That is what it should be like. Not even close.

How the Meaning of Hard Work Changed?

Maybe the idea started as something else entirely. It was something with a well-preserved meaning, before it slowly turned into what it is now. It was probably meant to push people to become the best version of themselves. Most probably, that is how our well-wishers intend when they tell us to give our best. But somehow, along the way, it got twisted into something else. It became a way to make people give away everything they have, inside a world that is far more interested in taking than it is in giving anything back.

In reality, I think we should give our best only in those things that we ourselves like and genuinely enjoy doing. Every effort we make is an investment on our part. Just like anything else, our effort should also go to those things that we ourselves truly believe in and genuinely enjoy doing.

The problem was never giving our best. The problem was forgetting that our best is limited.

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The Problem with Hustle Culture

In this totally obsessed world of competition and overproductivity, you would always see the people around you, especially the ones who benefit from your work, your boss, and your manager, pushing you to give everything you have to your job. No matter how much we do, there is always someone expecting more from us. Everyone wants you to give everything you have.

But why should you?

Your job is not everything. I am not encouraging you to stop doing your work or become irresponsible. That is not what this is about. Rather, I believe that you should only give as much as you yourself genuinely want to give. There is a real difference between the two. There is a huge difference between working sincerely and surrendering your entire identity to your work.

Work is not your life. Your life is the things you love. Your work is often just something you do to stay alive, to pay for the life that happens outside of it. Life is far more than giving your best to everything. It is about balance, and balance is not something anyone teaches you. You just have to figure it out the hard way, usually after giving too much for too long.

Losing Yourself One Task at a Time

Somewhere along the way, many of us begin measuring our worth by our productivity. We slowly start believing that every task deserves our maximum effort. Every project becomes a test. Every expectation becomes another mountain to climb.

Often, we are driven by the need to prove ourselves. And we end up giving so much of ourselves that we deviate from what we actually are, or what we originally started out to do. Often, without noticing, before long, we are no longer living. We become just performers.

Life is far more than giving your best to everything. It is about balance. Sadly, balance is something the current culture of productivity has absolutely no interest in teaching.

The Society that Exploits in the Name of Exchange

Once, a nineteenth-century writer, named Henry David Thoreau, left the busyness of ordinary society and went to live alone by a pond for two years, mostly because he wanted to find out how much of daily life was actually necessary and how much of it was just noise everyone had agreed to accept. He came back convinced that most people were spending their one life on things that were never worth the exchange. So just imagine how much trouble we are in if we are giving our best to so much even when it is not worth the exchange.

Another problem is that it also opens up to exploitation by society. Life often takes us to such times when we are exploited precisely for giving too much. Not always with cruelty behind it, sometimes just because the system rewards whoever hands over the most of themselves first. After all, we live in a culture that quietly celebrates endless sacrifice and calls it dedication.

It is really important to actually give only that much so that you yourself can maintain it without falling apart. That sounds obvious when you write it down. It is much harder to actually live by.

Cost of Pushing too Hard and Need for Avoiding Burnout

Ever heard about the Greek myth of Icarus? Icarus was given wings made of feathers and wax by his father, Daedalus, who was a craftsman who warned him not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat would melt the wax and he would fall. Icarus, caught up in the thrill of flying higher and higher, ignored the warning. The wax melted. He fell into the sea. The myth has survived for thousands of years not because it is dramatic, but because it is true. Pushing beyond what you can sustain does not lead to greater heights. It leads to collapse.

Since nothing about us is infinite, when we give too much and push ourselves too much, we often end up facing the real risk of burnout. Burnout is not just unproductive. It is genuinely hazardous to our own mental health. It is not simply about getting less done; it is about losing the version of yourself that cared about doing it in the first place. It is the loss of enthusiasm, the loss of curiosity, the loss of the particular joy that made you care. Mental health does not recover as quickly as a missed deadline does.

Why Boundaries Protect Mental Health?

The unfortunate truth is that people often become accustomed to whatever we give them. If today we give one hundred per cent, tomorrow that hundred per cent quietly becomes the new expectation. Very rarely does the world stop and say, “That is enough.” It simply asks again and again. Until one day we realise that we have become completely exhausted.

Life often takes us to situations where we are exploited precisely because we keep giving too much. Not always with bad intentions, but through a culture that quietly celebrates endless sacrifice.

That is why boundaries matter. It is important to give only that much which we ourselves can sustain without losing our peace of mind.

Protecting our mental health should never be confused with laziness. Knowing your limits and choosing to respect them is not a weakness. It is possibly the most difficult form of self-awareness a person can develop in a world that profits from you not having it. The alternative costs far more than it looks like it does from the outside.

Your best is not an infinite resource, whatever the job description implies. It has a limit, and pretending otherwise is how people end up giving everything to a job that would replace them without a second thought, while giving almost nothing left over to the people and things that would actually miss them.

The Burden of Trying to Improve Everything

The strange thing about modern life is that we are constantly encouraged to optimise every part of ourselves. Even our hobbies slowly become productivity goals. Reading becomes a challenge to finish more books. Writing becomes a race for consistency. Exercise becomes another metric to improve. Rest itself becomes something we feel guilty about if it is not somehow productive.

The pressure somehow spreads into every corner of life. Eventually, even the things we once loved begin to feel like obligations.

Often, we are driven by the need to prove ourselves. We end up giving so much of ourselves that we slowly drift away from who we originally were and what we actually wanted.

Sometimes life rewards that sacrifice. But many times, it simply asks for more. It is important to just stop giving and ask a simple question: Is it really worth giving any more?

What Actually Deserves Your Best?

Our work is often something we do to stay alive. Our life, however, is made up of the things we truly love, the people we care about, the books we read, the music we enjoy, the conversations we remember, the dreams we quietly protect, and the hobbies that ask nothing from us except our presence. Those deserve our best, much more than our careers.

There is nothing wrong with being average at things that simply pay the bills if that allows us to become extraordinary in the parts of life that actually make us feel alive. In the end, our finest energy is limited.

We cannot pour it into every expectation the world places upon us. Some of it must be kept for ourselves. Some of it must be saved for the people we love. And some of it should always belong to the dreams that first reminded us why life was worth the trouble of living in the first place. Give your best where it is genuinely wanted. Everywhere else, doing the necessary to sustain is enough.

The real goal is not to give our best to everything. The real goal is to give our best to what truly deserves the best parts of us.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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In this world of continuous expectation, why is it that people expect us to keep on doing one thing after another? Why does it feel as though our lives have already been planned long before we are even old enough to understand them? I mean, why the hell is there such a long list of expectations? This is something that has always puzzled and often frustrated me.

The Pressure to Follow Life's Invisible Timeline

First, go to school. Get good marks. Then use that education to get into a good university. Then go on to get a job and earn money. Then get married. Then have children. Then teach those children to do the same things you did. Then retirement. And only then, somehow, are you allowed to just rest for the rest of your life. Wait, it’s not that you are allowed to rest, it’s rather that you are expected to rest. Even at the end, there is that stench of expectation, looming somewhere.

What is the point of this cycle? Why does it even matter? Why do we always have to follow it? And why is everyone expected to just follow it, without question, like it was handed down from somewhere we are not allowed to ask about?

Success Never Seems to Be Enough

Looking back at my own life, I have actually managed to complete a few of these stupid things. I somehow managed to get decent grades and go to one of the best universities in my country. Anyone who has studied in the highly competitive Asian education system probably understands what comes after joining one of those good universities. The better a university is considered, the greater the stress within it.

I somehow managed to bear the pressure of that so-called good university, and believe me, it was something that may sometimes sound good in nostalgia or a dream, but the reality is not what we need, want or expect. Stress just becomes part of the air you breathe there. Nobody questions it. Everybody just absorbs it and tries their best to move forward. Truthfully, the competition, expectations and stress became so heavy for me that, somewhere during those years, success slowly stopped feeling exciting and started feeling like just a checkmark.

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After that gruesome grind came the next stage. Now came the part of the job. Luckily, I somehow even managed to get a decent job. The job also came with its own set of issues, but let’s skip that for the moment. The bigger problem was something else. Strangely, instead of feeling like I had reached something meaningful, it felt as though society had immediately moved the goalpost.

A new question has arrived from society.

"Are you married?"

When Marriage Becomes the Next Expectation

The expectation just does not seem to end. The questions never seem to stop. I do not understand why people are so adamant about seeing others move on to what is considered the next phase. I genuinely do not get it.

And the problem is not the question itself. The problem is that it is never asked as a simple curiosity. It is asked as though marriage is the obvious next step, something that should already be happening. It is asked as a matter of expectation. As though there is a correct order to a human life, and you are now visibly, embarrassingly behind on it.

I am in my mid-twenties, and it is like everyone is just reminding me that it is time to get married. The relatives are obviously the most inquisitive ones, but its not just them. Starting from colleagues to actual strangers, this has somehow become something that should already be happening. It is not like people just drop the topic if I say I will maybe think about doing it after four or five years. That answer feels disappointing to them, every single time. Some people have even tried to justify, with real conviction, that the mid-twenties are the best time to get married. As though they know the shape of my life better than I do.

Every Stage, Another Burden

Well, for me, staying unmarried is the chance to carry fewer responsibilities. Honestly, being unmarried feels like the last remaining piece of my freedom. It is one of the only parts of life where my time still genuinely belongs to me. And it really hurts when people question that. As though it requires a defence in the first place. Well, I just want to enjoy the freedom before marriage.

What’s worse, I now know for a fact that it won’t end at marriage. After marriage, people will continue to ask about children. It’s just a never-ending list that I really could do without.

Everything in life has arrived as an added responsibility. And with each responsibility, I just feel the freedom disappearing and leisure moving further away from me.

School had expectations. University added stress and pressure. Work threw in responsibility. I really don’t want to find out what else marriage will do. At least not now. Each stage seemed to promise that freedom would arrive once I reached the next one. And yet every new destination somehow arrived carrying another burden waiting mischievously for me.

Did Childhood Hold Our Greatest Freedom?

It is like childhood was the only true freedom most of us will ever get. Everything that came after felt like it was promising something it never actually delivered. Every stage came wrapped in the promise of freedom, but kept handing over additional weight instead, while slowly taking the innocence, the naivety, and the freedom of childhood without ever giving us a choice. Responsibility replaced our innocence. Pressure took away curiosity, while routine stopped us from wandering. The freedom that always seemed to be waiting somewhere ahead kept moving further away.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, writing in ancient Rome nearly two thousand years ago, warned against exactly this. He said that people are not given a short life, but that they waste a great deal of it chasing things that were never worth the chasing, only to realise too late how much time had already disappeared in the process. Two thousand years, and somehow we are still building the exact same flowchart he was warning people about.

The Flowchart to Successful Life. Why?

Firstly, why the hell is there even a flow chart at all?

I completely fail to understand why society just wants us to keep doing the next thing on the list. Who decided that one particular sequence should define a successful life? Who sat down, centuries ago or otherwise, and decided that this exact sequence of school, university, job, marriage, children, retirement? Why does everyone simply accept that order without ever asking about it?

Secondly, I just do not get the point of constantly moving forward. If you can never enjoy what you have already completed, what’s the point of it? What is the use of reaching one milestone if the very next breath is spent being reminded of the milestone you have not reached yet?

