I do tend to wonder sometimes who I would be if I had been born somewhere education didn’t cost so much. Not just money, though that too. I mean the other currencies like the mental overhead of knowing your presence somewhere is conditional or the low tune of financial anxiety that runs underneath every single lecture, or every library hour, every exam season. “I can’t afford to fail.” I say to myself time and again. Who would I be if none of that had been the backdrop?

I love learning. That’s the thing I want to say first before anything else, because it matters that you know I’m not writing this from resentment. I love the specific feeling of a concept clicking into place. The very beautiful moment a text you’ve been circling suddenly opens. The way a good argument, followed carefully to its end, rearranges something in you that you didn’t even know needed rearranging. I love education. I just don’t always love the terms.

It’s two types of learning. The learning that feels like encounter and less of a credential. You come to something and it comes to you, and the exchange is totally genuine. You leave changed in some small or large way, and the subject leaves a mark on how you move through the world afterward. That version of learning is what I personally think people mean when they talk about education as a right, as something owed.

Then there is learning as transaction. You bring what is demanded of you, in the form it is demanded, by the deadline it is demanded, and in return you receive the thing that allows you to keep going. In this case, the credential. This version is exhausting to me in a very particular way. The fatigue doesn’t present itself cleanly in this case. It hides inside ‘busyness’. It looks and feels like productivity. But what it’s actually doing is just slowly narrowing the part of you that can afford to be curious or be slow, or be wrong. To wander. The human part of you that I think learning actually needs.

I do know that I learn best when I can give education what I can afford to give it. Not necessarily what it extracts from me or the environment I am in. It’s a huge difference. Extraction assumes the resource is there and takes it. Giving assumes you are an agent who chooses what to offer and when. One leaves you emptied. The other, even when it’s so difficult, leaves you with something.

I think about the students who passed through institutions where the conditions were different. Where the thinking wasn’t accompanied by the sound of a clock running down on a loan, or the calculus of whether this particular pursuit was worth its particular cost. I don’t think they were necessarily smarter, no. I think they had more of themselves available. And I wonder what I would have done with that. What questions I would have stayed inside longer. What fields I might have wandered into without needing them to justify themselves immediately.

This, however, is not a straightforward argument for free education, though I don’t think that argument is inherently wrong. It’s something far more smaller and more personal than that. It is about the conditions under which a person can actually receive something and absorb it. Let it work on them the way it’s supposed to. Learning is not a passive act, but it requires an interior spaciousness that is very hard to maintain when the terms of your presence are always in question.

I still love it. I want to be clear about that. I love it the way you can love something that has never been fully easy. But I do wonder, sometimes, what it would have felt like to meet it differently. To come to a subject with nothing owed, nothing running out, and most certainly nothing to prove. Just the specific subject, and me, and whatever we might have made of each other.

There is a very specific kind of person everyone seems to like. You have met them. I have met them. They deflect compliments with a small, almost embarrassed smile. They say ‘oh, it was nothing really’ when it was clearly something. They do not take up more space in a room than they need to, and somehow that restraint makes people lean toward them, want to be near them, trust them. We call this humility, and we greatly admire it the way we admire clean water for its clarity and its lack of pretension thereof.

Beneath all that admiration lies a question that gnaws at us repeatedly. The question of whether some of those quiet people are not humble at all. What if they are simply afraid? Perhaps they’re cowards.

There is a difference only humanly possible between choosing not to speak of your own worth and genuinely not believing you have any. One is discipline and the other is instinctively damage. And from the outside, where the rest of us sit, watching, they can at most times look almost identical.

The truly humble person knows what they are worth. They have done the internal accounting, they have looked at themselves clearly, and they have simply decided that announcing it would be tedious, or unnecessary, or beside the point. Their silence about themselves is not the absence of self but a full self at rest.

The person with low self-esteem has done no such accounting, or maybe they have, and the numbers came back wrong. They cannot speak well of themselves not because they choose restraint but because they do not believe there is anything worth restraining at all. They wait and wait. They wait for someone else to say the thing first, to light the candle for them so they can, at last, see themselves in the room. Like I said, cowards.

The fraught truth about how we have come to treat self-praise in polite society is that we have built a culture that punishes confidence and rewards self-effacement so consistently that we have made it nearly impossible for people to know the difference between genuine modesty and chronic self-doubt. We have told people, for so long and in so many ways, that speaking well of yourself is a form of aggression, that it crowds out the people around you, that it is the calling card of the unbearable, that some have quietly stopped believing they have anything worth saying at all. And we accept this as virtue. We give it a name. We call it humble.

The arrogant ones, of course, are easy to identify. They constantly fill every silence with themselves. They take the compliment and raise it. They believe their presence is the point of the room. If you’ve ever sat close to a speaker that’s always playing something, and loud at that, then you most definitely get the kind of exhaustion that comes with spending time with people of this quality. Nobody likes them, and everyone says so, often.

But in our eagerness to not be that person, in our social recoil from that particular brand of self-love, we have perhaps overcorrected. We have created an ideal of the self that is palatable only when it is invisible.

What is a man if not praised by other people and other people alone? What is a man if the entire project of their self worth is outsourced to the opinions of others without knowing how to buy it back?

