Nikhil's Blog

If you have been working on a long-term project but struggle to finish it, one way to force yourself to see it through is to leave your current environment. It’s not practical for every situation, but it can work when you are too comfortable in the routine of your everyday life. Go to a faraway hill station and work from there for a month. These days, especially in India, you can find places with good internet, three meals a day, on-call services and serene surroundings. Spend the month working…

If you are in your thirties, you don’t have much of a career left. Whether AI will replace your job or not, your willingness to work for a company will certainly diminish. There is also a possibility that you will be replaced by people younger, smarter, and more energetic than you—people who still have more hunger to succeed, and more years to offer than you do. I am thirty-six, and I don’t imagine myself being employed after fifty. And I am being very optimistic on the page. The supposedly…

There are two camps. One says, make money—it is life’s ultimate truth. The other says money makes you evil and corrupt. One says money makes people respect you. The other says relationships cannot be bought with money. One says people who claim money can’t buy happiness simply don’t know where to shop. The other says, try buying someone’s love with money. Both camps are right in a way. But my point isn’t whether you should dedicate your life to making more money. You don’t really have a choice…

A man who is focused on his self-improvement, one who is so engrossed in his own life, will often appear boring to the world. The definition of “interesting” often lies in excesses, as per someone else’s standards. You will notice that the people they call “interesting” know less, say more, do more random things, and are comfortable living their lives in this fashion. The man who introspects will often find himself at a crossroads. He will be observant of others and, in turn, of his own…

The Bhagavad Gita says that the most contented man is he who cares more about his actions or deeds and less about the fruits of those actions. He finds joy in the action itself, and so whether the fruits arrive or not cease to matter. He has already found fulfilment in the act of performing the action. And if that action is in accordance with his true nature and his duty, then he will eventually find contentment in his life. This is perhaps the most debatable part of the Bhagavad Gita because…

You are judged by how you make others feel. We focus too much on making the best first impression, but part of an initial impression is also how others feel in your presence. One way to achieve this is by leveraging a polite tone and genuine courtesy. This is one of the most strategic levers because it highlights your mental strength. Talking politely to someone cannot be faked beyond a point. It means processing the information in your mind, along with the emotions that emerge from that…

A lot of people struggle with managing their emotions and blame themselves for making emotional decisions rather than rational ones. But first of all, there is no such thing as a purely rational decision. A decision that benefits you in the long term is usually considered rational and “practical.” Emotional decisions, by contrast, are often short-term because emotions are, in essence, short-term feedback loops. We resort to willpower to control our emotions. We restrict ourselves from feeling…

All our lives, we try to figure out the best possible way to live. We are constantly caught in the conundrum of whether to betray a friend to rise to the top or to remain true to our ethics. We struggle to answer whether being ethical has any real benefit at all. There is no divine reward for being ethical throughout your life. There is no afterlife where you will be judged by how you lived, how many people you helped, or how much love you spread. These are religious notions handed down through…

I have been writing consistently here for a year now. You can go back a year and find one essay published every single day without fail. I have broken a lot of the writing advice that gets thrown around on social media, except for one piece of advice—and that is something I didn’t learn from social media. Social media is filled with advice about maintaining a swipe file of ideas. They tell you to keep track of trending topics. Write about subjects that are most likely to go viral. Write on…

There is no state in a human being’s life where you are truly satisfied with what you have. Climbing Mount Everest is easier by comparison because you know where to stop. There is a peak, and every aspiration eventually ends there. You take the contentment of the climb, store it in your memories, and never want to try it again because what would be the point? But in life, there is no peak. All peaks exist only in your mind. You achieve one thing only to discover that there is more. And so the…

Feeling saturated with life is inevitable. You are bound to feel cramped and bored with everything you do repeatedly. Like monkeys, we are wired to seek novelty, and we constantly attempt to find it in the world around us. Almost anything you do repeatedly is eventually bound to make you less grateful for the reward. A good relationship feels boring after a while. A session at the gym feels boring. Sitting down at a blank page to write every day feels boring. But this saturation does not mean…

Everybody says beating short-form addiction is necessary. There are studies showing how harmful it can be to the body and mind. But nobody talks about how to actually quit the short-form addiction, especially TikTok and Instagram Reels. The epidemic is so widespread that people have even started building apps that mimic the functions of TikTok and Reels, but supposedly deliver useful content instead. In India, TikTok is banned, and I hardly ever used Instagram Reels. I am not into posting…

You become what you tell yourself through repetition. This advice is psychologically true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe something that influences how you act, and how you act determines the outcome, which is usually in accordance with your belief. Act like a leader, and they will eventually start treating you like one. But it isn’t always so easy. Some days, it’s impossible to believe in yourself. Everything feels so heavy that moving one leg out of the room, attempting to…

You need to practice living without the things you love. If you love food, you need to fast for a day, or spend a week without indulging in your favorite dishes. If you cannot live without books, you should spend a month living without them. If you cannot live without someone, if you think you are addicted to someone, then you must definitely learn to live without them. Do things that do not involve them. You must experience the blank space in your head that emerges when you are forced to…

It’s tough to survive in corporate life if you don’t have someone who makes your day. It gives you a reason to wake up and look forward to going to a place that seems designed to keep you demotivated. Wage labour is perhaps the most depressing thing to have happened to mankind. Yet, it has also given people the leverage to do bigger things, lift themselves out of generational poverty, and find hope in life. The method, however, is designed to kill you slowly. Not just your personality, but your…

