It is the purchase that does not provoke. It does not invite envy or scrutiny or the weird aggression that satisfied women attract. It lets you have something nice while still looking like you know your place.

Because satisfied women are dangerous. A woman who has what she wants might stop performing. She might stop apologizing. She might stop making herself smaller to make others comfortable. She might expect things. She might start to believe that her wants are legitimate, that her pleasure matters, that she does not need to justify her existence through endless sacrifice and endless settling.

The dupe keeps you safe from becoming that woman. It keeps you deniable. It keeps you in the category of women who are still humble, still striving, still safe to be around.

And the cost of that safety is that you never quite get what you came for.

This audience is harshest precisely when you are alone. In public, around actual people, you can sometimes forget it. You can be distracted by conversation, by the social texture of a moment. But alone, scrolling, considering, the audience returns at full volume. This is when the negotiation happens. This is when you talk yourself out of things, or into lesser things, or away from the whole question of wanting.

The audience is most powerful when it cannot be argued with, when it is not a real person making a real objection but a composite of possible objections, assembled from memory and fear. A real person can be persuaded, reasoned with, ignored. The imagined audience cannot. It is always right, always watching, always ready to find you guilty of the crime of wanting your own life.

And so you perform for it. You perform modesty. You perform practicality. You perform the kind of woman who doesn’t make waves, doesn’t expect too much, doesn’t take up more than her allotted space. You perform until the performance becomes indistinguishable from personality, until you can no longer tell if you genuinely prefer the simpler option or have simply been trained to believe you do.

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Living with a Defence

Once you learn to negotiate yourself downward in one domain, the skill generalizes. You start recognizing the same sensation in places that have nothing to do with shopping.

There is a version of a job you accept the way you accept a dupe: not because it matches what you want, but because it is defensible. The brand name that silences relatives. The salary that looks responsible. The role that is “stable,” a word used like a sedative. You say yes because the other thing, the riskier thing, the more alive thing, feels like it would require too much explanation.

And then you do what you have always done. You adapt. You learn to make it work. You file down the parts of yourself that do not fit. You call your boredom “learning” and your shrinking “professionalism.” You stop asking whether you like it because the question has become expensive.

One day you look at your calendar and realize you are living inside the professional equivalent of a bag whose strap never sits right. Nothing is technically wrong. Your title is fine. Your parents are proud. The only problem is that you are somewhere you never meant to be, and the part of you that wanted something else has gone silent.

There is a kind of relationship women enter the way they buy dupes: because it is easier to justify than to want. He is decent. He is stable. Your mother can sleep. The relationship functions. It does not, importantly, invite drama. And women are taught from girlhood that drama is the worst possible sin. Worse than boredom, worse than loneliness, worse than vague sadness, worse than the slow suffocation of being unseen.

So you accept the stable man the way you accept the stable job, with relief that pretends to be happiness. You tell yourself passion is for teenagers. You tell yourself you are lucky to have someone “good,” because women are trained to feel greedy when they want both goodness and aliveness in the same person.

You become the woman who makes it work. Who explains him to others. Who shrinks her needs into something he can handle. Who praises herself for being low-maintenance.

And one day you catch yourself swallowing disappointment before it becomes visible, and you realize you are living with a dupe. Not a fake person, a real person. But a relationship that is “basically the same” as love while never delivering the feeling you came for.

The dupe trap teaches you to accept “fine” so thoroughly that you mistake it for your own preference. You start believing you are genuinely low-maintenance. You start confusing self-denial with being easy-going. You start feeling superior for not wanting much, when what has actually happened is that you have learned to distrust your own appetite.

And then someone says, “but it’s just a bag,” in the tone of a person who has never had to defend their pleasure.

Yes. It is just a bag.

That’s why it matters.

Because if you cannot let yourself want a small thing without building a case against yourself, what happens when the stakes are higher? When you want to ask for a raise, and the same internal tribunal convenes? When you want to set a boundary, and the same fear of being “too much” kicks in? When you want to leave something, and the same voice whispers who do you think you are?

I think about the women I know who have done this with their entire lives. Women who had ambitions they edited before speaking. Women who wanted to move cities but talked themselves into staying because staying was easier to explain. Women who wanted to leave but convinced themselves that “fine” was enough, that asking for more was greedy, that the ache they felt every morning was simply what adulthood felt like.

They are not weak. They are not stupid. They are women who learned, through a thousand repetitions, that the safest way to want something is to want something smaller instead. Who learned that the punishment for visible desire is worse than the pain of invisible deprivation. Who learned to build lives out of “close enough” because “close enough” could be defended and the real thing could not.

The dupe trap is not about shopping. It is about what happens when self-denial becomes so automatic that you can no longer feel it happening. When the defence becomes the desire. When you lose access to your own preferences because they have been filtered so many times they no longer register as yours.

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The Politeness Tax

There is a unique discomfort women feel in rooms where money is discussed by people who are paid to discuss it.

A bank. A dealership. A financial advisor’s office. The discomfort is not about the money itself, it is about the performance required to appear competent while simultaneously being treated as though you are not. Someone turns a screen toward you, highlights a single number (the EMI, always the EMI), and speaks in that brisk tone that pretends to be helpful while rushing you past the parts that matter.It feels like everyone does this. It feels like you are wasting their time if you insist on understanding.

The industry just needs you to be polite.

Women sign things they do not fully understand because they do not want to seem difficult. They do not want to look ignorant, or slow, or demanding. They do not want the person across the desk to sigh, or repeat themselves, or make that small face that suggests you are being a problem. So you nod. You smile. You trade comprehension for smoothness, and tell yourself you will figure it out later.

This is the politeness tax. The fee extracted from women for prioritizing likability over information.

The alternative is not to avoid financial instruments entirely, though many women do that too. They decide that debt is “bad,” EMIs are “traps,” credit cards are “dangerous,” and they build an identity around never touching them. Avoidance couched as discipline. It keeps you dependent on other people’s fluency. It keeps you from using tools that, properly understood, can make life easier.

Financial literacy for women is fundamentally about becoming un-rushable.

