you are not falling in love with the person. you are falling in love with the relief of having them.

your nervous system wired for safety above everything else stops scanning for red flags the moment it decides I need this person. oxytocin floods in. dopamine floods in. the brain, drunk on attachment chemicals, starts editing out the things it doesn’t want to see. the tone they used on Tuesday. the way they shut down when something gets difficult. the conflict they walked away from instead of through.

you overlook it all. not because you’re stupid. because you’re attached before you’ve actually seen them.

the brain, drunk on attachment, starts editing out what it doesn't want to see.

going slow is not playing games. it is not withholding. it is not fear dressed up as strategy.

it is the only speed at which you can actually see who someone is before you’ve made them necessary.

when you slow down, you create space to say — hey, I didn’t love how that conversation went. can we talk about it? you can hold a boundary without feeling like you’re risking the whole thing. you can watch how they handle a small disagreement before you’re six months in, suddenly realising this person cannot repair. cannot regulate. cannot sit inside discomfort without making it your problem.

slow is where you find that out early. before the attachment has made you rationalise it.

slow is where you find out early — before the attachment makes you rationalise it.

good things take time to build. not because the universe is being poetic about it. because anything real requires enough time to show you what it actually is.

need is fast.
want takes longer.
the relationship worth having is the one built from the second word.

need is fast. want takes longer.

if something in this felt like yours — you belong here.

Subscribe now

are you in it because you want them — or because you need the feeling of having them? reply and tell me.

the one who is genuinely curious — asking questions they don’t know the answer to, listening without preparing their next point, willing to be wrong in public, going deeper into a subject even when there is nothing to perform for.

and the one who just wants to be seen understanding.

you know the second type. big words. strong opinions delivered with the confidence of someone who hasn’t actually sat with the question long enough to be uncertain about it.

they are not thinking. they are announcing.

there is a difference and you feel it within minutes.

performative intellectualism is just noise.

genuine curiosity is quiet. it asks and then actually listens. it changes its mind without embarrassment because changing your mind means the thinking worked. it goes down rabbit holes at midnight with no audience. it finds a subject genuinely interesting rather than strategically interesting — not because it makes them look smart, but because they actually want to know.

performative intellectualism is loud. it is not interested in the answer. it is interested in the impression the question creates. it drops references it hasn't fully read. it mistakes vocabulary for depth. it would rather be seen as intelligent than actually become it.

the question that changes you is the one you ask honestly.

here is the thing about curiosity though.

it compounds.

the person who is genuinely curious — who asks honestly, listens carefully, sits with not knowing — that person is quietly accumulating something the performer never will. actual understanding. a mind that has been tested against reality instead of just against an audience.

in five years the gap between them will be enormous.

one will have grown into something real.

the other will still be performing in rooms that are getting smaller.

the one who is okay with not knowing will always outgrow the one pretending they already do.

be the one who asks.

if something in this felt like yours - you belong here.
The Far Interior. every week. always free.

Subscribe now

what's the last thing you changed your mind about? reply and tell me.

you know how the modern dating scene works.

talking stage. then a situationship. then a break. then somehow another situationship. then the “what are we” conversation that solves absolutely nothing. then another break.

we have normalised making people earn the most basic version of our trust. we have turned connection into a checklist. and somewhere along the way we forgot that real things don’t follow a script.

and then sometimes — not often, but sometimes — one evening changes everything.

not a grand gesture. not a perfect date. just one brief, unremarkable hangout. fifty minutes, maybe. the kind of evening that doesn’t feel significant while it’s happening.

and then the next day you’re talking to them.

and the day after.

and suddenly you realise you didn’t decide this. it just happened.

all it really takes is one good hangout for you to start talking to this person every single day. and when that happens — you know. you just know.

the part that gets me is this.

your guard is up. it has been up for a reason. things have happened — the kind of things that make you careful, that make you slow, that make you build walls you don’t always talk about.

and yet.

you fell anyway. not because you chose to. not because you sat down and made a rational decision to trust this person. but because something in you recognised something in them before your defences could do anything about it.

that recognition is not weakness.

it is the most honest thing the heart does.

and the wildest part?

you weren’t even dating yet. you were just friends. and you were already inseparable. already showing up for each other every single day. already choosing each other in the small, quiet, unglamorous ways that actually mean something.

that is what nobody talks about.

we are so obsessed with labels — boyfriend, girlfriend, talking, official that we completely miss the moment the thing actually began. it didn’t begin with a conversation about what you are.

it began with one evening. one conversation. one unremarkable fifty-minute hangout that somehow rearranged everything.

so if you’re in the middle of a talking stage right now. if you’re on your second situationship with the same person. if you’re exhausted by the performance of modern dating —

remember this.

the real thing doesn’t make you perform.

it just makes you show up. every day. without even deciding to.

and when that happens — when you look up and realise you’ve been talking to someone every single day and you don’t even know exactly when it started —

that’s the one.

has something — or someone — ever moved faster than your caution could keep up with? reply and tell me.

if something in this felt like yours you belong here.
the far interior. every week. always free.

