There’s a romantic little lie we like to tell ourselves.

That we are who we are.

Fixed.

As if we’re doomed to follow childhood scripts, horoscope blurbs, unhealed wounds, and a few oversized quirks masquerading as fate.

As if our identity is some ancient tree we’ve merely grown into.

Roots too deep to cut.

As if “authenticity” means never changing.

As if the child who dreamed, or the teenager who rebelled, or the twenty-something who tried and failed… still has a vote on what the thirty-something adult should do now.

But here’s the trouble with that story:

The version of you that got here—into the job you don’t love, into the relationship that drains you, into the finances that leave you gasping for air, into the habits that numb rather than nourish—

That version of you is not the one who will get you out.

Nietzsche said it as an invitation: Become who you are.

Not who you were. Not who they expect you to be.

Who you really are—underneath the deadwood.

And that means death.

Little deaths, every day.

Old beliefs must be buried.

Outdated dreams must be mourned.

Expectations—yours, theirs, society’s—must be burned at the altar of becoming.

There’s a reason most people in their 30s feel stuck.

They carry the past like a legacy instead of a draft.

They treat “this is how I’ve always been” as a personality trait instead of a design flaw.

Jordan Peterson calls it pruning the deadwood.

A quiet violence you must do to yourself.

Not because you’re broken. But because you’re outdated.

And yet, we cling.

To the dream that didn’t pan out.

To the friend group we’ve outgrown.

To the version of us that once made sense in a different context.

We romanticize the stuckness.

We forget: the real work is not in looking back with regret or forward with anxiety.

It’s in looking within—with a knife.

Not to harm.

But to cut away what no longer fits.

And sometimes, you don’t need a knife—you need a match.

Not to destroy yourself.

But to cremate what’s already dead.

So you can become the person who can lead you out of the mess.

Because the one who got you here…

Can’t get you there.

And that’s not sad.

That’s freedom.

But even freedom comes at a cost—

You will have to face the grief of letting go of who you thought you were.

(Read our follow up post on this theme- Carrying Fire Forward)

There’s a romantic little lie we like to tell ourselves.

That we are who we are.

Fixed.

As if we’re doomed to follow childhood scripts, horoscope blurbs, unhealed wounds, maybe some late diagnosed traumas and a few oversized quirks masquerading as fate.

As if our identity is some ancient tree we’ve merely grown into and are now staring helplessly, in awe of our past us.

Roots too deep to cut.

As if “authenticity” means never changing.

As if the child who dreamed, or the teenager who rebelled, or the twenty-something who tried and failed… still has a vote on what the thirty-something adult should do now.

But here’s the trouble with that story:

The version of you that got here—into the job you don’t love, into the relationship that drains you, into the finances that leave you frustrated and gasping for air, into the habits that numb rather than nourish—

That version of you is not the one who will get you out.

Nietzsche said it as an invitation: Become who you are.

Not who you were. Not who they expect you to be.

Who you really are—underneath the deadwood.

And that means death.

Little deaths, every day.

Old beliefs must be buried.

Outdated dreams must be mourned.

Expectations—yours, theirs, society’s—must be burned at the altar of becoming.

There’s a reason most people in their 30s feel stuck.

They carry the past like a legacy instead of a draft.

They treat “this is how I’ve always been” as a personality trait instead of a design flaw.

Jordan Peterson calls it pruning the deadwood.

A quiet violence you must do to yourself.

Not because you’re broken. But because you’re outdated.

And yet, we cling.

To the dream that didn’t pan out.

To the friend group we’ve outgrown.

To the version of us that once made sense in a different context.

We romanticize the stuckness.

We forget: the real work is not in looking back with regret or forward with anxiety.

It’s in looking within—with a knife.

Not to harm.

But to cut away what no longer fits.

And sometimes, you don’t need a knife—you need a match.

Not to destroy yourself.

But to cremate what’s already dead.

So you can become the person who can lead you out of the mess.

Because the one who got you here…

Can’t get you there.

And that’s not sad.

That’s freedom.