It means asking for the interest rate and whether it is flat or reducing. It means asking for the total repayment amount, not just the monthly figure. It means asking about processing fees, prepayment penalties, late charges. It means asking for the document and reading it outside the room, where no one is watching you. If the person across the table becomes impatient, notice that impatience for what it is: a business model that depends on your discomfort.

Women are trained to treat questions as imposition. That training is expensive.

It connects to the dupe trap because the mechanism is the same. In shopping, the dupe lets you avoid being the woman who wants too much. In finance, silence lets you avoid being the woman who asks too much. Both keep you pleasant. Both keep you smaller than you need to be.

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What Unlearning Feels Like

The first time you buy something without justifying it, you will feel a lurch.

You wait for the internal tribunal to convene, and it does not. Or it does, and you let it talk, and then you buy the thing anyway. The gavel does not fall. No one appears to punish you. The world continues.

This is disorienting, if you have spent years believing that unjustified wanting would somehow be detected and penalized.

You bring the thing home. You do not hide the bag it came in. You do not cut out the price tag and bury it in the trash. You do not prepare a speech for anyone who might ask. You just... have it.

The pleasure, when it comes, is not euphoric. It’s a kind of settling, like a bone going back into socket. Oh, you think. This is what it feels like to just have something.

But then comes the second part. The guilt that arrives anyway.

The machinery takes time to dismantle. You have spent years associating purchase with defence, and the neural pathways do not disappear just because you have decided they should. So you feel guilty, and then you feel guilty about feeling guilty, and the whole thing becomes a small jumble of guilts that seem ridiculous to describe out loud.

This is normal. This is what unlearning feels like. It is a slow, irritating process of catching yourself mid-flinch and choosing differently anyway.

Some days you will backslide. You will buy the dupe when you meant to wait for the original. You will accept “fine” when you know you wanted more. You will hear yourself performing the old alibis and feel the familiar undertow of a habit that is not yet broken.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is recognition. To notice, each time, what is actually happening: not a financial decision but an identity negotiation. Not prudence but fear. Not maturity but the old inherited constriction, still running its program.

And then, noticing, to choose again.

There is something I want to say about what happens in the body when you finally buy the thing you wanted and let yourself have it without apology.

The first few times, it feels illicit. You keep waiting to be caught. You wear the thing and feel a strange self-consciousness, as though everyone can see that you wanted it, that you chose yourself, that you committed the crime of desire. But if you do it enough times, the vigilance fades. The pleasure clarifies. You start to understand what it feels like to simply have a thing, to use it, to enjoy it, without the purchase being a story about your character.

This is what unlearning actually produces: not a permanent state of freedom, but moments of it. Gaps in the old pattern. A growing familiarity with the texture of wanting without justification. What it feels like in the body, how it differs from the defended version. You start to recognize the difference between I don’t want that and I’m not allowing myself to want that. The two have different weights, different temperatures.

And slowly, you begin to trust your own appetite again.

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Owning Wanting

It returns, always, to the same small scene.

You, alone, with your phone or your laptop or your thoughts. A tab open with the thing you want. Another tab open with the thing you can justify. And a third presence, invisible but heavy, that is not on the screen at all: the imagined audience, waiting to see what you will do.

For years, that audience has run the courtroom. It speaks in the voice of prudence. It tells you to be sensible, humble, low-maintenance. It reminds you where you came from. It warns you against becoming the kind of woman people talk about.

And the worst part is how reasonable it sounds. I It sits inside you and speaks calmly, and because you want to be a good person, you listen.

So you click the dupe. You feel relief. You tell yourself the matter is closed.

But wanting does not disappear because you refused it. It reroutes. It becomes low-grade restlessness, resentment. It becomes the second purchase, and the third, none of which satisfy, because none of them were the thing. It becomes a habit of “close enough” that eventually attaches to everything: work, love, ambition, the whole architecture of a life.

One day, if you are paying attention, you realize the question was never about the bag. It was about whether you are allowed to be a woman who chooses herself without apology. Whether you are permitted to spend money on your own ease without converting it first into virtue.

So many women are not trying to spend. They are trying to remain unpunishable.

They are trying to stay likable. Respectable. Good. They are trying to avoid the old accusations that circle female pleasure. Vanity, frivolity, shallowness. They are trying not to become a story.

So they purchase innocence. They purchase modesty. They purchase deniability. They purchase a life in which they can always say, if challenged, I didn’t really want it that much anyway.

But you cannot build a satisfying life out of deniability.

A satisfying life requires you to admit you want. To be specific about it. To let the wanting be visible, even when you cannot perfectly justify it to people whose approval you do not need.

This does not mean buying everything. It does not mean ignoring money, or pretending consequences do not exist. It means building the muscle of wanting. Assessing honestly: Do I want this? Can I afford it? Is it worth it to me? And then choosing.

The world will still have opinions. The audience does not retire. But something shifts when you stop letting the audience write your receipts. Your life gets calmer. Not smaller. Calmer. The constant background negotiation dims. You stop paying for innocence. You start paying for what you actually came for.

Which, most of the time, is not the object. It is the feeling of being allowed to inhabit your own life.

And that should not require tricks or loopholes or dupes. It should not need to be smuggled past an internal customs office. It should be the most ordinary thing in the world: a woman, looking at what she wants, and letting herself have it.

Not as proof of anything.

Just as a form of being alive.

This is not an essay against dupes. Some dupes are excellent. Some preferences are genuinely modest. Some women truly do not care about the bag and are not performing indifference, they simply have other things they want more.

This is an essay against the habit of settling before you have even asked yourself what you want. Against the reflex that converts desire into apology. Against the way women are taught to treat their own pleasure as a debt that must be justified before it can be incurred.

The next time you have two tabs open, try asking a different question. Not can I justify this but what am I actually trying to justify? Not is this sensible but whose definition of sensible am I using? Not what will people think but why am I still performing for people who are not in the room?

The answers may not change what you buy. But they will change why you buy it. And that is where freedom lives, in the quality of the choosing. In the difference between selecting and settling.

You are allowed to want things. You are allowed to want specific things. You are allowed to want the actual thing you want, not the safer version, not the more explainable version, not the version that will draw less attention.

The world will not end. The audience will not descend. You will simply be a woman who chose herself, once, in a small way.