Subscribe now

We Are All Trying Here dropped on Netflix in April. I watched it at 1am on a Tuesday, laptop on my bed, lights off. Somewhere around episode three I stopped watching and just sat with it.

I am turning twenty in August. The feeling was already there before the show. The show just gave it a shape.

The Korean title translates directly as: Everyone is fighting their own worthlessness.

Not failure. Worthlessness — which is a different thing. Failure is external. Something happened, it didn’t work, there’s a clear before and after. Worthlessness is internal. Ambient. It doesn’t need a specific failure to exist. It just sits underneath everything audible only at 2am when the work is done, or in the half-second pause when someone your age announces something and you’re already doing the math before you decide to.

I recognised it immediately!!

The show follows an aspiring director who has spent twenty years trying to make his debut film for Twenty years. I have been trying for two, at most.

And yet.

The feeling he carries — watching everyone around him arrive somewhere while he’s still in transit, being the one in the group who hasn’t yet, maintaining dignity in the gap between who you are now and who you said you’d be — that feeling doesn’t require twenty years. It requires one conversation where someone asks what you’ve done and you edit the answer before you give it.

I’m a data science and AI student. I know people my age who have already shipped products, already have internships at companies I’d recognise, already have something to point to. I’m building things that don’t yet have a metric attached to them. No launch number. No proof.

Just the internal conviction that the work matters and the daily uncertainty about whether that conviction is correct.

This is the gap where worthlessness lives. Not in failure.

In the unconfirmed.

There’s a line in the show I haven’t been able to put down.

I laughed the first time honestly but by the third time I understood it was the most honest thing in the show he said…

It describes someone who has tied their worth so completely to

external validation that when the validation doesn’t come self-destruction becomes the only remaining proof that they exist. At least the falling apart is visible. At least someone notices….

I’m not that person. But I understand the logic in a way that unsettles me….

The Bhagavad Gita has one line that I keep returning to.

I used to read this as detachment — as not caring. It’s actually the opposite. It’s a description of the only position from which serious work is possible.

If your worth is attached to the result, the work gets contaminated. Every action becomes an audition. You can’t write honestly when you’re watching yourself write. You can’t build something real when you’re primarily building proof of your own value.

The characters in this show are all attached to the fruit. The director needs the debut to prove he was right to try. The producer needs the hard exterior to prove she isn’t afraid. The successful director needs the next hit to prove the last one wasn’t luck. They’re all working. All trying. And the trying is making them smaller because the trying isn’t for the work. It’s for the verdict.

I’ve been doing versions of this. I feel it when I check something before it’s had time to grow. Measure something at the wrong scale. Refresh something that hasn’t had time to breathe.

The action contaminated by the audition.

What the show does quietly, over twelve episodes is not solve this.

It doesn’t arrive at a scene where everyone is free of comparison and at peace with their pace. That would be a lie honestly.

What it does instead is make the worthlessness visible and name it.

Let the characters look at each other and recognise, without saying it out loud, that everyone in the room is carrying the same thing they thought was uniquely theirs.

The person you’re envying is fighting the same feeling from a different position.

This should be comforting. Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it just means the feeling doesn’t end when you arrive somewhere it changes shape.

I’m almost twenty now and I’m building something I believe in before I have proof that I should.

Studying a field moving faster than anyone can fully keep up with.

Doing all of it with that low-frequency worthlessness running underneath not loudly, not destructively, but present. The way background noise is present. The way you stop hearing it until something reminds you it was always there.

The show reminded me.

And then it did something unexpected.

Not by fixing the feeling but by making it communal.

By saying you are not uniquely deficient.

You are not behind because something is wrong with you. You are in the middle of the thing, like everyone is in the middle of the thing, and middles don’t feel like anything yet.

