What are we optimising for

August 3, 2026 Leave a comment

There is a peculiar anxiety that defines modern adulthood, which is the fear that somewhere, someone your age is living life better than you. They wake up at 5 AM to journal, meditate, go for a run or walk, consume protein-heavy breakfasts with ingredients you cannot even pronounce, maintain diversified investment portfolios, post thoughtful LinkedIn reflections about leadership, practice intermittent fasting, listen to podcasts at double speed, and somehow still find time to post photos captioned ‘grateful for the journey.’ Meanwhile, you are eating leftover biryani at 11 PM, ignoring unread emails, and wondering whether watching three back-to-back episodes of a series on OTT counts as self-care or surrender. Welcome to the age of optimisation, where every aspect of human life is treated as a system waiting to be upgraded.

Every time I am on my Instagram, it is showing me posts and reels on how to work harder, sleep better, network smarter, manage my relationships more efficiently, eat cleaner, learn faster, age slower, retire earlier and build passive income streams. I keep receiving spam on how to track my calories, my mood, my steps, my productivity, and my screen time (usually through apps that require even more screen time!). Human beings have never had more tools to improve their lives, yet many seem increasingly unsure about what all this relentless optimisation is actually meant to achieve. That question matters because optimisation itself is morally neutral. One can optimise for wealth, prestige, freedom, family, creativity, impact, or simply survival. The real danger begins when people optimise by default, without consciously deciding what destination they are trying to reach.

For much of human history, life paths were shaped by geography, class, castes, family structures, religion, and social expectations. A farmer’s son often became a farmer, and family businesses were inherited. Communities dictated rhythms of marriage, work, and social responsibility. These systems could be deeply restrictive, but they also answered major life questions before individuals had to confront them. Modern life replaced those rigid structures with unprecedented freedom, but that freedom has created its own exhaustion. Today, individuals can theoretically become anything, from a founder, consultant, artist, social development specialist, creator, digital nomad, climate entrepreneur, venture capitalist, to a wellness coach, or any number of job titles that appear to have been invented inside a coworking space brainstorming session. But when every path appears open, every decision begins to feel like closing off another possibility.

This conundrum is particularly visible in India, where rapid economic transformation has dramatically expanded aspiration. In cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurugram, millions of first-generation professionals are participating in one of the largest upward mobility experiments in modern history. Many are children of doctors, teachers, farmers, small business owners, or government employees whose sacrifices created opportunities their children could only dream of. Their children now work in multinational firms, startups, for-purpose organisations, consulting companies, and global technology firms. The opportunities are real, but so is the pressure. Success often carries responsibilities beyond personal fulfilment, as it repays family debt, funds siblings’ education, supports parents, and becomes a symbol of collective social mobility. Ambition, therefore, becomes deeply emotional because it often carries the weight of inherited dreams.

This phenomenon is hardly unique to the geographic boundaries of India. Similar pressures shape immigrant families in the United States, first-generation professionals in Kenya, and upwardly mobile households across Southeast Asia and Latin America. However, India’s sheer population scale makes this phenomenon particularly visible. At the same time, global workplace culture has become remarkably effective at turning ambition into identity. Work is no longer simply something people do, but it is increasingly defining who they are. At networking events (and even social ones, as I am experiencing), the first question is almost always ‘What do you do?’ Rarely does anyone ask what brings someone joy, what relationships they value most, or whether they feel at peace with their lives.

Modern workplaces reward speed, availability, and measurable outcomes. There is always another promotion cycle, another certification, another startup opportunity, another productivity framework, and another way to feel perpetually behind. Entire industries now thrive by convincing people they are one habit away from becoming better versions of themselves. Even leisure has been absorbed into ambition, as travel becomes networking with other travellers you meet at the airports, next seat, at breakfast tables, sunset viewing, and in the swimming pools, reading becomes content consumption, exercise becomes data analytics on your smartphone, hobbies become monetisable side hustles, and rest becomes recovery for more work. Recently, a friend joked that he can no longer enjoy a morning run unless his smartwatch confirms he enjoyed it efficiently, which may be one of the most accurate summaries of modern life.