Choosing to Pause Instead of Rushing Ahead

There seems to be so little room left to simply exist. Little room to sit with an achievement before being told what remains unfinished. Life was never supposed to be a race between checkpoints. Arriving somewhere should actually mean something. It should give us permission to stay there for a while, to breathe, to understand it, to let it become part of us before the next expectation starts knocking. We need to enjoy the moment and let it become part of us before rushing toward the next expectation.

If we spend our whole lives chasing the next stage, we might reach the very end of it only to realise we never actually lived inside any of the stages we worked so hard to reach.

Maybe it is best to forget the responsibilities sometimes. Let us just forget all the milestones and responsibilities left behind us, and stop thinking about the ones still waiting somewhere ahead. Maybe true justice to ourselves is being allowed to pause. Even when everyone around you insists you keep moving.

Sometimes, it is best to just forget all these for a while. Instead, just make the opportunity to live because that is something we so rarely get. Living in the moment, while feeling it completely with the deepest parts of our heart and soul, is possibly the most important thing of all.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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What if almost none of it is actually in our control? What if much more of our lives is determined by luck than we would ever like to admit?

We are told that hard work creates success. Yet the older I get, the more I wonder how much of life was decided long before we ever got the chance to work for anything. What if effort is only one part of the story, and luck is the part nobody wants to discuss?

The Unequal Starting Lines of Life

We often like to believe that effort is the deciding factor behind success. We are taught that hard work leads to rewards, that persistence eventually pays off, and that people largely create their own destiny. While there is certainly truth in that, reality often feels far more complicated.

Life in today’s world is so much about luck. And I mean that genuinely, not as a passing complaint but as something I have turned over in my mind many times and keep arriving back at. Everything has become about luck. The kind that nobody talks about openly because admitting it makes the whole system feel terrifying. Birth in a country defines so much. Your parents, your ancestry, your circumstances, all of it defines so much. Long before you make a single meaningful decision, the shape of your life has already been partially drawn by forces you had absolutely no say in.

Why Is There So Much Variation in Life?

What have we done wrong to not have the best there is? That question sounds almost childish when you say it out loud, but the truth is it is one of the most honest questions a person can ask. Why is it so abnormal? Why is it so devastating and disastrous that the same effort provides a different result, that the same work provides a completely different outcome depending on who you are and where you started?

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The ancient Greeks had a goddess for this. Tyche, whom the Romans later called Fortuna. She was depicted standing on a wheel that never stopped spinning, lifting some people to the top and dropping others to the bottom entirely at random, owing nothing to anyone, caring about merit not at all. They built a whole mythology around luck because they understood something that our modern world pretends otherwise. Fate does not distribute itself fairly, and it never has.

Genetics, Circumstances, and the Lottery of Birth

Luck does not stop with external circumstances. Even genetics seems to matter. Even our most intrinsic part is a matter of luck. Even skills, memory, and mental capacity, things that feel like the most personal parts of ourselves, all appear to be so different in different people under different circumstances, and none of it was chosen.

Talents like creativity and imagination play such a significant role in our lives, but they are not the same for everybody. What’s worse? People often find themselves with talents they aren’t interested in, and interests they lack talent for. It feels so counterintuitive.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave in ancient Rome and became one of the greatest thinkers of his time, drew a hard line between what is within our control and what is not. Most of what shapes the foundation of our lives, he argued, falls entirely in the second category. We did not choose our minds. We did not choose our bodies. We did not choose where we were born or to whom.

And yet we are expected to compete as though we did.

When the Same Effort Produces Different Results

This is so dissatisfying. When we give all our effort to get nothing back, but someone else gets everything without any visible effort at all. We see kindness go unnoticed, honesty punished, and hard work overlooked. We watch people carry burdens they never deserved while others inherit advantages they never earned.

In those moments, it becomes a question, difficult not to ask. Why does good often seem to be punished? Why are we stuck in a world where fairness feels more like an ideal than a reality? When the kind person suffers, and the cruel one thrives, and there is no satisfying explanation for why.

I genuinely do not know. And I have stopped pretending that I do. The world does not seem to operate on a system of merit, however much we have been told it does. Two people can struggle equally hard, sacrifice equally much, and dedicate the same amount of themselves to the same goal — and end up in completely different places. One succeeds. The other falls behind. And the difference between them is sometimes nothing more than where they happened to be born, and to whom.

That is not a comfortable thing to sit with.

Finding Peace in an Imperfect World

Why are we stuck here? Why do we not just find peace? These are the questions that come at the end of a long day, when the frustration has nowhere left to go.

Yet perhaps there is another way to look at it.

If luck truly plays such a large role in life, then maybe we should also be gentler with ourselves. Perhaps not every failure is a personal flaw. Perhaps not every success is entirely earned. Maybe many of the comparisons that consume us are built upon foundations that were never equal to begin with.

Recognising the role of luck does not mean giving up on effort. It simply means understanding that effort is not the only force shaping our lives. There is a strange peace in accepting this.

The world may never be perfectly fair. Outcomes may never perfectly reflect merit. Some questions may never receive satisfying answers. But perhaps peace comes not from trying to control every outcome, but from understanding the limits of what was ever ours to control in the first place.

Accepting What We Cannot Control

An honest answer, one I keep arriving at reluctantly, is that peace will never come from the world becoming fair. Mostly because it probably will not be truly fair. At least, not in our lifetimes. Peace, if it comes at all, has to come from somewhere else. From letting go of the idea that every outcome is a verdict on our worth. From understanding that effort matters, but that effort was never operating on a level playing field, and pretending otherwise only makes the losses hurt more.

We can still work harder when we feel like it. We can still try. We can still push for our beliefs. We can still pursue our goals. We can still try to become better people. But maybe we do not need to carry the additional weight of believing that everything that goes wrong is entirely our fault, when so much of what shapes our lives was decided long before we had any say in it at all.

Maybe we do not need to carry the weight of believing that every result is entirely our responsibility. And perhaps finding peace begins when we stop fighting that truth and start making peace with it.

In the end, life is only part effort, part circumstance, and part luck. The wheel always keeps spinning. Sometimes in our favour. Most of the time, not. The only question is what we do on the days it does not turn our way.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Charles Dickens wrote those words in a completely different century, in a completely different world, living a completely different life from anything any of us will ever know. Yet somehow those words have followed humanity all the way here. Across all that time, all that distance, all that change, they have ended up becoming one of the most accurate ways to describe not just the world we currently live in, but also our own individual lives within it.

Living Through History's Most Contradictory Age

The fact that a man writing about Revolutionary France in the 1800s could so precisely capture what it feels like to be alive right now says something devastating about how little the fundamental tension of human existence has actually shifted. The current world we live in is probably the best it has ever been — and yet somehow it is also the worst of times. Both of these things are true, and that is precisely what makes it so disorienting to live through.

It is considered the best of times because people are finally learning to go against their animalistic instincts and aiming for the most humane version of themselves. That is not a small thing. For most of recorded history, power decided everything. The strong took. The weak endured. The idea that ordinary people had rights worth protecting — worth fighting for — is, in the grand scale of human civilisation, a genuinely recent and radical notion.

Yet here we are.

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The Rise of Humanitarian Values

This is the time when revolutions are being made in every aspect of the world — in politics, in culture, in how people understand their own minds. People are revolting all around the world against oppressors and dictators. Today’s world has been the most eye-opening one our species has ever inhabited. The next generations are understanding and working towards humanitarian goals that every previous generation either ignored or actively suppressed.

People are trying to finally take control of their own lives, their own world, and in doing so making way for a better tomorrow. People are finally caring about the environment. Thinking about the balance between work and life. Making way towards secularism and against war. Everyone in the world at least currently has access to ideas which were once so easily unrecognised — ideas that once lived only in the minds of a privileged few and died there quietly.

But sadly, then again, this is also the worst of times.

Power Rarely Gives Way Freely

The old orders of exploitation, the conservatives of every variety and the defenders of every crumbling hierarchy are trying so very hard to push back against progression. And the thing about power is that it does not surrender easily. It never has. The ancient Greeks understood this through the myth of Sisyphus — eternally pushing the boulder uphill, watching it roll back down, beginning again. Progress has always felt something like that. Exhausting, repetitive, necessary.

What makes it worse is that the resources of the oppressors are excessive. Genuinely excessive. The largest problem of all is that the oppressors have become too good at using those resources — technology, misinformation, systems of control — to suppress the revolutions and protests that rise against them. The very tools that could liberate people are being turned, efficiently and ruthlessly, against them.

The Ongoing Struggle Between Progress and Oppression

We are in a world that is desperately trying to move forward, but the clash between the oppressors and the oppressed is becoming too brutal. Too costly. The past horrors and traumas are not letting us move forward to the world we so desperately need. History leaves wounds that awareness alone cannot close. Understanding a scar does not make it disappear. That weight is real and it is slowing everything down.

No change was ever accepted freely. Nor was it ever given proper support — even when it was clearly for the better of humanity. The French Revolution promised liberty and delivered years of terror before anything resembling dignity arrived. Every movement for civil rights, every push toward equality, every attempt to redistribute power was met with ridicule, suppression, and violence before it was met with anything resembling acceptance.

Even in today’s world, that scenario has not changed.

Learning From History's Mistakes

But here is what history also tells us, clearly and without ambiguity. The oppressors always lose eventually. Always. Every empire that built itself on the suffering of others has collapsed. Every system that concentrated power at the expense of human dignity has, sooner or later, been torn apart by the very people it tried to silence. It is often believed that opposing forces are what keep the world in motion. It is the tension between them that is the actual engine of change. And history has proven this right, over and over and over again.

The oppressors of today are no different. Their resources are vast. Their grip is strong. But they are fighting against something that has never, in the entire history of humanity, been permanently defeated - the desire of people to be free.

That desire does not die. It gets suppressed, yes. It gets brutalised, yes. But it does not die. It passes from one generation to the next like a fire that refuses to go out, no matter how many times it is stamped upon.

Hope in an Age of Contradictions

We have learned lessons from history, and we are fighting against all the odds, against all the oppression, against all the systems designed specifically to make us feel small and powerless and alone.

What I truly hope, what I deeply, completely, without reservation hope is that we live to see the day when this revolution wins. That final complete victory. When the world that the oppressed have been bleeding for finally arrives. When human dignity is no longer something people have to fight and die for, but something that simply exists as the undeniable foundation of how we treat each other.

The struggle is brutal right now. The cost is real, but the revolution is right. And what is right has a way of outlasting everything that tries to destroy it.

We will see those brighter days.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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The purpose is not to achieve something greater or be someone better, but rather to just preserve what we already are. We do not always need to become more productive. Nor do we need to chase another ambition. All that truly matters is to just be away.

Why Modern Life Makes Us Want to Disappear?

Even if it means hiding in the shadows, there is still something appealing about stepping outside the reach of everything and everyone that constantly demands our attention. Retreat often feels less like avoidance and more like self-preservation.

The modern world is so very consuming in almost every aspect of our lives. It does not merely ask for our time and money; it asks for our attention, our energy, our thoughts, and sometimes even our identity. It feels like everything just wants to demand our very own soul. It seems determined to shape us into the image of the norms it has created for itself. Somewhere along the way, it tries to absorb every part of us.

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This is why, sometimes, what we truly wish for is simply to be left alone with myself. Away from the pressure and all the politics. Away from the constant noise and absurd expectations that have somehow become normal. There is a part of me that believes there must be another way to live, one that allows us to retain who we are instead of continuously reshaping ourselves to fit what others expect.

