The Unmapped Path

  When Rest Becomes a Performance There's a genre of video going around right now where people film themselves doing nothing, for days, on purpose. Ninety-six hours in bed. Snack towers built for endurance. Hydration stations set up like base camp. Entertainment queued for the long haul. Some of it has the production value of a small documentary. Which is, if you think about it for more than a second, a strange way to rest. The joke and the thing underneath it "Bed rotting" reads as ironic; a knowing, self-aware response to burnout culture. Instead of pretending to have your life together, you lean all the way into collapse and film it. There's something honest in that, even something funny. It's a rejection of the hustle-and-glow aesthetic that dominated the last decade, where rest had to look productive too...the "productive morning routine" video, the 5am cold plunge, wellness performed as another form of achievement. But watch closely and the sa...

  The Line Between Delulu and Denial "Delulu is the solulu" was never really a joke. Underneath the irony, it was a real philosophy: believe something so hard that reality eventually catches up. For a while, that worked — as a mood, as a meme, as a way to survive a decade that gave people plenty of reasons not to believe in anything. But somewhere in the last year, the joke started curdling. The internet is now calling delulu "dead",  not because people stopped being delusional, but because the fantasy stopped protecting anyone. Vision boards don't pay rent. Manifesting a better boss doesn't get you one. And a generation that got very good at ironic self-belief is now asking a harder question: how do I know if I'm building myself up, or just lying to myself more elaborately? I've written before about the value of productive self-delusion — the Head Chef mindset, believing in your work before it's earned belief. I still stand by that. But I wan...

Deciding to act despite the uncertainty of outcome is courage.   Starting something new, be it a new art project, a hobby, career shift or having that one conversation you have been avoiding with someone; requires a particular kind of courage. What “Having the Audacity to Dare” mean Have the audacity, the courage and the burning fire to begin something. Having the audacity is a step in the right direction; it’s showing up when you don’t know how things will turn out. So many of us we wait for the right time, wait until we are feeling confident or certain enough of the outcomes of whatever it is that we are going to do. We treat those as pre-requisites, while in reality they are the steps we have to take in order to begin. Here’s the thing, you build confidence by attempting, not by writing it in your journal daily. You gather information on what YouTube, and Instagram users want to watch by posting and getting feedback, not by endless research.   Like I said in the begin...

It's always "the most stressful 24 hours of my life". "When will it end?", is a question most of us don't ask them, and ourselves too; after all, there is no denying that besides over-consumption, one of the things influencers have successfully done, is to convince us that success can only be achieved by being overly productive...just like them (apparently).  Behind every action taken by any animal occupying a space on Earth, there is a core driver; the driving force fueling the thinking, behavior etc., in this case humans. what do you think are the core drivers behind over-productivity? Let's explore them below Productivity as a proxy of self-worth- First, we understand that before every, if not all influencers, is a person who noticed something wrong in their life or that of others. And with productivity influencers, studies have shown that most of them previously struggled with attaining or achieving their goals in time; for instance, failing a grade...

  We are raised on a steady diet of “realism.” From the moment we enter the school system, we are told to manage our expectations, to look at the data, and to stay within the lines of what is probable. We are taught that “wishing” is for children and that “doing” must be grounded in cold, hard facts. But here is the secret that the most successful people in the world won’t tell you:  Logic is a rearview mirror. Logic is based on what has already happened. If you only ever act based on what is “realistic,” you are condemned to repeat the past. To bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you don’t need more logic. You need a healthy dose of delusion. The “Head Chef” and the Standard of Excellence Think about a student in a high-pressure culinary academy. Why is there a Master Chef standing over their shoulder while they whisk a simple sauce? It’s not just to teach them a recipe; it’s to enforce a “delusion” of perfection. To that student, it might f...

  Our experiences might be different, but I believe it all starts in kindergarten during our graduations before we step into the elementary school environment, where each one of us walks up to stage and say what they want to be when they grow up. And then by the moment we proceed to high school after a few years, we are handed an invisible checklist of things that we should have achieved before a certain age. It is a rigid, strict, unforgiving timeline: juggle high school work with studying for college’s first semester calculus and biology exam, juggle high school work with working a part time job so you can have a car by your first year of college, secure an internship in your first semester of college, graduate on time, land the dream job immediately, climb the ladder swiftly, and secure stability before the clock strikes 25. We look at LinkedIn announcements and Instagram milestones, convinced that everyone else received a functional map while we are left wandering the forest wi...