Technology has intensified this culture by expanding the scale of comparison. Earlier generations compared themselves to neighbours, relatives, or colleagues. Today, individuals compare themselves with startup founders in San Francisco, creators in Seoul, bankers in London, and influencers in Dubai before breakfast. Social media ensures that there is always someone younger, wealthier, fitter, more accomplished, and apparently more fulfilled. What social media rarely reveals are burnout, loneliness, failed ventures, strained marriages, anxiety medication, or the existential doubts that often accompany visible success.

One of the strangest contradictions of elite ambition is that many people spend decades optimising for lifestyles they barely have time to enjoy. Prestigious jobs leave little room for family, and dream vacations are interrupted by work calls. This is not an argument against ambition itself, as ambition can be deeply meaningful. It can lift families out of poverty, create institutions, solve major problems, produce art, and expand human progress. The problem is unconscious ambition. If someone wants to optimise for income, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. If someone prioritises freedom, impact, family, or creativity, those are equally valid choices. The important thing is understanding which game one is playing. Too many people are climbing ladders handed to them by parents, peers, employers, or algorithms without ever asking whether they wanted to climb those ladders in the first place.

The absurdities of optimisation culture become visible in everyday life. People optimise their routines while neglecting friendships, chase promotions while postponing health, expand professional networks while losing touch with siblings, or save aggressively for retirement while forgetting how to enjoy their lives in the present. Many work relentlessly for future freedom as though the future is guaranteed, but it is not, as layoffs and illness happen,  political systems become unstable, and entire industries disappear. The future remains far less controllable than optimisation culture would like people to believe.

That uncertainty can feel frightening, but it can also be liberating. If life is fundamentally unpredictable, perhaps the goal should not be maximum efficiency. Perhaps the goal should be building a life that feels coherent, a life where work matters but does not consume identity, where ambition exists without becoming an addiction, and where success includes relationships, health, curiosity, and moments of stillness. It may mean creating a calendar that reflects actual values rather than external expectations.Ultimately, every individual must confront the most important question for themselves: ‘What is all this effort for?’ Not what impresses employers, relatives, social media followers, or algorithms, but what genuinely matters on a personal level. For some, the answer may be financial security. For others, it may be family, entrepreneurship, public service, writing, travel, or a quieter life built around enough rather than endless accumulation. The greatest tragedy of modern life may not be failure, but may be becoming extraordinarily efficient at pursuing goals that were never truly your own.

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Why change cannot be delivered

July 27, 2026 Leave a comment

Five years ago, I met Priyanka, a young woman from a small village in the Latehar district of Jharkhand. Like many women in rural India, her world was defined by invisible boundaries. Opportunities were limited, mobility was constrained, and the digital revolution that was transforming urban India felt very distant from her daily reality. When she joined a rural digital entrepreneurship programme, she did not see herself as an entrepreneur. She simply wanted to learn how to use a laptop and perhaps earn a modest income.

Today, Priyanka runs two digital service centres in her village and around. On any given day, she helps scores of people access government schemes, apply for jobs, update documents, pay utility bills, and navigate digital platforms that would otherwise remain out of reach. Villagers who once travelled long distances and spent an entire day completing simple administrative tasks now walk a few minutes to seek her assistance. More importantly, young girls in the village consider her as their role model and hold upward career aspirations. They see someone who looks like them using digital tools to build a livelihood and create value for her community.

What changed in Priyanka’s life was not merely her income but her sense of agency. She stopped being a passive recipient of charity and became an active participant in shaping the future of her community. Her story reminded me of a lesson that I have encountered repeatedly over the past twenty years in development. Lasting change does not happen when we deliver solutions to people. It happens when people gain the confidence, capability, and opportunity to create solutions for themselves.