The only problem is that the world is always there, pouring its own reality all over us.

When Society's Expectations Become Our Own

The values of society tend to become our values. Its worries end up becoming our worries. Even its ambitions have a way of becoming our own ambitions, often without us even noticing the mental backlash we face. We fail to notice the small part of ourselves we lose with each worry and ambition.

Marcus Aurelius, an emperor turned philosopher, wrote something in his private journals nearly two thousand years ago that still lands strangely hard. He said, more or less, that people look for retreats in the countryside, by the sea, in the mountains. But nowhere can a person retreat more quietly or freely than into their own mind. He believed the inner world, if tended to honestly, was the only real refuge from the noise of everything outside it. What he wrote so long ago is much more real in today’s world, where our mind is our greatest truth.

The Hidden Cost of Endless Productivity on Mental Health

The excessive pressure that so many people have accepted as normal is not at all what is best for everyone. For those of us who long for a more peaceful and serene life, this relentless pace always feels exhausting rather than inspiring. And yet we are expected to embrace it, sadly.

Everyone around us often seems so convinced that ambition must always come first. Success becomes the measure of worth. Overproductivity has become a moral virtue. Somehow, the world is shaped so weirdly that even rest begins to feel like guilt.

The system forcefully pushes us toward meaningless achievement and endless growth, but often at the cost of our mental well-being and individuality. We become another cog in a machine that never ever seems to stop moving. We become compliant participants in a cycle that few people even think to question, and even fewer who try to escape. It keeps us stuck in a cycle of unquestionable mechanisms. Through this, slowly, the world takes away our naivety.

There is something deeply unsettling about realising how much of life is spent fulfilling expectations that were never truly our own.

Escapism, Nihilism and Individuality

Often in these cases, escapism and nihilism seem the only method to actually defend the innocence of our minds. Escaping into some fantasy or dream has often been helpful in taking us away to a better world or a better life, even if temporarily. Similarly, nihilism can also help us to just be free from all the competition, productivity and pressure.

These things are often criticised as distractions, but truthfully, they serve as shelters. They allow us to step outside reality for a while and remember that other ways of living and thinking are possible.

When everything becomes a competition, when every moment must be optimised, and when every achievement is measured against someone else’s success, the idea that none of it ultimately matters can feel strangely liberating. This is why certain forms of nihilistic thinking attract people. Strangely, believing in the idea that life lacks meaning somehow helps us find the meaning of our true selves.

The Struggle to Preserve Freedom Through Chaos

Escapism and nihilism free us from the burden of constantly proving our worth and provide us with the greatest relief of freedom. Often these are treated as chaotic, but perhaps chaos is what we should be attracted to when it offers something that excessive order cannot.

Civilisation runs on systems, schedules, rules, hierarchies, and expectations. These things that have been deemed necessary have begun to suffocate the human spirit by rooting out the uncertainty and the wandering. Therefore, a little refusal to conform can give us the feeling of freedom. Chaos is probably the only freedom from the constant Order of the Civilization that has been forced on our minds.

Hence, it is necessary for all of us to at least dream of disappearing for a while, not because we hate the world, but because we need to remember who we are, as the world is no longer true to us or who we should be.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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What Facts Cannot Actually Transfer

Facts can give you knowledge, but can they really give you the feel of something?

I once read Anne Frank’s diary. Sitting in Asia, decades and thousands of miles away from where Nazi Germany used to be, I still felt the walls closing in around her. I already knew the history. I knew the numbers, the events, the political causes. History books had told me all of that in precise detail. But nothing prepared me for what it felt like to actually live inside that hiding, to feel her hope and her fear existing together in the same breath. That is something a textbook could never have managed to do.

People have always said the world has become a much smaller place because of the use of technology. Truly, it has become so and somehow, in becoming smaller, something has also been lost. In some ways, even we ourselves have become smaller within this overwhelming modern system. More filtered, contained and distracted.

Art, I think, is what makes the world bigger. It is what keeps it worth exploring.

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Twenty years ago, before the age of the dominant internet, a person in Asia could only read about American history or the World Wars from textbooks. And how much can a history book really teach you? Facts can provide knowledge, sure. But knowledge and feeling are two very different things.

Movies like Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now changed something in me. Those films did not just show me war. They made me feel the desperation, the cruelty, the deeply human cost of it in a way no historical summary ever came close to. The feeling of experiencing the nature of war through those films is something else entirely.

The Bridge No One Talks About

No one in America could have ever known the emotional texture of Bengali culture from any academic text. But the films of Satyajit Ray gave them a doorway into that world, its rhythms, its sorrows and also its beauty. Similarly, the introspection into Japanese culture that millions of people across the world have felt through anime could not have come from sociology books alone. It just could not.

I have also read books like ‘Walking with the Comrades’ and felt the harsh, complicated, difficult lives of people living in conditions I had never ever been near. Not completely or perfectly, but enough to stop seeing them as complete strangers and understand something real about their world and the harsh reasons behind it.

The Broken Earth trilogy did something different but equally strange. It made me feel the inner reality of a woman from a completely different time and existence. Her fears became somewhat familiar. Her exhaustion and frustration felt real. So did her determination. Only, Art does that. It removes the distance between people, like no other.

And it is not just novels or movies. Songs, paintings, theatre, photography, animation, there is so much more. The feeling that a Renaissance painting creates cannot be understood through a textbook explanation. The emotional atmosphere of songs like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ or ‘Blowing in the Wind’ cannot be replicated by reading historical summaries about the post-war world. I have felt the hunger for a different and better world resonating from those songs, the urgency and exhaustion and fragile hope of people who were tired of waiting. No textbook gave me that.

Art as the Time Machine

Here is what I keep coming back to. Art stores emotions, not just events. It carries the inner life of a moment across decades and delivers it, still breathing, to whoever is willing to receive it.

In that sense, art is the only real time machine we have ever managed to build.

Old fantasy novels written generations ago reveal the fears, desires, and imagination of the people who lived in those times. Paintings from the Renaissance carry an atmosphere we can never physically visit. Even the smallest, most personal diary written by a teenager in hiding has survived longer than most of what was built around her. This is the true beauty of art.

This here is the thing that no one talks about enough. Art is the only thing that can never become obsolete. Every platform disappears. Somehow or the other, every device becomes outdated. Every technology eventually gets replaced by something better. In the world of art, nothing becomes better or worse; everything is unique and contains unique emotions. They just change and evolve but never get outdated. No honest painting ever stops being a painting. No honest novel ever stops being true. Art does not age the way everything else does, because it was never storing information. It was always storing feelings and emotions. Art therefore never expires.

What We Are Leaving Behind Right Now

It is important to understand that we are also creating art at this very moment, whether we think of it that way or not. The films being made today will tell our future generations what we valued and what we feared. The songs being written now will teach them how we struggled, loved, and endured. The articles written by ordinary people, trying to understand their own lives, trying to survive the pressure of a world obsessed with productivity and hustle culture, will become a record of what it genuinely felt like to be human in this particular time.

Future generations will look back at our art just as we look back at theirs. They will try to understand us through what we left behind. And what we leave behind, more than anything else, will be how we truly felt and how honestly we tried to express it.

Art is not just how we understand the world. It is how we make sure the world does not forget us. That, I think, is enough reason to keep making it. Even when it feels small. Even when it feels like nobody is watching.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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In today’s world, the real luxury is no longer about owning more. It is more about needing fewer artificial things to make us feel comfortable.

Natural Living Against Artificial Comfort

In a world filled with huge machines, unstoppable noise, and endless construction, perhaps the greatest privilege left is still a cool breeze entering through an open window on a summer afternoon. Something we once had for granted, but these days, so few get to actually feel it.

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Oh, how the world has changed. In today’s world, having an air conditioner is no longer a flex. The true flex is living in a place where you do not need to depend on one during the harsh summer days.

There is something deeply comforting about not having to rely completely on artificial things in life. Everything nature has provided carries a feeling that our handmade substitutes can never fully replace. The coolness of a mountain breeze feels different from artificial cold air. The calmness of sitting beneath a tree feels far better than resting inside a concrete room.

The Lack of Connection with Nature

Somewhere along the way, we became too confident in our ability to redesign the world to reflect the views of humanity. We believed we could build a perfect life through technology, speed, expansion, and endless development. But the irony is that, even after all this progress, some of the greatest comforts still come from the simplest parts of nature. It was always stupid to try reshaping nature in our own image.

We built massive skyscrapers believing they would take us to heights humanity had never reached before. Yet no building can truly compare to standing silently on a mountain and looking at the horizon. We filled cities with lights bright enough to erase the stars, only to realise much later how much peace existed in the night sky we had slowly hidden from ourselves.

What We Lost While Chasing Success and Productivity

No feeling created by modern systems can completely replace the emotions nature gives us freely. A river flowing through silence, rain hitting the earth after a long heatwave, the wind before a storm, or simply the sound of birds early in the morning, these things still touch something ancient within us.

And yet, in our pursuit of success, money, productivity, and bigger dreams, we kept changing the world faster and faster. We cut forests to expand cities. We traded open skies for enclosed spaces. We replaced natural balance with endless consumption, believing it was progress.

But what is the value of achievement if the end result is a world becoming harder to live in?

Nature Was Never Meant to Be Replaced

The modern lifestyle has given us convenience, but almost always at the cost of peace. We now spend money trying to recreate the same comfort that nature once gave us freely. Air conditioners replace trees. Artificial parks replace forests. Noisy machines replace the silence we once had naturally.

Perhaps the problem was never development itself, but the belief that human-made success would always be greater than nature’s design. After all, great human achievements were never meant to be better than the things that nature itself has provided.

It was our stupidity to believe that nature was not perfect. The truth is that nature was never imperfect to begin with. We were simply too distracted by ambition to notice its completeness.

The Search for Balance Between Progress and Nature

Maybe true progress is not about conquering nature or trying to replace it, but learning how to live alongside it again. Maybe the future does not need any more artificial comfort, but more shift towards the tranquillity that nature provides in order to create a proper balance between human achievement and the world that keeps us alive.

Our ancestors did thrive in the nature in a world that was much harder to understand. We can also do the same, as we have a far better understanding than our ancestors. If given the opportunity, we will find that nature can grant us much more than the luxuries that we dream of.

Because in the end, no luxury can ever feel greater than the clean air, the peaceful weather, the flowing water, or a life that still feels connected to the earth beneath it.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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What will our legacy be? Many of us have at least once thought or have pondered upon the question. And many would probably believe that our legacy is our achievements, ratings, records, or awards. But is this really what our legacy is?

I beg to differ.

Our true legacy is not how we are documented in files, but rather how the people around us have remembered us.

The Pressure of Competition and Career Success

In this world of constant change, pressure, and competition, we often end up focusing far more on the dossiers written about us than on the emotions we leave behind.

We focus on the grades we receive. We focus on the ratings we receive in our careers. We chase promotions, records, achievements, and recognition. Somewhere in all of this, we forget one of the most important things of all. How do we make the people around us feel?

Many people push themselves and others harder with the hope of building what they believe will become their legacy. We blatantly pressure colleagues to work more and more so that we can move ahead towards some vague notion of success. We sacrifice our relationships for success, which does not matter too much. We become so preoccupied with productivity and status that we slowly forget the true emotional impact we leave on others every single day.

What Is a True Legacy in Life?

Legacy is not a document made up of papers and records. It is not an archived file stored somewhere in the vast cloud storage. It is not just a certificate hanging on a wall or a title written beside our name.