This Is the Best Time to Be Alive. So Why Are We All Miserable?

We live longer than kings once did. We travel across continents in hours, not months. We swipe right to find love, click a button to summon dinner, and summon strangers to drive us wherever we want. We carry libraries in our pockets, edit our faces in real time, and outsource memory to machines. We treat boredom like a bug to be patched.

Groceries arrive without us stepping outside. We speak to glowing rectangles and call it connection. Entire careers are built on pixels and likes. We’ve delegated thinking to search engines, emotions to algorithms, and validation to strangers on the internet.

Plagues are now fought with mRNA and machine learning. And war? For most of us, it’s something we scroll past—tragic, yes, but distant. Rarely something we run from.

We are the most connected, entertained, informed, and comfortable generation in human history.

And yet…

Unhappiness might be the only thing we’ve scaled faster.

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The Great Illusion

We bought into a lie.

That happiness is something you can buy, stream, or manifest. That if you just hustle hard enough, post consistently enough, optimize long enough, you’ll finally feel whole.

But happiness, it turns out, is a byproduct. Not a goal. Viktor Frankl said it clearly: “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

We turned the pursuit of pleasure into a substitute for purpose. And we called it success.

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Social Media, Mirror Mirror

Our tools are no longer tools. They’ve become the architects of our identity.

We used to compare ourselves to neighbors. Now we compare ourselves to the highlight reels of the internet’s top 0.1%. Creators, influencers, billionaires, crypto bros, wellness gurus. Everyone is selling something. Most of all, themselves.

So we feel behind. Behind in life, behind in looks, behind in purpose.

We internalize this as failure. And we reach for the one solution we’ve been conditioned to believe works: buy more. Scroll more. Work harder. Post more. Perform more.

More is the new meaning.

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When Meaning Left the Room

Frankl saw it coming.

When people stop believing in something larger than themselves, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.

And modern life has handed us a buffet of anything:
Fame without service.
Consumption without contribution.
Comfort without challenge.
Validation without connection.
Influence without integrity.

But meaning doesn’t come from ease. It comes from effort. From saying: “This matters. I will carry it. Even if it breaks me.”

We’ve confused safety for salvation.

We’ve forgotten that the most fulfilled humans in history weren’t the most comfortable. They were the most devoted. The ones who suffered well. Who turned pain into poetry, loss into leadership, fear into fuel.

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The Existential Vacuum

Call it what you want—burnout, boredom, the slow ache of “meh.” Frankl had a better term: the existential vacuum. That hollow hum beneath all the noise. When life is full but not fulfilling. Loud but not meaningful.

You can’t fill that vacuum with dopamine.

You fill it by asking better questions.

Not “How can I be happy?”
But “What is worth suffering for?”

Not “What should I do with my life?”
But “What does life expect of me?”

Not “What can I get?”
But “What am I here to give?”

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The Quiet Rebellion

There is a rebellion, but it won’t trend.

It’s the quiet work of choosing meaning over metrics.
Of unplugging from the attention economy to pay attention to your soul.
Of creating instead of performing.
Of going deep instead of going viral.

It’s choosing to build something real in a world addicted to the unreal.

It’s saying: “I will not be defined by how comfortable I am. I will be defined by what I carry.”

Because yes, this may be the best time to be alive.

But it’s also the easiest time to be asleep.

And waking up—truly waking up—might be the most radical act of all.

Two purebred labradors.
Same breed. Similar lineage. Practically identical DNA.

One eats bananas like it’s his calling in life.
The other looks at a banana like it’s an existential mistake.

How does that happen?

You can replicate the blueprint.
You can control the environment.
And still—different choices, different behaviors, different beings.

It’s easy to forget how much variation exists beneath apparent sameness.
We like patterns. We want predictability.
But living things, unlike machines, come with subtlety. With agency.

Even identical twins—those supposed human photocopies—grow up into people with distinct fears, different humor, unique dreams. One becomes a pilot. One writes novels. One loves the city, the other the silence of forests. All that from the same starting point.