After 20+ years in development sector, this is the lesson I carry with the greatest conviction that change cannot be delivered to people. It emerges when people discover their own power to create it. We often treat it as something that can be designed, funded, managed, monitored, and delivered. We create theories of change, strategic plans, annual targets, dashboards, and impact indicators. We write proposals describing how communities will evolve over the next three or five years and convince ourselves that social transformation can be engineered with enough resources, expertise, and discipline. Yet the longer I have worked in this sector, the more I have realised that change is far more organic, unpredictable, and human than our project documents suggest.

When I began my career, I believed what many young professionals entering the development sector believe, that poverty could be reduced through good Programs alone, that social problems could be solved through smart interventions, and that institutions with the right intent could create pathways for people to improve their lives. I still believe in all of those things. What has changed is my understanding of where transformation actually comes from. After working across livelihoods, entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, women’s empowerment, public health, education, and digital inclusion, I have come to a simple conclusion that development succeeds when people gain the agency to shape their own futures.

One of the first assumptions I had to unlearn was the idea that communities are primarily defined by what they lack. Development discussion is filled with the language of deficits. We identify needs, vulnerabilities, gaps, and constraints, and catalogue problems and design interventions to address them. While these exercises are important, they can also blind us to a more powerful reality. Communities possess knowledge, resilience, social capital, aspirations, and capabilities that outsiders frequently underestimate. Over the years, I have met women who built successful enterprises despite social barriers, farmers who adapted to environmental challenges long before climate resilience became a policy priority, and young people who created opportunities where experts saw only limitations. What distinguished these individuals was not the assistance they received but the agency they exercised. The most successful development programs I have witnessed were those that helped people discover their own capacity to act.

This may sound obvious, yet much of the development sector still operates as though change originates from institutions rather than individuals. We often speak of empowering communities as if empowerment is something that can be handed over like a grant or a training manual. Experience has taught me that empowerment is not delivered, but is unlocked. People change their lives when they begin to see themselves not as beneficiaries of someone else’s program but as active participants in shaping their own future.

Another lesson that I took years to fully appreciate is that projects produce outputs, while ecosystems create change. Development organisations have become increasingly sophisticated in measuring activities and outputs. We know how many people attended training programs, how many households received services, how many entrepreneurs were supported, and how many villages were covered. These numbers and accountability matter as funders and stakeholders deserve evidence that resources are being used effectively. Yet some of the most transformative changes I have witnessed had little to do with what was captured in a monitoring framework.

I have seen projects with impressive numbers disappear almost entirely once funding ended. I have also seen relatively modest initiatives continue creating value years after external support had ceased. The difference was rarely the size of the budget or the quality of the project design. More often, it was whether the intervention had strengthened the local ecosystem or not. Sustainable change emerges from relationships, institutions, markets, networks, and leadership. It emerges when communities develop the capacity to solve problems collectively, and when local actors begin driving progress themselves. 

This is particularly true in the field of livelihoods and entrepreneurship, where I have spent much of my professional life. For decades, development programs have focused on training individuals, providing assets, or facilitating access to finance. These interventions are valuable, but they are rarely sufficient. Entrepreneurship does not flourish simply because someone acquires a skill. It flourishes when an entire ecosystem supports risk-taking, innovation, market access, mentorship, and growth. The future of development, especially in rural economies, lies in building environments where success becomes possible for many.

One of the more surprising lessons from my career concerns money. Having spent years raising resources for social programs, I have a deep appreciation for the role of funding in creating impact. Without resources, good ideas often remain aspirations. Yet after helping mobilise hundreds of crores for development initiatives, I have come to believe that development is rarely constrained primarily by money. That may sound like an unusual statement coming from someone whose responsibilities have included fundraising and partnership development, but experience repeatedly points in that direction.