And then perhaps again. And again.

Until it stops feeling like rebellion and starts feeling like what it always should have been:

Ordinary. Unremarkable. Yours.

This is the question that keeps coming back to me this week. Sam Altman built a company around the transformer architecture he didn’t invent, using scaling laws discovered by researchers who’ve since left for competitors. Diddy built an empire on a myth of self-made genius while systematically exploiting everyone around him. Charli XCX watched her album get diluted into wrong hex codes and wrong interpretations the further it traveled from her hands. In rural China, a chicken wears an ankle bracelet generating data for systems it will never comprehend, creating value it will never capture.

The question isn’t just who gets credit. It’s who gets to narrate, and what disappears when they do.

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1. “Sam Altman Has No Idea What He Is Doing”: Neural Foundry
Link

The title is provocative but the argument is precise: Altman’s actual contribution to OpenAI is fundraising and network-building, not technical insight. The transformer architecture came from Google. The scaling laws came from researchers like Kaplan and McCandlish. Ilya Sutskever saw what transformers could become. The people who built the thing keep leaving for Anthropic or Google or xAI, and those labs are now matching or beating OpenAI on benchmarks.

What’s left when the scientists who understood your technology decide they’ll have more integrity elsewhere? A reputation for being “not consistently candid” with your board, former employees under NDAs that threatened their equity, and a valuation held together by the mystique of being first.

What I got out of it: The distinction between “scaling” as an insight versus “scaling” as the phase that begins after someone else has done the conceptual heavy lifting. Altman didn’t pick up the transformer architecture and champion it internally, he arrived once it was in motion, then retrofitted the curve into a personal philosophy. There’s something to be said about watching someone narrate a revolution they didn’t start. The confidence never wavers. The vocabulary adapts. “Scaling” becomes a worldview rather than an engineering phase. And the people who actually understood the thing, who saw what it could become before it became anything, keep leaving for places where they won’t have to watch their work get repackaged as someone else’s vision.

2. “The Reckoning We Still Refuse”: Gerrick Kennedy, Future Tense
Link

This is ostensibly about Netflix’s Diddy documentary. It’s actually about complicity: the institutional kind, the cultural kind, the kind you don’t notice until someone names it. The piece traces how Puff’s violence was always public knowledge: he beat Steve Stoute so badly he broke his jaw, paid $500K, and was partying in the Hamptons with J-Lo five months later.

The documentary shows the predator but can’t seem to examine the ecosystem. No experts on domestic violence. No interrogation of how hip-hop’s foundational misogyny provided cover. No exploration of how Black celebrity culture looked away, how white consumers maintained moral distance, how media traded access for flattering profiles. And it’s produced by 50 Cent, who has his own documented history of domestic violence charges, revenge porn, and mocking Terry Crews for coming forward about sexual assault.

What I got out of it: The question one of the talking heads asks himself: “Does that make me part of the Sean Combs cult?” That question, Kennedy argues, is the one the documentary can’t face. The system that made Diddy possible is the same system that made the documentary. And maybe that’s always the limit of institutional reckoning. The institution can show you the monster, can even profit from showing you the monster, but it cannot show you how the monster was fed. Because the feeding involved too many people who are still in the room. The camera points at the predator so it doesn’t have to point at the audience.

3. “Training, Reasoning, Coordination: The Three Levers of AI Progress”: Marcel Salathé
Link

A mental model for understanding where AI gains are coming from. Three overlapping S-curves: training (more data, bigger models), reasoning (more compute at inference), and coordination (multiple agents working together). Each lever delivers great returns until it doesn’t, then marginal gains shift to the next one.

GPT-4.5 was the signal that training scaling is hitting real constraints. 10x the compute of GPT-4, and the gains were... modest. OpenAI’s own system card initially called it “not a frontier model.” Now the action is in reasoning: o1’s log-linear relationship between test-time compute and accuracy. Coordination is still speculative, but the historical precedent is interesting. Human brains haven’t changed in 10,000 years, yet here we are splitting atoms. The difference isn’t individual intelligence, it’s that those brains learned to coordinate.

What I got out of it: The Ilya Sutskever framing: 2012-2020 was “the age of research,” 2020-2025 was “the age of scaling,” and what comes next is “back to the age of research again, just with big computers.” What strikes me is how this reframes the current moment not as acceleration but as transition. The easy gains are behind us. The next gains require thinking differently, not just spending more. And if the coordination lever is real, and if the future is multiple agents working together rather than single models getting bigger, then we’re not building minds anymore. We’re building societies. With all the emergent dysfunction that implies.

4. “Trustless Chickens” — Thejaswini M A, Token Dispatch
Link

In Guizhou province, free-range chickens wear ankle trackers. The data flows into a blockchain. Middle-class families in distant cities pay 10x the normal price, scan a QR code, and watch their dinner’s step count.

The technology exists because Chinese consumers have been repeatedly traumatized by food safety scandals. You’re not paying for premium protein, you’re paying to worry less about what’s on the plate. Blockchain here isn’t solving a technology problem. It’s prosthetic trust, bolted on after the original trust was hollowed out.

Farmer Jiang doesn’t own the blockchain, the hardware, the software, or the customer relationship. One year Lianmo ordered 6,000 chickens. The next year, zero. No warning.

What I got out of it: “The ledger records everything it was designed to see and almost nothing about why anyone thought this was the best we could do.” This is the sentence that’s been stuck in my head all week. We keep building systems that optimize for legibility, for making things trackable, auditable, verifiable, without asking what gets lost when legibility becomes the goal. The chicken’s step count is visible. The farmer’s precarity is not. The consumer’s anxiety is soothed. The conditions that created the anxiety remain untouched. Blockchain here isn’t a technology story. It’s a story about what happens when trust has to be manufactured because it can no longer be grown.

5. “The China Playbook Indian Founders Haven’t Read”: The India Notes
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An interview with Alysha Lobo, who cold-emails Chinese CEOs and shows up at their headquarters without appointments. Once got inside DJI because she stopped to pet a stranger’s Golden Retriever during a typhoon. The whole thing is a masterclass in “you can just do things.”

