People can be upset because of me and yet I may not have done anything wrong. That these two things can be true at the same time is news to me, and I am still in shock; it has not settled in yet. I have come to realize, somewhat painstakingly, that invoking negative emotion in another person is not proof of doing something bad.

The reason I am writing about this today is to fully grasp the concept of “bracing for impact”. My therapist has told me repeatedly across many sessions, “When you make a decision and communicate it, the other person may not like it. They may react badly. You have to brace for that impact.” For me, this felt like it should not be allowed. It’s as though the teacher had left the hall and we were all allowed to cheat in the exam. If I can brace for impact, I am free to do anything. I am no longer restricted in my actions by how others around me feel. I am worried this might sound obvious to you, but I am trying to explain just how much of a paradigm-shift it has been in my life.

Emotional Reasoning

When I was reading a book about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in the chapter on cognitive distortion, one of these listed distortions was called “emotional reasoning”. In that chapter, Dr. David Burns describes the distortion as such:

Emotional Reasoning is when you reason from how you feel. “I feel guilty. This means that I did something bad.” Emotional Reasoning is a distortion because your feelings all result from your thoughts. And if your thoughts are distorted, then your emotions / feelings will not reflect reality.

This is the only distortion out of nine that I read and could not identify what was wrong in thinking that way. If I feel guilty, I must have done something bad. Isn’t that why, evolutionarily speaking, guilt exists? To point us towards moral goodness? In the same way, if I have upset someone else, isn't that some sort of foolproof evidence against my actions?

I think emotional reasoning is the main kind of reasoning in my life. Most of my day, I am a calculator of emotions. How will I feel if I play another game of Fortnite? How will S feel? How will our maid feel if I ask her to do a little more work? Feelings, you might say, are the grounding force in my life - something real that I can base action on. But if I shouldn’t reason based on emotions, what else is there?

Do No Harm

Perhaps one way to make life decisions is based on values and principles. My training in philosophy meant that any such principle I’d come up with was up for questioning. Don’t lie. What about lies that grant a teenager a bit of freedom in a conservative household? Don’t murder. What if it is to save a hundred people, like Agamemnon did? Everything became context-dependent, and I started to find general life principles to be useless. Emotion seemed to be the only real thing that existed.

So by default, the only principle I end up operating on is “Do no harm.” My worst nightmare is being the villain in someone else’s story. Disappointing someone, putting someone in a bad mood, making someone angry - these are the only kinds of impact that seem real, so that is what I end up basing my actions on. (As an aside, I also think “Do no harm” is less of a principle for me than a survival mechanism. I am afraid of provoking people or upsetting them, because it might have bad consequences for me - anger directed at me, strained friendships etc.)

Self-Sacrificing

I guess you’d call what I’m describing as people pleasing. I think a more accurate term at least for myself, might be self-sacrificing. “Do no harm” (with a very flexible and all-encompassing definition of harm) led me to make myself very tiny, so as to not even be a factor. It was always other people who could be upset, never me.

Bracing for impact is a challenge. If I can do that, what more can I get away with? It makes me feel as though the world is open for play. I can build whatever kind of life I want, unencumbered by the weight of other people’s emotions about it. If I really did that, what kind of life would I want to build? This is a question I feel like I’m only asking myself for the first time now.

There is fear that this type of thinking is too selfish or self-centered. Is it giving in too much to western ideas of individualism and giving up on the communal ways of living I’ve seen growing up? Maybe those two things don’t always have to be at odds. The life I want to build might still have community at its heart. It just would be a choice made from a free place, and I imagine that is what makes all the difference.

Reflection Prompt:
What's a decision you want to make but are afraid to communicate? How  can you brace yourself for a bad reaction before communicating it?

📖 What to Read

Is Life A Game?

From this article by The New Yorker, I learned about value capture, and it was a concept that seemed deeply relevant to my life. So often, we start out doing a thing for its own sake, and then get trapped in external incentives we didn’t care for to begin with.

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It isn’t necessarily, according to Kc. He says when his knee hurt (he just had a surgery), he would console himself by saying to himself, “It’s okay Kc, it’ll get better.” He talks to himself in third person very often, and that was fascinating to me because I never do. I never have. The number of times my brain voices would have said the word “Nishant” are very very few. I can’t remember even one time.

So according to Kc, self-love is when you can talk to yourself and be kind and gentle, like you would be with someone you love. You can be someone you love. So Kc is self-soothing by telling himself, “It’ll be okay, Kc”. I realize that I do say those things to myself sometimes, but only in the ‘I’, in that I will be fine, or I’m doing alright.

Conversation as rationality

One of the most powerful experiments I’ve learned in therapy is - “Would you talk about a friend the way you talk about yourself?” Often, I have found solutions to my own problems when asked, “What would you advise a friend in this situation?” It seems that the ‘I’ is a deeply biased space where all rational thought goes to die. The moment it shifts to a ‘he’, clarity starts to emerge.

Some philosophers argue that this is the reason almost the entirety of Plato’s work was written in conversation. He believed that humans were terrible reasoners in isolation, and it was only in conversation that rational thought emerged. All of this points to the efficacy of Kc’s approach. How powerful it could be if we could be in conversation with our own self, and hence think more clearly about our lives and give ourselves the same love and affection we would give a lover.

I talked to Kc about this only a couple days ago and I remain fascinated by it. I tried an experiment where I wrote down how I thought others would describe Nishant, both at work and personal life. I guess this is what it means to get to know yourself. Till now, I have been driving a car where I can only see out the windshield. I don’t have any idea what color my car is on the outside. This is an experiment in trying to see if I can step out and observe the car that is being driven.

I tried to describe Nishant in my journal the other day and here’s what I came up with:

In his personal life, Nishant is a kind and generous person. He is understanding, empathetic, and he communicates well at least with S. He's not so communicative with the other people in his life. He is also really smart and someone people can trust that they'll get good advice from. He is a good writer and the people in his life seem to appreciate his writing. He is also thoughtful about everything he does. If I met Nishant, I would note that Nishant seems smart and good at what he does, but I'd be suspicious and be like "I'm sure he's missing something about life." because people who are really smart often do. If I read Nishant's newsletter I'd want to be friends with him. I'd probably be really happy for him that he has enough clarity to create a life he wants. I would also wonder that if close friends are so important for him, why does he live away from them? He doesn't seem to be prioritizing that in his life, so he's probably a bit lonely.

In his professional life, if I met Nishant I would be a bit intimidated, because he is really good at what he does and seems very self-assured about it. I would not want to be competing with him, or I probably would but only to be challenged and have another smart person who's working on the same things. I would observe how he is in office and I'd probably wonder how he gets away with coming to office so late. I would be inspired, intimidated, but also enjoy being around him.

Experiments in third-person

I sat down to write something for this newsletter today and couldn’t get a word out. Then I tried to switch to third person. “Nishant is sitting here trying to write but can’t.” and my brain responded, “Nishant should just type whatever he can. It doesn’t matter if it’s any good or it makes any sense.” That is how I ended up being able to write this today.

There is research that proves the efficacy of exactly this approach. In 2017, researchers measured how people’s emotions responded to them talking about themselves in third-person and saying the same thing in first-person. They found that people who talked to themselves in third person were able to regulate emotions and exercise self-control with significantly less stress.

Removing the biases we have towards ourselves by taking an outsider’s view seems like a powerful thing. Even in meditation, there is the idea of stepping out of the self and taking an observational approach. I am going to try and get better at getting to know Nishant, so that I can be a friend to him and guide him better in stressful situations or otherwise.

I think about those fights often, because I think it was those fights that have defined all my relationships since. The particular issue might change, but the script in my head is the same: they are always wanting more, I am always giving less.

I don’t know that it’s valuable today to dissect my particular predicament, because I haven’t really found anyone else with this particular variant of attachment issues. What I want to talk about is patterns—the nasty problems that seem to keep coming up over years, sometimes even decades, even when the people and situations are entirely different.

Recently, I’ve started to get deeply anxious whenever I see the ninth grade dynamic replaying in my life. And it is really about the way I see it, not about what’s happening. My partner might ask “What’s your plan for the day?” and my threat response will get activated. Will I say some adultified version of “I want to go play”, and will I get an “but this is the only time we have” in return? Will it lead to a big fight where we ultimately conclude that I am not fit for romantic relationships, and hence destined to be alone?

I note myself responding this way. I note the anxiety and the inability to answer a straightforward question in a straightforward way. And I am now tired of it. It has been a decade of my brain responding this way. I am terrified that this will never change, that I am doomed to live my whole life inside of a threat response. That is a deeply sad possibility. What a tragedy it would be to have all this life to live, and spend it all afraid of monsters that (most probably?) don’t exist.