There is a woman I might have written, if I had been interested in the interior of modern embarrassment. She works hard. She is good at what she does, genuinely good, so good that other people notice and remark upon. But when they do remark upon it, something in her contracts instead. She does not know what to do with the information so she deflects, she diminishes, she says ‘oh, I just got lucky’ or ‘it was really just a team effort’. Or nothing at all, just a short, uncomfortable laugh that ends the conversation. This woman is celebrated for her modesty. She is called grounded. And maybe she is. Or maybe she has simply lived so long in a story where she is not quite enough that she has stopped being able to imagine a different one. Maybe her humility is not a choice. Maybe it is a ceiling she has learned to call a floor.

What really matters is not whether you are humble or arrogant in my opinion. Those are the obvious ends that are easy enough to spot. The question is whether you are truly humble or consequentially diminished. Whether the quietness about yourself comes from a place of fullness or a place of lack. Whether you could, if the moment required it, stand up and say I am good at this. I have earned this. I did this well and mean it without an apology or the reflexive flinch.

For many people, that simple, factual and unadorned sentence is the hardest thing in the world to say. Harder than grief or any anger they have ever had to endure. Because we have not been trained to say it. We have been trained to wait for someone else to say it for us, and to look surprised and a little bashful when they do, as if we had no idea. Even if we had an idea. We always have an idea. We just learned, somewhere along the way, that having one made us quite dangerous for everyone else

True humility is not the absence of self-regard. It is self-regard that has grown large enough to stop needing constant confirmation. It is the person who knows what they are worth and does not need to say so at every available moment, because the knowledge is load-bearing, it holds them up from the inside. They are not waiting for the room to tell them who they are at all times.

Low self-esteem, dressed in humility’s clothes, is the opposite. It is a person held together by external consensus, needing the constant small votes of other people’s approval to stay upright. Knock those votes away, and there is very little structure underneath it.

The trouble is that both of these people, at a dinner party, look more or less the same. Both of them deflect the compliment. Both of them say ‘it was nothing’. But one of them means it as a kind of grace. And one of them, God help them, actually believes it.

The next time you find yourself impressed by someone’s modesty, I believe it worth wondering which kind you are looking at. And the next time you catch yourself unable to say something true and good about yourself without first waiting to see if anyone else will say it for you, it is worth asking if that truly embodies humility. Or whether it is something more quieter, and lonelier, and far much harder to deal with.

The following is a conversation that did not happen and also happens every day. One party speaks from 1938. The other from now, 2026. The line between them is neither a miracle nor any form of explainable physics. It is a Saturday.

The voice comes through like voices always do in these things…

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Is someone there? I was told — they said there was someone I could speak with. From the other side of time.” A pause. The sound of a chair, wooden, adjusting under weight. “I feel rather foolish saying that.”

“Don’t. It’s real enough.”

“And you’re from — when?”

“2026.”

Silence. Then:

“Lord. And things are — Christ how do I even ask this… how are things?”

“Tell me what your day looked like. Today. An ordinary day.”

“Well… this morning I woke up late. It is a Saturday. Made coffee. You know, the usual. Then I had a conversation with Claude about whether to take the job offer in Brussels or stay in Sweden. It gave me a breakdown of both options. Then it asked me how I was feeling about it emotionally. I said tired. It said it understood.”

A very long pause.

“I’m sorry — you had a conversation with whom?”

“Claude. It’s an AI. Artificial intelligence. A .. uhm — it’s a machine, essentially, but one that can speak. And write. And reason, or something close enough to reasoning that most people stopped asking which it was.”

“A thinking machine.”

“Yes.”

“And you spoke to it. This morning. About your life.”

“About a career decision, yes.”

“And it — it gave you counsel.”

“It did.”

“Like a person would.”

“Better than some people, honestly. It doesn’t get bored and it doesn’t have somewhere else to be.”

The silence this time is longer. When the voice returns, it is quieter.

“In my time — I should explain… I feel like I should explain — we have radio. Wonderful thing. My wife and I listen in the evenings. Roosevelt spoke on it, you know. Fireside chats. The idea that a voice could travel through the air and arrive in your sitting room, that was astonishing to my parents. My father the first time he heard it, he walked around the back of the set to see who was there. He genuinely thought someone was hiding.”

“And now?”

“Now we accept it. It’s furniture. The children don’t even look up when it comes on.” A breath. “I imagine that’s how it goes.”

“That’s exactly how it goes.”

“So this machine. This Claude guy. How many people speak to it?”

“Hundreds of millions.”

“Hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions he says.”

“Daily.”

“What else does it do? Beyond counsel.”

“It writes. Code, letters, legal documents, novels if you ask it to. It can read an x-ray and flag what a doctor might miss. It translates languages in real time. It can take a conversation like this one and turn it into a polished article in about forty seconds.”

“Forty — ” The voice stops. Recalibrates. “And the people who used to do those things. The writers. The translators. The clerks and the typists and the analysts.”

“Yes?”

“What happened to them?”

A pause on this side too.

“They’re still here. Most of them. But the work… well, the work is different now. There’s this thing that happens where a skill you spent years building becomes, overnight, something a machine can do adequately. Not always better. But adequately. And adequately is usually enough for whoever’s paying.”

“That sounds like — that sounds like what they said about the mills. What the machines would do to the weavers.”