That’s not a solution. But it’s the whole truth……

And the truth, even when it doesn’t fix anything, makes the weight slightly easier to carry for us…

I don’t know if I’ll look back at nineteen as the year I figured something out or the year I was still figuring.

Probably both. Probably at the same time.

What I know is this this show found me at the right moment!!!

And what it left me with is not an answer but a reorientation.

The work is the work. The trying is the trying.

That’s enough to begin with i guess for now….

This is not a crisis. I want to be clear about that. I am not writing this from a place of dramatic existential collapse. I am writing it from something quieter and more persistent the feeling that I have been circling the same questions for two years now getting slightly better at asking the and no closer to answering them.

Which I have come to suspect might be the point.

The conversation goes something like this.

It starts with something ordinary a dataset I’m cleaning at 10 pm, a train window somewhere between cities, a song that I’ve heard a hundred times that suddenly means something different. And then without warning I am somewhere else entirely. Thinking about what any of this is for. About whether the life I am building resembles the life I actually want. About the person I was at seventeen and whether I would recognise him now and whether he would approve of me.

About what it means to be almost twenty and already nostalgic for something you haven’t finished living yet.

I am studying Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and I am trying to build models and spending my days inside systems designed to find patterns in chaos to extract meaning from noise to predict what comes next from what has already happened. And then I close the laptop and sit with the irony that the most important questions in my own life submit to none of these methods. There is no loss function for a life. There is no training data for becoming someone worth being.

The model optimises and the person wonders…..

I have been reading philosophy since I was seventeen. Not systematically the way a student reads with a syllabus and an exam at the end but hungrily the way you read when you are looking for a sentence that will help you get through the week.

I found Bhagvada Gita first. Then Marcus Aurelius. Then the Upanishads, which I am still inside, probably permanently and which i have had since childhood but never read it around that time.

What I noticed by reading all of them is that they are all having the same conversation I am having. Across centuries, across languages, across wildly different ideas about what the self is and what happens after the same conversation.

“About how to live with intention in a world that does not particularly reward intention.”

About how to feel things fully without being destroyed by them. About how to want things without becoming the wanting.

Nobody has answered it. They have all just gotten more precise about the question.

And I found that comforting…….

I am nineteen years old now and I am a data science student in Guwahati and I am trying to build a newsletter because I cannot stop thinking and I have run out of people to think with.

That is the honest version.

The slightly more elegant version is: I am at the beginning of something. I can feel it the way you feel a shift in weather not the rain yet, just the pressure change, the quality of light going different. Nineteen going on twenty. Student going on something else. A person who has been asking questions in private for two years, deciding to ask them in public.

This newsletter is that decision.

It will be about philosophy but not the kind that lives only in books. The kind that lives in the gap between what is happening and what it means. The kind that becomes necessary at 2am when the work is done and the questions return.

It will be about travel the way a place can reach inside you and rearrange something. I have not been everywhere. I have been enough places to know that geography does something to thought that staying still cannot.

It will be about love and heartbreak and the specific digging out of almost the relationships that were possible and then weren’t,

the versions of yourself that existed in someone else’s eyes, the long complicated aftermath where most of the actual understanding happens.

It will be about what it means to be a young man in 2026

building AI systems by day and reading Stoic philosophy by night and living inside the most “technologically accelerated moment in human history” and trying to remain, quietly, a human being.

It will be about beauty. About the things that make the chest hurt for no clear reason. About why certain songs belong to certain versions of you. About ruins, physical and otherwise.

The Upanishads say it is the first prerequisite for any serious life is

Not intelligence. Not ambition. Not discipline but Seeing clearly.

I do not have it yet I am nineteen and I have barely begun.

But I am trying to develop it. And I have found that writing is one of the few practices that forces something like clarity that you cannot be vague on the page the way you can be vague in your own head, that the sentence either holds or it doesn’t, that the thought either survives being written down or it reveals itself as wishful thinking.

This newsletter is an attempt at viveka. At seeing clearly, in public, over time.

I turn twenty in August.

By then I will have written several of these essays. By then some of you will have been reading long enough to notice when my thinking shifts. By then the conversation will have continued the same one, the one I have been having for two years

the one Arjun was having in a war with Shree Krishna, the one every person who has ever tried to live intentionally has been having since the beginning.

I don’t know where it goes. I don’t think it ends.

I think you just get better at having it….

Welcome to The Far Interior. Reply and tell me what version of this conversation you’ve been having. I’m here.

Subscribe now