If not all these, what exactly is going to be our true legacy?

Legacy is how we connected and lived with other people. It is about how we touched the lives around us. It is about how people feel when they think of us after we are gone.

A legacy is supposed to have a long-lasting impact, making the world better for everyone. It is about the feeling of leaving something behind that will last forever. It is our shadow on the world that will connect us to everything, long after we are gone.

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Why Success and Power Do Not Last Forever?

Many believe that power is the only way to leave behind a mark in the world. But power does not last forever. So then how can it be a legacy? Isn’t a legacy meant to last forever?

Power only exists for a period of time with us before it is handed over to someone else. Even the governments change. New revolutions reshape older ones. Even the most powerful people today will one day return to the same dust as the weakest among us.

So, what is the point of focusing so much on power?

Power may place your name in books, but how much does that truly matter once you are gone? If you think about it, even those books and records can change. History itself is often manipulated by those in control. What is written today may not be what is shared tomorrow. The records we leave behind are never as permanent as we expect them to be.

On the other hand, kindness leaves something far more difficult to erase.

Human Connection Is More Important Than Recognition

If we genuinely help people, even in minor ways, then the world becomes a slightly better place. Our existence is supposed to make everything better. Then again, there is something really meaningful in leaving behind better emotions instead of better numbers.

We should ask ourselves how people remember us after we are gone. This should be the guiding question whenever we wish to leave a better legacy.

It is far better to spend our lives trying to improve the lives of others, rather than endlessly chasing records, ratings, and comparisons that will just end up being some vague documents or part of an endless archive. If not anything else, it will at least lead to a little more peaceful sleep at night, knowing that our existence brought comfort instead of pressure.

Why Kindness Matters More Than Achievement

The people in this world are what truly make the world what it is. There is no greater way to leave a mark than by making life a little lighter for those around us while we still can.

And what is beautiful is that kindness rarely stops with one person. The better we treat others, the more likely they are to pass that goodness forward themselves. A simple act of understanding can travel much farther than we realise. In this way, compassion creates a chain reaction, one that slowly spreads warmth, hope, and emotional wellness through the lives of many people we may never even meet.

The world is not truly built on records. It is built on feelings.

That is why it is important not to lose ourselves completely in the endless pressure of competition, productivity, ratings, and social success. Our humanity is still the most important thing we carry.

Creating a Positive Legacy Through Compassion

We should try our best to bring positivity into the minds of the people around us. And strangely enough, while doing that, we often bring a little more peace into our own minds as well.

Because in the end, this is the legacy that truly remains.

Leaving the world better than we found it is the only legacy that matters. Not a perfect career made up of flawless reputation, but rather a world that became slightly kinder, somewhat warmer, and a bit more hopeful because we once existed in it. Therefore, a better world with better people and more positivity than the one we started in is the only legacy we should try to leave.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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The chain of being lost in the darkness of the night is real. What I am talking about here is a version of insomnia, something often called the nocturnal insomnia. Many of us struggle to fall asleep at night. It’s definitely not wrong to feel this way, even if it sometimes feels like you’re the only one still awake while everyone else has quietly moved on.

Nocturnal Insomnia or Calmness of Night

The thing about nocturnal insomnia is that it works like a chain reaction. Anyone who has faced it knows one thing clearly. The trouble of falling asleep at night is very real. Usually, recognising a problem is considered the first step toward solving it. But here, it feels different. For those of us living with this nocturnality, accepting that we cannot sleep easily at night does not free us. It settles into us, like a truth we cannot ever manage to shake off.

Over time, we end up stopping fighting it. We forgo all effort of trying to sleep early. As the effort fades, we finally begin to belong more to the night than to the day, even without noticing.

Many of us do not become nocturnal because of fear or sadness. It often starts in small, harmless ways, studying late, enjoying the calm, or simply noticing how gentle the night feels compared to the weight of the day. But then it evolves into something deep in our minds and hearts. What begins as a choice becomes a pattern, and that pattern becomes a big part of our identity.

Strange Comfort of Being Awake at Night

For me, it has gone even further. I have started to enjoy the night too much, in a way that feels both comforting and difficult to explain.

There is a stillness in the night that feels almost personal. In that silence, there is no one watching, no one interrupting, and no expectations to meet. I am alone with myself, and in those moments, I feel closer to who I really am. Not the version shaped by others, not the one trying to keep up, just me. There is a strange kind of honesty in that space.

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And maybe that is why it becomes hard to let go of the melancholic habit.

Reading, writing, watching films, or simply sitting with my own thoughts, everything feels deeper at night. The darkness does not hide things. It reveals them. It stretches thoughts, slows time, and makes even the smallest feelings feel larger than they are during the day.

I have spoken to friends and relatives who live like this, and many of them feel the same. Those who have experienced the night always prefer the night. There is something about that uninterrupted silence, that distance from the noise of the world, that feels almost necessary.

But there is another side to this, too.

Hidden Cost of Living Out of Sync

Sleeping during the day, feeling tired all the time, and struggling to wake up for responsibilities are not small problems. The world continues to move in its own rhythm, and we fall out of sync with it. Often, it feels like we are living slightly out of place and yet, even with all of this, we do not hate the night. We cannot bring ourselves to. After all, somewhere in that darkness, there is a comfort we have not been able to find elsewhere.

I think all of us who have lived like this would understand that feeling. The night does not demand anything from you. It does not rush you. It just lets you exist, and most of the time, that is all we are really looking for, but we never really manage to get it during the normal hours.

However, it should be noted that this is not about glorifying insomnia.

If this pattern is hurting you, if it is taking away your health or your peace, then it is necessary to get help. And reaching for it is very, very important. It is a way of taking care of yourself.

Beauty of the Night That We Chose Us

At the same time, for those who have already drifted into this rhythm and are learning to live within it, there is something that deserves to be said. That is exactly what I am trying to do.

As for me, I do really feel there is a serene, nice, almost fragile beauty in the darkness of the night.

I am sure that, for some of us, sitting in that silence, feeling everything a little more deeply than we should, becomes a part of who we are. It is not just that we chose it but rather because, somewhere along the way, the night also chose us.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Ever wondered what would happen if we could just give up everything and go away to a place where there is nothing chasing us? No memories from the past, no trauma from childhood, no prejudice trying to determine our fate. What would we have done then?

The Fantasy of Starting Over but Bound by Invisible Rules

In a way, this question itself shows how deeply we crave freedom, not just physical, but emotional and mental. In this world, the possibility of leaving every part of us behind does not seem to exist. Everything we have become bound by unspoken rules, laws that keep us restricted, agreements we are forced to accept, and patterns we are pushed to follow. But why is there no way to just leave it all behind and go?

Feeling trapped in life is probably the most common feeling in today’s overwhelming world, but it is also one of the truths we avoid discussing in society. Even the discussion itself feels like an unspoken restriction in the current world. This itself speaks a lot about the weight of modern expectations and how much the world has still remained the same sad place it was before the age of awareness. It feels as if we are still living within some sort of unseen structures of the past.

The Past That Won’t Let Go

No matter what we do, the past keeps chasing us, and the uncertain future stands ahead, casting its shadow over our present. Everything around us seems to pull at us, disturb us, distract us from what we truly desire. There never seems to be any actual answer as to why we can’t escape the past. But not having an answer does not make it possible. It just somehow manages to provide an illusion of freedom.

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The problem of the past is that it has often pushed us towards finding meaning in suffering, but why is there ever a need for suffering? This has created a world that has been shaped by awareness but failed to change or learn from the trauma of the bleak shade of the gloomy past. There is awareness, but no relief or change.

The problems are too much if we ever ask our hearts what it truly needs. The only thing we will realise is that often, what the heart wants does not make sense to the outside world.

Mental Burden of Society, Emotional Freedom and Reality

How did the world end up becoming like this? When did humanity change? Or maybe it was always like this. Maybe the only reason we are seeing it now is because we have become more aware.

But then again, if awareness has increased, why has it not brought us closer to what we truly want?

Some say we are moving toward a better life as a society. But are we really moving in the right direction? Not just as individuals, but as a whole.

It all just seems like overthinking and future anxiety, but that does not make it unreal. These questions need to be considered, even if the world forbids us to ask them openly. It really is much more than philosophical thoughts on life and society or some sort of yet another existential crisis. It’s about finding and understanding what is going wrong and maybe making an attempt at improving some of it.

A World That Still Breaks Itself

Now try asking this. How much more does the world have to go through before things actually get better?

Humanity has faced so much, yet it still seems drawn toward the very destruction it tries to avoid. There are still wars. There are still political conflicts. There is still discrimination and hatred spread across the whole damned world.

It does not always feel like the world is improving. At times, it feels like hope itself is being worn down.

Even now, when we understand mental health better, people still push productivity on those who are struggling with depression. Society still values work and profit over the well-being and lives of people. Why does none of this never ever seem to change?

If we keep asking these questions, we will realise that it will eventually bring us to moments when truth itself starts to blur. At moments like this, even truth and the meaning behind the different truths begin to feel uncertain. Maybe the answer is not as large as the problem itself. Then again, maybe there is no answer to it in reality.

The Small Part We Can Play

The only thing we can truly do about everything is our own small part.

It probably will feel insignificant. There might be no finding peace in the chaos. It may feel like it does not matter at all in the larger picture. But there is still something meaningful in doing what we can, in choosing not to add to the weight of the struggle and overwhelming trauma the world is continuously going through.

There is a certain peace in knowing that, at the very least, we tried to do our small piece. And perhaps that is all there is in the end, no perfect world for us, no complete freedom for all, but rather small acts of peace, kindness, clarity and effort that will help keep us and the world going in the right direction despite everything.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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How do we lose ourselves to productivity? When we start with writing as a hobby, we start with the intention and feeling that we write to be free from everything and everyone, to pen down our feelings. But slowly, that itself becomes something we start to consider as part of our “free time,” almost like a space that needs to be managed.

The Silent Shift From Joy to Performance

For all those who follow other hobbies, they must have felt this too. The start of a hobby is always in the expectation of being free to do something we like. But somewhere down the line, when we end up trying too much to focus on it, it goes on to become something else. It becomes structured, shaped by routine, and slowly influenced by external validation, just as with a career or study. If you have never felt it, then that’s really good, but sadly, most of us have felt the same, even if we can never tell anyone about it. I mean, most of the time we would even avoid telling ourselves about it.

I think that somewhere in our hobbies, there comes a point where, even though it is a hobby, we end up getting lost in the praise or the need for consistency. I mean, it is supposed to be a hobby, but somehow, even that has become something that is considered a way to boost productivity.

Why Praise Changes Everything?

When we say that we read books or write regularly and get some praise, even we ourselves end up focusing on that praise. And then the shift starts to begin. The focus moves away from the joy of doing it to the outcome of being noticed for it.

Why is a hobby even supposed to be about praise?

But somehow, the reward mentality that has been created in the system ends up creeping up like a parasite even into the things we like. We end up focusing on it so very differently than we should. And the sad part is, we even feel bad if on some day we feel like not picking up our hobbies and just slacking off.

This is not supposed to happen. A hobby is supposed to be rest, not a means to productivity. It is meant to give space, not take it away.

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When Rest Starts Feeling Like Guilt?

But then again, why do we still feel bad?