The substance: Chinese hardware competitors share labs. Rivals can literally walk into the same facility and tinker with each other’s robots. The government acquired Germany’s Kuka robotics and then used it as a live classroom for domestic players like Estun and SIASUN, turning a foreign acquisition into competitive acceleration rather than a monopoly. WeChat has replaced the App Store. Every major retail store has a dedicated section where influencers come and do TikToks. The Shenzhen-Guangzhou-Hong Kong cluster is now the #1 science and technology cluster in the world, ahead of Tokyo-Yokohama, ahead of San Francisco.

What I got out of it: Chinese chopsticks are round at the eating end and square at the holding end. The symbolism: the part facing outward means be kinder to others; the part pointing toward you means be harder on yourself. I keep thinking about this as a design philosophy, that the interface you present to the world and the interface you use to grip reality might need to be different shapes. And maybe that’s what the Chinese hardware ecosystem understood before anyone else: that competition and cooperation aren’t opposites. You can share labs with your rivals because the hard part isn’t protecting your secrets. The hard part is building the capacity to have secrets worth protecting.

6. “The Meesho Must Go On”: Tigerfeathers
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A 15,000-word deep dive on India’s largest e-commerce platform by order volume (bigger than Amazon India, bigger than Flipkart) that most English-speaking metro Indians have never heard of. The trick: Meesho exists to serve buyers and sellers traditional e-commerce ignored.

The founding story is a masterclass in listening. They started with hyperlocal fashion, pivoted to Shopify-for-merchants, noticed that WhatsApp boutiques run by housewives were more engaged than the shopkeepers they’d built for, pivoted to serve them, then noticed their end customers had matured enough to buy directly, pivoted again. Each time following the user, not defending the business model. One of their core values is literally “Listen or Die.”

They moved to zero commissions when every marketplace relies on commissions as primary revenue. They built discovery-based feeds when every competitor built search. 73% of all orders come via algorithmic recommendations, not search, because their customers are used to browsing physical bazaars without preconceived buying intent.

What I got out of it: The Viktor Frankl epigraph that opens the piece “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’” as a description of product-market fit. Meesho had its why from Day 1: serve the people traditional commerce ignores. The how shapeshifted from pivot to pivot- hyperlocal fashion, Shopify clone, WhatsApp resellers, direct B2C- but the why never changed. Most startups die because they fall in love with their how. They build a technology, a business model, a growth loop, and when the market shifts they can’t let go. Meesho kept letting go. They killed working products to chase what their users actually needed. “Listen or Die” as a core value sounds like corporate pablum until you realize they’ve actually done it four times.

7. “The Death of Cool”: Charli XCX
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Charli on what happens when your work escapes your control. After brat, the narrative wasn’t hers anymore. Brands adopted a visual aesthetic that was clearly tapping into the album but got it slightly off each time. The more time passed, the more bastardized the representations became. These representations were replicated, reproduced, deemed as truthful.

The death of cool isn’t popularity. Julia Fox could have a McDonald’s meal and little Julia drones delivering Amazon packages and still be cool because she’d find a Warholian way to make it make sense. The death of cool is “the second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people.”

What I got out of it: One of the vinyl plants accidentally printed 10,000 copies of brat in the wrong hex code. That mistake, she says, felt inherently brat; a bastardized version born from accident. Maybe if you spin it with the right confidence, anything can be cool. Maybe cool can live forever. But I think the deeper point is about authorship and entropy. The moment you release something into the world, it begins to degrade semantically. Other people’s interpretations layer over yours. Brands borrow the aesthetic without understanding the ethos. The thing you made becomes a thing that references the thing you made. And at some point you have to decide: do you fight to preserve the original meaning, or do you let go and find the brat energy in the decay itself?

8. Dream11’s Existential Pivot: Money Control Link

India’s largest fantasy sports platform lost 95% of its revenue overnight when Parliament banned real-money gaming. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 made no distinction between skill games and chance games. Dream11, rummy apps, all of it, gone.

Here’s the remarkable part: they didn’t sue. They didn’t lay off anyone. CEO Harsh Jain split 1,200 employees into eight independent business units (FanCode, DreamSetGo, Dream Money, Dream Sports AI) each operating like a seed-stage startup with its own P&L. And the core Dream11 app is pivoting to... watch parties. A “second screen” where users can watch sports alongside influencers doing real-time commentary and banter. The thesis is loneliness: “People want to scream, shout or banter while watching a fixture.”

What I got out of it: “If you have a sports match where a decision went against you, a refereeing decision, and you lost the final, it doesn’t mean you change the team. It means you play another World Cup six months later and then you bring home the trophy.” There’s something almost spiritually instructive about how Dream11 handled this. No lawsuits, no layoffs, no public tantrums about regulatory overreach. Just: okay, this is the new game, how do we play it? The watch party pivot sounds almost absurd (from a billion-dollar fantasy sports platform to... group viewing?) but the underlying insight is serious. They’re not selling fantasy sports. They’re selling a way to not watch sports alone. The mechanic was always incidental to the loneliness it solved. When you know your why, you can survive the death of your how.

9. “Can Indian Movies Ever Recreate the Magic of a Housefull Friday Show?”: Avantika Shankar, Vogue India
Link

Hemant Chaturvedi was the cinematographer on Company, Maqbool, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal. He quit the film industry ten years ago. He hasn’t watched a movie since. Instead, he’s spent six years traveling to 20 states, photographing over 1,250 single-screen cinema halls, self-funded, self-produced, documenting what remains of the medium’s golden age.

The stories he’s collected: Raj Kapoor’s secret underground tunnel at Eves Talkies in Meerut so his family could come and go without being mobbed. A theatre in Burhanpur with a sign specifically forbidding bananas (the region is ripe with plantations). One cinema owner in Jalna who refuses to cancel shows despite poor ticket sales because the theatre is named after his grandmother. Projectionists who trained for years before they could run machines on their own. Artists who hand-painted film posters. The chai-wallahs and paan shops that sprouted around every hall.

Some owners have held onto their projectors from the 1920s like treasures. Others have discarded them at nine rupees a kilo.

