What if love became infrastructure 

September 28, 2026 Leave a comment

I got the title (more like borrowed) from a WhatsApp group where a member shared the theme of the ‘At One Impact Week 2026’ conference in Singapore. This one powerful phrase, ‘what is love became infrastructure,’ made me think deeply from romantic and philosophical perspectives initially, and finally from an economist’s viewpoint, and I ended up doing a visioning exercise (sort of) for the future. Ideating and eventually writing this essay took me back down memory lane when I was a student of Social Planning.

We think of infrastructure as something tangible, visible and measurable, like roads, bridges, electricity, water systems, digital networks and financial systems. We know how to calculate their construction costs, estimate their economic returns, and argue over who should pay for them. We even understand that infrastructure can determine the destiny of societies and can alter the trajectory of an entire generation. But there is another infrastructure without which none of these systems ultimately works, and yet it rarely appears in our economic imagination. It is invisible, difficult to measure and almost impossible to commodify. It is love, not romantic love, though that matters too, but the broader human capacity to care, to notice, to remain, to take responsibility for another person’s wellbeing. We have traditionally treated love as a private emotion and have failed to recognise it as a public resource.

Every society runs on enormous quantities of unpaid love, like a parent getting up in the middle of the night for a sick child, or a daughter accompanying an ageing parent to hospital. However, none of these acts is generally counted as economic output. They do not appear in national accounts and are not part of productivity statistics. However, if we remove it altogether, hospitals will become more crowded because there will be nobody to care for people after discharge. Children will require more formal intervention because fewer adults will be available to support them. Elder-care systems will become unaffordable. Workplaces will become less resilient because employees have no one to rely upon outside them. We have created elaborate systems to compensate for the absence of care while rarely acknowledging the care that prevents those systems from collapsing in the first place.

The more efficiently we organise modern economic life, the more we seem to separate it from the relationships that make life worth living. We have become remarkably good at producing things and increasingly uncertain about how to sustain one another. We can deliver almost anything to a doorstep within minutes, but we cannot guarantee that someone will sit beside an elderly person who is lonely. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet, but millions of people live without a person they can call when they are frightened. We can build increasingly intelligent machines, but many people struggle to find another human being willing to listen without looking at a screen. The technological revolution has reduced distance while, in some unexpected ways, increased emotional distance. Perhaps this is not a contradiction, and perhaps we simply solved the wrong problem. We became extraordinarily good at connecting devices, markets and information, while leaving the architecture of human connection largely to chance.

If love were infrastructure, loneliness would become an infrastructure deficit. That may sound absurd today, as we are used to thinking of loneliness as a psychological condition, a personal problem or sometimes a consequence of individual choices. But imagine applying the logic we already use elsewhere. If a community has no reliable public transport, we do not tell every resident to become better at walking, instead, we investigate the transport system. If people have no access to clean water, we do not blame them for being thirsty. If an entire generation has inadequate access to education, we do not simply advise young people to become more self-motivated. We build schools and institutions. Why, then, when millions of people experience profound social isolation, do we so quickly individualise the problem? Perhaps some loneliness is personal and inevitable. But some of it is produced by the environments we have built, like cities designed around cars rather than encounters, housing designed around privacy rather than community, workplaces designed around productivity rather than belonging, digital platforms designed around engagement rather than connection, and economic systems that leave people with less time for the relationships they depend upon.

The future city may therefore have to answer a question that today’s urban planning rarely asks if the city make it easy or difficult to belong? A well-designed neighbourhood might not simply be one where people can reach work quickly. It might be one where an elderly person can walk to a park, a child can meet other children, a young professional can enter a community without already knowing someone, and a person living alone has places to go where consumption is not the price of admission. Public libraries, community kitchens, parks, sports facilities, cultural centres, pedestrian streets and shared spaces are not mere amenities but relational infrastructure. Their purpose would be partly to create the conditions under which relationships can emerge naturally. Nobody can be ordered to make a friend. Governments cannot manufacture affection, but governments can certainly create environments in which human beings are more likely to meet one another, spend time together and develop trust.

This would require us to rethink the economics of care. Our economic systems are designed to value what enters markets. Care becomes visible when it is professionalised and paid, like a nurse, childcare worker, therapist, home-care worker, etc. But when the same work is performed by a spouse, parent, sibling, friend or neighbour, its economic value often disappears. What we fail to measure, we tend to underinvest in. And what we underinvest in eventually becomes a crisis. The care economy is therefore not an alternative to the productive economy; rather, it is one of its foundations. Every employee who arrives at work has already been sustained by some network of care. Every entrepreneur has had someone who tolerated their uncertainty. Every successful professional has, somewhere along the way, benefited from someone else’s patience, encouragement, childcare, emotional support or practical help. Economic independence is rarely as independent as we like to imagine.