“It is exactly like that. Except this time it’s not the weavers. It’s everyone. It’s the weavers and the accountants and the journalists and the junior lawyers and the researchers. Me. I have a postgraduate degree. Years of study. I apply for forty positions and hear back from four. And I use the machine to help me write my applications. Because if I don’t, the people who do will be faster, and cleaner, and — ”

“And adequately is usually enough.”

“Yes.”

“Are you angry?”

The question reaches me unexpectedly.

“I don’t know. I think we went through anger. Collectively. Around 2023, 2024. There were arguments, think-pieces, protests of a kind. People said it wasn’t right, what was happening. That something was being lost. That there ought to be laws.” A pause. “And then it just — kept going. And the arguments became furniture too. Something in the background no one looks up for anymore.”

“In my time we are building toward a war. The second one in my lifetime.” The voice is measured the same way someone recounts weather. “I sometimes think the reason people accept catastrophe is that it arrives so incrementally. Each morning you wake and the world is only slightly worse than yesterday. So you adjust. And then you wake again.”

“Yes.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? You adjust.”

“We are so adjusted.”

“Tell me the thing you started to say. You started this with something . Some sort of a moment. You said you were going to tell a friend something and then you stopped.”

“I was going to say, ‘So I had a conversation recently with Claude — ’ and that’s when I heard it. The way it sounded. I basically heard it through someone else’s ears, someone from further back, and for about four seconds I understood completely how strange it all was.”

“Four seconds.”

“And then my friend asked what it thought. And we moved on. Because by now it is nothing. The extraordinary became ordinary so fast that most of us weren’t watching when it happened. We looked up one day and the world had already rearranged itself around us and we were just, well you know, living in it. Asking our questions. Getting our answers. Not thinking about it.”

“Not thinking about it.”

“Not at all.”

There is a long quiet then, and in it you can almost hear the year 1938. The specific quality of its silence, the weight of its un-knowing, the whole enormous fact of everything it has not yet become.

“I should go,” the voice says finally. “My wife will have supper on.”

“Of course.”

“One last thing. Is it — are you — “ A pause. Searching. “Are you still human there? In 2026. Fundamentally. Are you still — is that still the right word?”

A longer pause on this side.

“I think so. I hope so. We still make coffee in the morning. We still watch snow. We still grieve our fathers and call our friends and feel tired on ordinary Saturdays. The things that matter are still the things that matter. It’s only — “

“Only?”

“Only that we’ve handed so much of the thinking to something else. And we’re not sure yet what we traded away when we did that. We won’t know for a while. Maybe longer than I’ll be alive.”

“Hm.” The sound of a man absorbing something he cannot quite hold. “Well. That sounds rather familiar too.”

In 1938, a man goes back to his supper and doesn’t mention the conversation to his wife because there is no language for it yet.

In 2026, a woman opens a new tab, types a question into a white box, and waits less than two seconds for the answer.

She does not think about this. That is the whole story. That is the entire thing.

There are days when something in me simply stops. I don’t mean breaks, no. Stops. The same way a clock stops without any warning, the hands just ceasing in the middle of whatever they were doing. That. The mind goes dark and quiet, the body follows, and what remains is just a stillness so complete it almost has a texture to it. You could run your hand along the walls of it. You could sit inside it and hear, very faintly, the world continuing without your participation in it. The wind, the particular language the trees speak when no one is listening, birds going about the serious business of you know, being birds. That is the closest I can come to describing it. A darkness with no bad thoughts in it. Just dark.

I did not always know what to do with days like this.

For most of my life, solitude was where I went to suffer. I have always loved it, (I have always been the kind of person who finds crowds exhausting and silence restoring) but loving solitude and knowing what to do inside it are two entirely different things. For years, what I did inside it was sit with thoughts that had no business being left unsupervised. They were loud for no apparent reason and they were constant and they were the only furniture in the room, and so I arranged my interior life around them the way you arrange a life around any fixed, immovable thing. By simply accepting it as permanent.

The last four years I have lived alone. Like truly alone. Doing life without a witness, navigating each day with only myself to answer to. In the beginning, when the quiet came and I reached for the familiar darkness and found it gone, I did not know what to do with that absence either. There is a very specific and particular grief in losing even the things that hurt you. The mind, trained for years on a certain kind of weather, does not simply turn toward sunlight when the clouds clear. It has to learn. Slowly and almost reluctantly, the way anything learns when it has been feral a long time. Through small increments and patient repetition, by a gentleness it does not yet believe it deserves.

What I do now, on the days when everything stops, is very little. And I have had to learn that very little is quite enough.

I journal every morning (or I try to at least). Not for posterity or an audience, but because I believe that a mind that thinks as loudly as mine does requires a vessel or it will simply overflow into everything. Most people pour their interior life into another person and I truly understand the instinct. But journaling lets me meet my thoughts alone first, hold them up to the light before they are given to anyone else, decide what they actually are before they become words spoken out loud in a room. A particular light comes through the window every morning, and I have come to associate it with this; a pen moving and the thoughts finally having somewhere to go that is not just endlessly inward.