Many social challenges that appear to be funding problems are, in reality, leadership problems, institutional problems, capability problems, or trust problems. Additional funding can accelerate progress when strong systems exist. It can also magnify inefficiencies when those systems are weak. Some of the most effective organisations I have come across were not the wealthiest. They were the ones who built credibility, nurtured talent, fostered partnerships, learned continuously, and remained deeply connected to the communities they served. Development ultimately depends on institutions, as strong institutions outlive projects, preserve knowledge, adapt to changing circumstances, and create platforms through which future generations can continue the work. Sustainable change requires institutions capable of sustaining momentum long after a grant agreement expires.

Another belief I have gradually become sceptical of is the sector’s fascination with innovation. Few words are used more frequently in development conversations today. Every conference, funding call, and strategy document seems to emphasise innovation as the pathway to impact. New technologies, new models, and new approaches are often celebrated as solutions to deeply entrenched social challenges. Innovation undoubtedly has value, and many important advances have emerged from creative thinking. Yet the longer I work in development, the more I believe that adaptation is often more important than innovation.

Communities do not need solutions that look impressive in presentations; rather, they need solutions that work within their realities. The most successful initiatives I have known were not necessarily the most innovative. They were the most adaptive and respected local contexts rather than attempting to impose external models. The development sector is full of examples where brilliant ideas failed because they ignored the realities of the people they were intended to serve. It is also full of examples where relatively simple approaches succeeded because they were grounded in local ownership and practical wisdom.

Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that ownership is the ultimate measure of impact. For many years, I believed that scale alone represented the highest aspiration in development. Reach more people, expand into more geographies, and increase the numbers. Scale is important, and the magnitude of global challenges demands ambition. Yet scale without ownership is fragile. Programs that depend indefinitely on external actors are vulnerable by design. Lasting change occurs when communities begin to see an initiative as their own, when local leaders emerge, when institutions take root, and when progress continues without constant external direction.

This requires a profound shift in how we think about our role as development practitioners. Too often, organisations position themselves as providers of solutions. A more useful role may be that of a catalyst, connector, facilitator, and investor in human potential. The objective is not to become indispensable, but to create the conditions under which communities can thrive independently. Success is not measured by how long people depend on us, but by how effectively people progress without us.

As I reflect on my 20+ years in this sector, I remain optimistic despite the scale of the challenges before us. Climate change, inequality, unemployment, public health crises, and social exclusion remain formidable problems. Yet I have seen enough examples of human ingenuity, resilience, and determination to believe that meaningful progress is possible. I have seen individuals transform their circumstances, communities build collective solutions, and institutions evolve into powerful vehicles for social change. These experiences have reinforced my conviction, which has only grown stronger with time.The future of development will not be determined solely by larger budgets, more sophisticated frameworks, or more ambitious programs. It will be determined by our ability to strengthen local institutions, nurture entrepreneurship, build resilient economic ecosystems, and trust communities to shape their own destinies. If twenty years have taught me anything, it is that change is not something we deliver to people. Change is something people create when they have the opportunity, confidence, and freedom to act. Our responsibility is not to direct that process. It is to help create the conditions that make it possible and then have the humility to step aside.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.

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Economyths

July 20, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: David Orrell | 320 Pages | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publisher: Icon Books | Year: 2012 | My Rating: 8/10

“If economics has an equivalent of Newton’s law of gravity, it is the law of supply and demand.”
― David Orrell, Economyths

Every profession and subject has its myths, like medicine once believed illness was caused by imbalances of bodily humours! Astronomy once believed that Earth sat at the centre of the universe. Economics, despite its mathematical sophistication and Nobel Prizes, is no exception. David Orrell’s Economyths examine some of the stories modern economics tells us and ask whether they still deserve our trust.

What makes this book particularly engaging is that Orrell, a Canadian mathematician, is not writing as an economist defending one school of thought against another. Orrell approaches economics with the curiosity of an outsider and the scepticism of a scientist. He argues that many of the assumptions that underpin mainstream economic thinking are treated as objective truths when they are, in fact, useful stories, simplifications, and sometimes outright myths.