Perhaps the next stage of capitalism will involve recognising this by redesigning institutions around the reality that people have caring responsibilities. Not by putting a price on love itself, because the moment love becomes a transaction, we risk destroying precisely what makes it valuable. Parental leave, elder care, flexible working, community services and mental-health support are not corporate generosity or welfare expenditure but investments in the infrastructure of human capability. The question would no longer be how much care we can extract from individuals before they burn out, but how we can design economies that reproduce care rather than consume it.

The 20th century built welfare states around the assumption that governments could provide a substantial share of social security. And now, the 21st century is discovering that governments cannot provide human presence, which is increasingly scarce. As populations around the world age and families become smaller, geographically dispersed and increasingly mobile, the question of who will provide everyday human care will become one of the defining social questions of the century.

We are approaching a world in which machines can converse, remember, personalise and simulate empathy with extraordinary sophistication. An AI companion may be available 24 hours a day, never become bored, never interrupt and never judge. For millions of lonely people, this may provide genuine comfort. There is nothing inherently tragic about that. However, if machines become exceptionally good at giving us the feeling of being understood, will we become less willing to tolerate the inconvenience of understanding another human being?

Human relationships are inefficient as they demand time, contain misunderstandings, and require compromise. Other people have needs that compete with ours, and they disappoint us, change, and sometimes even leave. But these inconveniences are not defects in the human system but are more part of what relationships teach us. A machine can perhaps simulate unconditional attention; another human being offers the possibility of mutual responsibility. The challenge for technology, therefore, should not be to replace human relationships but to protect the conditions under which they can flourish. The best AI may ultimately be the AI that saves time for us by reducing bureaucracy for doctors, helping families care for distant parents, assisting teachers, making public services easier to navigate and freeing people from repetitive work. Technology should ideally expand the space available for human presence rather than fill that space itself.

If this sounds utopian, consider how many things that once seemed private have already become legitimate subjects of public policy. We once treated literacy as an individual matter, and now we build education systems. We once treated disease as fate, and now we build healthcare systems. We once treated poverty as personal failure, and now we debate social protection. Our definition of what society owes its members has expanded repeatedly. Perhaps relational wellbeing will be the next frontier.

Imagine a future national wellbeing report that contains a metric nobody takes seriously today: the capacity to care. It might measure how much time people have for family, whether older people have regular social contact, whether young people have trusted adults, how many neighbourhoods possess accessible community spaces, whether workers can take time off for caregiving without economic punishment and whether people feel that they belong somewhere. Imagine a company reporting not only employee turnover but whether its organisational culture leaves people with enough time and psychological capacity to maintain lives outside work. Imagine investors recognising that communities with high levels of trust and social connection are more resilient in crises. These ideas may sound soft compared with infrastructure spending today. But history repeatedly demonstrates that societies often collapse because the relationships holding them together become brittle.

Love, in this broader sense, is demanding and requires boundaries, accountability and difficult choices. A society organised around love would not be one in which everyone agrees with everyone else or where harm is excused because the perpetrator is human. It would be one in which disagreement does not automatically turn the other person into an enemy, where vulnerability does not become a source of shame and where the dignity of a person is not entirely dependent on their economic usefulness. It would ask a different and radical political question: What do we owe one another?

Perhaps this is where the idea of love as infrastructure becomes most disruptive. Infrastructure is usually associated with physical capital, but civilisation also accumulates relational capital, like trust, friendship, community, reputation and reciprocity. The ability to call someone in a crisis is a form of wealth. Knowing that someone will notice when you disappear is a form of security. Having people who will help you when your circumstances change is resilience. These things are not equally distributed. Some people inherit enormous reservoirs of relational capital through families, communities and social networks, while others inherit almost none. We talk endlessly about inequality of income and increasingly about inequality of opportunity. Perhaps it’s time we should also talk about inequality of belonging.

The most interesting possibility is that love may eventually become a new way of thinking about development itself. It will be a recognition that human beings are profoundly relational creatures and that any civilisation that ignores this will eventually pay for it through other systems like healthcare, welfare, policing, education, mental-health services and lost productivity. What we fail to provide through relationships, we eventually attempt to provide through institutions, often at vastly greater cost.