I read. I deliberately took reading back in recent years the way you reclaim something that was stolen from you. I had been a bookworm as a child, I treated books the way other children treated food, as though the body required them. Then life happened, the way it always does, and reading became something I used to do. Ancient history. When I did start again, I started with crime fiction. Crime fiction is propulsive. It is designed to carry you forward on its current without asking too much of you. This genre is so captivating that once you start a good book, the next page practically opens itself. You’re hooked and can’t put it down simply because you want to know what happens next. I read on my phone like every new generation reader does now, and then over time I found myself wanting physical books like a true literary snob. Wanting the weight of it. I have never looked back.

I write about what I read. Pages and pages, the way we did in school during Literature class, except now there are no grades and no one to impress and the writing is therefore, finally, honest. I call it mind-dumping, which is an ungainly name for something that has become quietly indispensable to me. It makes the interior habitable. It turns noise into language and language into something you can actually look at, assess, put down, and walk away from.

I also do own a coloring book.

I am currently reading East of Eden. I came to it through crime fiction (unbelievable), which built the bridge plank by patient plank that carried me here. To Steinbeck in a basement somewhere, pouring every language he had ever learned into a single sentence, then the next, then the next. You understand within the first few pages why certain writers become what they become. It is not a mystery really.

Outside my window right now the birds are doing what they always do at this hour. Being unhurried. Can’t believe I used to find that indifference unsettling. The world continuing so fluently without my participation, without even noticing my stillness. It is the most comforting thing I know now.

Sometimes you say something to a friend and immediately think ‘I need to write about that.’

And if I’m being totally honest, this is the best I’ve ever felt about myself in retrospect. In some aspects at least. That screenshot is from a conversation I was having with a friend a few days ago. I was explaining how I don’t find men entertaining enough anymore (and before you assume the worst, no, this is not a villain origin story). It is, if anything, the opposite.

Here’s my thing, for the most part, and I will wait right here while any of them gather the audacity to refute this, I was the personality hire of every single one of my relationships. I am not saying they were mere vacant people wandering the earth with nothing to offer. I mean they must have had something for me to be attracted in the first place. But in hindsight? I was just falling in love with myself. Entertaining myself. Running the whole show and generously letting them have a seat in the front row.

I’m sure you know the type. The good morning texts sent with genuine excitement. The waiting by the door like they were coming home with a deed to a villa in Tuscany with my name on it. The big smile. The energy. That was me. It has always been me. And it will forever be me obviously. People say heartbreak beats the joy out of them and turns them into emotionally unavailable minimalists, and I understand it intellectually. But that will never be me. I will always be funny, warm, and completely unbearable in the best way possible to the people I love, and especially to a partner. That is simply non-negotiable.

However.

What I flagged in that conversation is that I no longer have the energy to perform that excitement without evidence. Without seeing something first. Some signal. Some proof of life, personality-wise.

My very good friend (name redacted to protect the devastatingly insightful ) put it plainly:

It’s okay to wait for someone that’ll come save you instead. Since you’re always out here trying to save everyone else from themselves.

Like I said, devastating. Accurate. Rent-free in my head ever since.

To be clear, I am not surrendering my personality at the altar of past disappointments. Absolutely not. That’s a one way ticket to a life of nothing but utter misery and what sane person wants that? The love of life stays. The humor stays. The small, quiet joy stays. What I feel done with is presenting all of it upon arrival, like a welcome basket at a hotel that doesn’t deserve the five-star treatment yet.

Because what happens when you do that is that you end up with someone who responds “yes” and “no” while you ask all the questions, start all the conversations, and essentially run a one-woman theatre production for an audience of one who can’t even be bothered to clap. All you’ve done is given them a personality to borrow. A mirror to perform back at you. You’ve made it so easy to seem engaging just by being in the room with you. An open bar but for emotions.

So I’ll ask again, what sane person wants that?

I’m often teased for being the “man-hater” friend in most of my friend groups. Because of how I talk to men. The way I respond to their ramblings. The way I coexist with them. None of that qualifies as man-hating though. Not even remotely. I don’t hate men. It’s just that:

1. I’m too opinionated
2. I hate stupidity. From men or women. And unfortunately, a lot of it comes from men.

Up until the age of 25, I think I was a very okay person. I was the textbook cool girl. Every negative definition you can attach to that phenomenon? I was that. It had its perks. But the downsides always outweighed the good. And that kind of arrangement only survives for as long as you refuse to study people. To actually learn them. Read them line by line like a book. Not in an obsessive way of course, just enough to coexist peacefully. Just enough to know what is happening in front of you.

And like I said, up until the age of 25.

Past that, my tolerance for stupidity declined dramatically. Including my own. Especially my own. Because once you start actually studying people and the world in general, you start seeing patterns. You start noticing where you disappear. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It helps to have friends who also hate stupidity because you would rather disappear than take them the same problem they helped you survive before. It forces accountability. Even when I repeat mistakes, I sometimes don’t even tell them (and TRUST that silence to become a full blown mirror).

Look at where this got you. Again.

I am, admittedly, a big fan of learning lessons the hard way.

The point of this article, however, is a TikTok I came across (hello doomscrolling) by @Isabellajeantaylor. She explained something that felt uncomfortably precise. In many cases, men don’t necessarily want partnership really. They want an audience. They want you to bear witness to their lives. Their past. Their present. Their philosophies. Their favorite artists. Their favorite shows. Their favorite concerts. Their greatness. You name it.