The answer lies in the constant mindset that has been poured into us through the current education and career systems. These systems were supposed to help people, but in today’s world, it almost feels as if people are there solely to keep them running. And that mindset is exactly what creeps into our personal time as well. It slowly enters even our hobbies, warping our most personal times.

The overproductivity culture is slowly eating into all parts of our life and affecting the parts we love by turning those very things against us. What once felt like an escape starts to feel like a responsibility. And that is where we end up losing ourselves.

Choosing Rest Without Shame & Taking Back Control

It is high time that we stop with this constant need to be productive in every possible way. We need to step away if we feel like it and do so with the belief that it is our own damned right. Even slacking off from our own hobbies is our own wish. There is no need to feel any remorse about it.

Just like the hobby was our choice, so is the decision to slack away from it.

Thereby, the next time you feel any guilt or remorse for not giving time to that musical instrument, or for taking too long to finish a book, or for just staring outside the window instead of making your new painting, or even for simply sleeping instead of writing your next article, just throw all those negative feelings out of the window.

You have time. You will return to it on your own terms.

It is supposed to be your own time in your own world. And everything that you do is for yourself, not the other way around.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Feeling blank is a strange and common experience and happens more often than we like to admit.

However, the point of feeling blank is something we rarely understand. We cannot control what goes into our mind, and our mind does not always listen to us. We are, in many ways, shaped by what we think, so our mind is actually everything.

Cognitive Overload, Overthinking and Mental Block

It often becomes a real problematic scenario when our mind goes completely blank. In those moments, we fail to understand what to write or say.

Obviously, there are also times when our minds would just be overwhelmed with too much thought, making it feel crowded. But often, those thoughts are not what we want. We cannot stop our minds at that time. And then, in contrast, there are moments when our mind just completely empties. The same mind that once overflowed suddenly becomes silent.

We would often daydream a lot. Our thoughts wander freely when we are at ease. But when we sit down to pen something down, or when we need to express our thoughts, suddenly our mind goes blank. And it feels so extremely frustrating then.

We cannot move or sway our minds toward something. It resists direction.

It also happens when we are trying to absorb information, and somehow our mind just goes away. It feels like pure nothing. That silence can feel heavier than noise. It often causes trouble for us. We feel stuck in that moment, unsure of what to do next.

But the truth is, there is really nothing we can do to get rid of it, except accept it.

From Mental Blankness to Mental Wellness and Rest

Well, truth be told, this blankness happens because our mind is also meant to have rest and just wander about. It is not built for constant control or constant output.

The thing is, we humans are actually wanderers, but in the present day, we cannot allow ourselves to go wandering freely. We force ourselves back. We expect to focus all the time. So the mind tends to adapt ways of getting its rest. And sometimes, it does that by drifting away completely.

Even when we feel that our mind has gone completely blank, it is often the mind’s way of telling us something. Maybe it is saying, “I need some space.” Maybe it wants to step away. Or maybe it is simply asking us to slow down and breathe for a while. It can also be a sign of emotional burnout. Instead of fighting it, we should try to listen and try to give our minds the rest it so dearly needs.

Often, we will see that after this rest, or this blockage, or even this phase of hyper-wandering, our mind eventually returns to focus, if given the opportunity. Not forced, but rather naturally.

The point is to accept it and not fight it. Because only then can we understand our mind better. And only then can we slowly move toward a healthier state of mental wellness.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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The Beginner’s Mistake: Breaking Consistency

One of the challenges associated with writing is that the sharing part seems like a more difficult task than the writing itself. And this is something I, as a new writer, am slowly beginning to notice.

Now why is it that I am suddenly thinking about it? The thing is, I haven’t posted anything for the last 10 days. In the last 2 months, I have never ended up with this much gap in my posting. Even the last post I had made was made ready by me earlier as a backup. I have mostly tried to write biweekly and have always managed to make at least one post per week. But this time, something different happened. I did not post for a long period. But then again, was I lazy in writing?

Well, the thing is, I have written more in the last week than I have in any other week. But the problem was that I just kept on writing. Truthfully, I am very new to this world of writing and much more new to the world of sharing the writing. And doing this thing is actually teaching me a lot more than I had expected it to. So this article is about a few such lessons, but is mostly about some new realisations.

Writing From Emotion vs Publishing With Structure

So I say I wrote much more, but how come I never posted? Firstly, I guess this is one of the fatal mistakes that comes with the curse of being a noob. Any experienced writer would probably know better than this. But then again, even if they know about this, it does not mean they do not actually feel the same as I do.

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Some things you avoid because your mind tells you they are a mistake, and other things you avoid because your heart tells you to. I think this mistake of leaving a blog or any form of writing by breaking the consistency streak is something that is avoided by experts because it is the mind telling them to avoid it, and not the heart. But for beginners, the heart tends to win more often.

So what is it that is deep in the heart of writers? Well, simply put, it is the desire to write. The heart wants to put the things in the mind onto paper. This becomes much more truthful for people like us who write on instinct and mostly from feelings.

Most of the first drafts I have made have almost always been at night when I am feeling kind of nostalgic or getting lost in my thoughts. And when that feeling comes, the desire is always to just write whatever comes to mind. It does not feel like taking out an old piece and making it presentable for sharing.

But the truth is that the presentation part is also actually important, at least in today’s world. Still, the heart often overrides the mind. This tends to create an odd conflict. It is where the beginner writer struggles due to a lack of understanding of the ‘content creator mindset’, which the experts have already developed.

Emotional Writing Challenges

This overriding of the heart is also much more common for those who get too attached to what they like to do, to the extent that it may even sometimes be categorised as mild symptoms of OCD. And somehow, even the mind does not care to intervene often in those cases, since the mind is also feeling relief from pressure while doing so.

Add to that the fact that I myself am one of those people who do not have a good memory. So even if my mind thinks of overriding, somewhere it comes to a conclusion that, well, it is better to put it down on paper (or laptop/mobile for me), because if I do not, I will later forget all about it.

Also, there are other things, well, maybe excuses, that even the mind comes up with regarding inconsistency, for those of us who write part-time. Firstly, it feels like who cares about your consistency? You do not have much of an audience anyway. I mean, I get 2-3 likes per post and not even 10 views. That somehow becomes a feeder for procrastination and delays in posting.

I started posting with the intent and focus on writing rather than sharing. So that also becomes a good argument for the mind. So long as I am writing, the mind accepts that. Well, the writing is going on. So, there never comes much guilt.

The Fear of Judgment in Writing and Creative Vulnerability

There are other factors also that sometimes make me feel that sharing is the challenging part. During writing, everything is my own. But when sharing, it is not. I have to care for the outside world. I have to understand the world before making a post, even if it means erasing some of the things I felt.

And somewhere down the line, there comes a fear of backlash from people that creates a boundary. That boundary is not something that can be ignored. The heart wants to write as it pleases, but the judgments and volatility in the outside world ensure that the mind hesitates to share everything. Sandwiched between the two, consistency ends up suffering.

Writing as Escape vs Writing for Audience

Now add to all this the ‘part-time’ aspect. For me, writing is more about escape from everyday life. It is the writing itself that provides that escape, not the sharing.

And since I do not depend on writing as a source of income, the consequences of inconsistency do not feel dramatic. But still, somewhere down the line, I want people to share my feelings and maybe help a few express theirs. It is, after all, why I started creating a blog.

It may seem hypocritical, but truthfully, it is just a fight between heart and mind.

Seems like I started by talking about a lesson I learnt, but I guess I just ended up writing. It may even sound like justification, but really, I just went with the flow. Well, I guess I should talk at least a bit about the lesson.

Understanding the Pressure on Professional Writers

This has actually helped me empathise with the lives of other writers and people in artistic industries, as much as it has helped me empathise with other humans. Sometimes, understanding ourselves really does help us understand others better.

This experience has helped me empathise with other writers and people in the artistic industries. We often see them as perfect, distant, and successful. We often see great people in the artistic industries and think they have so much. They feel so out of reach. We often see them as perfect lives filled with fun and glory. Hell yeah, we even envy them sometimes.

We have even hated them when they fail to deliver the perfect movie we wanted, or when they mess up a favourite character, or when they stop writing the next sequel. But the truth is, they are also humans, and they have their own challenges and problems. We only see the output, not the struggle behind it. But that does not mean they are free from these struggles.

We get angry when they delay, when they fail to meet expectations. But now it feels different. They are writing. Most definitely writing. But completing, sharing, and delivering comes with pressures we often ignore.

We may get angry at George R. R. Martin for not finishing the last books of A Song of Ice and Fire, but while writing myself, I realised that such writers have not given up. They are writing, definitely writing. But somewhere, they are unable to complete things, not because they are lazy, but because of a combination of challenges. The pressure on them is far greater than it is on someone like us who pursues writing as a part-time hobby.

Their pressure is not just about consistency over time, but also about consistency in quality, and that too without breaking the hearts of several million hearts. Well, we people have a hard time not breaking the hearts of just our beloved ones and believe the burden he has of not breaking the hearts of so many. That weight of millions of fans is something we can barely imagine. These are some really difficult expectations to live by.

The Hidden Reality of Creative Work and Art

It has also helped me understand those who are just starting in creative fields. It made me realise the challenges faced by all those other people who are just starting out in the artistic industry, those who are trying to make a living solely from writing, acting, painting, or singing.

They are the braver ones, as they have actually made the decision to completely give everything they have to that world, despite all the hardship and challenges that they have to face. They choose uncertainty. They choose to struggle, and that takes courage. The balance they must maintain amid daily struggles, expectations, their own desires, industry chaos, and life pressures, very few understand, is not easy.

The Balance Between Heart and Mind in Writing

So I guess somehow or other, for all writers, even the great ones, the heart’s desire to just keep writing often dominates over and overwhelms the mind’s need for practicality. After all, the hearts and minds of writers belong much more to the realm of wondering fantasy than they do to the land of brutal reality.

Overall, the truth is that writers never lose enthusiasm for writing. The enthusiasm is always there. In the end, writing definitely improves our own well-being and provides meaning.

Perhaps that is one of the paradoxes of art. We begin to express, but somewhere along the way, we learn that expression alone is not going to be enough.

In the end, writing is not just about putting words on paper. It is also about finding the courage to let those words exist in the world. For many of us, that second part will always feel harder. The same enthusiasm for writing, which brought us to this curious world of art, also becomes the reason other parts of writing, like sharing, consistency, and structure, fall behind.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Losing Touch With Our Own Culture

For those of us who live far away from home, we do not get to be involved in the culture of our past and often have to give up our culture and adjust to living among the culture of others. In today’s extremely fast-paced world of migration and relocation, this disconnection is very common for us all. It becomes an unfair trade we make without fully realising its cost.

We do not get a real chance to actually explore our own culture due to this disturbing disconnect. Often, we are so very involved in adapting to our present surroundings that we slowly drift away from what once felt close to our hearts. This drift is so slow yet gradual that we only notice it when something reminds us of what we have lost. Sadly, something lost is never easy to refound.

How Books, Music and Movies Bring Back Home

In those long days of severance, listening to a song in our mother tongue gives us a touch of the home we all so dearly desire. That familiar sound carries more than words; it carries forgotten memories, cherished identity, and an unusual belongingness. It feels like returning to a different time, even if only for a few minutes.

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Similarly, watching a movie from our region reminds us that there is a place from which we are. Somehow, these things seem mundane, but then again, they actually give us a touch of what we could have always felt had we been near our own homes. They quietly rebuild a bridge we did not know was breaking.