And perhaps the deepest irony is that we already know how to build this infrastructure. We do not need a revolutionary technology. We need to rediscover ordinary human practices that modern life has made increasingly difficult, like sitting with someone, listening without checking the phone, knowing the names of neighbours, sharing food, visiting the elderly, creating public spaces where nobody needs to buy anything, giving people time to care, allowing friendships to develop slowly and treating presence as something valuable rather than unproductive. The infrastructure of love is built in minutes, conversations, gestures and acts of attention. 

When we imagine the future, we tend to imagine what technology will allow us to do. Perhaps a more important question is what technology will allow us to stop doing, and what we will choose to do with the time we recover. If AI does our paperwork, who will we visit? If autonomous vehicles drive us, who will we meet on the journey? If machines educate our children, who will teach them how to care? If algorithms know our preferences better than our friends do, will we still make the effort to know one another?

The future will not be short of infrastructure. It may, however, be short of reasons to use it together. Perhaps the civilisation that comes after ours will judge progress differently. It may look back at our obsession with highways, buildings, bandwidth, productivity and growth and wonder why we spent so much effort making things faster while allowing relationships to become harder. It may find it strange that we measured national wealth but not the wealth of human connection, counted houses but not homes, calculated healthcare expenditure but ignored the unpaid care that kept millions alive, and celebrated technological connectivity while tolerating extraordinary levels of loneliness. And perhaps the great infrastructure revolution of the future will begin with a deceptively simple realisation that the purpose of infrastructure is not to connect roads, machines, markets or data, but to enable human beings to live meaningful lives together.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

Filed under Opinions Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

September 21, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi |Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot| 224 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Picador | Year: 2019 | My Rating: 8.5/10

” When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

The novel was originally published in Japan in 2015 and translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot in 2019. The novel was also adapted into a film, Café Funiculi Funicula, which was released in Japan in 2018 and directed by Ayuko Tsukahara. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an adaptation of a stage play. Kawaguchi was a playwright, and the original story was written for the theatre before being adapted into a novel. The theatrical influence remains visible throughout the book, with ‘clang-dong’ written as a scene shift as characters arrive and leave the cafe. Almost everything happens in one enclosed space where the characters enter, sit, talk, listen, and leave. The narrative is carried by dialogue. The result is a novel that sometimes feels less like conventional fiction than like a collection of intimate dramatic scenes.

The story is set in a small café in Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula, where a customer can travel into the past. There are rules, of course, as one must sit in a particular chair; one may meet only people who have visited the café; nothing said or done in the past can alter the present; and the traveller must return before the coffee becomes cold. The café is therefore less a machine for travelling through time than a chamber for confronting memory. The novel doesn’t have altered timelines, paradoxes, dystopian futures, or battles with destiny. The supernatural mechanism is deliberately narrow, where the past is sealed, and the future remains untouched. Only the traveller’s understanding of what happened can change, and time becomes another technology of human agency.

Kawaguchi is less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its emotional residue. This novel is about the strange human wish to return to a moment in personal history, in which a conversation that ended a relationship, the apology that was never made, the goodbye that was too hurried, the person whose absence has become more real than their presence ever was. The café does not offer a second chance in the conventional sense. It offers something both smaller and, perhaps, more difficult chance to see the past without being able to repair it. The novel proposes that regret is not necessarily a desire to alter history. Sometimes regret is simply the recognition that we misunderstood history when we were living through it.

The novel’s emotional world is built from ordinary disappointments in life rather than extraordinary tragedies. The narrative follows four distinct visitors: Fumiko, who wishes to speak with the boyfriend who left her; Kohtake, a nurse seeking a letter from her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband, Fusagi; Yaeko, a bar owner mourning a final conversation with her late sister; and Kei, the café owner’s ailing wife who travels to the future to see her unborn daughter. Assisted by the quiet barista Kazu, the cheerful owner Nagare, and a quiet Ghost of a woman who guards the chair, these characters learn that while they cannot alter the present reality, the act of expressing their true feelings completely transforms their hearts and gives them the strength to face the future.

The brilliance of the café’s rules is that they remove the fantasy of control. In most stories about time travel, the past is a problem to be solved. Go back far enough, and one can prevent the accident, save the relationship, kill the tyrant, invest in the right company, or avoid whatever mistake has subsequently become intolerable. Time in the novel is not represented by a clock or some abstract metaphysical force. Instead, it is represented by a cup of steaming coffee and measured by the cup gradually losing its heat. The travellers to their past have only until the coffee becomes cold. The deadline is arbitrary, intimate, almost domestic, and yet it transforms the familiar cup of coffee into a measure of mortality. We have all experienced versions of this deadline. A conversation that we postpone, a phone call that we assume can be made tomorrow, parents we intend to visit during holidays, a friend we imagine will always be there, a relationship we believe has time to repair itself.