At some point, the anxiety that the problem will never go away overtook the problem itself. Suffering from time and space insecurities is hard, yes. But remaining optimistic that it will not always be this hard is a different ballgame altogether. Each time I start to feel as though I am unable to set my boundaries, I get more anxious that I will never be able to set my boundaries. A problem that is about a particular situation on a particular day expands into a deep sense of pessimism about my future.

I tried techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy. According to CBT, this cognitive distortion would be called the fortune teller error:

Fortune Telling, also known as Jumping to Conclusions, is a cognitive distortion, which is a type of thinking error that involves predicting the future with absolute certainty. This type of distorted thinking can lead to negative emotions and actions, and it's important to recognize and address it in order to improve mental health and well-being.

Examples might include, “I’ll never get that job,” or “I’ll never feel better.” The positive reframing might be to say “I’ve been making progress on this problem, and there’s no reason to believe I will always be insecure about it.” This type of reframing helps, but only marginally. If I have been struggling with this insecurity for a decade, there is enough ground to worry that I will struggle with it my whole life. I don’t think the fear is entirely baseless.

What I have found helpful is to flip this script on its head by accepting it. Maybe I will always have a threat response. Maybe it will never truly go away. But awareness is power. Knowing that this is a pattern, that this is my particular pattern, already charts a way forward. If the mind always writes the same script, there are also voices that can push back and restore some sanity.

I think my focus needs to shift to amplifying the right voices. I can note that I had a threat response, and I can wait for it to pass. Instead of wishing it away, I can just choose not to act on its basis. Breaking the pattern does not have to mean that the original inclinations are absent. It can also mean adding new inclinations that can take preference.

In this context, a scene from A Beautiful Mind comes to mind. The movie, a biopic about the life of mathematician John Nash, depicts his struggles with schizophrenia and hallucinations. He sees three hallucinated people who lead him into some dangerous situations. The last scene of the movie is him walking out of the Nobel ceremony with his wife. As he's leaving, he still sees them standing there. He just chooses not to engage, and turns towards his “real life”.

Alcoholics and addicts of different kinds also report this. The urges might lessen in intensity but never go away. They just have to choose to respond differently to them. In some sense, that is a consolation. I don’t need these insecurities to go away. That is not exactly in my control. I just need to learn to respond differently to them. Instead of going mindlessly on the path they tend to take me, I can choose to look, and then ignore them.

Maybe then, there will be a day when the voices of insecurity will vanish, and all that will remain is the voices I chose to put in place. What a glorious day that will be.

I often have trouble believing that I’m not okay, and these days I hold on to the fact that I always feel like crying as proof that I am not. Whenever I feel tears coming, it's strangely relieving because it justifies my functioning differently than I would like to: not writing enough, not keeping the house clean, not being “on top of it” at large. I must be going through something. I am not always like this. 

This always thing has been a bit of a struggle lately. It feels like so much of adulthood goes by with less than ideal mental health that I’m always waiting to be better. It seems as though there is a better, more active and happier version of me out there, it's just that I am not that way right now because I’m “going through something”. At what point do you have to say that “going through something” is just what being me is like? How long can you keep distancing yourself from who you are when you’re not okay, if you’re “not okay” most days of the year?

It eats at me that I have not written the newsletter in six months. I tell myself it’s because I haven't been okay. But for six months? For half a fucking year? And look I know, getting better takes the time it takes. I know that there is no “acceptable timeframe for depression to last”. But, and I know this sounds funny, it feels like half a year is dangerously close to my whole life. If I have not been okay for the last six months, is there a being okay waiting for me in the next six? Why would there be? What reason do I have to believe that there is? 

I have started to feel like this is what adulthood is. It's always going to be a bit of a mess, and depression will always be lurking by the corner. I will have moments of joy that make me forget about it, but there is no version of me that is Capital T Thriving. It feels like that is a fantasy, a snapshot if you will, that stops me from dedicating myself completely to the current moment.(Warning: Unreliable narrator, not to be taken at face value. May turn around next week and say he’s Thriving and has no clue what he was crying about.)

I read some relationship advice a few years ago that stayed with me. Apparently, it's a red flag if you’re in a relationship counting on “potential”, that there is a future version of the other person who will have overcome the things you don’t like about them. It's understandable that this is a red flag - you could spend your whole life waiting. I feel like too much of my life has gone by with me waiting to be better. “I’ll go to this gathering when I’m better”, “I’ll write the newsletter when I’m better.” Maybe I just need to do all those things imperfectly while staying in my sadness. 

There is a thin line there between going out and doing things for your own good and pushing yourself too hard and having a public breakdown. What if I am at a party and cannot control my tears? What if my brain is so completely fogged out that I’m insufferably boring and nobody wants to stand near me for more than five minutes? Oh god, what if I’m that guy awkwardly standing alone while everyone else is chatting in groups? Surely, that’s worse than being in my bed scrolling through reels. Surely, there is some value in recognizing that I’m not up for this right now, and that it might be better for me to wait it out?

The other thing that bugs me about “not being okay” is that it makes the whole “consistency” thing feel so out of reach. Everybody on the internet keeps preaching that the magic happens when you write consistently, when you post consistently. Of course, the ideal human being for the content mill is one that keeps producing. Of course, it rewards that human being. But are there people who find it easy to do that? Are there people who aren’t knocked out for months (or years) at a time and fail at being consistent? If there are, good for them. My life currently is not structured for that kind of consistency in my creative life. (AKA I have a job that pays my bills and on most days turning up for it feels like all the consistent I can be.)

The boring answer to these open questions seems to be to take it one day at a time, because of course, being “not okay” is not a monolith and has its variants. Some days, I’m too “not okay” to do anything. On other days, I’m less “not okay” and maybe I can ramble on for a few paragraphs or clean my room a little. I think navigating this well involves the ability to calibrate my level of “not okay” honestly and make decisions on that basis. 

Somehow that doesn’t feel like a resolution, maybe because it isn’t a resolution as much as a way to cope. I’m not sure I have a resolution. Maybe I will one day when I’m okay, but I know better than to hold my breath.

This is me, every day after work. When there’s no-one else around, I spend my evenings just watching short-form video for hours. Then, I end up regretting it and do it all over again the next day.

You might say I’m addicted. That is not, however, my primary concern. It’s the negative self-talk around the habit I’m more worried about. Lately, I’ve found a way to make those voices a little less loud, and I want to articulate it with you.

What’s the sich?

When I say that I have no self-control, I have personalized an issue that is in-fact not personal or unique to me at all. Everyone I speak to who’s my age or younger is facing the challenge of too much screen time. I think that has something to do with low self-esteem. When you’re going through life with the suspicion that there’s something not quite right with you, everything that isn’t perfect is a candidate for why it could be your fault.

Situationism is a school of thought that helps me see how much of my behaviour is not “my fault”. The situationists hold that our actions are dictated far more by the situation we find ourselves in than our ‘character’ or ‘personality’. They cite a number of experiments. In one, subjects were pay phone callers. Some of these subjects found pre-planted coins in their booth, while others did not. When each one got out, they were met with a stranger who dropped a folder full of papers. The experiment found that those who found the coin in the booth were more likely to help the stranger than those who didn’t.

The point the situationists make is that situations are far better at predicting behaviour than the individual’s character. You might see the person helping the stranger pick up the papers and think, “Oh, that’s such a nice person,” when in fact, the act had barely anything to do with the person.

The important insight here is that we often wrongly attribute things to identity. We take behavior to be the indicator of who a person is, as opposed to what they’re going through. Are we doing that with ourselves too? Maybe each time I call myself lazy or weak-willed, it’s actually that there are so many things calling upon my limited energy that I have none left for the things I want to do more of.

The Rat Park

There is another experiment in the 1970s I recently found out about that I think the situationists could make use of. Apparently, it’s long been proven that rats in a cage, when given the option between water and morphine, will pick morphine each time and overdose. The conclusion was seemingly clear. The drugs win.

A psychologist had the bright idea of doing the same experiment, but in a “rat park”, a colony where the rats could socialize with each other. Notably, in that colony rats preferred the water over the morphine. Even if some took the morphine, they took it in lesser quantities and never overdosed. The situationists might learn about this experiment and say “Aha!” The situation makes all the difference.

Now imagine if the isolated rats criticize themselves to no end. “You have no self-control! You will never be able to quit because you’re weak!” On the other hand, the colony rats pride themselves on a clean lifestyle. “I treat my body like a temple, ya know.” Both would be deluded in thinking their character has something to do with their choices.

The upshot here is that we could do with being kinder to ourselves about the things we’re not able to do and places we’re not able to get. I felt a sense of relief when I stopped blaming myself for the Reels addiction. Instead, I got curious about the situation that supports this behavior. Coming home from work to an empty house will do that to you. The silence needs to be filled.