So what’s going on?

Maybe the formula is incomplete.
Maybe we’re not just nature + nurture.
Maybe there’s a third element—call it randomness, call it spirit, call it soul—that adds unpredictability to the equation.

A sort of divine dice roll baked into existence.
Not chaos. Just uniqueness.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the universe isn’t trying to mass-produce consistency.
Maybe it’s running experiments. Millions of them.
Tweaking variables.
Watching what happens when one dog eats the banana and one does not.

It makes you wonder:
How much of who we are was planned?
And how much just emerged?

Because if two labradors—born to sniff, fetch, and follow—can diverge on something as simple as fruit…
What does that say about people?

Maybe your weird taste, your odd instinct, your quiet refusal to follow the crowd—maybe those aren’t bugs in the system.

Maybe they’re the point.

—on self-doubt, innovation, and the noise within

Once, in a pomegranate, a seed dreamed aloud.

A dream of branches, of wind singing and sun dancing. Of becoming. Of mattering.

And just as quickly, came the chorus.
Some seeds scoffed.
Others whispered warnings.
Many simply added their voice to the noise.

This is how it begins, isn’t it?

One idea—raw, naïve, unformed—sprouts. Not in the world, but in us.
A product. A company. A story. A poem.
A different life.

And before it even finds legs to stand, before it’s allowed to breathe—
come the voices.

Sometimes they’re external:
“That’s not practical.”
“It’s already been done.”
“Why you?”

But mostly, they’re from within:
“Who am I to try?”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“What if it does?”

Like the seeds, we begin to argue with ourselves.
Endlessly weighing and measuring, poking and prodding at possibilities until the moment passes.

The seed that knows it will become a tree is not foolish.
It is simply not yet distracted by doubt.
It hasn’t been taught to overthink.
To outsource its faith.
To speak in committee.

Because somewhere between the first hopeful voice and the ninth cautious one, innovation dies.
Or at least, it goes quiet.

It leaves the crowded pomegranate and seeks quieter soil—
the heart of a quince, perhaps.

But here’s the thing.

We are all seeds.
And the fruit we inhabit is of our choosing.

You can stay in the pomegranate, feeding on fear and certainty and clever counterarguments.
Or you can find the silence required to grow.

Innovation is rarely born in consensus.
It sprouts in solitude.
In the voice that dares to believe before there’s proof.

So the next time you hear your idea whisper—“I will be a tree…”—
don’t interrupt.
Just listen.

And let it grow.

(inspired by Kahlil Gibran – The Pomegranate)

There’s a romantic idea we inherited from the ’90s. That maybe—just maybe—our work selves and our true selves could be one and the same. That we wouldn’t need to clock in and become someone else. That the emails, the spreadsheets, the standups, the late-night breakthroughs—they could all be part of something bigger than just a job.

It sounded like fiction.

And then Severance came along and asked: What if you actually could split the two? What if there was an “innie” who worked, and an “outie” who lived—and neither knew the other?

A horror story for some.

A fantasy for others.

But maybe there’s a third path.

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Most of us have been raised with two opposing models:

• Work to live. Clock in, clock out. Work is a means. Life begins at 6 PM.
• Live to work. Your job is your purpose. Your career is your identity. It’s not what you do—it’s who you are.

And both have their truths. And their traps.

But there’s a third camp. Quiet. Rare. Often misunderstood.

It’s when the boundary dissolves—not in burnout or obsession, but in flow.

Where work doesn’t feel like work.

Where the doing becomes the being.

Where you stop asking “Is this my passion?” and start noticing: you forgot to ask, because you were too immersed.

This isn’t a life of balance.

It’s a life of integration.

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Someone in that Grantland thread put it beautifully:

“To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitation… to live for something bigger.”

This isn’t the treadmill of workaholism. It’s not escapism, either.

It’s the fire of becoming. The kind that doesn’t care if it happens in an office or a studio or a Slack channel or a lonely road at 3 a.m. with an idea you just can’t let go of.

