I used to be able to sit with a simple moment and feel something.

A good conversation with family and friends. Finishing a small task. Playing a game for an hour or two (I used to be a gamer). Simple things that felt like enough.

Then at some point … I’m not sure exactly when … they stopped hitting the same way. Not because the things changed. Because I did.

Here’s what my days started looking like.

Waking up and reaching for my phone before my eyes fully adjusted. Reels before breakfast. Doom scrolling between tasks. Jumping between Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, back to Instagram …. consuming an enormous amount of content and retaining almost none of it. Watching short videos at 2 am not because I was enjoying them but because stopping felt weirdly harder than continuing.

I wasn’t relaxing. I wasn’t entertained. I was just…..stimulated. Constantly, cheaply, overly, emptily stimulated.

And then I’d try to do something simple like having a real conversation, reading something long, sitting with a feeling … and find I couldn’t. My attention would scatter after two minutes. My brain kept reaching for the next hit before the current moment was even over.

I had broken my own brain. Slowly & voluntarily.

This is what nobody talks about when they talk about social media addiction.

It’s not that it makes you sad exactly. It’s that it makes everything else feel boring. Real life … with its slower pace, its lack of background music, its absence of an algorithm curating the most stimulating possible next thing starts to feel insufficient.

A conversation with a friend can’t compete with an infinite scroll. A walk outside has no autoplay. Finishing a task doesn’t come with a notification. hell!! Even while watching TV, I felt the need to scroll something else.

So your brain, trained now to expect constant novelty and instant reward…starts to check out of real life. Not dramatically. Just quietly. A little every day.

And you wonder why you feel vaguely empty even when nothing is actually wrong.

I started noticing it properly when I realised I couldn’t finish a single long article without picking up my phone at least twice. That felt like a problem worth taking seriously.

So I started making small changes. Not a dramatic digital detox … I tried that once and lasted two days. Just friction. Small intentional friction.

1. Work blocks where the phone goes face down and stays there.

2. A workout every morning before I touch any screen, because physical movement is one of the few things that produces real dopamine, the kind that actually lasts.

3. Trips where I’m too present to scroll.

4. Reading Substacks instead of watching reels .. long-form writing that asks something of me instead of just feeding me. ( i started a substack page so that i can revive my love for reading and writing)

My screen time is under four hours a day now. That used to feel impossible.

And slowly…. embarrassingly slowly, the simple things started feeling like something again. A good conversation. Finishing a task. Sitting somewhere quiet without needing to document it.

Not everything. Not perfectly. But enough to notice the difference.

I don’t think social media is evil. I don’t think you need to delete everything and move to the mountains.

I just think we dramatically underestimated what handing our attention over to an algorithm one designed specifically to keep us hooked, not to make us happy, would do to us over time.

Happiness is mostly made of small, slow, unspectacular moments. And we’ve spent years training ourselves to find those moments boring.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.

Put the phone down. Do the boring thing. Sit with the quiet long enough for your brain to remember that it’s actually okay in there.

It takes longer than a reel. That’s kind of the whole point.

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The job market is hard. But a lot of you are making it harder for yourselves.

Let me tell you what my week actually looks like.

I wake up to messages from random relatives… aunties, uncles, family friends, sending me their son’s CV, their niece’s profile, their neighbour’s kid who “just graduated and is looking for something good.” No context. No role in mind. Just, get them a job.

I open my inbox and find resumes that look like they were built in 2015 and never touched since. Skills listed that everyone has. No portfolio, no projects, no evidence that this person has done a single thing outside of attending college and collecting a degree.

And then, my personal favourite applications from people who clearly have not read the job description. Not even skimmed it. Just saw a vacancy, hit send, and moved on to the next one like it’s a lottery.

And then these same people will tell you the market is broken.

Here’s the hard truth nobody is saying out loud:

A degree is not a product. It is not something you hand over in exchange for a salary. It is the bare minimum. The floor. Not the ceiling.

And the data backs this up … a recent study found that the majority of unemployed youth in India are graduates. Educated, degree-holding, and still unemployable. Not because the market failed them first, but because nobody taught them to be good at anything specific. They can do low-level coordinating work but struggle to think creatively, write confidently, learn quickly, or adapt to new situations. And so they get stuck. Or they don’t get started at all.

The education system told you a degree was enough. Your parents probably did too. Social media showed you people landing dream jobs at 22, and you thought that should be me, I have a degree, what’s the hold-up?

But nobody told you that the person who got that job spent two years building things online, experimenting, failing, learning skills nobody taught them in class, and showing up even when nothing was working yet.

A degree tells me you can complete something. That’s it. Everything else, I need to see it.

The skills I see missing most aren’t even technical.