The book systematically dismantles ten such myths. Markets are not always efficient, people are not perfectly rational, money is not neutral, growth is not synonymous with wellbeing, and risk is not always measurable. These ideas may sound obvious after the financial crisis of 2008-09, market bubbles, and widening inequalities of recent decades, but Orrell demonstrates how they are deeply embedded in economic models, policy discussions, and public discussions.

One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is its insistence that economics is not a physics problem. Human societies are messy, emotional, political, and adaptive. Unlike atoms, people change their behaviour when circumstances change. They are influenced by culture, fear, aspiration, power, and relationships. Any attempt to reduce economic life to neat equations inevitably leaves something important out.

As someone working in the social development sector, I found myself reflecting on how often development conversations are shaped by economic assumptions that go unquestioned. We celebrate GDP growth while overlooking ecological degradation. We measure income while ignoring dignity, and optimise for efficiency while neglecting resilience. The book reminded me that the indicators we choose are never neutral, as they shape what we value and what we overlook.

The book encourages intellectual humility and reminds us that economic models are maps, not territories. Useful maps matter, but problems arise when we mistake them for reality itself. Reading Economyths also felt surprisingly relevant beyond economics. In many ways, the book is about the dangers of oversimplification. Whether in public policy, business strategy, or personal life, we often gravitate towards elegant frameworks because complexity is uncomfortable. Reality rarely conforms to tidy narratives, as the world is interconnected, dynamic, and often unpredictable.

The book questions whether economics is ultimately about how societies organise resources to support human development, and then what exactly are we optimising for? Wealth? Growth? Efficiency? Security? Sustainability? Happiness? The answer matters because different goals produce different systems and different outcomes.

More than a critique of economic theory, Economyths is a reminder that every model reflects a set of values. The challenge is not to abandon economics but to recognise its limits, question its assumptions, and remain open to perspectives that better capture the complexity of human life. I finished the book with greater scepticism toward economic certainties but also with greater appreciation for the importance of asking better questions. In a world increasingly driven by metrics, forecasts, and optimisation, that may be one of the most valuable lessons of all. Economyths is a thoughtful and provocative read for anyone interested in economics, public policy, development, business, or simply understanding the assumptions that quietly shape modern society.

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Building Demand for Development

July 13, 2026 Leave a comment

India’s rural development dialogues have treated health, education, and income as parallel priorities often pursued through separate policy silos. Budgets are allocated, schemes are launched, infrastructure is built, and targets are set, all with good intent. However, one foundational truth remains insufficiently acknowledged, that increasing rural incomes is not merely an economic goal but one of the most effective demand-side interventions for health and education. Without income security, even the best school education systems and local health facilities struggle to translate access into outcomes. With income growth, aspirations gain purchasing power, the choice basket expands, and human development accelerates in ways no standalone welfare program can achieve.

The constraint on health and education in rural India is rarely a lack of awareness alone. Most families understand the value of a healthy body and an educated child, but they cannot act on that understanding consistently. Irregular incomes, seasonal employment, debt cycles, and exposure to shocks force households into a constant state of prioritising needs and what is immediately affordable. In such conditions, preventive healthcare is postponed until illness becomes unavoidable, and education becomes negotiable once opportunity costs rise. When incomes increase, particularly when they become predictable rather than sporadic, this calculus begins to shift fundamentally. I have witnessed this change countless times among the families from rural livelihood and entrepreneurship development programs across multiple states of India, from the north to the northeast.

The first visible change that accompanies rising rural income is in health-seeking behaviour. As disposable income grows, households move from reactive to preventive care. They begin to spend on nutritious food intake, diagnostics, maternal health, and timely treatment rather than relying solely on home remedies or last-resort interventions. This is observable across rural belts where livelihoods have stabilised through dairy cooperatives, non-farm employment, or entrepreneurship opportunities. Increased income reduces the psychological cost of seeking care. A doctor’s visit no longer feels like a financial gamble, and medicine is no longer a choice between recovery and indebtedness. Over time, this shift translates into lower morbidity, higher productivity, and a virtuous cycle of income and wellbeing.