What I got out of it: The piece started with a memory from Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota (2006), where Chaturvedi dedicated a single lens to each of the film’s four storylines to create distinct visual languages. Naseeruddin Shah told him afterward: “After so many years of being an actor, today I have understood what lenses can actually do.” Creativity born from limitation. Now the industry’s appetite for experimentation has shrunk, Anurag Kashyap is relocating to South India, and Chaturvedi photographs what remains: monuments to a medium that once demanded craft at every level. There’s something about the projectionists who trained for years, the artists who hand-painted posters, the ecosystem of chai-wallahs and paan shops, an entire economy of skill that existed because cinema was hard. And now cinema is easy, which means it doesn’t need those people anymore. The single screens are discarded at nine rupees a kilo not because they failed but because we solved the problems they existed to solve. Progress often looks like this: making things easy enough that the people who made them possible become unnecessary.

10. Sophie Kinsella (1969-2025) Link

Sophie Kinsella, who wrote the Shopaholic series as millions of women’s introduction to the pleasure and pain of financial recklessness rendered comic, died this week of glioblastoma. She was 55, two days shy of 56.

Her final book, published last year, was a novella about a novelist who wakes up in a hospital bed and learns she has a brain tumor. She wrote it after her own surgery. “I just thought people might be curious to know what it feels like to go through this,” she told Robin Roberts. “It’s funny in parts, it’s sad in parts, but I hope it’s full of optimism and love most of all.”

Her family’s statement: “She died peacefully, with her final days filled with her true loves: family and music and warmth and Christmas and joy.”

11. “Does Anyone Really Know You?”: Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
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The feeling of unknownness steals over us at odd moments, sometimes, perversely, when we’re surrounded by people who know us well. Like Levin in Anna Karenina, who notices “a wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife” despite his happy marriage, we become suddenly conscious of an inner sanctum no one has breached.

Rothman works through the intuitive assumptions: that being known is about overlapping Venn diagrams of information, that the people who know a lot about us must therefore know us. But your parents have the naked-baby pictures and still might not see you as you are now. In The Truman Show, millions observe someone constantly from birth, and their circles and his are congruent, yet Truman wouldn’t be wrong to say no one really knows him. Viewership is passive. If passively acquiring knowledge counts as really knowing someone, then Google really knows you.

The shift: maybe “Does anybody really know you?” is the wrong question. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we may not settle into any particular way of being until someone studies us. Other people help us know ourselves, working with us to create a shared idea of who we are. The question isn’t whether we’re known, it’s whether we’ve arrived, in collaboration with people we care about, at a conception of ourselves that we recognize.

What I got out of it: Stanley Cavell on It Happened One Night: Peter can see Ellie right in front of him but can’t let her enter his dream. “To walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If they’re to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like putting together night and day. It’s scary. But what haunts me is the earlier observation: that if passively acquiring knowledge counts as really knowing someone, then Google really knows you. We live in an age of unprecedented information about each other. Our step counts are tracked, our purchases logged, our attention measured in milliseconds. And yet the feeling of being unknown persists, maybe even intensifies. Because being known isn’t about data. It’s about someone working to see you, choosing to see you, risking something in the seeing. The systems that know the most about us are often the ones that know us least.

12. “100 Years of Art Deco in Mumbai” — BBC
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Art Deco exploded at a Paris exhibition in 1925, and within years it had traveled from Miami’s pastel hotel facades to the mansion apartments along Mumbai’s Marine Drive. The style, geometrical ziggurats, sweeping curves, sunburst designs, circular rooftops, symbolized an unequivocal break from the past, celebrating the dawn of a new post-war modern age.

Mumbai is now home to what may be the world’s largest documented collection of Art Deco buildings (some estimates put it second behind Miami). The style transcended architecture to shape home interiors, furniture, fonts, jewellery, and some of the world’s most iconic cinema halls — Radio City Music Hall in New York, Regal and Liberty and Eros in Mumbai.

What I got out of it: Atul Kumar, founder of the Art Deco Mumbai Trust: “It represented hope, optimism and speed, coinciding with the emergence of the motor car and also concrete as a building material, which when compared with stone, could be worked with in a tenth of the time and fifth of the cost.” The style wasn’t elaborate like Victorian Gothic, it came with a classicism and simplicity that has survived the test of time. Speed as aesthetic. Optimism poured into concrete. What strikes me is that Art Deco was born from constraints too, concrete instead of stone, the need to build fast, the post-war hunger for something new. And yet the constraints produced beauty that outlasted the urgency. A century later, the buildings still stand along Marine Drive, monuments to a moment when modernity felt like a gift rather than a threat. Maybe every golden age is just a brief window when the new technology and the old craftsmanship overlap, before the technology makes the craftsmanship unnecessary.

Also in the mix:

• a16z’s “Big Ideas 2026” (Part 2): The VCs are bullish on “forward-deployed motions” taking AI to the 99% of companies outside Silicon Valley, voice agents managing entire customer relationship cycles, and ChatGPT becoming the AI app store. The most interesting prediction: prompt-free applications arrive. “The chat interface was training wheels. Now AI becomes invisible scaffolding woven through every workflow.”

• DeepSeek’s Forbidden GPUs (Link): DeepSeek is reportedly training its next model on Nvidia Blackwell chips the U.S. explicitly banned from China. The real point: without Nvidia, there is no competitive AI model. The moat isn’t data or algorithms anymore, it’s who can get GPUs through the border.

• TCS buys Coastal Cloud for $700M: Indian IT services giant buying its way into the top 5 Salesforce advisory firms globally. The bigger story: Microsoft announced $17.5B for India, Amazon took its commitment to $35B by 2030.

• “Predict Delinquency With 90% Precision” (Link): A fintech piece about detecting financial stress 7-15 days before a payment is missed. The interesting move: framing collections as relationship management rather than punishment. The early warning window creates space for intervention without the borrower feeling surveilled.

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The chicken walks in circles on a mountain slope, generating data for systems it cannot comprehend. Altman attaches himself to work of capable researchers, blesses their discoveries as part of a personal doctrine of “scaling,” sells that doctrine as philosophy. The artist watches her aesthetic diluted into wrong hex codes. The documentary can show the predator but can’t examine the ecosystem. The cinematographer photographs what remains of the single screens, monuments to a craft that once demanded skill at every level, now discarded at nine rupees a kilo. The Art Deco buildings still stand along Marine Drive, hope and optimism poured into concrete a century ago, when speed itself was an aesthetic.