Now, there is nothing wrong with bearing witness to your partner’s life. That is, as a matter of fact, the beauty of partnership. We are co-witnesses. We are the only two people who will ever fully understand what happened inside our shared world. That part is sacred. The problem begins when witnessing becomes one-directional. The stories you hear (or my own stories for that matter) of women’s hobbies and favorites being sidelined because they’re “just alright.”

Your Bridgerton series cannot possibly rival The Godfather (I say this with love, if one more person asks me to watch this movie I might end up on the evening news). When your Sabrina Carpenter obsession is “cute,” but Metallica is mandatory because “THEY ARE THE GREATEST THING EVER!” When your interests are tolerated but for whatever reason his are the law.

I will never say, “Men don’t know what they’re doing.” They do. Adults know exactly what they are doing. When you assume they don’t, that’s just infantilizing them. Giving them so much armor to excuse their actions. When a grown man insists that something is superior, that something matters more, that something defines culture without a reasonable justification to it, he knows exactly what he is asserting.

Power. Authority. Hierarchy. Read that again.

This connects to another conversation I had recently: the whole thing with women loving projects. That women love “fixing” men. Men do it too. In fact they do it way more aggressively than women. They just do it differently. More subtly. Before you notice, your preferences have shifted. Your vocabulary has shifted. Your worldview has adjusted slightly left or right to accommodate his gravity. You begin loving what he loves, hating what he hates, dressing in ways he compliments most. Not because you were forced to, but because it happened slowly enough to feel like evolution instead of influence.

Beguiling, is it not? How incredibly fascinating life becomes when you are sober enough (emotionally, mentally, physically) to study humanity in real time.

I have never taken interest in a man’s life because I believed his tastes were superior or he was the epitome of a life well lived. Not once. Even as the cool girl. I went to the concerts. I watched the films. I attended the parties with his friends. I sat through the endless monologues about producers, directors, art, guitar solos. I did it because experiencing something with someone you care about is one of the most intimate things in the world. In my world, participation is not submission and interest is not hierarchy.

I have sat through movies I have no interest in for the sake of making them feel seen, making them feel valued and understood. This is someone saying, ‘Hey, this is a piece of me and it’s important and I’d like you to watch this and see what I like.’ I love that game. – Isabella Taylor

I love seeing someone from their point of view. Not interrogating them like a therapist. Not putting them on trial with a bunch of questions for them to go through. Just existing beside them. Watching what lights them up. Observing what they defend. Understanding what shaped them. And nothing unsettles me more like when learning becomes cross-examination. When “getting to know you” feels like an intense psych evaluation instead of immersion. I do not need to dissect you to understand you. Heck, I do not (consciously) want to. I can sit beside you and learn through proximity.

Because sometimes the most powerful way to understand someone is to live next to their joy. And of course, somewhere in that observation, you might also learn where it all went wrong. How certain insecurities formed. Why certain defenses are rigid. Humanity reveals itself vividly when you simply pay attention and observe.

At the core of it, I love witnessing someone exist in their world. I love seeing you be fully you. What makes and breaks you? Who are you when there’s zero influence on your life other than yourself. Not so I can adopt it. Not so I can shrink around it. But so I can understand it while still remaining myself.

That is the difference. I am not a man hater. I simply refuse to be an audience member in my own life. Seeing your world will at no point mean abandoning mine, even if that seems to be the unspoken requirement of that dynamic.

In 2025, I became one with the darkness. Not metaphorically. Literally.

2025 was the year I finally sat down with darkness and said, hello, old friend. Not because I specifically wanted to, but because the alternative was letting it take me down entirely. I flirted with thoughts I hadn’t entertained since I was maybe what? Twelve (don’t say it, I know)?

I fought though. Fought long and hard. All year round. And I won. But good God, I hated that year.

Yes, good things happened. I am utterly grateful for them. Still, 2025 was the most emotionally exhausting year of my twenties. Everything I thought I had survived before it looked at me and said, hold my beer.

Strangely, the gym stayed close. It had to lol. If there is one thing in this life that holds me together, it is that place. Every time a friend tells me they are struggling, I have to physically stop myself from insisting they join a gym… not because it’s a cure to something… anything, but simply because of what it has been for me. Structure, release, proof that I can show up for nobody but myself when everything else feels unmanageable.

In 2025, I hated the state of my life. Fully. And, for once, I held no one accountable but myself. Every choice I had made – good or bad – led me there. That truth hurt, but it also made it easier to drag myself forward. And no, I am not out of it. But I learned how to let the darkness in, pull out a chair for it, and ask it to talk instead of pretending it wasn’t there.

Gosh 2025 can absolutely go to hell.

Happy New Year, by the way. I arrived in 2026 so exhausted I couldn’t even form resolutions. Part of that is fatigue – decision fatigue, choice fatigue, life fatigue. Part of it is a quiet belief that whatever is unfolding is doing so for a reason I cannot see yet. I am exactly where I am meant to be. And I still fucking hate it.

That year stripped the rose-colored glasses I had worn my entire life. Or maybe I finally remembered to take them off I don’t know really. That doesn’t mean I won’t make more mistakes. I will. They’ll just have to be new ones. Or at least the old ones dressed differently. Because if I have to sit across from a psychotherapist one more time, everyone who led me there is coming with me.