Education follows a similar but slightly delayed trajectory. At very low-income levels, schooling competes with survival. Children’s labour, whether on farms, in family enterprises, or in caregiving roles, has immediate economic value. As incomes rise, the opportunity cost of schooling declines. Families are more willing to keep children in school, invest in better quality institutions, often private schools in their own villages or neighbouring towns, and support supplementary learning such as tuition or digital tools. Crucially, income growth often changes learning outcomes and ambition, and not just enrolment. Education stops being about literacy alone and starts being about mobility, including English proficiency, technical skills, credentials, and pathways beyond the village economy.

This transition from survival to investment is critical as human capital investments respond strongly to income thresholds. Below a certain level of income, households simply cannot afford to plan long-term, and above that critical level, behaviour changes rapidly. Rural India today stands at precisely this inflection point. Decades of infrastructure expansion, electrification, and digital penetration have laid the groundwork. What remains uneven is sustainable income enhancement pathways at scale. Where it happens, demand for health and education services rises organically, often faster than supply systems can respond.

However, increased income alters expectations and does not merely increase consumption. Rural households with higher incomes begin to demand quality, accountability, and outcomes. They compare schools, question teaching standards, seek second medical opinions, and are willing to pay for reliability with profound implications. It challenges the assumption that rural citizens will accept poor service quality indefinitely. It also creates space for private, social, and hybrid service models like low-cost clinics, diagnostic centres, skill academies, and ed-tech platforms that were previously unviable due to weak demand. Income growth can enable choice for households, who would increasingly adopt mixed strategies of using public facilities for some services and private providers for others. This duality can, if managed well, improve overall system performance. 

The ripple effects of income-driven demand can extend beyond individual households. As spending on health and education will increase, local economies will diversify. Teachers, health workers, lab technicians, transport providers, and service support staff will find employment closer to home. Women’s participation in the workforce will rise as care responsibilities will reduce and aspirations will expand. These multiplier effects will strengthen rural markets, making income growth more resilient and less dependent on a single sector like agriculture.

However, income growth alone is not sufficient, as demand without supply will lead to frustration, not development. In many rural areas, rising incomes have resulted in out-migration for services, with families travelling long distances or relocating temporarily to access quality healthcare and education. This is not a failure of income-led development, but a failure to anticipate and respond to it. Both public and private supply systems must be designed to scale alongside income growth. Physical access, skilled personnel, digital connectivity, and trust are essential if local ecosystems are to capture the benefits of rising demand.

Livelihood programmes and social sector investments are often conceived independently. Income-generation schemes focus on outputs like jobs created and enterprises supported, while health and education programmes focus on inputs like schools built, staff hired, and beneficiaries enrolled. What is missing is an integrated demand-supply lens. Rural income enhancement should be explicitly recognised as a human development strategy, with parallel investments planned in service delivery capacity. When livelihoods improve in a region, health and education infrastructure should be strengthened proactively, not reactively.

For corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthropy, this insight could be particularly valuable. Rather than choosing between livelihoods and social services, funders should see them as sequential and reinforcing investments. Supporting rural entrepreneurship, value chains, or digital livelihoods creates the conditions for sustained demand for health and education. Complementing this with investments in service quality of teacher training, primary healthcare strengthening, telemedicine, or skill education will maximise impact. Fragmented interventions will yield fragmented outcomes, while integrated strategies can create lasting change.

When rural citizens earn more, they become more vocal stakeholders in the local political economy. They demand better governance, transparency, and responsiveness. Health and education, being highly visible services, often become focal points of this demand. Income growth thus strengthens democratic accountability. It shifts the relationship between the state and citizens from charity to entitlement, from gratitude to expectation. 