Making Excuses?

I know that there is a dominant position on this found in many a motivational video. You can rise above your circumstances; beat the odds and get what you want. To this worldview, the situationist approach can seem like making excuses or not pushing ourselves hard enough. The voice is one of a stern coach who doesn’t let you give up and pushes you beyond your limits.

Here’s the thing about having this coach in my head. He’s good at making me do one extra rep at the gym, but he doesn’t really know when to stop. When I fail, he can be mean, calling me lazy or weak. That is not a voice that helps me reach my goals. A more empathetic voice is that of the situationist. Of course, you’re not able to stop watching Reels. It can be lonely living alone, and escaping is a way to cope. It’s understandable.

To me, the stern coach comes at a very high cost, and is not effective at his job either. A kinder coach creates an environment where I can thrive sustainably, and where it’s okay for me to fail. I like playing in the kind coach’s team, so I think I’m going to keep doing that.

More Examples of Situationist Flips

Here are some more examples where people wisely take the focus away from the individual and on the situation they’re in.

1. Imposter syndrome: Reshma Sujauni, the founder of an organization called “Girls Who Code”, tackles imposter syndrome in this commencement speech. If women at the workplace feel like they don’t belong, they’re told it’s because they’re suffering from “imposter syndrome”. Saujani puts forth that imposter syndrome doesn’t actually exist. It’s a tool to make the woman the problem, so that they don’t start to question the structural problems in workplaces that make them feel this way.

2. Habit-building: In the popular book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, he emphasizes a stance that is, I think, quite situationist. You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. The focus is less on will-power and motivation to build habits, and more on how we can set up systems (or situations) so that we do what’s needed.

If you know of any other places you’ve seen this flip happen, feel free to tell us about it in the comments or reply to this email.

Until this point in my life, I did not care what I was wearing. I have had the same clothes for years, and the new ones are almost always gifted by family. Recently, I started to care about my outfit, obsessing over what I wear to work every day.

There’s your traditional Balcony plot: why this change? What happened, and what do we think of it? So let’s get into it.

Edgy Outfits

For the past three months, I’ve been working from office. We work out of a shared workspace where I often find myself surrounded by strangers, whether on lifts or common spaces.

My default wardrobe for this time has been a random polo t-shirt and a pair of jeans with sports shoes. Slowly, though, I have started to feel uncomfortable with the fact that no-one takes note of me. All they think is - another person, working a corporate job, coming to work in generic business casuals; nothing new under the sun.

I have felt sad thinking about myself this way: just another person, working in marketing or some such at a startup. Like evvverybody else. But I’m not like everybody else. If clothes are meant to be about self-expression, can I express through my outfits that I’m more than that?

That is the question that led me to learning more about fashion. For a few days, I tried wearing interesting outfits to work, from a printed kurta one day to just a nice t-shirt the other. I ignored the stack of plain polo t-shirts in my wardrobe. The experiment, however, never led to the satisfaction I sought, and I think the reasons behind that are a bit deeper than the outfits themselves.

Lying to Myself

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre talked about the concept of ‘bad faith'. The common meaning of the phrase ‘operating in bad faith’ is someone who’s being deceptive, not being honest in dealing with other people. Sartre turns this phrase inward, arguing that we can be in bad faith with our own selves.

I’ll explain the way I understand this with an example. I once overheard a conversation in college which went this way:

“I’m not a smoker, bro. I’m trying to quit.”

“I don’t think you can call yourself a smoker *unless* you’re trying to quit. Smokers are essentially people who are trying to quit and failing at it.”

What this person deftly did was change what it meant to be a smoker. It sounds like that’s someone who is at peace with their smoking, but according to him, almost no-one ever is. Sartre would’ve agreed. For him, a person clinging only to their freedom to quit (I’m quitting tomorrow!) and denying their current reality (I’m not a smoker!) would be someone who’s in bad faith. They fit the definition of a smoker through their actions, but deceive themselves in not owning up to that identity.

In the exact same way, it is in bad faith for me to say that I’m not a marketer. A marketer is someone who works in marketing. I fit that definition, and if I choose to disown it, I am conveniently hiding only in my freedom and not acknowledging the current facts of my life.

Like the situation with smokers, perhaps all marketers are people who work in marketing while desperately wanting not to be seen just as marketers. In that case, I am much more of a marketer than I lead myself to believe.

The Bad Faith Wardrobe

For Sartre, bad faith is an inevitability - it is not possible to be truly authentic, since all forms of ‘being authentic to myself’ are identity prisons out of which I am always free to escape. Not recognizing that freedom would be bad faith just as much as leaning into it too much is. We are always either denying our current reality, or our freedom to transcend it. There is just no getting out of this predicament.

The resolution to the original conflict, then, is this: If I *am* a marketer, it is also true that I am not *just* a marketer. Trying to reflect one of those truths in my outfit is always a denial of the other. Correlating identity so strongly with what I wear is then always a losing game.

I have now gone back to the comfort of polo t-shirts, concluding that the identity game is futile at large. That we come to work in checked shirts and trousers says nothing of our internal lives. We all share the predicament of being boxed into roles that don’t speak to our whole self, and that is the condition that we must make peace with.

More Bad Faith Examples

My current wrestles with bad faith end here, but I am a bit nerdy about this stuff and thought of a few more examples of it that you might enjoy.

1. In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep is choosing between two belts, and her new intern played by Anne Hathaway chuckles, thinking they look exactly the same. It’s clear she thinks it’s a bit ridiculous how the people in that room obsess over fashion. This is what Meryl Streep says in response:

Okay, I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select that lumpy blue sweater because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back […] It’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

Where’s the bad faith? Streep’s point is that we are all inevitably communicating something with what we wear. In thinking it doesn’t matter, Hathaway’s character is in denial of the fact that she is equally obsessive about her outfit. Staying casual is as much of an obsession with fashion as being ‘dressy’.

2. In the book No Logo, Naomi Klein deconstructs the brand as a tool of capitalism. It’s a fascinating book in which one of the things she talks about is “ironic consumption”. It’s the idea that since we cannot escape consumerism and branding, we participate in it ironically. We wear the big brands and watch the franchise movies but without giving into their sincere allure. The brands, then, simply capitalized on this ironic consumption:

In this complicated context, for brands to be truly cool, they need to layer this uncool-equals-cool aesthetic of the ironic viewer onto their pitch: they need to self-mock, talk back to themselves while they are talking, be used and new simultaneously.

Two brands come to mind. dbrand, the phone case brand, which is explicitly rude to its customers on social media, abandoning the principles of branding but only to create new ones. Another is Nothing, the smartphone company whose name suggests the lack of a brand altogether, but of course, that is the brand for people who think they’re above identifying with a brand.

Where is the bad faith? Simply in the fact that these are brands that are selling products, but to be ‘cool’ brands, they have to be in bad faith, denying that the people in those companies are building brands while doing exactly that.

I allowed myself to nerd-out in this edition more than I typically do, but I hope that was somewhat enjoyable to you. If you liked it, do share this with a friend. It’s the best way to support my work. See you soon with another edition!

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These days, I’ve been feeling a bit small in front of people who earn more than me or have more meaningful jobs. A voice in my head tells me I could’ve been so much more than I chose to be. So many people around me are doing so much more.

As an adult, status is mostly conferred to you based on your work. It could be how much impact you’re having on the world or how much money you’re taking home. The work I do is interesting. My colleagues are both smart and kind. The daily experience at my job is something I’m grateful for, but it’s not as flashy as writing for The Caravan or founding a startup. There’s less status in it.

I have to admit that I struggle with feeling like I’m behind on the status games. I could’ve optimized for more status and I chose not to, and on some days I struggle to remember why. This week, I just want to untie these knots with you.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

The first time status ever came up for me was when I was considering a job at a small publisher no one had heard of. I told my therapist that I wouldn’t want to go to parties and say I work at a small online publication no-one had heard of.

She asked me:

Is it worth optimizing your life choices to what you’d like to say about yourself at parties? Or do you think that we should focus instead on our own day-to-day experience?

The answer was fairly obvious. I took the job at the publication, and I learned a lot about the publishing ecosystem working there. I did feel a bit uneasy explaining to people where I worked, but I would’ve regretted not taking that job for the sake of my status at parties. That experience made it a thumb rule for me that I wouldn’t let status get in the way of enriching experiences.

The Desire for Status

Of late, the conviction that I don’t want to play status games has weakened. When I mentioned it to a friend, he said it might have something to do with being in Bangalore. I dismissed it at first, but have come around to that view. What has changed is that I’m not surrounded by people who see and understand my journey. When most people around you know you by your LinkedIn bio, you want to make it good.