I read somewhere in that it’s never the people who actually need therapy that end up in it; it’s the victims. That sentence will forever stay with me. I hope you also think of it every time someone tries to turn you into a stepping stone. Always fight back even if the opponent is yourself.

So, happy New Year again. Here’s to arriving at new destinations with challenges we didn’t even know existed. And more importantly, here’s to choosing our communities carefully – because if struggle is inevitable, let it be shared with people who are worth our time, our effort, and our mental energy.

You Need an Outlet. Not Another Form of Consumption

Society loves to prescribe reading as if it were a universal balm. Stressed? Read. Restless? Read. Burnt out? Read. It has become the culturally approved cure-all, neatly packaged as both productive and relaxing. Yet somehow the truth feels far less romantic than all that. Reading is not an outlet in my opinion. It is not a release. It is consumption rather than a release. Active, disciplined, mentally demanding consumption. Several thought sons and daughters from neuroscience to philosophy have been telling us about this misconception for years.

Maryanne Wolf, whose work Proust and the Squid argues that reading is a “biologically unnatural activity,” one that requires complex neural coordination and sustained attention. In other words, the very thing people claim is “relaxing” is cognitively one of the most demanding tasks we perform. To “enjoy” a book — even if it’s just a breezy, light, escapist fiction novel — you must bring yourself to it fully. You construct worlds, inhabit other minds, negotiate emotions that are not yours. You imagine, translate, visualize, interpret. You get required to show up mentally. Keith Oatley (the Anglo-Canadian Psychologist famously known for how work Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction) describes this as “simulations of the social world”. Mentally and emotionally taxing even when pleasurable.

So when society glorifies reading as a serene escape, it quietly ignores what reading actually demands. Which is focus, presence and interpretive effort. It is beautiful work, yes. Nurturing, expansive work. But work nonetheless.

Modern life breeds pressure at a speed the human psyche was not designed to metabolize. We cling to the fantasy that reading is some effortless form of rest. Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, argues that contemporary culture is built on hyperattention and endless self-optimization. We consume information compulsively under the guise of self-care. In that environment, people reach instinctively for what looks socially acceptable: books, scrolling, binge-watching, podcasts, articles. Activities framed as “productive rest.” But these are all forms of consumption. They fill you (sometimes beautifully, sometimes numbly) but they do not empty you. They do not interrupt the emotional backlog piling up beneath all that we can see on the surface.

The truest form of outlet asks nothing of you. It does not ask you to be composed, focused, or eloquent. It makes no intellectual request of any kind. It does not require your full imaginative capacity, discipline, or coherence. A release is messy by design. Unstructured. Undignified. It is the psychological exhale we keep postponing because it lacks the aesthetic glow reading provides.

Julia Cameron’s concept of “Morning Pages” in The Artist’s Way captures this perfectly… three pages of unedited thought, not meant to be read or analyzed. Just dumped and released. James W. Pennebaker’s decades of research on expressive writing is of the same opinion that unfiltered emotional output reduces stress, improves regulation, and clears the internal backlog that passive consumption can’t touch.

On one hand, we have forgotten how to release at all. We have collectively lost the art of having very personal outlets. We are so accustomed to polished forms of living that we curate ourselves so relentlessly — our speech, our thoughts, our personalities, even our recovery — that raw expression feels almost embarrassing. Polished consumption has basically replaced catharsis. We constantly fear being perceived as inelegant and wind up mistaking the performance of intellectual engagement for the practice of emotional hygiene.

On the other hand, a more optimistic reality is that release is always available to you, and it costs nothing.

• Speak into a recorder.
• Write in fragments.
• Buy very cheap glass and break it.
• Have good sex with people (or a person) you like.
• Let your mind blabber without editing.
• Scream into a pillow (or go park your car somewhere and scream your heart out).
• Cook with whatever you have in the fridge.
• Take a walk outside.
• Talk to the void while taking a walk in the fresh outdoors.
• Take two pencils or just your fingers and drum like an amateur on the table (shockingly kids don’t this these days.. how awfully unfortunate).
• Externalise the noise.
• Do a solo Karaoke session.
• Let your thoughts spill on paper without meaning.

These are the moments that mentally feel like a massive sigh of relief. And overtime you realise that they matter because expression is the only thing that will allow you to meet yourself again. Without that encounter, even the most diligent reading habit becomes another layer of avoidance.

Reading expands you most definitely, but an outlet frees you.

We need both obviously. One to grow the mind and stretch our imagination, the other to empty our emotional backlog and unclog the soul (as I like to headline my nature walks). The mistake is believing they are interchangeable. They are not.

In a culture obsessed with endless consumption, choosing to obsessively express and let something out becomes a very quiet radical act.

It might sound crazy but I just watched Better Call Saul in 2025. (Yeah, 2025. Fight me if you want.) The portrayal of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (I think it was OCD because the symptoms were strikingly similar) was absolutely brilliant. So much that I couldn’t stop taking notes on Chuck’s entire life in the series. It was fascinating to see how perfectly Vince Gilligan directed the tragedy of Chuck’s existence to the dot. Incredible cinema.