India’s development journey offers ample evidence of this dynamic. States like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra that have successfully diversified rural incomes through improved irrigation, manufacturing clusters, or services consistently outperform others on health and education indicators. The lesson is that the effectiveness of social spending is amplified when households have the means to engage with it meaningfully. Supply creates possibility, and income creates participation.

As India looks ahead to the next phase of rural transformation, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, education, or livelihoods, but how to sequence and integrate them. Treating income growth as the foundation of demand generation reframes the debate. It reminds us that people are not passive recipients of services, but active decision-makers whose choices shape outcomes. Empowering those choices through income security may be the most humane and pragmatic development strategy to have. This has the potential of unlocking a chain reaction that will turn latent needs into effective demand, services into systems, and welfare into wellbeing. Healthier bodies and educated minds do not emerge in isolation, but they grow where households have the freedom to choose them. And that freedom, in rural India, begins with income.

If this essay made you reflect on how income shapes opportunity, choice, and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article every week in your inbox. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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Why everyone says, I am fine 

July 6, 2026 Leave a comment

There is a performance that many people have mastered in modern life, of looking completely fine while quietly falling apart. It has become one of the most refined social skills of our time. You show up to work on time, reply to emails with professional warmth, attend weddings with coordinated outfits, post cheerful holiday photos, laugh at dinner parties, and reassure everyone that ‘all is well’ while your internal monologue resembles an emergency board meeting. Rent is rising, parents are ageing, careers feel uncertain, relationships are complicated, your back hurts for reasons your doctor politely describes as stress related, and you have not felt truly rested since sometime before the pandemic. Yet when someone asks how you are doing, the answer remains remarkably consistent, ‘Good, good. Just busy.’

Across the world, people are becoming increasingly fluent in this language of polished distress. Social media has trained us to curate competence, while professional culture rewards composure, and families often value stability over vulnerability. Entire societies function because millions of people continue showing up despite private exhaustion. But this performance feels particularly pronounced among Indians who are living both within India and across the global diaspora, where social expectations are often complex, relentless, and efficient at producing outward success alongside inward strain.

The Indian social script remains deeply achievement-oriented. From childhood, most of us are introduced to a familiar sequence of expectations that feels both culturally specific and globally recognisable, which includes performing well in school, attending a branded university/college, entering a respectable profession, earning well, marrying appropriately, buying property, caring for parents, raising successful children, and maintaining family honour while appearing effortlessly grateful for the opportunity. There are, of course, regional, class, and generational variations, but the broad architecture remains remarkably durable. Even among progressive urban families, conventional expectations often survive in modern packaging. Instead of explicit pressure to become a doctor or engineer, there may be subtle comparisons with cousins working at Google, Amazon, or investment firms in London. Marriage pressure may sound softer, but family Whatsapp groups can still function as passive-aggressive reminder systems.

The emotional burden becomes even more complicated because these expectations are rarely framed as pressure, as they are often presented as love, sacrifice, duty, and practical wisdom. Parents who invested heavily in their children’s education may genuinely believe they are guiding them toward security. Extended families may see their involvement as care. Communities may celebrate conformity because it appears stable. But good intentions do not eliminate psychological consequences. Many young professionals in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Hyderabad are managing demanding careers while quietly navigating family expectations around marriage, caregiving responsibilities, home ownership, and financial support. They are often simultaneously trying to be globally competitive professionals and culturally responsible children. It is a difficult balancing act, made harder by the fact that neither side fully acknowledges the strain.

For Indians living overseas, the pressures often become even more complex. The immigrant success story remains one of the most celebrated narratives in many diaspora communities. The child of immigrants in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia may be expected to succeed professionally in highly competitive societies while also preserving cultural identity, supporting family back home, and remaining deeply connected to traditions that often become more rigid in migration. This produces a strange phenomenon where individuals feel pressure to excel in two worlds while fully belonging to neither. You are expected to understand tax laws in Seattle, maintain emotional fluency in Bihari family politics, and explain to relatives why you are still unmarried at 32 despite having what appears, on paper, to be an excellent and successful life!