This says something about the modern industrial complex, doesn’t it? It requires that we as workers stay untethered, going where the jobs take us. But of course, we seek the company of others wherever we go. How, though, are we to become desirable to strangers? By getting those coveted jobs, leaning further into the complex to signal wealth, intelligence, artfulness, or all of the above.

Somehow, when I had the safety of friends who loved and saw me, I did not crave being seen and wanted by anyone else. I wanted to close myself off from the world. It’s sort of like how people gain weight in the security of relationships. Could it be that we only care about what we’re channeling externally when we’re unfulfilled in our relationships?

Status and Loneliness

I used to care only about what my closest friends thought of me. If they thought I was doing okay, I would be okay. I don’t have them around me as much to offer that reassurance anymore, so I care what strangers think of me. I care where I work, how much I earn, what I do, or how many people I manage. When no one is telling you you’re doing okay, you start looking for external signals that you are.

Maybe, then, the race for status stems from loneliness. On the flip side, to live a life unconcerned with status might entail nurturing relationships where status is not a factor. Somehow my salary and my job title just matter less when I’m surrounded by people who don’t care about them.

I just want to feel like I am good and smart and fun to hang out with. One way to get there is to have a fancy title at a well-known company. Another is to be in the company of people who truly know me. Where does that leave me? I’m yet to find out.

I come home from work at 6 and I can't immediately lie down and watch Reels. If I did, that would mean the dishes wouldn't get done and I'd need to order out, again. I don't want those things to happen, but I also really don't want to work anymore. I want to rest. I want to release my body from the constraints of tasks.

Unfortunately, it seems that there's a long way to go before I get that rest. I'm starting to get a little frustrated. Why can't I rest? I've worked all day. Why, world, do you not allow me to rest?

Not hiring someone for housework is my own doing. I have no one else to blame for what I've decided to take on here. If I decide to call it quits, I can again make ample time to rest, but something tells me that's not what I should be doing right now. Something tells me I need to change my relationship with rest.

Mothers and Leisure

Growing up, to see my mother at rest was a rare sight. She was, and still is, always busy cooking, cleaning, organizing or offering support to friends and relatives. I have often wished she took more time to rest. The pace at which her life operates seems unsustainable to say the least, but she has sustained it now for decades.

My life in comparison has had ample avenues for rest. Whether through deliberate choice or structural reasons, I've always benefited from others helping me in my personal tasks. Rest has always been aplenty.

Setting up a new life in Bangalore, I decided that I wouldn't get house help, at least not right off the bat. How much work could it be to take care of one person? As it turns out, more than I could imagine. My days are now packed with tasks, whether at work or home. I lie down on my bed at 10, thoroughly exhausted, and pass out. I was describing my predicament to a friend and said, "Jaise mummy log ka nahi hota hai? Poore time kaam aur fir thak ke so jana. Vaisa hi chal raha hai."

I've been living life this way only for a few days, and I've felt some resentment build up within me. I don't know who it's directed at, but it's there. I should be able to rest. Why isn't the world giving me the space to rest? I deserve it!

The Right to Rest

Historically, rest has been seen as a right of the workforce. The 8-hour workday was fought for so that we could have 8 hours outside of work and sleep for 'what we will'. Of course, this division was not nearly as neat for homemakers.

When fathers come home from work, the whole house starts to adjust itself around their emotions. They're often exhausted and hungry. Mothers rush to get the food ready. The man returns from a long day of hunting, and must be served the rewards of his hunt.

As men, our lives have always followed this unsaid dynamic: You go to work, you get to rest. Not having that for a few days has made me see how our mothers' lives were never operating on that cycle. Work is a constant. You stay active the whole day and then you sleep. There is no resentment. It is just how life is.

I think up to this point, I've only experienced the challenges of daily adult life as a man. Out for work, in to rest, the whole world ordered around this body clock. A more current rendition, of course, might involve hiring women as cooks and cleaners, now that there is an aspiration to equality in marriages. Nonetheless, there is something very similar about the experience. I'm tired. Please, world, order yourself around me.

Rest and Entitlement

I think my body needs to be trained to stay active once I return from work. It needs to shed the idea that work is at the workplace, and home is a space of respite. Only men have been able to see things in such binaries, and I think those of us who aspire to be equal partners cannot afford to continue doing so.

I started writing this piece a couple weeks ago, and have since admitted defeat and hired help for some of the housework. A life without leisure was manageable but not desirable, and my philosophical commitments only take me so far.

This time, however short, did change my perspective on rest. I was able to shed some part of my entitlement to rest, and my body doesn't immediately ask to lie down when I come home from work. I'm on my feet, and ready to tackle household tasks. I haven't gotten where I want to be, but it is a step forward.

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📖 What to read this week

This is not your typical Balcony recommendation. It's just raw emotion on a page, and it might make you cry. That's all I'll say about it.

Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm

I always negotiate with auto-drivers. Once you learn to do it, it's notoriously hard to unlearn.

"Sir Qutab Minar chhod do?"
"100 lagenge."
"Sir 50 me jaate the, aap toh 100 hi pahucha diye."
"Arrey bhai... chalo 80 de dena."
"Chalo 70 de denge."
"Chalo."

This is my daily existence. One day, my friend asked me a question, "Kya karoge 30 rupay bachake?"

As a topic, negotiating with auto-drivers is interesting to me because its a habit that reinforces the way the world is. I claim to be someone who disapproves of the way the world is, so there's a clear dissonance here between action and belief.

The ethical non-dilemma

I am horrified by deep inequality in India which places me in the top 1% of this country. I feel no sense in which I deserve this privilege. I also think the auto-driver who's working 7 days a week for 10-12 hours should earn much more than I do as a person who enjoys a comfortable 40-hour work week.

I don't think these beliefs are too radical. I'm also not particularly judgemental towards people who don't see things this way. It's just what makes sense to me, and I haven't found compelling reasons to think otherwise.

The average auto-driver in South Delhi makes anywhere between Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 25,000 per month. It is also often the case that they're the sole earner in the family. If so, the household income of this family is lesser than my expenses as an individual each month.

When I think about it this way and recall what I believe about inequality, it just does not make sense that I'd want to pay him less for his service. What happened to being horrified by inequality?

Who's a good person?

I don't mean to justify the negotiating. In my book, it's not good to do it and I want to do it less and less. But on some days, emotion gets the better of me. On some days, when the world has only taken from me, I don't feel like giving to it.

We like to believe we're all good people. I'm finding that notion hard to justify, at least for myself. There are too many ways in which I am actively complicit in systems that are not good. I know it, I understand it, and I participate anyway. This is the mess I must own up to and live with.

The way I've made sense of it is that such complicity is part and parcel of striving to be a good person. I think good personhood is not something you arrive at, at least not if the world you inhabit is unjust in the first place. I think you're always only striving towards it.

As an aside, I was listening to the DIVINE song 'Punya Paap' recently, and I heard it in a wholly different way: Jabse paida tabse kiye humne punya-paap. Of course, I cannot fathom or relate to it in the context of his childhood. I do think, though, that it speaks to the messiness of finding ourselves in systems of oppression, and reckoning with how we ourselves behave inside of those systems.

Striving for A Better Future

Thinking about ethics and dissonance also reminded me of a time when Alexandria Occasio Cortez was criticized for buying expensive shoes, especially since her public persona was all about being the voice of the oppressed. To that, she responded on Twitter, "Living in the present is not an argument against building a better future."

I saved that response because I thought it was interesting. I don't know if I'm convinced by AOC here, but I mention it to say that there is no single way of being a political person who wants a better world.

I can allow myself the contradictions and still strive when I can to live up to my beliefs. As long as there is the messiness instead of high-headedness, and there are the dilemmas instead of convictions, I think I'll do okay. What do you think?

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📖 What to read this week?

I have an inkling I might've shared this piece before, but it was too compelling today given the theme of this newsletter. At a time when we're bombarded with suffering on our feeds, what is our responsibility as viewers?

This responsibility, for Azoulay, is not abstract. Photographers and people who have let themselves be photographed assume that someday people will see their images and do something in response to what they see, she argues. They imagined you, their future viewer, hovering above them at the moment the picture was taken, and you must live up to their expectations.

Two of my friends had a fight recently. It was the kind of situation where resolution did not seem possible, or at least easily achieved. They tried talking it out; that only made it worse. Some time has gone by, and things have not gotten better.

I've been trying to preserve a sense of community in my adult life. It's the rare thing we had as children and then didn't anymore. When my friends fight, it threatens the existence of the community. It makes me afraid that soon all my friendships will be individual, with nothing that is able to hold them together anymore.

Recently, though, I've been told to let go of this need for a conflict-free community life. I was venting to a friend about how things feel broken, and that I feel the need to fix them. He said, "Perhaps you need to learn to live with a little brokenness."