The characters who enter the café are not given additional time in any meaningful quantitative sense. They are given a few minutes. What changes is the quality of those minutes. The past becomes suddenly precious because the characters know precisely how little time they possess. Kawaguchi turns the familiar fantasy of ‘more time’ into better attention to the time already available. The novel asks its characters, and by extension its readers, to accept that the past cannot be changed. But it also constructs an elaborate fantasy in which people can return to the past precisely because they cannot bear to leave it alone. Acceptance is rarely achieved by simply deciding to accept. We revisit memories, replay conversations, imagine alternative sentences in our minds. We wonder what would have happened if we had arrived five minutes earlier or stayed five minutes longer. Kawaguchi’s café gives physical form to this universal mental habit. Kawaguchi ultimately asks a question that is simpler than its time travel premise and harder to answer: ‘If you were given one last conversation with someone you had lost, what would you say?’

Filed under Books Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Humans, AI, and Singularity

September 13, 2026 Leave a comment

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) belonged to the margins of intellectual conversation in India. It appeared occasionally in science fiction paperbacks, in obscure academic journals, and in the late-night philosophical arguments of university students who spent more time debating the future than preparing for exams. Today AI has escaped the lab and entered dining table conversations. Hardly a day passes without newspapers carrying stories about machine learning, humanoid robots, generative AI, autonomous weapons, AI tutors, AI doctors, AI girlfriends, AI layoffs, or the looming question of whether machines may someday surpass human intelligence altogether.

I read these reports with fascination and a peculiar sense of déjà vu. They take me back more than thirty years, to conversations I had as a young student with my peers and professors about singularity, machine consciousness, and the possibility that intelligence itself might eventually become independent of biology. Back then, those conversations were treated as the eccentricities of a teenager. Most people dismissed them as fantasy, a youthful obsession fed by too much science fiction and too little realism. However, today many of the same questions have escaped philosophy departments and entered boardrooms, parliaments, military doctrines, and ordinary households.

Over the years, I discovered that very few people took such conversations seriously. In fact, until now, I have met only two individuals who shared similar views with genuine conviction: a young computer scientist then in his twenties, and a CEO of a major technology company then in his sixties, around 2010. One represented the restless optimism of a generation growing up with intelligent machines, and the other carried the hard-earned realism of someone who had spent decades building technology at scale. Despite the difference in age and experience, both sensed the same thing, that humanity may be approaching a transition far larger than another technological cycle.

The idea of technological singularity was always unsettling because it challenged one of humanity’s oldest assumptions that intelligence is uniquely human and therefore naturally tied to human control. The singularity hypothesis suggested something far more radical that technological systems could eventually improve themselves at a pace beyond human comprehension, producing an intelligence that exceeds human cognitive capability. At the time, in 1993-96, even discussing such ideas in India invited amused smiles. We were a country still grappling with unreliable electricity, landline waiting lists, and typewriters in government offices. To talk about self-improving machines in that era sounded absurdly premature.

But history has a habit of moving slowly for decades and then suddenly all at once. The internet changed how humans accessed information, and smartphones changed how humans interacted with information. AI now threatens to change what information itself means. This is not another technological wave comparable to social media or e-commerce, but it can potentially bring a civilizational shift. The printing press democratised knowledge, electricity mechanised labour, and the internet connected humanity. I think AI may redefine cognition itself. That is why the current AI moment feels fundamentally different. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other emerging systems are doing something historically unprecedented as they are beginning to perform tasks once considered exclusively intellectual. They write essays, generate code, compose music, summarise legal documents, diagnose diseases, create artwork, conduct research, and converse with startling fluency. 

Many critics comfort themselves by pointing out AI’s current flaws, as it hallucinates, lacks emotional depth, and cannot truly ‘understand.’ But this criticism misses the larger pattern of technological evolution. Early automobiles were unreliable and slower than horses on rough roads. Technologies mature exponentially while human intuition remains linear. We judge the future by the limitations of the present, forgetting how quickly those limitations disappear.

This is why singularity debates no longer feel theoretical. The unsettling part is not that AI can already imitate human capabilities; instead, it is the speed at which it is improving. Systems that seemed miraculous two years ago already appear primitive today. The interval between breakthrough and obsolescence is shrinking dramatically. Humanity is accustomed to gradual adaptation, and it seems that AI may deny us that luxury.