It’s adaptability. The willingness to start small. The ability to say I don’t know this yet, but I’ll figure it out instead of waiting for a role that perfectly matches the version of yourself you imagined at graduation. It’s the basic understanding that you need to give someone a reason to hire you, not just a reason to feel sorry for you.

There is a laptop in your house. There is internet. There are free courses, YouTube tutorials, communities, newsletters, and people building things from scratch every single day with nothing but time and wifi.

Read the job description before you apply. Build a portfolio even if nobody asked for one. Write about what you know. Create something. Volunteer. Experiment. Fail at something small so you can learn from it before the stakes are high.

Show me who you are outside of your college name.

Because when I’m looking at two candidates and one has a degree and nothing else, and the other has a degree and a trail of things they tried and built and learned, it’s not even a decision.

I’m not saying the system is fair. It isn’t.

I’m not saying nepotism doesn’t exist; it absolutely does, I see it too. I’m not saying the economy is fine or that every rejection is your fault. There are real structural problems and real systemic failures and real reasons this market is harder than it should be.

But between the broken system and the job you deserve, there is a gap. And the only person who can fill that gap is YOU.

Waiting for the market to get easier is not a strategy. Sending fifty random resumes a day is not an effort. Telling your relatives to find you something is not networking.

Building yourself into someone worth hiring is the work. And most people aren’t doing it.

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I have a good job. I earn well. I have a good partner, good food, and a comfortable life that ticks most of the boxes I was told to tick growing up.

And yet, sometimes I sit in my bathroom and cry, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why.

It’s not burnout. It’s not a breakdown. It’s not even sadness, not really. It’s something quieter and harder to name… the feeling that life is fine, but you are somehow not.
That everything is in place and yet you keep opening your phone at 2 a.m. looking for something you can’t describe.

I don’t know what I’m looking for. That’s the part that gets me.

I’ve tried to fix it the way you do when you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still. I started writing. I started creating content. I looked into side hustles, new skills, courses, things that might light something up. Not because I found a passion, but because doing nothing felt worse than doing everything.

And somewhere between the third unfinished project and the fourth late-night googling “how do people figure out what they actually want,” I realised I’m not lost because I failed at something. I’m lost because I succeeded at everything I was supposed to want, and it still didn’t feel like enough.

That’s a strange thing to admit out loud.

I think part of it is what we see online. Everyone’s life looks like a story - a narrative with direction, aesthetic and meaning. A person quitting their corporate job to travel. Someone is turning their hobby into a brand. Lives that look like they were chosen rather than just accumulated.

Mine feels like a spreadsheet. A checkbox.

Good column here. Good column there. All the numbers adding up correctly. And yet I keep staring at it, wondering why it doesn’t feel like anything.

I know comparison is a trap. I know Instagram is a highlight reel. I know all the things you’re supposed to know. And I still check it at 2 a.m., like the answer might be there this time.

The thing that sits heaviest, though- and this is the one I don’t say out loud- is that I want to be inspiring. Not famous, not viral, just the kind of person who means something to the people around them. The kind of person whose life looks like it was lived on purpose.

But I don’t inspire myself right now.

And you can’t give what you don’t have.

I don’t have a conclusion for this. I thought about writing one, something about how feeling stuck is just a chapter, how clarity comes, how it gets better. But I’d be writing it for you and not for me.

So here’s where I actually am:

Comfortable enough that I can’t complain. Restless enough that I can’t stop. Trying things not because I know where they lead but because moving feels better than standing still. Crying sometimes without a reason good enough to explain.

And writing about it at least, because if one person reads this and feels less alone in their perfectly fine, quietly suffocating life ……..

Maybe that’s what interesting looks like for now.

I didn’t go to Vietnam looking for a lesson. I went for the bánh mì, the motorbike chaos, and those impossibly photogenic lanterns in Hội An. What I came back with was something far harder to photograph — a new way of seeing my own country.

In ten days, I covered nearly seven cities: Hanoi’s tangle of old streets, the misty highlands of Sapa, the imperial stillness of Huế, the charm of Hội An, the energy of Da Nang, and the sprawl of Ho Chi Minh City.

I planned every leg of it myself — overnight trains, neighbourhood research, timing it so nothing felt rushed. It was a lot. And yet it never felt overwhelming, not because the places were quiet, but because they were genuinely easy to be in.

“Walking through Hanoi’s old quarter at peak hour should have been miserable. Instead, it was one of the most memorable walks of my trip.”

That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. I’m from India - Bangalore, specifically- and if you’ve grown up here, you know exactly what it means when a crowded public space is actually walkable. It means people aren’t throwing wrappers on the ground. Vendors aren’t blocking footpaths. The air isn’t thick with something you’d rather not breathe. Vietnam, in most of the places I visited, had this quietly figured out.