The feeling of reading a book in your native tongue is something that can help you explore the past of your own culture. Since reading books is often like a serene conversation we are having with ourselves, it makes us feel like we are still talking, at least for some time, in our own native tongue. It becomes a private return to a voice we rarely get to use anymore.

This may not seem like much, but to someone who is stuck in a foreign place, this becomes a bridge of emotional comfort and cultural connection. It is like a small relief but that feels far bigger in our hearts.

The Comfort of Mother Tongue

We all have felt nice once in a while, listening to our mother tongue from some random stranger when we ourselves feel like a stranger in a strange land. But we cannot always get that chance to interact with someone in our native language. Books, movies, and songs step in here, giving us at least a small sense of connection to the words we hold so dear. They become substitutes for conversations we wish we were having.

On a sidenote, there really is some vague satisfaction in using slang and cursing in our own native tongue. But we barely get to talk in our own language these days, let alone curse. Hence, even those playful parts of our language become a distant memory.

Again, movies and novels come to the rescue, as they give us an opportunity to hear and even think in those expressions, bringing back a small but meaningful sense of familiarity. It feels like briefly stepping back into an older version of ourselves.

Art and Nostalgia as an Emotional Escape

For those who are stuck in distant places, we often feel like there is no real way to go back to our original lands. And because of that, the world feel dimmer, empty and incomplete.

We wish to go back to the place where we lived our childhood, where we had built our best memories with friends and family. But, there always is some stupid work, heavy responsibility, or some other obligation that keeps us tied and imprisoned to where we are. Despite that strong desire to just leave everything behind and run away to the comfort of our home, we rarely can. Life has to always move forward, even when a part of us just wants to go behind.

Art, therefore, becomes the only escape we can have. Never a complete return, but something close enough to feel the connection to culture.

Watching a movie from our own region brings back memories of the past. The mention of our hometown in a film can fill our minds with unexpected joy. Reading about a landmark in a book can bring back memories of time spent there. Listening to a song about our native place can fill us with nostalgia and longing. Each detail becomes a doorway to something we once lived.

Taking the time to create a new painting of something from our past can bring back memories of childhood, when everything was simple. I can bring back old feelings and emotions.

Exploring Cultural Identity Through Art

In addition to that, there is so much art that exists from the past to the present in our own regions, paintings, movies, dramas, and novels. This reminds us of the rich history of our culture.

It makes us feel our story is part of something much larger. For those who feel small due to being surrounded by strangers in a strange land, this simple relief can mean a lot.

Even while being stuck thousands of kilometres away from home, we can still explore at least a part of the majestic depth of our native indigenousness. Art becomes a form of cultural memory that we can carry with us. A memory that travels when we ourselves cannot.

The Role of the Internet in Cultural Connection

Despite our disadvantages, we at least have the internet, which lets us access almost anything from anywhere. This has become one of the few ways we stay connected to our roots. Apparently, it is like a modern bridge to something which feels ancient and personal.

Through it, we can explore the lives of people from our past and understand how our culture has evolved over the millennia. The emotions captured in books, songs, and films often reflect the major historical and cultural events that shaped our identity. In those stories, we find fragments of ourselves and, most importantly, reflections of our homes.

And in that, we find a strange form of comfort, knowing that even from far away, we are not completely disconnected. The distance remains, but it no longer feels absolute.

The Mixed Emotions That Art Brings

Sometimes, watching a movie in our native language can even increase our desire to go back home. It can intensify homesickness. It opens a door we cannot physically walk through. But even then, there is a strange sense of peace in that feeling. Because homesickness itself is proof of a deep emotional connection to who we are and where we come from. It may hurt, but it also reassures us of a place where everything was better and forgiven.

There is always something bittersweet in art. But that does not reduce its value. On the contrary, it enhances it. Just like truth, good art rarely comes in a single emotion.

A love story may remind us of someone from our own past, of a lost love that did not turn out the way we hoped. That may bring sadness. But at the same time, it reminds us of something we once felt deeply. And that feeling still lives somewhere within us.

And that, in itself, carries something unusual. It forms a kind of meaning that stays long after the moment passes.

Finding Home Without Returning

Art does not give us a single emotion. It gives us a mix. It allows us to feel both joy and sorrow together. And through that, we reconnect with the life we once lived, the place we once called home. It does not replace reality, but it does soften the emotional distance.

In the end, it is still worth taking time to connect with our past through art. Because right now, art is one of the few ways we have to revisit those emotions without physically travelling back.

We may not be able to return whenever we want to wherever our heart desires. But through stories, music, and paintings, we can still feel a part of that place we wanted to be our world.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Why We Avoid Extended Family Gatherings Today

Spending time with our extended family is something most of us are not at all interested in these days. In this busy life of today, we often forget that there is a real need for connection.

It can also be a very difficult thing to do. Since we are extremely busy, the little free time we get always feels too precious. Hence, we just rest, scroll through our phones, or sit quietly at home after a long day.

This becomes even more true for those of us who are introverts. We always tend to create excuses to stay away from gatherings. Large gatherings and constant conversations always feel too much. The tremendous effort of listening, speaking, and interacting for hours almost always feels exhausting.

There are also other emotional reasons. Some of us carry memories of moments when family members hurt us, knowingly or unknowingly. Our hearts remember those moments clearly. It may remind us of that uncomfortable joke an in-law once made at our expense, or that heavy scolding an uncle gave us for no reason. Sometimes it is the highly competitive cousin with whom we could never quite keep up. Somehow or other, a small part of our ego comes alive that makes us hate the family gathering.

In many ways, family is more complicated than friendships. Friends are people we ourselves choose, mostly based on a common mindset, and they also choose us in return. Family is different, filled with dissimilar people of very distinct mentalities, often belonging to diverse generations. We never got to choose our relatives. Yet, despite these complications, there is still some value in attending that occasional family dinner or small gathering.

Complex Emotions in Complicated Family

It is true that while family members may have caused us pain at times, but they have also witnessed important moments of our lives. Some of them have seen us grow, struggle, and succeed. They have also seen us at our best, and at least a few of them were genuinely happy for us when we achieved something we had deeply desired. For every wretched cousin who mocks us, there is yet another one who wholeheartedly cares and would truly support us without hesitation.

Family gatherings can also reveal things we may not otherwise notice. Sometimes a relative may be going through a difficult period. It may not always be financial. It could be emotional or personal. In such moments, our own experiences might help them in their dark time more than we realise.

There are also moments that cannot be repeated. That gathering might be the last time we see a grandfather who once loved us deeply in childhood. It might be the chance to sit and talk again with that chatty sister whose company we enjoyed while growing up.

Sometimes it is also an opportunity to correct small mistakes from the past. None of us are always flawless. Meet-ups provide a chance to maybe correct some wrongs that we ourselves have done, as in the end, we ourselves are also not perfect beings. Perhaps there is an apology that we wanted to make but was never spoken, or a misunderstanding that grew massive over time. Perhaps the next family gathering may provide the moment when you finally remove that old guilt that made it difficult for you to face your little brother.

The Hidden Value of Family Memories

In this shifting, volatile world, we fail to realise how much our extended family are going through and how much it has changed over time. People may move to new cities, and the children grow up. Yet among all these dynamic changes, there are still some things that remain static. Often in those statics we find that there still is something that remains of the lost childhood. A constant that connects our lives with those of our extended family is often the shared memories of all our childhoods.

Our family saw us grow just like we saw them struggle, celebrate, and age. We have all seen each other through our good and difficult times. Thus, from our earliest years until the later stages of life, those relationships remain connected to our personal history.

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In many ways, family gatherings are built on nostalgia. They allow us to reconnect not only with relatives but also to catch up with parts of our own past selves.

Somehow or the other, it does feel good somewhere in our hearts to sit and gossip with our cousins or listen to the ancestral stories from our grandparents. There is an absolute joy in talking about old memories. There is warmth in listening to grandparents tell ancestral stories.

Sometimes these conversations even help repair relationships we believed were permanently broken. They can provide closure to unresolved feelings that have stayed with us for years.

Generational Conversations We Rarely Have Anywhere Else

Family gatherings also offer something rare and forgotten in modern social life - contact between different generations. It is only within our family that we will ever truly get to be and feel close to people who do not belong to our generation. Outside of family, we rarely spend time with people who are decades older or younger than us. While the generational gap is mostly known for creating misunderstandings, it can also be an opportunity to understand perspectives very different from our own.

Twenty years from now, there is very little chance that any child will ever ask us how life was during the COVID-19 pandemic. But a curious niece or nephew might. They may wonder how people lived inside their homes for months, how schools were closed, and how the world suddenly stopped.

Nostalgia Keeps Family Bonds Alive

Sharing those stories can bring back emotions from our own past. Somehow, telling those stories will bring back the memories, both good and some bad, of our childhood and help us revisit those priceless moments. Some of those memories may be difficult, but many of them remind us of how life has changed.

If not anything, it simply feels good to tell others of our old stories.

Likewise, our grandparents, uncles, and aunts have lived through events we cannot fully imagine. They have gone through things we could never perceive. Their stories about resilience, traditions, and survival are experiences we have never experienced ourselves. Family gatherings may be the only opportunity we get to hear those stories and gain some insights into the past.

Sometimes we may even receive advice that seems worthless now but becomes valuable later in life. A casual conversation about raising children may appear irrelevant today, but could prove useful many years from now. Maybe on some desperate day, we may try to use a trick to stop our child from crying, as we once heard from that old aunt.

The wise eyes of the older members are filled with experience. While the innocent new eyes of the children are filled with hope. There is something to learn from both the hope of the newborn and the experience of the old. Both of these help us glance at a connection between the past, present, and future.

At least some part of the gathering is simply about happiness and nostalgia. We may meet a newborn child of a cousin and feel joy at seeing a new life begin. We may talk with a newly married couple about their honeymoon and perhaps feel inspired to visit the same place ourselves someday.

There are always some members in our family whose eyes fill with happiness at just seeing us. Somehow, seeing the glitter in their eyes also fills our own hearts with happiness. Happiness is the only thing that actually increases with sharing. Some family members will just make us realise how easy it can be to make someone happy by just our presence.

It is often the older members of our family who are the happiest simply because we cared enough to just show up. They would immediately shower us with blessings at just seeing us. And blessings from well-wishers are always helpful.

Annoying, Complicated, Yet Important

Having noted all positives, it is implicit that there are always going to be at least some negatives associated. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect everything to be positive. Just like every other part of life, families also contain conflicts, misunderstandings, and painful memories. Some forms of trauma cannot be ignored or forgiven easily. No one should ever feel forced to meet people who have caused deep and lasting harm. I shall never urge anyone to go to in front of those to whom you just truly don’t want to.

Similarly, I would not ask an introvert to go against all her instincts and struggle to be part of a gathering. Introverts should never feel pressured to change their nature just to fit in. But sometimes it may be enough to sit quietly beside a calm aunt who has seen and endured so much in her life. It may feel nice to just sit with a thoughtful uncle who understands the importance of silence.

Overall, it may still be worthwhile to reconnect with those family members with whom we once shared a bond that we genuinely miss and would like to feel again.

Finding Balance Between Distance and Connection

Believe me when I say, every family gathering is an opportunity to explore our past, feel happiness in the present, and improve hope for the future. The opportunity is not always available to all of us. It is rare for those of us who are forced to live thousands of miles away from our home and family. We often strive for a chance to meet our relatives, but don’t get one. I believe people who have the opportunity and feel at least some belongingness to the family should try their best to attend family events.