What’s the thread? Maybe it’s that the people who narrate aren’t always the people who know. Maybe it’s Rothman’s question about being known: that viewership is passive, that if passively acquiring knowledge counts as really knowing someone, then Google really knows you. And the systems that record everything are often the ones that explain nothing.

What are you going to do with this?

Until next week.

Seven results.
“New Life Plan (draft.)”
“New Life Plan FINAL.”
“New Life (be serious yaar).”

All of them had the same fundamentals: a colour-coded schedule, some righteous bullet points about “non-negotiables,” maybe a macros tab, definitely a reading list. All of them fizzled out somewhere around Day 4.

If an anthropologist had to reconstruct my personality from my documents alone, they’d think I’d lived twelve completely different lives and abandoned eleven of them in week two.

You probably have your own version of this. The untouched planner that still smells like the store, the half-set-up Notion “Life OS,” the gym membership that gets most of its exercise from auto-debit.

There’s a very specific high in that first moment.

New Google Doc. Blank Notion page. A notebook with the plastic still on. You sit down “just to plan” and suddenly you’re rearranging headings, choosing fonts, calling a document “Q4 RESET”.

For a while, your entire life feels exfoliated. The page is clean. You feel clean. The future looks like a well-lit study vlog.

Nothing in the outside world has changed. You haven’t cooked a single vegetable, sent the scary email, had the hard conversation, opened your bank app. But staring at that unsullied plan calms something deep inside you. The outline of your life feels better than the lived version.

I used to feel a faint shame about this. Now I’m mostly fascinated by how predictable it is.

Because this isn’t just “I’m dramatic and I need change.” This high is biochemical.

Katherine Milkman, a behavioural scientist at Wharton, has spent years studying what she calls the fresh start effect. She and her co-authors looked at millions of datapoints like gym check-ins, goal-setting websites, Google searches for “diet”, and found the same pattern looping over and over. Right after certain dates that feel like psychological chapter breaks (Mondays, birthdays, New Year’s, new semesters), people are much more likely to start something aspirational: exercising, saving, learning.

You recognise the graph immediately:

sharp peak, then a sag.

The first week of January, the gym is full. By February, you can hear your own footsteps again.

Milkman’s argument is that these “temporal landmarks” let us mentally file our past self away. The old you was the one who ate badly and watched reels till 3 a.m. The new you has a conistency spreadsheet and a moral glow.

Fresh starts work. They really do make it easier to begin. But the dopamine that got you there has no idea how to survive a normal Wednesday.

The plan felt like a transformation. The work feels like… work.

And our brains are not great at tolerating that slump.

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When the New Job Becomes Just Your Job

Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell wrote, back in the 70s, about something they called the hedonic treadmill. Our tendency is to adapt to good and bad things faster than we think we will. The lottery winner and the accident survivor both drift, eventually, toward their old baseline of happiness.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, who has basically dedicated her career to asking, “Why doesn’t good stuff make us happier for longer?”, keeps finding the same pattern: we get a lift, and then the lift fades.

The job you were breathless about on LinkedIn becomes… Outlook, Teams, badly formatted PowerPoints, one colleague who types like they’re punishing the keyboard.

The relationship that felt like a Karan Johar B-side becomes “What are we eating?”, “Did you pay the BESCOM bill?”, and two people scrolling in mutual silence.

The city you moved to for adventure becomes traffic, rent, and your usual problems, just with better coffee.

The gym stops being a glow-up montage in your head and becomes a room with harsh lighting and a trainer who keeps saying “last two reps” when he’s lying.

This is hedonic adaptation in action. The extraordinary becomes background music. It’s not a sign that your life choice was wrong. It’s a sign that your nervous system is doing its job: normalising whatever you expose it to repeatedly.

Progress lives in this very unremarkable middle stretch. Most of us hate that.

We’re so used to associating change with intensity, big decisions, dramatic “I’ve had enough” moments, aesthetic vision boards, that when progress shows up dressed as “I did the same thing again on a boring day,” we don’t recognise it. We call it a rut. We go hunting for a new high.

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The Girl in Your Head and the Girl Who Has to Wake Up Tomorrow

Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius gave us this beautiful phrase: possible selves.

Possible selves are all the versions of you that live rent-free in your mind. Who you might be, who you hope to be, who you’re terrified you’ll become.

There’s the self who wakes up at 6, lifts, drinks water from opaque bottles, answers emails within 24 hours, and has a basic handle on her taxes.
The self who has a book in bookstores and doesn’t break out in hives when someone says “can you send us a bio?” The self who has a calm, kind relationship with her body and doesn’t treat the weighing scale like a referendum on her worth.

These selves are not useless fantasies. Markus and Nurius argue that they’re how we organise our hopes and fears. They give the present some direction: “I want to move closer to that; I desperately don’t want to move closer to that.”

The trouble starts when your favourite version of you only lives in conditions you do not actually have.

The girl in your head has a silent house, a perfectly optimised morning routine, a manager who respects boundaries, a nervous system that isn’t fried, and absolutely no one texting her, “Can you talk? It’ll only take five minutes,” which we know is a lie.

She exists in HD.
You exist in patchy Wi-Fi and 4G.

Every time you try to move towards her, reality intrudes. Your mother calls. Your knee hurts. Your boss prepones your review. The sink is full. Blinkit delivers the wrong thing. Your period shows up early. The friend you were waiting to hear from sends a lukewarm, semi-dismissive response and your entire sense of self-esteem jumps into a dustbin.

The possible self in your head has never dealt with any of this. Of course, she’s more appealing than the you who has to answer her own doorbell.

Markus and Nurius say possible selves do two things: they motivate us, and they give us a way to judge ourselves. The judging is where things curdle. If the imaginary you is too perfect, you start using her as a stick to beat the current you with.

You’re not just late. You’re late and not that girl.
You didn’t just skip a workout. You skipped a workout and proved you’re not serious about your life.