The greatest immediate threat from AI may not be killer robots, instead, it may prove to be social destabilisation. Human societies are built on meaning, and not only economics. Work is not only about income; it is also about identity, dignity, and social relevance. What happens when millions discover that cognitive labour, which was once considered secure from automation, is no longer uniquely valuable? For decades, developing countries like India viewed knowledge work as the path to upward mobility. Entire generations were told to study harder because intellectual labour was future-proof. But AI is beginning to challenge precisely that very foundational assumption.

Industrial automation disrupted blue-collar work first, and AI may disrupt white-collar work next. Lawyers, designers, coders, writers, analysts, accountants, customer support executives, and even educators are already witnessing AI-assisted transformation. Some roles will evolve, others may disappear entirely, and new professions will emerge. But transitions of this magnitude are never painless. History celebrates innovation retrospectively while ignoring the generations displaced during the process.

India possesses one of the world’s youngest populations and also has one of the largest digital workforces. AI could dramatically increase productivity and democratize access to education, healthcare, governance, and entrepreneurship. Rural women entrepreneurs, local language interfaces, AI-powered agricultural advisory systems, and intelligent public services could transform development outcomes. Yet AI could simultaneously intensify inequality if access, ownership, and benefits remain concentrated among a small technological elite.

Technology itself is never neutral, and it reflects the priorities of those who build and deploy it. This is where India’s conversation on AI remains surprisingly shallow. Much of our discussion still focuses on whether AI will make us globally competitive. The urgent questions are political: who controls AI infrastructure? Whose languages does AI understand? Whose biases does it inherit? Which jobs become expendable? Who captures the economic gains? What happens to human agency in societies increasingly mediated by algorithms?

The deeper issue is that AI is forcing humanity to confront uncomfortable truths about itself. For centuries, intelligence has formed the basis of human exceptionalism. We accepted that machines could outperform us physically because intellect remained our final frontier. But if machines begin outperforming humans cognitively in many domains, our understanding of value may fundamentally change. Perhaps that is why AI discussions evoke such emotional intensity. 

Every technological revolution reshapes not only economies but human psychology. Industrialisation changed family structures, television changed attention spans, and social media altered social validation itself. AI may reshape cognition, creativity, and even interpersonal relationships in ways we barely understand. Already, many people interact more comfortably with algorithms than with neighbours. And yet, despite these anxieties, I remain cautiously optimistic. Not because AI will automatically produce a better world, but because humanity has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. The printing press triggered religious wars and political upheaval before enabling mass literacy. Electricity displaced industries before creating entirely new economies. The internet generated misinformation and addiction but also democratized knowledge and communication on an unprecedented scale.

AI, too, will produce both liberation and disruption. We are entering an era where ethical frameworks, governance systems, educational models,  and labour structures designed for the industrial age may no longer suffice. Yet our political systems remain trapped in short electoral cycles while technological acceleration operates exponentially. This mismatch worries me more than the machines.

Thirty years ago, singularity debates felt abstract because technological reality lagged far behind imagination. Today, imagination struggles to keep pace with reality, and that shift alone should humble us. Human civilisation may be approaching one of its most consequential transitions since the Industrial Revolution, yet our collective response often oscillates between hype and distraction.

Perhaps the most important question is not whether AI will surpass human intelligence, but the more important question is whether humanity can develop the wisdom necessary to coexist with technologies more powerful than any we have previously created. Intelligence without wisdom is dangerous, whether biological or artificial. And maybe that is the defining feature of our age. For the first time in history, humanity is no longer merely imagining intelligent machines; we are living alongside their early forms. The distance between science fiction and social reality has collapsed dramatically within a single generation. The singularity may still be decades away, or perhaps it may never arrive in the dramatic form as futurists have predicted. But one thing is certain that AI is no longer a peripheral technological development. It is becoming the central force shaping economics, politics, labour, warfare, creativity, and perhaps eventually even human identity itself. The question is no longer whether AI will change civilisation, but whether civilisation is prepared for what AI may become.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

Filed under Opinions, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Invisible Entrepreneurs

September 7, 2026 Leave a comment

Across rural India and much of the developing world, millions of women wake up before dawn, manage households, tend to livestock, cultivate small plots of land, process food, stitch garments, rear poultry, trade locally, and keep families economically afloat through a variety of income generating activities. Despite their relentless productivity, most of this work does not count as ‘business’ in policy frameworks, financial systems, or even social imagination. These women are workers, contributors, and risk takers, but are rarely recognised as entrepreneurs. Their labour remains invisible, undervalued, and structurally excluded from the very systems meant to promote enterprise and growth.