In our adult lives, the problem of community is a major one. We all want them, but they go through a lot, from breakups to strained friendships to relocations and marriages. How do we fight these challenges and sustain communities that make us feel seen?

Keeping things together

My response to conflict has always been charting a path to resolution. Not just in my own life, but also in the lives of others: I've always chalked down conflict to a failure of understanding. If only two people could understand each other perfectly, conflict would not exist. It is the gaps in communication, the faulty assumptions, that create and sustain conflict.

I thought that I could untie these knots, and so I must. Whenever my friends have fought in the past, I have tried to get in the middle of it. If only I could help them see the other side, it would all be okay.

It might be true that conflict exists because people don't understand each other well enough. It does not follow, however, that this somehow means it is easy to resolve. A failure to understand is not like a mistake in a math problem that can be easily untied. Often, the factors leading to that failure run deep.

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The Separation of Tasks

Living with brokenness, then, is an exercise in humility. Not all conflicts can be resolved. Even if they can, finding such a resolution is often not in my hands. A community can only exist with people who are dedicated participants.

Psychologist Alfred Adler came up with the concept of the 'separation of tasks' that's helpful here. In his imagination, interpersonal dynamics can be neatly separated into tasks. There are my tasks: the areas I'm responsible for: my actions, my thoughts, my beliefs.

There are areas I'm not responsible for, like other people's actions, thoughts, or beliefs. According to Adler, suffering can be chalked down to breaching this separation, whether by taking on other people's tasks or by having other people intervene in my own.

When I take on the burden of sustaining a peaceful community, that entails interfering with other people's tasks. If my friends have a bad fight, it is their task to resolve (or not resolve) it. If I try to control the outcome of the fight, it will involve my meddling with their tasks.

Controlling outcomes

There are people, and then there's the stuff that exists in the middle: friendships, relationships, communities, families. I think it's a mistake to focus too much on the stuff between them because we're in danger of forgetting about the people themselves. We are then only using the people for the stuff in the middle, instead of genuinely treating the people as ends in themselves.

If my friendships are only a way for me to get a sense of community, I will fail to see my friends as individuals in themselves, with desires and feelings that don't always suit the community. Philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said that people must be treated as ends in themselves. For Kant, manipulating them for other ends is a moral wrong.

I thought I'd end up figuring out a hack to building and sustaining a community. I'm only now realizing that such hacks are simply not possible; humans are too unpredictable. A perfect community would look dystopian: participants would be prohibited from behaving in ways that harm the community. Such control undermines the autonomy of the very people who are at the heart of it.

Vibrant communities cannot be built by singular crusaders. They are the stuff that exists in the middle, and every single piece has a stake and contribution to what that stuff looks like. That, I think, is as it should be.

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📖 What to read this week

I enjoyed this history of the 'weekend' as an idea, and how deeply it's come to shape our lives today. Here are some of the questions it grapples with:

What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of the materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

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I've never been a fan of the way that my parents have dealt with medical issues. Anything short of an emergency and they'll wait for it to go away by itself instead of seeing a doctor. Of course, they're not alone in this. Most of India is desperate to avoid the money pit that is the medical establishment.

I'm in the early years of taking charge of my own healthcare, and I decided that I would have a different approach. I would proactively consult doctors and follow their advice. Skepticism of the medical establishment was unscientific, and I intended to be the most scientific adult alive.

A few days ago, I had a high fever. The doctor, when I met him, gave me a medicine for constipation. I had a vague feeling that I didn't need medicine for digestive issues, but I didn't mention it. If the doctor thought it right, who was I to dispute it? It ended up causing severe diarrhea on top of a high fever. I had to be hospitalized the next day.

Asleep at the wheel

When I went to the doctor, I wasn't visiting another human. I was visiting science, and science told me to take the medicine. I had a slight inkling that perhaps I didn't need it, but determined to be scientific, I stayed quiet and took it.

During my hospitalization, I had gotten better on the third day, but the doctor said he would keep me a day longer. Note that every day in the hospital was a significant amount of money. Nobody was asking, 'Can you afford, financially speaking, to stay a day longer?' Nobody had asked, 'Do you feel like you want a medicine for the constipation?'

It was as though these were their decisions to make. Being a good patient meant obeying them without raising objections. The agency I had as a consumer who was purchasing a service was, in small, interpersonal ways, repeatedly undermined.

Of course, the issue here is that doctors don't represent science, at least not exclusively. They also represent capitalism. They're given the power to decide for patients on the basis of science. They can use it just as easily to influence the flow of capital.

Taking ownership

While I was sick and for a while after, I was addicted to Reels. I watched them for hours. When the Instagram content dried out, I opened YouTube shorts. It was an apt metaphor for the experience of hospitalization: let them make all the decisions. You just lie down and watch.

As humans, we're all too eager to let someone else decide. Doctors can dictate our health. Priests can dictate our morals. Algorithms can dictate our entertainment. Bosses can dictate our labor. Politicians can dictate the country.

I think succumbing to these people (or technologies) takes away from the essence of what it is to live. If we're not here to make our own set of terrible decisions, what are we here to do? A friend of mine likes to repeat these lines from Pygmalion: "What is life but a series of inspired follies?"

There are a lot of powerful people interested in stripping away our power to make authentic decisions, especially as we get the power to influence the world, whether through capital or our vote. That can be an algorithm that's figured out how to keep me scrolling. It can be a doctor who leads me to believe that when I get discharged is his decision.

Erosion of Agency

This isn't just about the hospital episode for me. It's about tapping into all the ways in which my agency is eroded.

In the technological context, philosopher Soshana Zuboff lays this out clearly in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She argues that what Big Tech is trying to do is far more insidious than capturing our time: they're trying to modify our behavior to suit their ends.

“The age of surveillance capitalism is a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.”

Every time I open Instagram, I think about this point. I never wanted an electric toothbrush, but now I've seen so many Perfora ads that I'm very tempted to get one. Instagram, in this case, did not connect supply and demand. By keeping me addicted to the platform and repeatedly showing me the ads, it created demand in my mind.

This is the ideal user Instagram wants; someone who is perfectly malleable and has some disposable income. They can then mold and shape my desires and sell them to the highest bidder. For Instagram, a human with a strong sense of agency is not good for business.

I'm starting to realize that like Instagram, the adult world doesn't like it much when I exercise my agency. They don't like it if I ask too many questions, go to a protest, or refuse to participate in patriarchal tradition. They'll do anything they can to convince me I can't do those things.

I wonder if this is particularly a 20s thing to experience. We're just starting out in the adult world, but most people have been around for a while. They know how things work. It is up to us to come and claim space in this world, and we're entitled to much more of it than we're led to believe.

I don't want to look back and realize that I let powerful men take control of my life. I want to ask the doctor thousands of questions. I want to spend less time on the apps. I want to go to more protests. I want to be deeply in touch with the freedom I have in this world. It's hard to live this way, and I fail to do it on a daily basis, but I want to keep wanting to.

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📖 What to read this week

I've been thinking about my parents' skepticism around modern medicine. I say this cautiously, but after experiencing hospitalization twice in recent years, I have some sympathy for their approach.

We might be taught to believe in Science, but it's not always in the spirit of science to believe whatever comes up on Google over our own experience. On the surface, this piece is about Flat Earthers who refuse to believe the Earth is round, but you'll find that it's about much more than that:

Most of us are content to passively swallow the harsh truth that the fundamental laws of the universe are too complicated to grasp without a graduate education in math. We trust that somewhere along the way, scientists smarter than we are actually did the calculations and got the right answers. The evidence is right there in our GPS satellites, our smart phones, our space station. I don’t need to check their work, we think. Not outsider physicists. They insist on figuring everything out for themselves, in ways they can understand. They are driven by the sense that their “own experience must be the starting point for [their] understanding of the world,” Wertheim wrote in her remarkably generous and empathetic book. So they come up with their own ideas, sometimes even designing and performing experiments to back them up.

"Think of life as a painting," I said. I was at a party in Delhi. I'd been asked a question I love answering, 'What was your thesis about?'

"When you're painting, you want to have some idea of the overarching end result, right? You wouldn't just go around splashing paint."

"Umhm," my listener said, fascinated but unconvinced.

"So that's how we should treat life, too. Nietzsche says that meaning is found not in daily pleasures but in the overarching narrative of life, and we need to figure out what that narrative is. That's what my thesis is about." I said.

"But, what if you just played around with the colours? Forget about the big picture, or painting, in this case, and just play around, a small part of the canvas at a time. Don't you think what gets created in the end will still be beautiful?" she asked.

"Um, maybe. Maybe you're right." I said, fascinated but unconvinced. We parted ways shortly after. I gave it some thought but concluded that such a playful approach was not for serious people.  