Let me be direct about something, because I think we don’t say it enough: India’s biggest problem right now is not infrastructure. It’s not funding, or policy, or even corruption — though all of those matter. Our biggest problem is civic sense. Or rather, the widespread absence of it.

I live in Bangalore — one of India’s most “developed” cities, home to the tech industry, global companies, and some of the highest per-capita incomes in the country. And yet, basic public spaces are treated with a kind of casual indifference that’s genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it. Footpaths become parking lots. Parks collect litter. Drains are clogged because it’s easier to throw something down than to carry it to a bin. We build flyovers and then spit off them.

“Vietnam is a developing country under a communist system, with far less wealth than urban India. And yet the streets felt more dignified.”

That contrast sat with me for a long time after I got home. Vietnam is not a rich country — it’s classified as lower-middle-income, still building, still growing. And yet the public spaces I moved through felt cared for. Swept. Respected. Like many people had quietly decided that this street, this corner, this small shared piece of the world was worth looking after — not because a law told them to, but because it seemed to be something they actually believed.

Civic sense isn’t a by-product of prosperity. If it were, every wealthy neighbourhood in India would feel welcoming and every developing country would feel neglected. But that’s not how it works. What I saw in Vietnam was people making a daily, unremarkable choice to treat shared spaces as worth respecting. That choice is available to all of us. We just, collectively, aren’t making it.

And it goes beyond litter. It’s the auto driver who doesn’t honk for no reason. The person who queues instead of pushing. The shop owner who doesn’t dump construction debris on the road. The pedestrian who doesn’t walk three-abreast on a narrow footpath. None of these requires money. None requires a government scheme. They require a decision about how you want to exist alongside other people.

The kindness in Vietnam helped too — and this part I found harder to explain. There’s a warmth in how ordinary people treated a solo foreign traveller that went beyond hospitality as a business. It felt like genuine human decency. A woman at a train station in Hanoi spent ten minutes ensuring I got on the right platform, with no shared language between us. A family at a roadside phở stall made room for me when the place was full. Small moments, but they added up to something.

I came back to Bangalore with a complicated feeling — love for a city I live in, and real frustration at what we keep accepting. The gap between what our cities could feel like and what they actually feel like isn’t primarily about money or governance. It’s about whether we, as individuals, have decided that public spaces are worth caring about.

That decision starts small. It starts with whether you drop that wrapper or hold on to it until you find a bin. Whether you park on the footpath because it’s convenient, or you don’t. Whether you treat the road outside your house as an extension of your home, or as someone else’s problem.

Vietnam reminded me that the version of a city where people move freely and comfortably through public spaces isn’t a fantasy reserved for wealthy nations. It’s the result of choices — ordinary, daily, individual choices — that anyone can make. We just have to want to.

Planning that entire trip on my own also taught me something unexpected: I genuinely enjoy building thoughtful, well-paced travel itineraries. There’s a real satisfaction in threading cities, transport, and timing into something that flows and still leaves room to breathe.

Planning a trip to Vietnam?

Drop a comment below saying “itinerary” and I’ll share the full link — cities, transport, timings, and everything in between.

And yet, I felt completely alone…

It wasn’t that anything was wrong. We hadn’t fought. We hadn’t stopped talking. But somewhere along the way, the small things that once made me feel so loved had slowly faded. No more random “thinking of you” messages, no more lingering hugs before leaving for work. And as I kept planning little dates, leaving notes, or asking questions just to keep us connected, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why does it feel like I’m the only one trying?”

That’s the tricky part about long-term relationships.
Sometimes, it’s not that one person has stopped loving. It’s just that one has stopped putting effort in the way they used to, and the other notices the gap more than they’d like to admit. And when you’re the one noticing, it can feel like rejection. Like being invisible.

But here’s what I’ve come to realise:

It’s not always that they don’t love you.
Sometimes, they’re just showing love differently. Maybe you’re looking at the present — the texts, the hugs, the dates — while they’re working their heart out to secure the future — a stable home, financial security, the dream of a family.

For many women, small things matter: the “good morning” texts, the hand-holding, the reassurance. For many men, love is in the big picture: providing, planning, building something lasting. And when these two languages clash, it’s easy to mistake effort for absence.

Love doesn’t always vanish — it just shifts shape.
It can be in the cup of tea they hand you without asking.
In the way they remember to lock the door so you feel safe.
In the long hours they spend working, not because they want to be away from you, but because they want to build a life with you.

The problem is — we get so used to expecting love in our language, we forget to notice it in theirs.

Long relationships aren’t easy. They ask you to listen not just with your ears but with your heart, to recognize that comfort can sometimes feel like neglect, and to remind each other that love, no matter how quiet, still needs to be spoken out loud once in a while.

Because when love starts to feel quiet, what matters most is whether both of you are still willing to tune back into each other’s frequency.