Welcome to being here, actually

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन

karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana

Bhagavad Gita 2.47

"Karam karte chalo, phal ki chinta mat karo, vats."

How it actually reaches most of us

A few weeks before I started the new job, I got a phone call I'd been working towards for the better part of a decade.

Ten rounds of interviews. Two months of studying until my eyes hurt. Then a voice on the other end, warm and quick: congratulations, here are the numbers. Three times what I'd been making. Past a figure I'd decided at twenty two would settle everything.

Then they hung up.

You know what I did next?

I went back to the browser tab I had open before the call. It was a long conversation with ChatGPT about how a person builds serious wealth in one lifetime. I found the paragraph I'd left off at and kept reading.

That's the whole story. I stood on top of the mountain I'd been climbing since my twenties, and my first act was to go scouting for a taller one. The switch had already flipped. It flipped before I felt anything at all.

Where was the ecstasy? Where was one plain, ordinary minute of being happy?

That night I came home from the gym and didn't get out of the car. Just sat there in the basement parking under my building, engine off, phone in hand.

My co-founder called, one of my closest friends. He was happier about my news than I was. I could hear it, the pitch of it. He could also hear what was missing in my voice.

"Bhai, do you even realise what's just happened? Do you really? You've done it, man. This was the dream."

Home. Close to the family. Everyone taken care of, everything handled, nothing for them to worry about again.

"Go call home. Call mum. Call dad. Tell them it was all worth it."

And that's when it landed. Not on the call with the offer. Not in the ten rounds, or the two months, or the years before them. In a parked car in a basement, hearing my own news read back to me by someone else, because I couldn't feel it on my own.

My eyes finally got the memo. For about three minutes.

It's been three weeks. I keep waiting for the rest of it to arrive.

I'm not sure it's coming. And I notice I can't write "where was the happiness" in the past tense, because past tense would be tidier, and tidier would be a lie. I'm inside this thing right now, while typing.

I've climbed a fair few summits in three decades. Different mountains, same weather at the top: a prize that dissolves on contact.

And then, finally, a pause. A turn of the gaze inwards.

Oooffff.

So much sitting there.

How often have you been physically in a room and nowhere near it?

How often have you run every possible path in your head and then announced, out loud, that you're just going with the flow?

How often have you seen and heard without once watching or listening?

There's a version of this on a battlefield, three thousand years old.

Arjun stands frozen between two armies, looking across at his own family, running the outcomes. Krishna doesn't hand him a prophecy. He tells him to act, and to loosen his grip on what the acting produces. It keeps surfacing in other accents, wherever people have had to work out how to move without knowing how it lands.

I didn't get here by reading any of them. I got here by climbing enough summits to notice the view was the same from all of them.

And here's the part I'll say plainly, since you'll spot it anyway: I'm starting a project about not chasing outcomes. On a blog. With a subscriber count. There's a joke in there and it's on me. I haven't solved it. I'd rather do the noticing out loud than pretend I finished the work before I started writing.

"Arre, do min baitho zra. Halki se ek saans leke toh dekho. Acha lgega."

Someone said that to me years ago and it did nothing at the time. Now it turns up every time I catch myself sprinting through a future that hasn't been built yet. Two minutes. One soft breath. It'll feel better. That's the entire technology.

So what is this?

Here, Actually is a weekly essay, out every Sunday, pulling from practical philosophy, psychology and spirituality, and trying to make all of it usable on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

The format is simple. One old idea, one true story, and whatever happens when you set them next to each other. Plato had a cave. Your brain has a filter that quietly decides what you even get to notice. Krishna had a chariot and a paralysed archer. I have a parked car in a basement. These turn out to be the same subject more often than you'd think.

It's written for people who can optimise almost anything except how they feel. Who cleared the exams, ran the numbers, built the career, and were never once taught what to do with a quiet evening. Plenty of IQ. The EQ still sitting in beta. I say that as one of you.

I'll be writing about attention, and where yours goes when you're not looking. About ambition, and why the top of the mountain never holds. About family, duty, and the cost of being the one everyone relies on. And about what actually helps, tested on me first, with as little solemnity as I can manage.

What it isn't: therapy, diagnosis, or advice from a professional. I have no credentials here. I have a life and a habit of looking at it too closely. If you're carrying something heavy, please talk to someone qualified. That isn't a disclaimer, it's the most useful sentence in this post.

The goal is small and I mean it seriously: that you finish each one understanding yourself a little better, feeling a little less alone in it, and giggling a little harder.

I've found this tough. Real tough, to be honest. But issa aighttt, let's pull this one togetherrr.

If the view from the top only ever lasts a moment, the climb had better be worth something on its own.

Welcome to the present.

Welcome to being here, actually.

Next Sunday: Plato's cave, and how many hours a week we spend watching shadows.

Subscribe below. And reply and tell me, when did you last catch yourself somewhere without being there?