It becomes less “this is the direction I want to walk in” and more “this is the woman I am constantly failing to be.”

At which point, staying in the land of manifestations starts to feel safer than actually taking any steps at all. The possible self remains pristine. The real self never has to be confronted.

“She Has So Much Potential” (And Now What)

If you grew up anywhere near the Indian middle-class meritocracy machine, you know this sentence:

“She has so much potential.”

We throw it around like a compliment. We write it in school notebooks. Teachers say it at PTMs. It’s often code for “seems bright but isn’t there yet.”

Psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleague Claudia Mueller ran a simple experiment that explains why this kind of praise is so poisonous. They gave a bunch of eleven-year-olds some puzzles and then praised them in two different ways.

Group A: “You must be smart at this.”
Group B: “You must have worked hard.”

Then they gave the kids a choice between easier puzzles that would guarantee success and harder puzzles that would actually teach them something.

The “you’re smart” kids ran toward safety. The “you worked hard” kids went hunting for challenge.

When the psychologists deliberately gave everyone a really tough set of puzzles, the smart kids cracked. They enjoyed it less. They gave up faster. When later asked to report their scores, a surprising number literally lied and inflated their performance to protect the “I am intelligent” image.

The effort kids weren’t having the time of their lives either, but they stuck around. They saw difficulty as a step in the right direction, not humiliation.

Dweck has spent decades since then exploring what she calls fixed versus growth mindsets. A fixed mindset treats ability as innate: you either have it or you don’t. A growth mindset treats ability as changeable: you can get better with practice.

If you’ve grown up marinated in “you’re so bright,” “you’re gifted,” “you’ll do something big,” you end up living in a very expensive cage.

Because then every hard thing becomes a test. Mess up once and the jury in your head bangs the gavel: you were a fraud all along.

It becomes much more tempting to stay in your comfort zones, where people keep saying nice things about your potential, than to enter arenas where you will unavoidably look average for a while.

Planning lets you stay in the compliments. Doing forces you to risk the silence.

It’s not that you don’t want to grow. It’s that growth requires you to be visibly unskilled in public for longer than your ego can comfortably tolerate.

Much easier to open a new document and rename it “New Life Plan: FINAL (updated).”

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Perfectionism Is Fucking You Up

Perfectionism doesn’t always look like colour-coded notes and a spotless room. Often it looks like your sink full of dishes at 1 a.m. because you couldn’t start your real work until everything felt “right,” and now you’re exhausted and still haven’t done the thing that actually matters.

Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett have a much harsher definition of perfectionism than the one we coyly use in interviews. For them, it’s a personality style defined by impossible internal standards, ruthless self-criticism, and tying your sense of worth to whether you’ve matched some imaginary ideal.

They and their colleagues talk about the “procrastinating perfectionist”, which is specific kind of person who deeply cares about doing things well and therefore…doesn’t start. Or starts and then abandons the effort at the first sign of mess.

Most of us underestimate how violent perfectionism is. You make one mistake in a deck and your inner voice goes straight to character assassination. You miss two days at the gym and your brain declares the entire fitness journey a sham. You fumble one line in a presentation and your body reacts like you’ve been publicly stoned.

It’s not simply “high standards.” It’s all-or-nothing thinking. If it’s not exceptional, it’s worthless. Which, if you step outside your own skull for half a second, is a completely deranged way to approach human development.

Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill did a meta-analysis a few years ago and found perfectionism rising across generations. Young people today are reporting higher levels of three different kinds of perfectionism: toward the self, toward others, and, my personal favourite hell category, the belief that others are demanding perfection from you.

Put that inside a culture of Instagram, LinkedIn, hustle porn, and everyone posting only their best angles, and it’s no wonder that so many of us cling to potential. Potential is the one place where perfection is still intact.

The future you has done everything right.
The present you can’t load the washing machine correctly on the first try.

So the present you keeps subcontracting her life to a future self who never actually shows up.

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The Tyranny of “Keeping Your Options Open”

Zoom out even more.

We live in a moment that worships optionality. The educated, English-speaking Indian twenty-something today is told, implicitly and explicitly, to keep all doors open as long as possible. Don’t “close yourself off” too early. Don’t pick a lane. Don’t get “stuck.”

Economist and philosopher Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice, the idea that more options don’t make us freer; they just make us more paralysed. More choices mean more comparison, more potential regret, more pressure to optimise.

Mihir Desai wrote about Harvard MBAs living under what he called the tyranny of optionality. They end up structuring their entire careers to preserve maximum flexibility, and then discovering they’d constructed lives full of exits and no actual home.

You don’t need to be at Harvard to feel this. In our version, it looks like:

• Doing a degree you don’t care about because “it keeps lots of paths open.”

• Taking jobs that look good on LinkedIn rather than ones you actually want to be good at.

• Hovering in situationships because committing would mean you can’t keep flirting with the fantasy of someone more exciting.

At some level, it’s rational. In a precarious economy, with insane urban costs and very visible inequality, you want optionality. You want the ability to pivot. You don’t want to be caught on a sinking ship.

But as a personality style, “I keep my options open” can easily become code for “I don’t build anything long enough to let it change me.”

Duckworth would call that an under-committed life. High on exploration, low on depth.

Potential fits very neatly into this culture. You get to feel like you could do many things. You don’t have to sit with the grief of choosing one direction over others.

The problem is: skills compound. Trust compounds. Love compounds. Reputation compounds. Depth is, annoyingly, what makes everything easier and more interesting over time.

And depth is only born in the middle.

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Grit Is Not “Rise and Grind”; It’s “You Showed Up on a Bad Day”

Angela Duckworth’s work on grit got colonised by LinkedIn motivational posters, but the original insight is much more…obvious?

She followed West Point cadets, Spelling Bee contestants, students, employees. Across all these groups, the people who achieved the outcomes we care about weren’t the ones with the highest test scores or the biggest initial hype. They were the ones who could keep showing up for one goal over a long period, even when they were bored, even when they’d failed, even when nobody was clapping.

Grit, as she defines it, has two pieces: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests. Put crudely: you keep working, and you don’t change your mind every four minutes.