The invisibility of rural women entrepreneurs is not accidental. It is the outcome of deeply entrenched economic definitions, gender norms, institutional biases, and measurement failures that collectively erase women’s work from formal recognition. To understand why rural women’s enterprises remain unseen, one must look beyond individual capability or ambition and examine how ‘business’ itself is defined, counted, and legitimised.

Entrepreneurship has a narrow and exclusionary definition. In mainstream economics, a business is typically imagined as a registered entity, operating from a distinct workspace, producing for markets beyond the household, employing labour, and generating measurable profits. This definition immediately excludes most rural women, whose enterprises are often home-based, seasonal, informal, and interwoven with domestic responsibilities. When a woman processes grains, sells homemade snacks, stitches clothes for neighbours, weaves handloom products, or rears goats for periodic sale, her work is seen as an extension of household duty rather than economic activity. The fact that it generates income is treated as incidental, not central.

This conceptual blindness is further reinforced by national accounting systems. Gross Domestic Product calculations and labour force surveys systematically undervalue or exclude unpaid and semi-paid work. Women’s labour in family farms, household enterprises, and informal trade is often categorised as ‘assisting’rather than ‘ownership’ work. Even when women contribute substantial labour and decision-making, land titles, business ownership, and enterprise registration are typically in men’s names. As a result, women disappear statistically, even when they are economically indispensable.

Social norms further deepen this invisibility, as in many rural societies, men are perceived as breadwinners and women as caregivers, regardless of actual income contribution in the households. When a man sells produce in the market, he is seen as doing business. When a woman does the same, it is often framed as ‘helping’ the family. Earnings generated by women are frequently pooled into household income, while men’s earnings are recognised as individual contribution. This asymmetry strips women of entrepreneurial identity and reinforces the idea that their work lacks independent economic value.

The location of women’s work also plays a critical role in its invisibility. Because women’s enterprises are commonly home-based, they blur the line between productive and reproductive labour. The home, traditionally associated with unpaid care work, becomes a site where economic activity is rendered invisible simply because it does not conform to spatial norms of business. While a shop has legitimacy, a kitchen does not; a workshop is considered productive, but a courtyard is not. This spatial bias penalises women whose mobility is restricted by safety concerns, social norms, accessibility, or caregiving responsibilities.

Most rural women operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, not as their choice but by necessity. Registration processes are complex, documentation-heavy, and poorly aligned with women’s realities. Limited literacy, lack of identity documents, absence of land titles, and dependence on male family members make formalisation difficult. Formal financial institutions, in turn, rely on formal registration to extend business credit, insurance, and market linkages. This creates a vicious cycle, where women remain informal because systems exclude them, and systems exclude them because they remain informal.

Despite extensive evidence that women are reliable borrowers and effective managers of small enterprises, rural women face disproportionate barriers to credit and access to formal business financing. Collateral requirements favour land and property ownership, which women rarely possess. Credit histories are tied to formal transactions that women are excluded from. Even microfinance, often celebrated as a solution, has limits. Loans are frequently used for household consumption rather than enterprise expansion, and women bear repayment responsibility without gaining corresponding control over assets or profits. Financial inclusion without entrepreneurial recognition risks turning women into financial intermediaries rather than empowered business owners.

Rural women tend to operate at the lowest end of value chains, engaged in production rather than aggregation, branding, or marketing. They sell in local haats (markets), through informal networks, or to middlemen who capture most of the value. Because their scale is small and operations fragmented, their economic contribution is dismissed as marginal. Yet, collectively, these micro-enterprises form the backbone of rural economies, sustaining food systems, crafts, services, and local trade.

The development sector itself has played an ambivalent role in reinforcing invisibility. Programs targeting rural women often frame entrepreneurship as a social development or empowerment intervention rather than a serious economic strategy. Women are encouraged to ‘supplement’ household income, and not to build scalable enterprises. Training focuses on skills rather than markets, confidence rather than capital, participation rather than profit. While these interventions have value, they inadvertently reinforce the idea that women’s enterprises are secondary and subsistence-oriented and not engines of growth.

Most measurement surveys and impact assessments rely on indicators that fail to capture women’s economic realities. Metrics such as revenue, employment generation, or formal registration overlook non-monetary contributions, seasonal income, risk mitigation, and household-level decision making. Women’s enterprises are often judged against male norms of entrepreneurship, setting them up to appear less productive or ambitious, when in fact they operate under entirely different constraints. When women’s work is not recognised as business, they are excluded from policy support, denied access to finance, overlooked in market development initiatives, and marginalised in economic planning. This exclusion perpetuates gender gaps in income, assets, and agency. It also represents a massive loss to economies that fail to harness the full potential of half their population.