In the end, everything depends on our perspective. The good and the bad are too much intertwined in a family. Family relationships are almost always complicated and imperfect. Yet they also contain history, nostalgia, and emotional roots that are irreplaceable and worth exploring.

So even in this ever-changing modern world, it may still be worth making some old-fashioned time for a few moments with our extended family. Those family gatherings are not only about relatives. They are also about remembering who we once were.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Image Credits:

Image no. 1: Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-people-sitting-at-a-long-table-KZfUMAgVPCg

Image no. 2: Photo by Considerate Agency on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/people-sitting-on-chair-in-front-of-table-with-candles-and-candles-UrzN-8K1PCE

Image no. 4: Photo by Suzy Hazelwood: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-old-pictures-3617568/

Image no. 5: Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grandmother-and-grandfather-holding-child-on-their-lap-302083/

Image no. 6: Photo by Sunil Damor on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-people-standing-next-to-each-other-kcwsNnTOtz0

Image no. 8: Photo by Hoi An and Da Nang Photographer on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-multi-generational-family-poses-for-a-photo-8Mp-l0jlK5A

Image no. 9: Photo by fauxels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-making-toast-3184183/

The other images are generated using prompts to Substack AI

In today’s busy and fast-moving life, we often overlook the silent strength and wisdom of the older people around us. Yet spending even a short time with them can teach us so much about resilience, gratitude, and the meaning of simple moments. It really is something profound.

An Unexpected Life Lesson

The people who have grown old with time and have seen so much and gone through so much are really some of the nicest and wisest people in the world. Even small conversations with them are enough to understand that the wisdom of the elderly people has come from the long journey of life they have already travelled.

Recently, at a family gathering, I got to meet a few of the old members of our family. One of my grandmothers, especially, brought me to tears while teaching me so much. This is one of the reasons I like to go to these family gatherings and always try to meet the elderly people. They have always been the kindest ones to me.

Meeting one of the Oldest Members of my Family

This grandmother I am speaking of is one of the oldest and nicest people I know. She has lived a long life and has seen so much. However, recently, a few months ago, she lost one of her children. It was one of the worst losses that people can ever imagine. Her eyes were so filled with grief and also wisdom. I do not know how they stay so strong for so long and yet feel happy about just small things. In her, I felt like looking at a lifetime of difficult experiences and great emotional strength.

I do not get to meet her often, and recently after seeing her at the gathering I just went on to say hello. Even that small gesture filled her with joy. She immediately blessed me and started telling my mother how nice she felt to meet me. I do not know how they can feel so happy at just meeting a person. Her ability to value such a small human interaction is what turned this simple greeting into such a meaningful moment for me. I was surprised how she still values family connections, even for someone as distantly remote as me, whom she has barely met in the last few years.

In my childhood, I had met her so many times. She actually is a very witty lady. She would often crack small jokes with me. I remember her as that person, and somehow it felt very sad to see the grief in her eyes now. Life has burdened her with so much, still she somehow carries it all with a gentle spirit.

The Strength and Grief Carried by Grandparents

She has changed so much because of the recent loss, and yet there is still so much strength in her. Her strength is really one of her most beautiful qualities. This strength is something I, a youth still in my mid-20s, can barely understand. I am having difficulty grasping the concept itself.

I truly cannot imagine how much she has gone through and how much life she has seen. Their long journey through life has probably taught them lessons that no book or lecture ever can. That is probably why the old people are the ones with the best mindsets.

I also met a few other old members of the family. Another grandmother was so happy that I just sat with her and took pictures with her. These simple things are something we all take for granted, and yet they were happy with just so little. It is really amazing how powerful simple moments can be in creating genuine happiness.

I do not know how much I will ever become in life, but I doubt whether I will ever become even a fraction of the people they have become. To me, their lives feel so very filled with vast examples of patience, endurance, and emotional wisdom.

The Sacrifices That Shape Generations

They have nurtured multiple children and filled their children’s lives with values and success. They have seen and endured so much pain and suffering. They have also seen the success of their children and their full lives and also felt that success themselves.

Our grandparents have lived, watching so many generations grow, yet they are happy with such little moments. Maybe the ability to appreciate small things is one of the deepest rewards of a long life. And this definitely is one of the greatest life lessons that we can learn from them.

I think this blessing is probably much more common among grandmothers. They have taken care of the home while taking full care of the children. Some of them also took care of work in addition to all of this. It is a sad reality that the sacrifices of women often remain unnoticed despite shaping entire generations of families. The motherly feeling is very common among older women who have made so many sacrifices for their family and children. Their deep sense of maternal care for everybody and everyone always remains for the entirety of their lives.

Even after seeing all these with my own eyes, it is still very difficult for me to comprehend how they have lived with so many sacrifices and yet become so much wiser. The slow growth of wisdom from years of responsibility, care, experience, patience, and resilience is something I have heard of but still find quite difficult to grasp, despite seeing it with my own eyes.

What Younger People Can Learn from the Elderly

They have seen so many moments of life and still managed to find happiness in the simple moments. Meanwhile, ignorant fools like me often ignore those simple moments and instead focus on things that are beyond my control.

Anyways, something I learnt from meeting the old members of the family is that the old are actually far better people than we will ever be, and they have truly learnt and understood what life really is. It somehow makes me realise that happiness really is often hidden inside these ordinary moments. Maybe it is difficult to find for us in this young age, but time will probably humble us enough to actually see these moments as reflections of love and joy in life.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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PS: This was actually more of a diary entry than an actual article. I really wanted to share some of my feelings that I am really having difficulty understanding, and I used this platform for this.

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The Struggle to Be Free and the Loop of Life

In this world, life often feels like a constant struggle. But if we think about it carefully, isn’t it that the struggle itself is done just as a means to help us become free? Deep inside, almost all of us want the same thing in the end. We want freedom.

Freedom is one of the most powerful human desires.

It is really very difficult to define what the meaning of freedom truly is. For most, freedom can mean financial independence. To others, it can mean the chance to travel, explore dreams, or simply live without constant care. For many people, it also represents emotional peace.

In our hearts, Freedom is the whispering hope that one day we will be able to live life on our own terms and walk our own paths.

Sadly, that is also why we struggle so much in the pursuit of freedom.

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Mental Pressure of Modern Life for the Middle-Class

The problem begins when we accept that our entire life is built around this struggle. It becomes as if the struggle is the purpose. Struggle appears again and again in so many different forms. Sometimes it comes through work pressure. Other times through responsibilities. And then often through the silent expectations placed on us by our society.

Because of this, we cannot just go on wherever we want or do whatever we wish.

For many of us who fall into the middle class of society, we are often lost in this loop. It is not always a physical struggle. In many cases, the real burden is mental. But the mental struggle we go through every day can be tremendous. Office work, responsibilities, financial planning, family planning, and social expectations fill our minds deeply.

The Invisible Mental Struggle of Middle-Class Life

Yet this constant pressure is rarely noticed by those around us simply because it is not physical. Most of the time, it is not just overlooked by society but also by our own selves. We simply accept it as part of life. But over time, this invisible struggle makes the loop feel heavier.

And still, despite everything, there is one thing that we all deeply desire with our heart and mind, just as almost every living being does. Freedom. But somehow, while struggling to reach that state of freedom, we can never really feel or utilise that true freedom.

Freedom is a so vast a concept but also so basic a desire. But the sad reality is that many of us, especially within the middle class, rarely reach that phase in life where we feel completely free. The thing is, we can never achieve true freedom to our full satisfaction.

Yet we continue to struggle for it hoping that we will finally find freedom. Anyways, what else is there to do? There really is no choice.

The Endless Loop of Work, Money, and Expectations

We work long hours chasing promotions, aspiring towards financial security. We do all these with a simple belief. If we can earn enough money, we will eventually gain enough freedom. Money begins to look like the key that will unlock the life we truly want.

So yet again the struggle continues in the hope of pursuing freedom.

But this does not end up being the best of choices, as something strange often happens along the way. By the time we finally reach the level of financial satisfaction we once dreamed about, most of us have almost always already lost the very desire for freedom that started the long journey. Somewhere in that long pursuit of money, we slowly become absorbed in the pursuit itself.

Work and ambition become habits, while the original dream quietly fades.

The Hidden Paradox of Modern Work Culture

When we finally look back, we realise that beneath the heaps of money we made, buried lies the original dream. We realise, we never truly used the freedom we hoped to gain from all our struggles.

By then, it feels too late to do anything. We often lose our youth, our dreams, our chance to explore and sadly, often our health.

Our youth has passed while dreams have been left unexplored. The energy to chase new experiences has weakened. The explorer inside us has fiddled away. Even our health has paid a price during the long years of constant struggle.

In this way, work and struggle do give us the resources to be free. But at the same time, they take away the opportunity to experience that freedom when it matters most. It becomes one of the quiet paradoxes of modern life.

So what can we really do? The answer is simpler than we think.

Finding Small Moments of Freedom in Everyday Life

While we continue to struggle in our daily lives to build a future of freedom, we should also try to explore the small freedom that already exists in the present.

Instead of waiting for full-fledged freedom someday in the distant future, it may be wiser to actually make a bit of an arrangement to get a temporary relief from day-to-day struggle and create small moments of freedom today.

Spend time on a short trip or a quiet hobby or a conversation with old friends or a walk in a place that brings peace or any other damned thing that you love. These small experiences may not be some grand adventures, but they allow you to touch the freedom you are working so hard to achieve.

This truly matters. Because it is these small explorations of freedom that keep the spirit of our dreams alive.

Of course, stepping completely away from our busy schedule is not always possible. It is definitely true that taking time off can bring pressure from colleagues, managers, or the company. The modern work-life balance is so hard to achieve while focusing on financial freedom. For most of us middle-class professionals, maintaining a steady source of income is essential for stability. Responsibilities simply will never ever leave us. But we can not just accept it and give up our hopes.

Small Dreams Keep the Spirit Alive

Yet even within these limits, it is still possible to take small steps toward the life we once imagined. And it is necessary to grab those possibilities to explore our dreams as often as we can. Even if for nothing else, just to remind us of our hopes and dreams. In the end, our hopes and dreams are what we truly are.

The pursuit of freedom may continue throughout our lives. The struggle may never disappear completely. But if we remember to experience small pieces of freedom along the way, the loop of life may be a little lighter and bearable.

Sometimes it is enough to pursue even the smallest dream or to fulfil a tiny desire that we once pushed aside. Not because it changes everything, but because it reminds us why we began this long struggle in the first place. And most importantly, it keeps our wishes and spirit alive.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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Happiness rarely stays for long. Yet somehow those few minutes of happiness become memories that stay with us for years. A short moment of joy can sit quietly hidden inside our memory while our days and weeks fill with worries. It is strange when you think about it. Sadness often feels long and heavy, but happiness only arrives like a brief spark.

Why Happy Endings Feel So Powerful?

Everyone has at some point felt in our life that happiness does not last forever. It is something that cannot go on for eternity. Most of us understand that quite well that summer (or winter, depending on what you prefer) does not last forever.

However, have you ever seen those movies or read those beautiful novels that end with a happy ending? They feel wonderful, and that final moment often becomes the most beautiful part of the entire story.