It’s not “never quit ever.” People pivot. People change fields. Duckworth is not advocating for staying in abusive jobs or doomed relationships. She is saying that if you want to build something substantial, you cannot switch objectives every time the middle gets uncomfortable.

Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose work underlies all the pop-science about “10,000 hours,” made a similar point. People who become truly skilled don’t just repeat things mindlessly; they engage in what he called deliberate practice. Slow, targeted, feedback-driven work at the edge of their ability.

Deliberate practice doesn’t feel like a montage. It feels like irritation and micro-failure. It feels like writing a paragraph, hating it, rewriting it. It feels like doing the same movement under a coach’s eye, again and again, while your muscles shake and your pride hurts.

I have never read anyone who said, “I loved deliberate practice. It was such a great experience.” Because it’s NOT. It’s terrible! What they say, in different words, is: “I loved who I slowly became because I stuck with it.”

You do not get that from potential. You only get that from progress. And progress is, nine times out of ten, boring when you are inside it.

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So What Does Growing Up Around This Actually Look Like?

Here’s the part of the essay where I’m supposed to give you a framework. I don’t have one. If I had a five-step system, I would have sold it to a productivity app by now.

What I do have are a few working principles I keep coming back to, mostly because my own life keeps breaking whenever I ignore them.

I am learning that fresh starts are not sacred. They’re just a tool.

Use them the way you’d use a double espresso: to power the first concrete, unsexy steps of something you actually want. Sign the form. Schedule the session. Block the calendar. Move money into the SIP. Tell one person you trust what you’re trying to do.

Don’t use them as periodic personality rebrands to avoid the middle.

I am learning that “staying” has to be embarrassingly specific.

“I’m going to be more disciplined” is nothing. It’s words. Milkman’s research on the fresh start effect is clearest when she talks about implementation intentions. The boring details of when, where, how.

“I will write my Substack essay on Sunday afternoons, even if it’s just a horrid draft,” is different from “I will write more.”
“I will lift on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, after work, for 45 minutes,” is different from “I will get fit this year.”

The middle starts to exist the moment you have a place to stand inside it.

I am learning to expect the crash.

If you know hedonic adaptation is coming, you don’t interpret boredom as a cosmic sign. You treat it like weather. You don’t rage at the sky for raining. You decide whether you’re the sort of person who carries an umbrella.

The day your gym feels pointless, your relationship feels ordinary, your job feels like admin work, that day is not proof about whether you chose wrong. It’s proof about whether you know how to keep walking when there are no fireworks.

I am learning to be seen in an unfinished state.

This is the part perfectionism hates. Show your work while it’s still ordinary. Publish the blog before you’re a Thought Leader. Say “I’ve started strength training” when your body looks exactly the same. Tell your friends you’re trying to spend differently when your account balance still looks tragic.

If you wait to be impressive before you show up, you will never show up. You will live and die inside the clean page.

I am learning to choose one thing to be bad at for a long time.

One domain where your explicit goal is not excellence but endurance. The thing you do that makes no sense to your CV, that doesn’t produce content, that doesn’t get you praise. The thing you do because you want to know what it feels like to be a beginner, then a little less terrible, then quietly competent.

It could be lifting. It could be Carnatic music. It could be longform writing. It could be managing people. It could be learning how to actually rest.

The point is not that it becomes your “thing.” The point is that you train yourself to survive the middle in at least one place in your life.

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The Radical Move: Stay

The older I get, the more I’m moved by people who are very slightly bored and still keep turning up.

The friend who has been in therapy every week for six years.
The colleague who didn’t jump funds every year and now genuinely understands an asset class.
The couple whose love story wouldn’t make it to a Netflix script but who know how to apologise and reorder biryani after a fight.
The woman who has been lifting since 2018, and now her knees work and she carries her own suitcase.

None of these lives look as glamorous as potential. They don’t photograph as well as the before/after transformation shot. They don’t come with trumpets.

But they feel different. Less drama, more doing.

Barry Schwartz would say they’ve voluntarily reduced their options in some areas so that something real could grow. Markus and Nurius would say their possible selves have been forced to reconfigure around the person they actually are, not the fantasy they perform. Duckworth would say they’ve chosen a few “ultimate concerns” and learned to endure the boring bits. Lyubomirsky would say they’re working with hedonic adaptation instead of against it, finding ways to vary and appreciate what they already have, rather than endlessly trading it in.

I would just call it adulthood.

Not the grim, “give up and stop dreaming” adulthood our teenage selves were terrified of. The gentler kind, where you realise that someone has to put water into the fridge or there will be nothing cold to drink, and maybe that someone can be you.

You don’t have to stop loving fresh notebooks. You don’t have to stop making playlists called “New Era.” You don’t have to give up on your dramatic Google Doc titles. God knows I won’t.

But the next time you feel that rush of “this time I will change everything,” ask yourself:

What am I willing to keep doing when this rush fades?

Can I tolerate being ordinary at this thing for a while? Can I bear to be my current self, not my fantasy self, while I do it? Can I sit in the middle long enough for something to take root?

Potential is the high of the clean page. It is delicious and addictive and sometimes very necessary.

Progress is whatever you keep doing once the page is full of scratches, the margins are crooked, and you’re slightly embarrassed by your own handwriting.

One lets you pretend you’re a different person for an evening.

The other is how, slowly, on hundreds of unremarkable afternoons, you actually become her.

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Things I read to write this:

• Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, & Jason Riis: the “fresh start effect” people.

• Sonja Lyubomirsky: patron saint of “why can’t we stay happy for longer?”

• Hazel Markus & Paula Nurius: the possible selves duo.

• Claudia Mueller & Carol Dweck: “praise for intelligence vs effort” study.

• Paul Hewitt & Gordon Flett: chronicling the many ways perfectionism wrecks us.

• Thomas Curran & Andrew Hill: perfectionism is rising, and no, you weren’t imagining it.

• Barry Schwartz: wrote The Paradox of Choice and ruined supermarket aisles for me.

• Mihir Desai: the one who pointed out that infinite optionality feels terrible.

• Angela Duckworth: grit.

• Anders Ericsson: “deliberate practice” and the deeply unsexy mechanics of mastery.