Living a daily life

I was 22 then. I am 26 now. The crucial difference is that the day is now the fundamental unit of existence. I am not conscious of living in my 26th year, or in July or in 2023. I am conscious that today is Saturday, and I am doing Saturday things. Tomorrow will be Sunday and then comes Monday.

I'd call this a daily existence. It's different from other kinds in that all energy is focused on the day, not situated in the bigger picture of a lifetime. That means my concerns now are also daily in nature: I'm far more worried about getting enough sleep than about global warming.

I wonder if every person has a unique time horizon they live on. When first getting to know someone, we could ask 'What time horizon do you live on?' I bet that we'd all have different answers, and it'd be fascinating to see the choices we make in light of them.

💡

Journaling Prompt
What time horizon do you live on? Days, months, years, lifetimes? How does that affect the choices you make? 

Losing the plot is not a bad thing

Adulting has made me a daily person. With the barrage of responsibilities, from laundry to repairs, I'm lost in short-term concerns.  

On some days, living by the day makes me afraid that I'll regret how my life just passed me by without an overarching theme or narrative. But the alternative can't be to obsess over the plot instead. All the days I spent worrying about the plot were spent doing just that: worrying. The plot was not actually moving forward.

My therapist says that sometimes it's good not to be too self-aware. We need to suspend our awareness in order to immerse ourselves in the moment:

"Think of surgeons, for example," she said, "Surgeons need to forget the stakes of their actions and focus on doing their task in the short term. If they keep focusing on the fact that a person's life is in their hands, they wouldn't be able to do the surgery."

Daily living feels like being immersed in the task at hand, and I'm finding it enjoyable. It's nice to suspend reflection about grand visions for my life and just live for a bit. Maybe it's okay to forget about the painting, and just paint.

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📖 What to read this week

Going by the theme of this week's newsletter, this is a fascinating article that takes inspiration from animals in living life with less concern for the plot:

Animals do not seek meaning, as far as we can tell. The very concept of a meaningful life is incomprehensible to them. There is just life, and life consists of the things that need to be done and then things they just seem to like doing. But one animal is quite different: us. The human. Many humans have a very strange idea that life should consist of more than just quacking and floating. It should be “meaningful,” whatever that is.

If you're new here - hello! I'm Nishant, and this is The Balcony, my weekly newsletter about philosophy and adulting. If someone sent this to you, you can sign up here.

If you had told 19-year-old Nishant that in a few years, he'd be at the gym strength training and drinking protein shakes, you'd see his face lose colour. Something had to have gone horribly wrong.

For the 19-year-old reading about patriarchy and power structures, the idea of masculinity was disgusting. He had no intention of ever relating to being a 'man'. He preferred being just a person, living out his life and emotions outside of the constraints of gender (a privilege afforded to him by his gender, I should add).

I talk about him in the past tense as if that's all changed. It hasn't. What has happened is only that I've started working out regularly. I have a little bit of muscle to show for it now, and it's brought up an important question: am I becoming a man?

Tempted by masculinity

Building my body has made it harder to claim a lack of affinity to gender roles. When I look in the mirror, there seems to be no way to relate to my muscles outside the framework of masculinity. I'm starting to look 'manly'.

What's more unsettling is that I'm not entirely resistant to the idea. I confess that I've felt the need for a little masculinity. I have gone through life till now as a feeble boy, always smiling so as to not offend anybody. I have stored up complaints against people, only for them to resurface later in cowardly forms. I have avoided conflict, at times resorting to lying to avoid uncomfortable conversations.

Despite my knowing better, it feels like some masculinity is just what the doctor ordered. Be a man. Don't be a pushover. Don't avoid conflict. Communicate your needs. Radiate strength, not weakness. I feel the gender role creeping up on me, and I'm anxious about letting it do so without examining it.

What's wrong with masculinity?

If strength becomes my norm, what happens to vulnerability? If I want to feel power, then over who, and on what grounds? I had an inkling that these are questions investigated deeply in feminist theory, so I spent some time looking for answers.

'In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer,' Kate Millett writes in Sexual Politics, 'it is probable that no other system has exercised such complete control over its subjects.' I had started to feel this control. Quietly but surely, the idea of masculinity had caught up to me while I wasn't looking, starting to capture more and more of my identity.

I went into the text, though, wanting to remind myself of why masculinity was problematic. Despite a rigorous liberal arts education, I had forgotten. Millett reminded me:

The basic division of temperamental traits is marshalled along the lines of 'aggressive is masculine' and 'passive is feminine' ... If aggressiveness is the trait of the master class, docility must be the corresponding trait of the subject group.

The problem with masculinity, of course, is that it defines itself in opposition to femininity, and there's a power dynamic built into the definition: men as strong and women as feeble. That is the problem with becoming masculine. It might seem harmless in isolation: what's wrong with being a little aggressive? It's when you examine what it's contrasted against–femininity—that the gaping flaws start to become visible.

Strength without masculinity

I want to be strong. I don't want to be strong in contrast to women. Relating to masculinity, though, makes it so that I cannot escape the opposition. If I need to get a little more assertive, it cannot be through claiming ownership of a gender role with a skewed power dynamic built in.

Admittedly, this is a messy position to be in. I find myself wondering if strength can be rid of its gender connotation and pursued as a virtue in and of itself. One of the appeals of having physical strength, at least for me, is the hope that it also translates into spiritual strength.  

I'm constantly afraid of what others might think, and whether I might offend them. I get tense when I'm near any sort of conflict. I am starting to wonder if I may have underestimated the role that a weak body plays in that disposition. I'm waging that a little self-assuredness in my ability to defend myself physically will translate to the same assuredness in my emotional self.  

I am not settled on this yet, and I come to you this week a bit messier than usual. If you have experience or thoughts about the conundrum that is masculinity, feel free to write back. I'd love to hear from you.

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📖 What to read this week

Since this edition is about gender and contradictions, I thought there was nothing better to recommend than a chapter from Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay:

I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions.

I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I'm pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it.

I spent two weeks recently scrolling through laptop bags: leather bags, faux leather bags, polyester bags, anti-theft bags, bags with trolley straps and bags that have iPad compartments. After hours of browsing, I finally ordered one eventually. I still kept looking for a few days after, though, in case I find something I like more.

Earning a salary again has made me look forward to purchases - what can I spend on that'll bring me joy and happiness? The question also makes me queasy, though. Am I buying things I need, or just giving into impulses?

I already have a backpack. It doesn't have a laptop compartment, and it's now about 8 years old, but it's still functional. It would be nice, though, to have a bag with a trolley strap.

What we actually buy

In his book, 'The Consumerist Society', Jean Baudrillard argues that what we purchase is not commodities, but signs. It's not about the laptop bag, per se, but that I want one that shows some sign of personality. I would hate to buy a boring black bag that looks like all the other bags when I lay it on the scanning tray at an airport. When people look at my bag, they should think, 'Oh, this guy is not like everyone else. He's different.'

Baudrillard would say that I'm not consuming a product, but rather a message about my own self. What I've wanted to project lately is a sense of vitality. I've wanted to seem like someone who, despite how difficult life is, figured out how to thrive. A nice bag, I'm more than a little ashamed to admit, would be a sign: here is a person who is doing well.

My image of a thriving person is someone who has the perfect mix of financial abundance, intellectual depth, meaningful relationships and physical health. When I finally buy a bag or anything else, I want it to be one that someone like that would have.

Magical Thinking

From Baudrillard's point of view, consumers like me are trapped in a kind of magical thinking. We purchase products for the signs they claim to produce. The product is the bag. The sign is vitality. What I get in exchange is not the sign itself, only the hope of its arrival.

He takes an interesting analogy: a group of Melanesians see aircraft flying by, carrying abundant goods that they crave. To summon the aircraft, they put together a few branches and creepers as a kind of fake aircraft, and mark out a landing ground. Putting this together, they think, will attract the aircraft to their land.

Baudrillard claims that humans in a consumer society are like this. We buy a few things that resemble a happy life and wait for happiness to miraculously arrive.

The beneficiary of the consumer miracle also sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits (waits desperately, a moralist would say) for happiness to alight.

'Affluence' is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness. The satisfactions which the objects themselves confer are the equivalent of the fake aircraft, the Melanesians' models, i.e. the anticipated reflection of the potential Great Satisfaction, of the Total Affluence, the last Jubilation of the definitive beneficiaries of the miracle, from whose insane hope daily banality draws its sustenance.

Buying Templates of Life

This kind of magical thinking is most blatantly visible, of course, in the famous Axe ad. Wear this perfume, and beautiful women will run towards you. Of course, nobody really believes it does, but the sign itself is valuable enough to make us want to buy it. I want to be the kind of guy who wears Axe.