Everybody likes attention. We do all sorts of things to make the world pay attention to our existence. We forget to focus on the quality of attention we are attracting. This is especially true on social media. When you are stripping clothes, dancing naked, what kind of people do you think you will bring to your profile? Sure, you will have thousands of followers, but what kind of followers? What kind of things will they expect from you? I am being extreme, but you cannot expect warmth from…

Everybody likes ambition until they have to face an ambitious person in real life. When they have to face that partner who would choose their ambition over them, that’s when the test of every relationship begins. Ambition is acceptable in men but not in women. Because no matter how far we think we have come in our evolution, in our civilizational ethics, in our understanding of equality, we still feel that without women, we are incomplete. And so we assign them the duty of completing us. Of…

It’s hard to acknowledge intelligence in someone, especially when that intelligence is greater than yours. The person who does that deserves as much respect as the intelligent person being admired. Because to admire someone, you need dual awareness: one of your own strengths and where you lack, and another of the superiority of the other person. Most people lack every kind of awareness. They can at least acknowledge their own shortcomings, but to acknowledge someone else’s superiority is nigh…

Political ideologies can make you stupid. I am not here to target the right or the left of the political spectrum. I am speaking as someone who has been on both sides of the seesaw. The fight is never really about the truth, and I think both sides are willing to acknowledge at least that much. The whole point of an ideological battle is groupthink. You believe in certain things, so you gradually start believing in things that are somewhat connected to your original beliefs. You find people who…

Your romantic obsession is a message that could be interpreted in more ways than you think. When you are obsessed with a person, you think that person has connected deeply with you. They have managed to touch strings in your heart that nobody could before. You make that person special in your mind by engaging in mindless scenarios and imaginary conversations. You make that person bigger than what they are, different from who they appeared to be. You start to live with that personality in your…

Being competitive has its advantages. You always fight hard, you never give up, and you always give more than you think you are capable of. But competitiveness is useful when the battle is on equal ground. Like in sport, where you know the other player is equally capable, so the only difference you can bring is your intensity. That sometimes creates the difference. The same competitiveness becomes useless when the battle is not on equal ground. When the fight isn’t about the finish line, when…

What you choose to react to says a lot about you. If you train yourself to observe what people choose to react to, you will learn a lot about them. The intensity of their reaction is proportional to how much something bothered them. There’s always more than meets the eye. Someone’s harsh reaction, harsher than the situation demanded, is never just about that incident. It is a trigger. That incident has triggered something in them. Either they were already frustrated and the incident gave them…

It’s nearly impossible to do everything at once. We know this truth, yet every time, we make the same mistake of thinking we can actually handle more things at once. We don’t want to leave anything aside, not even for a few months. Our mind is designed for focused work. There are studies and literature on the effectiveness of focused work, and we know that intuitively too. We have experienced the effects of focused work. The problem isn’t that we don’t know the effects. The problem is what…

AI has turned everyone into a product manager. You can think of an idea and bring it to life at a speed that was unheard of in the past. Never before in the entire history of human beings have we been able to manifest what we imagined and desired with such immediacy. This is a tremendous leap that we have taken, yet we have collectively gone numb to the scale of our own achievement. We are more fearful of what we have built. There are protests to stop it because we are afraid it will take away…

Many a times you are fighting with demons in your mind that only exists in your mind and nowhere else. You are fighting against the perceived slights, against people who were indifferent to you, who didn’t support you, who belittled you, who underestimated you. Your mind relives all those sessions again and again until you haven’t settled score with every one of those people. But here’s the problem with this approach. You cannot fight what you cannot see. To wage a war you need two people to…

There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never goes away. Maybe I love feeling inferior, or maybe it’s impostor syndrome that makes me feel that I am not good enough. No matter how much I create, I feel I haven’t done enough. This is specific to writing. In other areas of life, I get excited by even the smallest of my achievements, but when it…

Young men these days are so disheartened by the world that they have given up all hope. Every time you talk to them, they cite economic statistics, their struggles, their traumas, and how they have been systematically exploited. Of course, there is truth to that. But what do you expect from the world, an apology? The only way they have chosen to respond is by drowning themselves in addiction and women. The nihilism is not helping, but it is at least giving them a convenient excuse to do what…

There are days when getting out of bed feels harder. Every step feels like too much. There is an ache in the body that cannot be explained away as mere exhaustion because it is too much, everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. There is an ache, but there is no single source. There is a profound dullness within you that you do not know how to shake. Melancholy is a prolonged sadness. A kind of grief that settles within you. Unlike most kinds of sadness, this one does not disappear after…

What a pathetic state to be in, to want someone. To need someone. To need warmth. To need love. I write love as though I am writing a foreign word, a foreign curse, like a language I am trying to learn while knowing I can never become fluent in it. To constantly need someone to understand you is its own kind of prison, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. We all want someone to dig deeper into who we are, to learn about us, to know us better than we could ever tell them ourselves. We…

As I began understanding myself better, I realised that my understanding of the world is inverted. I understand almost everything through its absence rather than its presence. If you ask me what kind of furniture you should buy for your house, my mind doesn't imagine the perfect piece of furniture. Instead, it imagines a house without any furniture and concludes that anything would be better than nothing. I don't picture what would look beautiful. I simply recognise that furniture ought to…