Charles McGill didn’t step into Better Call Saul as a villain or an eccentric genius (or maybe he was, I’m not sure); he stepped in as a man whose utter brilliance was being eaten alive from the inside. A man already losing the long, brutal fight with his own mind. The first time we (or rather, I) truly understand him, he’s sitting in his darkened home with every light switch taped off, every device unplugged, and every possible conductor of electricity exiled from his environment, talking to Jimmy McGill (this was one of the first few scenes that Chuck was introduced into the series). He’s not trying to be dramatic or difficult at that moment, he’s just negotiating with the world in the only way his mind allows him to.

Electricity to Chuck was a threat that could tear through his nervous system if he lets it.

However, the cultural tragedy is simple really… society has made OCD “cute”. Parts of society at least. Something to slap on a TikTok caption because your drawer is alphabetised for the first time in your life. We’ve built an entire cultural runway around the idea of being “a perfectionist,” or “so OCD about my kitchen.” Yet when OCD shows up in its real, clinical extremity — obsession, fear, rituals, avoidance, loss — people totally recoil. They don’t want that version. Nope. Why would they? It’s not Pinterest perfect.

Charles McGill is the one who forces the viewer to look at the real thing as it is. As brutal and dangerous as it can get.

His hyperfixation on electricity was a manifestation of untreated, spiralling obsessive-compulsive pathology… so severe it structured every moment of his waking life, making it almost devastating to watch. In one of the most important scenes in the show is a single conversation in a hospital hallway where the doctor looks Jimmy in the face and names the truth plainly that “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” is not a real disease in the way Charles believes. Medically false. Psychologically however, devastatingly true.

That tension between physical unreality and psychological certainty is the architecture of Chuck’s downfall. And the show never looks away from it.

We’ve reached a point where “I’m so OCD about my skincare shelf” (whatever that means) has became a personality trait, rather than a clinical condition anymore. People love to borrow the language without carrying any of the weight. They want the aesthetic of control, the aesthetic of discipline, the aesthetic of being detail-oriented. OCD became a brand in the wellness economy. Clean, curated, and conveniently detached from the reality of the disorder itself.

However, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in practice is the complete opposite of what people claim. It’s a loss of control and the mind’s desperate attempt to survive chaos by creating rituals that ultimately become cages for your own life. It’s chaos masquerading as precision and fear disguised as logic. This is a mind that can’t trust itself so it clings to rituals rules and hyperfixations for survival.

I could talk all day about how the disorder is messy tormenting and often humiliating. I was borderline exhibiting the symptoms until a recovering friend noticed and dedicated themselves to helping me put an end to it before it spiraled out of control. It demands time, energy, and peace that the sufferer does not have. And perhaps the most ironic part is that while society loves the “relatable” polish of it, it wants nothing to do with the cases that actually resemble OCD. They’re emotionally taxing to anyone that has to look after you.

This perfectly encapsulates Chuck’s experience: the version of OCD that no influencer wants to label as self-care. It’s the isolating, relationship-destroying kind that transforms your home into a bunker and your own thoughts into an attack. Everything suddenly feels unproductive and unadmirable. There are no cute analogies to draw when he’s overwhelmed by fluorescent lights in a grocery store aisle or collapses at the copy shop, convinced the electricity is tearing through his body.

By placing Charles in a world obsessed with productivity and performance, the show quietly indicts our cultural misunderstanding of mental illnesses. The audience is forced to see the disorder stripped of all the romanticized language we’ve wrapped around it. And most viewers don’t realise how accurate, how textbook, and how painfully close to real-life severe OCD his storyline actually is.

The show nails traits that many depictions of OCD oversimplify:

• Obsessive fear and catastrophic thinking

Electromagnetic radiation becomes the focus, which doesn’t seem logical given the lack of evidence for such sensitivity beyond psychological explanations. OCD obsessions are rarely coherent anyway. His fear is overwhelming, absolute and self-reinforcing.

• Compulsive avoidance

He unplugs everything in his house. He lives in constant darkness. He wraps himself in space blankets. All these being more of compulsions and not just personal preferences. These rituals temporarily manage to convince him that he’s silenced the terror.

• Magical thinking

The idea that avoiding electricity can safeguard him. It’s irrational, but internally coherent. OCD totally creates its own logic. One that no one other than yourself and people that chose to feed into your delusion believe in.

• Hyper-fixation as identity

Chuck doesn’t just fear electricity… he totally organises his entire life around avoiding it. He makes sure everyone else does the same as well. The disorder becomes the architect of his routines, his boundaries, his interpersonal conflicts…everything.

• The illusion of recovery

When he “feels better,” he does what many do in remission: he tries to reclaim normalcy too quickly. Lights on. Stove plugged in. House re-electrified. It’s a brief moment of fragile hope, the kind that lets viewers believe in. But recovery without treatment often collapses under the weight of its own optimism. Almost often.

• The relapse

And then the relapse. The devastating relapse we all watched. Chuck’s relapse was catastrophic. The obsessions return twice as hard. Compulsions intensify. His grip on reality stretches out too thin. The scene where he tears apart his own walls looking for phantom electricity is perhaps the most accurate portrayal of OCD-induced breakdown ever filmed. It perfectly shows that the danger is almost never the fear itself, but the lengths a person goes to escape it.