Consumption, in Baudrillard's definition, isn't restricted to the act of buying products, though. To go a bit further, I've been feeling like I'm consuming a template of life - get a nice job, exercise regularly, hydrate, buy yourself and those around you nice things, and see how magically vitality will arrive. See how, magically, you will start thriving.

I think magical thinking does its most important work in such templates. I remember when my parents use to say, 'Just have to work hard for the IIT exams, beta, uske baad toh masti hai.'

Despite knowing otherwise, I'm still very gullible to this kind of magical thinking. If only X, things will be awesome. So I bought myself the image of a thriving person: I have a cool laptop bag. I bathe much more frequently, and I'm good at my job. I got myself a gym subscription, and I'm paying attention to my diet.

All I have to do now is look up at the sky and wait for vitality to alight.

I've just finished my first month at my marketing job, and I've been working hard to get a few early wins. As a marketer, that looks like more people signing up on the site or a social post reaching many people.

With all the data that tools now collect, I can track every little response I get on the content I put out. Even with this newsletter, I get to see open rates. But this data, I'm afraid, is only a mirage. It captures very little.

When we do work, we expect that it'll lead to something. We want tangible change in the world. I think the word tangible does a lot of heavy lifting here - what we want is not change, but change that can be tracked or measured. Outcomes that can't be measured, in the world of work, don't exist.

As an example, I recently added some bullet points on my resume, saying that I write this newsletter that has a great open rate. That says something, but barely. I hope at some point, I changed someone's mind or made them feel less alone. The open rate doesn't capture that kind of thing. I doubt there's a metric that can.

The Butterfly Effect

I think it makes sense to worry less about outcomes, for the simple reason that I will never truly know what they are. The work I've done, and will do going forward, plays a mind-boggling part in affecting the world. It's just simply not possible for me to know how.

I borrowed this particular intervention from 'The Butterfly Effect', a phenomenon which Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman explain in a way only they can:

“It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.” — Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The butterfly effect posits that a small event can have a massive impact in a complex system. Of course, it could also have no impact at all. The point, atleast for my purposes today, is that its virtually impossible to find out.

Imagine if this butterfly, let's call her Mitli, decided whether to flap her wings based on what she saw in front of her. Poor Mitli would feel so dissuaded, thinking to herself 'I keep flapping and nothing ever happens,' while a storm that wouldn't exist without her rages on, far away from her.

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Is the butterfly effect real? If you're wondering this, it's the wrong question to ask. Here's a great explainer if you want to dive deeper.

Letting go of the 'how'

With all the metrics I see online, I often get deluded into thinking that I can measure the outcomes of my work. What I can measure is so small in the face of what actually happens that it almost feels like a lie. What I can measure about the outcome of this newsletter is how many people open it. How little that is, and how insignificant.

Jim Carrey has this wonderful commencement speech he delivered a few years ago, and I've kept it close to my heart for a long time. In it, he recites a story about wanting a bicycle as a child. His parents couldn't afford it, but a friend of his  randomly enrolled him in a lottery, the prize for which was a bicycle, and he won. The moral of the story, as Carrey puts it, is this:

"As far as I can tell, it's just about letting the universe know what you want and then working toward it while letting go of how it comes to pass."
- Jim Carrey

Letting go of how it comes to pass is critical. The risk of holding on is that we might feel discouraged, or simply distracted. I cannot possibly estimate the changes I'm making in the world. I might as well focus on just flapping my wings as much as possible, and let the storms take care of themselves.

📖 What I've been reading

I loved this piece about Vincent Van Gogh and his obsession with painting cyprusses in the New Yorker. It made me want to create again.

You could say that we’re drawn to van Gogh because his life crackled with complexity. You might also say that this is putting the cart before the horse—that any life or object, no matter how ordinary-seeming, contains multitudes, if we bother to look. This happens to have been the premise of van Gogh’s art. The plainer his subject, the more he found.

Over the past few months, things worked out such that my closest friends and I got the chance to live together in Delhi. We packed a lot of life-living in that time, realising fully the vision we once had of living in a community house.

Now, unfortunately, it’s time for us to leave, as friends in adulthood often must. The wound is fresh. We’re closely aware of what’s possible when we’re together so it’s that much harder to leave it behind, but leave we must.

There’s a lot of grief that comes with leaving, and a lot of crying to let it out. It has been very tempting, during this time, to offer advice. Whenever I’ve seen my loved ones cry, I’ve gone looking for arguments or perspectives that can take away their hurt.

I’ve exercised restraint, though, and this time has made me reflect on crying, and how to be there for people when they are.

Emotions Can Be Shared

The advice you often hear about being there for someone is to listen, not offer solutions. I’m tempted to ask: what are the mechanics of that advice? Why does it work?

When someone has two heavy bags to carry, the best way to help them is to offer to carry one of the bags, not to tell them how to hold them. I think emotions work similarly: We have this magical power as humans to share our emotional burden. Being there, then, means taking on some of the burden ourselves.

We have this magical power as humans to share our emotional burden. Being there, then, means taking on some of the burden ourselves.

To Share, Not Solve

When people bear heavy emotions, advice be isolating. It can come across as, ‘this is yours to bear, I’m just telling you how to bear it.’

I think well-intentioned people are tempted to offer advice because we misconceive how we see emotions, as if they’re are inseparable from their owner. I think emotions, regardless of who they originate in, can be shared. And when we offer to share them, the other person doesn’t have to carry them all alone.

Most of the time, this kind of sharing looks like a tight hug. Sometimes, it can look like an offer to listen to them talk about their grief, or to watch a movie together that distracts them. It can look like a thousand other things, but they all say the same thing: you don’t have to do this alone.

📖 What to read this week

What’s the Point of Reading Writing by Humans? | Jay Caspian Kang
This is one of the more interesting questions to have come up in the ChatGPT craze lately. If ChatGPT could write this newsletter, would you be equally happy reading it?

We can disagree on whether A.I. can generate writing that could be convincingly passed off as mine—I think that, eventually, it will be able to do this—but I think you and I can agree that neither of us would want to read an article with GPT-4 (or 5 or 6) on the byline… I enjoy reading human writing because I like getting mad at people. Perhaps the personal quality in writing is a happy accident, and a lot of journalism could be replaced with an immense surveillance state with a GPT-4 plug-in. But the reason we read books and listen to songs and look at paintings is to see the self in another self, or even to just see what other people are capable of creating.

Imagine you walk by, taking a quick glance at the mats but largely ignoring him.

He follows you for a few more seconds, hoping you'll change your mind. You don't. He lets you go. Do you think the salesman is crushed by this rejection? Does he stand there, wondering if maybe he’s a bad salesman? Does he wonder if the doormats are any good?

The answer, at least if he’s a good salesman, is obviously not. He simply assumes you don’t need a doormat right now. That’s the easiest and most compelling explanation for why he didn’t make the sale.

When applying for jobs, I’m the salesperson. I’m selling my skills, my time and effort to companies who might want them. In this process, I’ve encountered a lot of companies who didn’t want me. In some cases, they wanted me until they looked closer and then they didn’t (I bungled an interview).

Each time I got rejected, my brain did not opt for the easiest and most compelling explanation: they just don’t need me right now. Instead, it chose to dwell on the question, ‘Am I worthy?’ This is why job searching is so excruciating - our brains are not like doormats. They’re not wired to accept rejection with numbness while supply looks for demand.

As customers walk away after looking at us, our brains feel hurt. They are tempted to ask, ‘Am I good? Do people think I’m good?’

Rejection isn't about worth

My therapist recently told me something recently:

Whether in careers or relationships, rejection is about fitment, not worth. If a company rejects you, that just means it’s not the right fit, and says nothing about your worth. Your job is to find the right fit.

I entered job-searching with the expectation that everyone will want me. After all, I’m talented, I have the skills, and I’m willing to work hard. I’ve realised, though, that that's not a good sales strategy. Good salespeople don’t focus on selling to everyone, but instead on spotting the right customer for their product.

The analogy is keeping me sane through this process. Recruiters are out in the market looking for what they want, and they get to take a good hard look at me and say, ‘nope’. When they do, I just have to move on to the next opportunity, like an unfeeling doormat.

Being a product

The more abstract point here is that capitalism does absurd things to our brains. We’re treated like doormats on the market and we’re expected to be alright with that, but of course we’re not.

I’m allowing myself to feel sad about rejections. I remind myself, though, that this is just the market trying out its various permutations till it finds a match. All I have to do is show up for the ride.

I am inspired by the salesman. He lets you go, since you don’t want his doormat, and moves on to the next customer, and the next one after that. He approaches a hundred people in a crowded market with patience and diligence. He knows there’s someone out there who’s actually looking for his doormats.

After all that work, he finally finds his customer. Through sheer hard work, he made supply meet demand. A job well done.