It’s not about “balance” because balance implies opposition. As if life is over here, and work is over there, and we’re perpetually juggling two different planets.

But what if they were never meant to be split?

What if the deepest form of freedom isn’t separation, but synthesis?

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So here’s a thought:

Forget balance.

Forget even purpose.

Instead—look for flow. Look for the thing that makes time irrelevant and effort joyful. That makes “inbox zero” meaningless, because you’re chasing something infinite.

Work doesn’t have to be your life.

But it can be part of it.

Seamlessly. Naturally. Like breath.

And in that state, you’re not working to live or living to work.

You’re just… living. Fully.

No severance required.

In a society where the “Claim Chain” keeps tightening its grip on the average citizen, the latest addition is here—don’t pay your traffic e-challan, and your driving licence could be suspended or even confiscated.

The new rules, as reported, are firm. You delay paying fines for three months? Suspension. Rack up three red-light violations or “dangerous driving” charges in a year? Say goodbye to your licence for a while. If that wasn’t enough, repeat offenders may find their insurance premiums skyrocketing—because, of course, even the private sector must now join in the enforcement orchestra.

Let’s pause for a moment, not to contest the need for road safety or accountability, but to observe the direction of flow in the claim chain. Because this is not about traffic violations alone. This is part of a larger design—a persistent escalation of responsibilities on citizens while the state quietly absconds from its own.

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The Citizen Must Comply

Update your phone number. Keep your address current. Watch your mailbox for digital notices. Respond in 30 days. Pay in 90. Follow up if you want to contest. Log into the portal. Confirm your compliance. Again.

And if you don’t?
We’ll presume you’re guilty. Suspend your licence. Stop your insurance renewal. Block your registration. Automate the punishment, remove discretion, and call it “smart governance.”

All this while assuming the digital infrastructure is flawless. It isn’t. Faulty challans, late alerts, dead numbers, unverified data—they’re all part of the system. But the burden to fix all of it? Squarely on you, the citizen.

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The Government Must… What Exactly?

While citizens are being algorithmically nudged and penalized, what happens on the government’s side? Are potholes disappearing with the same urgency? Are traffic signals synchronized? Is pedestrian infrastructure improving? Are we getting safer, better monitored roads—or just better monitored citizens?

Nope. Because that’s where the chain stops. The government side of this claim chain is weak, rusted, and often, simply missing.

Instead of a parallel escalation in public accountability, we get opacity and bureaucracy. The state enforces withoutreciprocation. It demands without delivering. It penalizes citizens for inefficiencies while normalizing its own. Worse, when someone does question the imbalance, they risk being labelled anti-national, obstructionist, or worse—”urban Naxal.”

This is the new social contract: You obey, while we watch. You comply, while we disengage. You’re a “good citizen” only so long as you do not ask why the system is broken, or how the ones in power are held accountable.

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The Flavor of the Season: Silent Obedience

Questioning the state has been steadily reframed—from a duty of citizenship to an act of dissent. And the flavors change with seasons: If you question policies, you’re political. If you critique inefficiencies, you’re elitist. If you resist digital overreach, you’re paranoid. But if you comply, quietly, you are “progressive” and “law-abiding.”

The result? A deeply asymmetrical ecosystem where the citizen is hyper-visible and hyper-accountable, while the state wears the cloak of benevolent invisibility.

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The Invisible Backbone of Responsibility

In the earlier post on the Claim Chain, we spoke about how systems, when not rooted in mutual responsibility, become extractive. This is that chain in action. A relentless loop of demands, backed by penalties, automated alerts, and increasingly digital systems that remove nuance and empathy.

This is not an argument against rules, but for reciprocity.

The citizen shouldn’t be the only one pulling the weight of compliance while the state coasts on slogans and surveillance. It is time we asked: Where is the state’s end of the contract?
Because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

And right now, the link that should bear the heaviest load—the state’s accountability—is the one that has gone missing.

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Until we fix that, the Claim Chain will keep growing. But it will remain one-sided.

And that, ironically, may be the most dangerous violation of all.