Charles McGill’s tragedy is not simply that he was ill. It’s the tension between who he was and what his disorder turned him into. It’s that this same illness targeted the very traits that once made him exceptional. He was a legal titan…top of his field. As Howard Hamlin would always say, “The greatest legal mind I know.” A man who built his identity on precision, reason, discipline, meticulousness and moral rigidity. OCD hijacks those exact qualities. His own brilliance did a full 180 on him.

A mind as sharp as Chuck’s does not soften its fears but rationalises them instead. It finds every possible way to strengthen them. Intellectualising panic until the panic feels like pure logic. Which would explain why and how his obsession with electricity became so powerful. You cannot reason your way out of it because your own reasoning is part of the trap.

By the time Charles reaches the lowest point of his illness, his world has shrunk to the size of his living room. Every sound becomes a devastating alarm. His relapse ends up eroding the pillars of the identity he spent decades building. And that’s pretty much the cruelest part of his story. He dies not as a lawyer, not as a mentor, not as a brother, but as a man fighting a war inside his own mind with no remaining ammunition.

Surrounded by the wreckage of his relapse. His lantern flickers, and in one haunting moment, the barrier between fear and surrender disappears.

The final question Better Call Saul leaves us with is whether Charles’ death was an intentional act or the tragic outcome of obsession-driven behavior. The ambiguity is deliberate, and it mirrors the psychological complexity of the disorder itself. The tragedy isn’t that we don’t know how he died, the tragedy is that everything leading to that moment made either outcome very believable.

In a culture that loves to sanitise, romanticise, and sell mental illness as identity, Better Call Saul refused to play along to this nonsense. Charles McGill’s storyline stands out because it doesn’t turn OCD into a personality quirk or a cinematic flourish. It presents it as a disorder that can dismantle a person from the inside out.

By giving us Chuck, the show forces us to reckon with the version of OCD that society avoids. The version that isn’t cute, or productive, or inspirational. The version that isolates. The version that frightens. The version that costs people their careers, their relationships, and in rare but real cases, their lives.

Charles McGill may not be the character people came to the series for, but he is the one whose story lingers on the most. He stays the reminder that mental illness will never be an aesthetic or a trend or a social accessory. It is a lived reality for most people out here in the real world and one that deserves utter honesty.

And perhaps that is what makes his portrayal one of the most accurate and haunting depictions of OCD ever shown on television. It completely refuses to lie to the viewer for their comfort.

I’ve always believed men don’t actually read self-help books for growth; they read them so they can announce to the nearest breathing organism, “I’ve read that.” It’s never subtle. It’s always followed by the classic performance: “I actually have a solution for that because I read 48 Laws of Power.” That tired routine.

Well congratulations, sir. You finished a book written like a dictatorship starter pack.

I actually read that book once – mostly out of curiosity, partly out of anthropological concern. The title alone feels like a fever dream. 48 Laws of Power. It sounds like someone attempted to rebrand the Bible for men who want commandments without the emotional labor of reflection. Or simply because they can’t trust their own instincts. Both being very ridiculous btw.

One of the first laws is something like never outshine your master. And I remember thinking loudly,

Why would I want to have a master who’s worried about being outshined?

If your so called “master” is shaking in their boots feeling threatened by your existence, then he’s not a master of anything. He’s a person with a title and no ounce of backbone. Real mastery is unshakeable. Real mastery doesn’t get insecure because someone else turned on their light. Real mastery doesn’t flinch for shit.

This whole idea that someone can “outshine” someone else already feels like a flaw in the system. And honestly, who invented the word outshine? Your light is yours. It doesn’t get dim just because someone else finally found a bulb. No one can ever steal your shine, and if they can, you were holding a torchlight sweetheart, not the sun nor the moon.

People’s hatred for self-help books (guilty as charged) often comes from experiencing them through men (and if yours doesn’t that’s totally fine as well btw) who read one chapter and suddenly think they’re the reincarnation of Marcus Aurelius. We’ve all met one – the guy who reads Atomic Habits or No More Mr. Nice Guy and suddenly thinks he has unlocked ancient wisdom that the rest of us, mere mortals, simply never had access to. First of all, you probably needed that book more than everyone around you. So spare us the TED Talk.

And if we’re being very honest here, most of the so called “insight” they recite as if it were scripture is something women learned at ten years old earliest. We were conditioned early to listen, observe, navigate, and survive. Society is our very own version of 48 Laws of Power for whatever reason. So you absolutely didn’t become some great philosopher because you finished Rich Dad, Poor Dad. You simply became a man who can summarize a chapter. You JUST read a book. Now sit down.

Pick up a fiction book and develop a personality like everyone else. Build some sense of imagination. Let your brain create something instead of clinging to these instructional pamphlets like your mind can’t function unless someone narrates your next move for you. It’s almost painful (in all honesty I don’t think I care but my goodness are we tired of hearing about them) watching grown men treat self-help books like some cheat codes to life because their minds forgot how to produce independent thought. Surprise your brain and develop an original thought… go on. You can do it I believe in you.

Self-help is meant to help the self. Not turn you into a one-man motivational seminar nobody asked for. The phrase reads: self and help. Nowhere does it say go door-to-door preaching Robert Greene like you’re selling salvation pamphlets.

So please, for the love of everyone within a 2km radius, get a hold of yourself. And put down the damn manual for one fucking second.