📖 What to read this week

The Work You Do, The Person You Are | Toni Morrison
This is a nice short essay by American novelist Toni Morrison, where she talks about navigating our work and personal sense of self. Here are four lessons she puts down that might be valuable to remember:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Dear Reader,

Till now, I’ve stayed away from talking about The Balcony, but I am breaking that rule today to set some expectations and make some promises to you. In lieu of that, here’s a renewed mission statement:

There are a few keywords here that I’d like to go over.

1. Twice a month: I started The Balcony as a weekly newsletter and had a great run with that. However, I will soon be starting a full-time job, and switching to a bi-weekly schedule gives me time to do this without burning out.

2. Intriguing Perspectives: This newsletter has, till now, mostly talked about Philosophy. I want to broaden that scope a bit to bring you perspectives from psychology, film and even wise things my friends say.

3. Living a good life: Not a successful life. Not a great life. Not a fun life. A good life. What does that mean? Let’s figure that out together.

Also, I’ve now moved the newsletter to Substack! Two asks from you in that regard:

1. Please add thebalcony@substack.com to your contacts. Pretty please?

2. If you have a Substack and you believe your readers might value it, do consider recommending The Balcony. It would make my day :)

That’s all folks. Here’s this week’s edition. Hope you enjoy it.

Passion, Career, Circumstances

I’m going through a major life transition and I won’t lie, it hasn’t been easy. Just to fill you in: I’m looking for a full-time job (in content marketing, so if you know about an opportunity, hit me up!) but the process is bringing up a lot of questions for me.

I started this newsletter late last year, and I’ve been so happy working on it surrounded by people I love. It’s now time, though, for me to confront some harsh realities: I need to be on a promising career trajectory, financially speaking, and that’s going to involve uncomfortable compromises.

I told my therapist recently:

I feel like you know, if I just had enough courage, I would be creating all the time, not worrying about the money. Not worrying about a career.

My therapist nodded in sympathy, but then said,

You have to understand, Nishant, that being your best self requires the best circumstances. You cannot force yourself to be your ideal self, do your ideal work, when the circumstances don’t support it.

Being your best self requires the best circumstances. This is an idea that stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about its implications.

Sapna aur Sachhai

There’s an iconic scene in Gully Boy, where Murad’s father tells him, “Tera sapna, tere sachhai se mel khana chahiye.” And Murad replies,

“Mai nai badalta apna sapna sachhai se mel khane ke liye. Apna sachhai badlega, apna sapna se mel khane ke liye. Uppar wala taufa diya hai, mai vaapas nahi karega isko.”

I get goosebumps every time I watch this scene. There’s something thrilling about a passion that breaks all rules. But it’s also a story that’s great for the big screen, but not necessarily for life. Nobody would watch a movie about Murad working for years to build an emergency fund and achieve financial stability so he could support his passion for rap.

I’m starting to realise that for me, the path to self-actualisation is not straight. If I force it to be, it will be at the cost of my own well-being. Right now, the effort is not to follow my passion, but to build the circumstances required for me to do so.

The erasure of circumstances

The story that is sold to us, from Gully Boy to 3 Idiots, is that we must chase after our passions and everything will fall into place. Don’t get me wrong—I love both movies with my whole heart—but there’s a nuance I’d like to add, for my own sake.

In chasing my passion, I cannot erase my circumstances. That’s too much of a burden to carry for me. So here are my circumstances: I exist in a world where existing costs money. I need to make rent. I need to feel financially secure. I want to drink fancy beverages, and express my love to people by buying them gifts.

I exist in this world not just as a writer, but as a son, a friend, a brother, a partner, a food-lover, a One Tree Hill fan and much more. I want to go about my life honouring all of these selves.

So yes, I am choosing not to do the best work of my life right now. I am building the house, so that one day when it’s built, I might have the freedom to exist inside it and do the work that’s closest to my heart.

If you’re a fellow builder, and if the process of building is getting tough and tiring, just know that you’re not alone. We’ll make it through this. ❤️

📖 What I’m reading this week

In keeping with the theme of this newsletter, here’s a piece by Lawrence Yeo about the ‘practical creator’. If you want, at some point, to pursue your passion full-time, Yeo has great frameworks on how to think about that, practically.

I've been going through a bit of a low phase lately. While in this phase, I believe things like:

• I'm actually a failure.

• I've made bad decisions in my life.

• I will never be as successful as my friends are.

If you sit with me and question me on any of these beliefs, I will have little basis to support them. They are just not true, but I have trouble seeing that because my brain isn't firing the right chemicals right now.

This is outside the domain of Philosophy, where the key challenge is to help us arrive at true beliefs. What happens when we believe things that are just false, and how do we get back on track?

Organized belief systems take the challenge of belief very seriously. Prayer and rituals are baked into every religion on Earth. We might hold something to be true, but believing it consistently might still be a daily battle.  

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'Kneel, join your hands, and you will believe'

This is a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal, a mathematician and Christian theologian. Kneeling and praying, Pascal suggests, might be far more effective in turning an atheist towards God than arguing with them for hours.

Pascal talks about how our automation (the default set of beliefs we fall into) needs to be tamed through customs:

For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter... it is custom that makes so many men Christians; custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc.

What Pascal understood, I think, is that there's a naivete in tackling problems of the mind directly. What's often needed is to switch the battleground entirely.

When I feel low, I first spend hours trying to find the ways out of the riddles my brain formulates. At some point, though, I'll get the bright idea to get moving: I'll go ride my bicycle or spend a good few minutes trimming my beard, and that'll help my mood more than any amount of thinking could have.

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Journaling Prompt
What are some ways in which you 'persuade your mind without its thinking about the matter', as Pascal said?

The Challenge of Living Truthfully

My life is enriched by the pursuit of meaning, not material pleasure. I know this, and yet I'm finding it difficult to live by. I'm afraid of spending my life responding to fears that are based on beliefs I don't even hold (money = success). Even so, it's such a mammoth task to stay focused and not fall into self-doubt.

I'm afraid of spending my life responding to fears that are based on beliefs I don't even hold.

Pascal was one of the greatest mathematicians to have lived, and yet he was humbled before his own mind, recognizing that belief requires far more than logic. 'Kneel, join your hands, and you will believe.' That's really something, isn't it?

📖 What I'm reading this week

This is a great piece of non-fiction writing about what it takes to be a door-to-door salesman. I've always been curious about how people do it - I'd be so extremely awkward. How would I ever cope with a whole day of ringing bells and getting 'please leave me alone' vibes? And yet, people do. “It’s constant rejection, but if you push through that, you can do anything.”

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I've been going through a bit of a low phase lately. While in this phase, I believe things like:

• I'm actually a failure.

• I've made bad decisions in my life.

• I will never be as successful as my friends are.

If you sit with me and question me on any of these beliefs, I will have little basis to support them. They are just not true, but I have trouble seeing that because my brain isn't firing the right chemicals right now.

This is outside the domain of Philosophy, where the key challenge is to help us arrive at true beliefs. What happens when we believe things that are just false, and how do we get back on track?

Organized belief systems take the challenge of belief very seriously. Prayer and rituals are baked into every religion on Earth. We might hold something to be true, but believing it consistently might still be a daily battle.  

'Kneel, join your hands, and you will believe'

This is a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal, a mathematician and Christian theologian. Kneeling and praying, Pascal suggests, might be far more effective in turning an atheist towards God than arguing with them for hours.

Pascal talks about how our automation (the default set of beliefs we fall into) needs to be tamed through customs:

For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter... it is custom that makes so many men Christians; custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc.

What Pascal understood, I think, is that there's a naivete in tackling problems of the mind directly. What's often needed is to switch the battleground entirely.

When I feel low, I first spend hours trying to find the ways out of the riddles my brain formulates. At some point, though, I'll get the bright idea to get moving: I'll go ride my bicycle or spend a good few minutes trimming my beard, and that'll help my mood more than any amount of thinking could have.

The Challenge of Living Truthfully

My life is enriched by the pursuit of meaning, not material pleasure. I know this, and yet I'm finding it difficult to live by. I'm afraid of spending my life responding to fears that are based on beliefs I don't even hold (money = success). Even so, it's such a mammoth task to stay focused and not fall into self-doubt.

I'm afraid of spending my life responding to fears that are based on beliefs I don't even hold.

Pascal was one of the greatest mathematicians to have lived, and yet he was humbled before his own mind, recognizing that belief requires far more than logic. 'Kneel, join your hands, and you will believe.' That's really something, isn't it?

📖 What I'm reading this week

This is a great piece of non-fiction writing about what it takes to be a door-to-door salesman. I've always been curious about how people do it - I'd be so extremely awkward. How would I ever cope with a whole day of ringing bells and getting 'please leave me alone' vibes? And yet, people do. “It’s constant rejection, but if you push through that, you can do anything.”

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