To a certain extent, we see it as a very happy movie because it is the ending that stays with us the most. However, if that story were a real event, we would understand something different. The happiness at the end of the movie or a long novel is not about lasting forever. It simply shows that the particular experience reached a moment of happiness at the end of the story. Not that it was a truly happy ever after. In many ways, our lives work like that, too.

Finding Joy in Small Moments (My Parasailing Experience)

Sometimes life teaches us something important through a very small experience. A short moment of joy, a sudden adventure, or even a brief escape from our worries can reveal something deeper about how happiness actually works in our lives.

Recently I went for parasailing. For those who are not aware, parasailing is considered an adventurous activity that involves using a parachute to fly above the water while a speedboat is tethered to it to provide the wind speed.

It is an extremely beautiful feeling; both thrilling and emotional. You are flying high in the air while enjoying the scenic beauty of nature surrounding the river. The wind passes around you, the water looks calm from above, and for a few minutes, life feels completely free. It was so very good and nice.

It was such a wonderful experience. But what made it so enjoyable?

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What Actually Creates Happiness?

Many people would say it was the adrenaline. But in truth, adrenaline can also come with fear. Some would say it was the beauty of the surroundings. But again, beauty alone is not always enough to create happiness. Truthfully, the meaning of happiness is very hard to define, which makes it even more difficult to understand what creates those short moments of happiness.

So why did I enjoy it so much?

For me, it was the feeling of freedom combined with the ability to enjoy that freedom the way I wanted. I wanted to explore the beauty of nature while flying high in the air, and for a few moments, I was able to do exactly that.

In short, it was a perfect combination of many small things. The people I was with. The adrenaline. The beauty of the river, the sky and the forest surrounding it. And most importantly, the freedom. All of these together created that moment of fulfilled happiness.

But the next question naturally appears.

Does this happiness last forever?

Sadly, it does not.

Why Happiness doesn't last?

Strangely, sadness and anxiety often feel like they last much longer. For the last six days, I had been constantly worried that my leave to go home would be rejected. My Office In-charge had declared that no leave would be granted because of an upcoming important event, and unfortunately, that event coincided with the leave I had requested.

Since I work very far from my hometown, going home requires a lot of arrangements. Tickets must be booked. Travel plans must be prepared.

Usually I only get the opportunity to go home once every two or three months.

So the possibility that my leave might not get approved felt like a huge emotional disappointment and also a mild financial problem. Because of that, the concern about those leaves kept filling my days with tension. The worry simply refused to disappear.

So if sadness and anxiety can stay with us throughout the day for so long, why does happiness only fill up for some moments and seem so temporary?

Perhaps the answer lies in how life itself is structured.

Happiness and Life in a Dark Universe

If we look at the cosmos, most of it is silent and dark. Undoubtedly, even that darkness is beautiful, but there is no life to feel or experience it. Huge parts of the universe are just barren and sterile. It contains no life at all, nothing to feel the emotions surrounding the beauty of the infinite cosmos. Yet in between those vast stretches of darkness, almost by random chance, there exist some small planets like ours that are filled with beautiful lifeforms.

Reality can feel similar to that.

Small sparkling moments appear within long stretches of difficulty, pressure, and uncertainty. In that sense, happiness can feel like a bright spark inside an otherwise heavy world. So, happiness is the delight that exists between those long periods of struggle.

But if happiness is so temporary, why should we still pursue it?

Because it is those moments of joy and happiness that help us continue.

In a strange way, happiness feels like finding a brief light from the shadow of constant worry. It is like stealing a phantom of peace from the ghost of eternal continuous pain. It may not remove every problem, but it gives us a moment where life feels meaningful again. In a twisted way, providing meaning to happiness is the salvation of the glumness.

Holding Onto Happy Memories During Difficult Days

The day I went parasailing was actually a Sunday, just two days after I discovered that my leave might be cancelled. But when I was up in the air, lost in the thrill and beauty, surrounded by wind in the sky, I was not worried about my leave at all. For those few minutes, I felt only joy and complete fulfilment.

Suddenly, life felt so very meaningful.

It was almost like floating inside a small paradise. Every trace of worry and unease disappeared during those precious moments. The anxiety was simply forgotten and faded away.

Of course, later those worries returned.

But that does not mean the experience was not worthwhile.

Because during that parasailing ride, I created a memory. One day, I will remember it again and certainly feel nostalgic about that moment.

These small, happy experiences are what many of us hold on to when life becomes difficult. The nostalgia feeds the peace in our hearts.

When we are happy, we rarely think about sorrow. Thinking about past or future pain would only dull the moment. But later, when life becomes heavy, those memories of joy often help us endure difficult days. It is the thought of that paradisical sensation that will provide support to get through a bad day.

In many ways, this is how I continue to move forward.

How Happy Memories Help us Cope?

Even when we feel lost in what seems like a perpetual state of worry and exhaustion, it helps to remember the small moments of peace we have experienced before. Sometimes it also helps to imagine future moments of happiness that we may create. When drowning in the desert of bashful morbid, it is important to hold on to past serenity or sometimes dream of a future wonder that you will create.

And whenever life provides an opportunity, we should create new moments of fresh delight. We should never miss a chance to be happy. And whenever possible, we should take a small step toward creating such experiences.

Even though happiness does not last forever, those brief moments can still guide us toward a better day. This really is how we can make a way to a better life.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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In today’s ever-changing dynamic world, where some of us are taken so far from our homes by necessity, circumstance, or a lack of opportunity, a quiet weight settles in the back of our minds, a sense of being very far away from everything and everyone we hold dear. That particular loneliness comes from missing familiar faces, recognisable voices, and the beautiful atmosphere of the place we call our home.

Migration, career growth, and education take many of us far from the place we once called home. Thus, homesickness in today’s world has become so common that many of us just assume it to be just another part of life. But being a part of life does not make it any easier to deal with, especially when that wave of homesickness hits in the middle of a lonely night. This emotional loneliness has a way of surfacing without warning.

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The Emotional Cost of Migration

It’s hard to understand for those who have stayed in the place of their choice for most of their life, but for the other unfortunate ones, the feeling of homesickness is very, very real. It’s something quite subtle that eats away at you, often in the laziness of a weekend or when you miss that invitation from a dear friend. It comes to haunt you when you see your colleagues enjoying time with their families on the office tour.

It happens in so many small moments, but there is something truly sad and disturbingly real about it. It may not be dramatic, yet it lingers in our hearts and minds. For us, ‘Far From Home’ is not the name of a movie, but rather a depressing scenario.

Homesickness is even more acute for those of us stuck in a place where even the language is not our own. Our mother tongue is also part of our home, and the desire to speak it can come back to haunt us when we realise that nobody around us understands it.

In today’s culture of migration and fast-paced life, we end up in places where everything feels different, from language and culture to traditions, priorities, and even emotions. While we gain new experiences, the old goes missing, and the memory and desire for all things far away in a distant place feel completely lost and gone. Cultural displacement can feel heavier than physical distance.

Why Homesickness Hits Harder Than We Admit

Homesickness does not just come from being far from your hometown, though that is often the case. There is something about the coziness of familiarity. There is something about being around people who feel like your own. Homesickness is not limited to your hometown. There is actually no true definition of home. Home is not just a house or a family; it is the combination of emotions associated with a family and a place that feels like your own. Sadly, some of us are not lucky enough to be in a place that can be called our home. For some, home exists more in memory than in geography.

For those working or studying very far from home, the despair of never truly returning home is something that cannot be shaken off. Going home does not become easy while working or studying; it requires almost meticulous planning, managing timelines, work, and studies, planning the journey, and, obviously, the biggest task, getting leave approved from people who often prioritise work over our personal lives. This makes the feeling of homesickness hit even harder, as all this planning makes going home feel like going on a trip to a distant place. Work-life balance often feels fragile in these moments.

Feeling Like a Guest in Your Own Home

It does not end there. Even home feels different when we go there after a long time. Things change while we are away. Time does not stop. What we see there after returning home has often evolved from what we had earlier. Surroundings change, people move and change. Often, we feel like a guest in our own home. The distance reshapes both us and the place we miss.

Truly, there is not much that can be done to get rid of this. It is more of something that we can acknowledge. Maybe talking with someone from our home may give us a temporary sense of peace of mind. Maybe some small comfort can be found by spending time with an old friend. Some good may be found in nostalgia.

Overall, life has to go on. All we can ever do about homesickness is maybe try to make some semblance of home wherever we are. Maybe cook a recipe from the hometown, browse through some pictures. Maybe see a movie in our mother tongue. In small rituals and familiar habits, we begin to rebuild a sense of belonging.

Homesickness may never fully disappear, but it reminds us that we have loved a place deeply enough to miss it. That is the poetic beauty to it. The knowledge that a place exists where all is forgiven, accepted, and welcomed gives us hope that we will eventually find our way back to that everlasting light at the end, even if the tunnel of homesickness feels long and endless. In the end, no matter what, we will surely and certainly end up home, wherever it is.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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In this world, which demands constant focus and fast thinking, moments of complete mental silence can feel absurd, disturbing and unsettling.

Feeling blank in our minds is a very common experience, and it’s perfectly okay. We can’t always control the thoughts that enters our mind. Mostly, our mind doesn’t listen to us, even if we try. Our thoughts tend to shape us. And it is these thoughts, which makes our mind everything.

Lost Between Overthinking and Emptiness

A tricky part of life is when our mind goes completely blank. No thoughts, nothing. It is then that the struggle begins. We struggle to know what to write or say. We, humans, often daydream, but when it’s the actual time to express our thoughts or write something down, suddenly, our mind just leaves us. This can be very frustrating. It’s almost like our mind refuses to follow our lead. The frustration reaches its peak when we’re trying to absorb new information, and then suddenly, it feels like there is nothing up there in our minds. This silence in the mound is louder than any disturbing noise.

Then there are those times when our mind is overflowing with excessive ideas and thoughts, but none of it is what we wish, want or need. We can’t ever stop these overfilled ideas. It feels like our mind is hyper wandering. There often is this swing between overthinking and mental block. It can be very confusing.

Honestly, this can be troublesome, but there’s really not much we need to do except accept it. We need to first accept it and only then we can move forward to our own wellness.

In reality, this swing between properly focused, extreme hyperactivity and complete blankness is part of how the mind protects itself from getting overloaded.

The Mind’s Need for Rest, Space and Wandering

The truth is, our mind needs rest and space to wander freely. We, humans, are natural wanderers, but mostly we force our minds to chase something constantly instead of allowing ourselves to go wandering freely. We expect constant focus. We demand a steady flow of productivity. Then, when that focus fades, we make assumptions that something is wrong with us.

In short, our mind is just finding a way to rest, by drifting away. It disconnects for a while so it can recover. Our mind is adapting its way to rest and wander, as we cannot give it the opportunity it needs to wander through the wonders.

When it seems like our mind is completely blank, it’s often a signal that it needs some space or a break. This is a way of our mind, like telling us, “Hey, I need a moment to breathe.” I believe we should listen to that and give our minds the breathing space they need. Mental clarity grows in space, not in pressure.

Usually, after we allow a break or a pause, and then do some wandering of our own, our mind will return to focus, when it gets the proper chance. The key is to accept these moments and not fight them. When we accept this, we help our own minds become healthier and move toward an overall better feeling. Over time, this simple shift towards acceptance can improve focus, creativity, and emotional balance.

A mind gone temporarily blank is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is just a request for mental wellness, balance, and recovery, and it is highly important that we provide ourselves and our minds with these wanderings.

Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.

Regards, D Roy

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