There is growing evidence that recognising and supporting rural women entrepreneurs yields significant economic and social returns. Studies show that women are more likely to reinvest earnings in nutrition, education, and health, creating intergenerational benefits. Women-led enterprises contribute to local resilience, especially in contexts of climate stress, migration, and economic shocks. Yet, without recognition, these benefits remain undervalued and underleveraged. Changing this reality requires a fundamental shift in how entrepreneurship is conceptualised and operationalised. Definitions of business must expand to include informal, home-based, and collective enterprises. Economic contribution should be measured not only by scale and formality, but by sustainability, resilience, and impact. Data systems must be redesigned to capture women’s work accurately, including unpaid and semi-paid labour, joint ownership, and household enterprises.

Institutional reforms are needed to lower barriers to formalisation without penalising informality. Simplified registration, group-based enterprises, and recognition of alternative forms of collateral can help bring women into formal systems on their own terms. Financial products must be tailored to women’s enterprise cycles, risk profiles, and asset constraints. Credit should be linked to capacity building, market access, and asset ownership, not just repayment discipline. Market interventions must move beyond production to address value chains holistically. Supporting aggregation, branding, digital access, and collective bargaining can help women capture greater value. Technology, if designed with women’s realities in mind, can play a transformative role by reducing mobility constraints and expanding market reach. However, as experience shows, access alone is insufficient without confidence, trust, and institutional support.

Finally, social norms must be confronted directly, as recognition is not only a technical issue but a cultural one. When communities, families, and institutions begin to see women as entrepreneurs rather than helpers, power dynamics shift. Legal recognition, public visibility, and role models matter, and so does language. Calling women ‘business owners’ instead of beneficiaries is a political act, and not just semantics. Invisibility is not a natural state, and is produced through choices about what counts, who counts, and whose work is valued. Rural women have always been entrepreneurs in practice, even if not in name. Making their work visible is not about charity or inclusion alone, but it is about economic realism. Until rural women’s enterprises are recognised, measured, and supported as legitimate businesses, development efforts will continue to underestimate both the problem and the potential.

If this essay made you reflect on rural development, women’s entrepreneurship and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article in your inbox every week. 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.)

The cover image is generated using AI

Filed under Opinions, Social Impact Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Why are we always mentally tired

August 31, 2026 Leave a comment

There was a time when exhaustion was easier to identify. We worked long hours in physically demanding jobs, worked on farms under harsh weather, commuted through polluted industrial cities, or managed households without modern conveniences. Fatigue had a visible cause as the body had been pushed beyond its limits. Sleep was recovery; weekends were respite, and holidays meant genuine distance from work. Today, however, many of us wake up after a full night’s sleep, scroll through our phones before even leaving bed, drink expensive coffee, attend meetings from climate controlled offices, or increasingly, from the comfort of our homes and still feel mentally drained before the day has properly begun. While we are physically more comfortable than many generations before us, yet psychologically exhausted. We automate chores, outsource tasks, order meals at the tap of a screen, and have technologies that promise convenience at every turn. Yet an unshakable sense of mental fatigue persists. Somewhere between smartphones, hyper-connectivity, and the rise of productivity culture, rest stopped feeling restorative.

A major reason for this exhaustion is that much of modern work no longer looks like traditional labour. We may not be lifting heavy loads or working on factory floors, but our minds are constantly occupied by invisible labour. A typical day now involves hundreds of micro-decisions and mental calculations involving responding to emails, interpreting workplace messages, deciding whether to switch jobs, managing finances, maintaining health routines, learning new technologies, and staying professionally relevant in rapidly changing industries. Many white collar jobs are dominated by meetings, presentations, reporting systems, compliance paperwork, and endless communication loops that often create the feeling of working without producing anything tangible. Alongside this is the emotional labour of being perpetually available, maintaining workplace diplomacy, projecting enthusiasm on video calls, and managing social expectations. In India, this mental burden is often amplified by family structures and social pressures. A young professional in Bengaluru may simultaneously be managing a demanding job, financially supporting parents in Patna, paying off loans, and navigating expectations around marriage, property ownership, and children. The body may be still, but the mind rarely is.