Weddings deserve special mention as global showcases of curated wellbeing. Few events demonstrate collective emotional theatre quite like the fat Indian weddings. Families spend enormous amounts of money celebrating joy while quietly navigating interpersonal tensions, financial stress, unresolved conflicts, and logistical chaos. Guests arrive dressed magnificently, smiling for photographs that suggest a flawless communal celebration. Beneath the choreography, there may be sibling rivalries, debt, parental anxieties, and relatives evaluating everything from the food menu to life decisions. And though the wedding album looks immaculate, the emotional spreadsheet rarely does.

Professionally, employees are expected to remain productive through layoffs, economic uncertainty, technological disruption, and burnout. In India’s startup hubs and global financial centres alike, people casually describe 80-hour workweeks as ambition while quietly experiencing anxiety, insomnia, and emotional depletion. The language of hustle culture has simply provided respectable branding for exhaustion. Saying ‘I am slammed’ has become shorthand for importance. Saying ‘I am overwhelmed’ remains harder.

Social media has amplified all of this by turning life into a continuous public relations exercise. Platforms reward milestones like promotions, vacations, engagements, anniversaries, fitness transformations, children’s achievements, and entrepreneurial announcements. They are less enthusiastic about ambiguity, grief, stagnation, infertility struggles, career confusion, loneliness, or ordinary dissatisfaction. The result is a digital ecosystem where everyone appears to be thriving. You scroll through photographs of destination weddings in Udaipur, startup exits in San Francisco, babies in matching outfits, and beachfront holidays in Bali while sitting with your own uncertainty and wondering whether everyone else has somehow figured out adulthood.

Many people who appear successful are privately negotiating debt, loneliness, marital strain, workplace anxiety, fertility struggles, caregiving responsibilities, mental health challenges, or the exhausting task of meeting expectations they never consciously chose. The colleague who seems composed may be supporting parents through medical crises. The cousin posting anniversary photos may be managing deep relationship problems. The entrepreneur celebrating funding rounds may be unable to sleep. The family friend who constantly asks why you are not married may have spent years trapped in an unhappy marriage themselves. Human beings are remarkably skilled at editing their visible narratives.

Indian society’s combination of collectivist expectations, rapid economic change, intergenerational obligations, and intense social comparison creates a particularly sophisticated ecosystem of invisible pressure. What makes this dynamic especially difficult is that many people feel guilty for acknowledging it. After all, they may have stable jobs, supportive families, educational privilege, or material comfort relative to previous generations. Gratitude becomes weaponised against honest emotional reflection. ‘What do you have to complain about?’ remains one of the most efficient ways to shut down vulnerability in many households. 

The irony is that a genuine connection often begins the moment someone drops the performance. When one friend admits they are burnt out, another confesses they are anxious. When someone speaks honestly about marriage pressure, career confusion, depression, caregiving exhaustion, or loneliness, others often respond with relief rather than judgment. The collective illusion begins to weaken. Perhaps the challenge of modern adulthood is not learning how to appear fine. Most people have already mastered that skill. The real challenge is building lives, friendships, workplaces, and families where ‘I’m not okay right now’ does not feel like a social failure.Behind many polished LinkedIn profiles, family portraits, wedding photographs, and cheerful Whatsapp updates lies the same truth that everyone looks fine because that is what society often rewards. But many are carrying far more than they show, and sometimes the most radical act of honesty is answering ‘How are you?’ with something closer to the truth.

If this article made you pause, reflect, or quietly say, ‘this feels familiar,’ you are not alone. Share it with someone who always says, ‘I am fine,’ and maybe start the kind of conversation we all need more of. Subscribe to my blog for one reflective article every week in your mailbox. It’s free!

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