Even rest has become strangely performative, as vacations are often curated for social media validation rather than genuine relaxation. People travel to scenic destinations only to spend significant time documenting the experience for Instagram. Meditation is increasingly packaged through apps that track streaks and productivity gains. Fitness devices convert sleep into measurable targets, making even rest feel like another metric to optimise. Reading books is replaced by listening to productivity podcasts at double speed. Leisure activities are routinely reframed as self-improvement exercises. Walking becomes hitting step goals, journaling becomes building mindfulness habits, and hobbies are often transformed into side hustles. Modern capitalism has shown an extraordinary ability to monetise downtime, and as a result many people return from vacations with travel fatigue, feeling as though they need another break to recover from their carefully curated break.

The smartphone has also fundamentally altered our relationship with boredom, and not for the better. For much of human history, boredom created opportunities for reflection and mental wandering. Waiting in line, sitting on a train, or standing at a bus stop often meant observing the world, thinking deeply, or simply letting the mind drift. Today, every idle moment is quickly filled by digital stimulation. We scroll while commuting, eating, waiting, and even during conversations. Notifications constantly interrupt our attention, creating an environment where our minds rarely experience stillness. Yet creativity, emotional processing, and deeper thinking often emerge during periods of mental quiet. Instead of such quiet, we are constantly consuming fragmented information like news updates, memes, political outrage, financial advice, celebrity gossip, and global crises, often within the span of a few minutes. The human brain was not designed to process wedding photos, economic anxieties, climate disasters, and viral dance videos in one endless stream.

The internet promised access to unlimited knowledge, but it also dramatically expanded the scale of social comparison. Earlier generations often compared themselves to neighbours, colleagues, or extended family members. Today, individuals compare their lives with influencers, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and strangers from across the globe. Social media ensures there is always someone younger, wealthier, more attractive, more successful, or apparently more fulfilled. This constant comparison fuels status anxiety. In India, where rapid economic mobility has transformed aspirations, this pressure can feel particularly intense. First-generation professionals moving from smaller towns to cities like Gurugram, Mumbai, or Hyderabad often carry the hopes of entire families. Success is rarely individual, as it is tied to broader expectations of upward mobility, making failure feel heavier and rest feel undeserved.

At the same time, many of the traditional institutions that once helped people cope with stress have weakened. Extended families are often geographically scattered. Friends have become fragmented, and neighbours frequently remain strangers. Young professionals frequently relocate for work, often living far from families and familiar support systems. Global cities create opportunity, but they can also intensify loneliness. Humans are deeply social beings, and managing life’s uncertainties without strong support systems creates an additional cognitive burden. Many people now seek connection through dating apps, therapy apps, social media, and digital entertainment that often provide temporary distraction but not necessarily meaningful belonging.

Technology has undoubtedly made life more convenient, but convenience should not be mistaken for ease. Ordering food online may save time, but it also introduces endless choices and decision fatigue. Streaming platforms eliminate the inconvenience of physical rentals but replace it with endless scrolling. Remote work reduces commuting but often erases boundaries between personal and professional life. Every convenience creates new layers of management. Earlier generations often had fewer options, which sometimes meant less mental clutter. Deciding what to eat for dinner today can involve navigating dietary preferences, delivery costs, health concerns, discount codes, and the occasional emotional justification that ordering biryani is a valid response to a difficult day, which, to be fair, it often is.

Perhaps most significantly, modern life is shaped by persistent uncertainty. Questions about job security, artificial intelligence, housing affordability, climate change, political instability, and retirement savings create a low-grade but constant sense of anxiety. These concerns are not abstract. Rising temperatures in Delhi, layoffs in technology sectors in Bengaluru, inflation affecting families in London and Lagos, and geopolitical instability all contribute to a sense that the future feels increasingly fragile. The human brain struggles with prolonged uncertainty, often interpreting it as a threat that demands constant vigilance.

The solutions to this exhaustion are unlikely to be found in another productivity hack or expensive wellness trend. What helps is often remarkably simple, like protecting boredom, taking walks without constant digital stimulation, nurturing relationships where no performance is required, setting boundaries with work, reducing unnecessary commitments, and accepting that not every aspect of life needs optimisation. Mental exhaustion is not always a sign of personal failure or poor discipline. In many cases, it is a rational response to systems designed to capture attention, maximise productivity, and blur the boundaries between labour and leisure. In a world that celebrates endless ambition, constant growth, and relentless hustle, perhaps the real skill of the future is learning how to preserve attention and protect mental stillness. It may involve resisting the urge to monetise every hobby, declining unnecessary busyness, and reclaiming genuine rest without guilt. In an era defined by noise, speed, and infinite demands on our attention, uninterrupted mental peace may be one of the rarest forms of luxury available and increasingly, one of the most necessary.

(Cover image is generated using AI)

Filed under Opinions Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Manu Mayank

Thinking Beyond the Obvious

Skip to content ↓