The price of stability in an unstable world

October 19, 2026 Leave a comment

We have been sold a dangerous idea that stability is normal and disruption is the exception, but is it? Yes, stability is an achievement, though an expensive one! Every morning, when the electricity is on, the internet works, the bank processes a transaction, food reaches you from a quick-commerce platform, a child gets to school, a salary arrives on time, and a hospital has the medicines it needs, it means thousands of invisible systems are doing their job in the background. We notice them only when they fail. For most of modern history, perhaps the greatest privilege was not wealth but predictability, the reasonable expectation that tomorrow would look broadly like today. That expectation is now harder to sustain as wars are disrupting supply chains, climate events are destroying livelihoods, artificial intelligence is unsettling occupations, financial volatility travels across borders in milliseconds, and demographic change is altering the very structure of families and work. We are entering an era in which instability may no longer be a temporary interruption to ordinary life but may become the usual.

So, who pays for stability in an unstable world? The obvious answer is governments, which build roads, maintain electricity grids, regulate financial systems, run hospitals, banks, police, and borders, subsidise food, respond to disasters, and provide social protection. But businesses pay too, as they maintain inventories, assets, diversify suppliers, retain cash and build redundancy into systems that would otherwise be cheaper and more efficient. So do families, as they keep emergency savings, buy insurance, invest in education, maintain social networks and sometimes make profoundly conservative choices because the consequences of failure are too high. Individuals pay in ways that don’t appear anywhere on a balance sheet. They stay in jobs they dislike because they’re secure. They postpone starting a business because they cannot afford six months without an income. They choose a predictable career over an uncertain vocation. They save instead of spending. They remain in cities they don’t particularly love because the city offers better healthcare, schools and employment opportunities. Stability, in other words, is not free, and we purchase it every day, often without realising that we are doing so.

But we don’t all pay the same price for instability. A wealthy household can absorb a medical emergency, while a poor household may have to borrow, sell an asset or withdraw a child from school. Likewise, a large corporation can survive a temporary collapse in demand, whereas a small enterprise may shut down permanently. A professional with savings can spend six months learning a new skill, and at the same time a casual worker may not be able to afford six days without income. The ability to absorb a shock is itself becoming a form of wealth. We have traditionally measured inequality through income, consumption and assets. Perhaps we now need another measure: the unequal distribution of uncertainty. Two families earning the same amount can live completely different lives if one has savings, insurance, secure housing, social capital and access to credit while the other survives from one monthly payment to the next.

Consider the millions of informal workers in India whose economic lives were disrupted during the COVID-19 lockdown. For many, the crisis was not simply about losing a job. It meant losing the entire architecture through which survival happened, like their daily wages, transport, access to urban work and sometimes food itself. The images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres home became one of the defining visual memories of the pandemic. The crisis revealed how much of India’s economic stability was being privately financed by people with almost no financial cushion. When formal systems failed, the burden was transferred to households, communities and individual workers, where families became the insurance company of last resort.

Something similar happens every day, at a smaller scale, when an illness strikes a low-income household. India has made enormous progress in expanding healthcare access, insurance and public health infrastructure, but for millions of families, healthcare expenditure can still become a destabilising financial event. The difference between a middle-class household experiencing a serious illness and a poor household experiencing the same illness is not simply the quality of medical treatment available. One family may recover financially after recovering medically, while the other may spend years repaying debt. The illness turns into a crisis cascade of healthcare expenses, debt, reduced consumption, interrupted education and sometimes the sale of productive assets.

Climate change is producing another version of the same problem. Take a small farmer in Bihar, Assam, Odisha or Rajasthan. Agriculture has always involved uncertainty, but climate volatility is changing the scale and frequency of that uncertainty. An unexpected flood, prolonged heat, irregular rainfall or pest outbreak can wipe out months of effort. We often respond by telling farmers to become ‘climate resilient’, adopt new practices, diversify crops or use technology. All of these can be useful, but we tend to forget that resilience requires resources. A farmer with savings, irrigation, crop insurance, access to credit and market information has options. A farmer who owns little land and depends entirely on one seasonal harvest has very few. We cannot keep asking the poorest citizens to become more resilient without asking whether we have given them the financial and institutional infrastructure with which resilience can actually be built.

The same contradiction is visible in India’s growing, small-enterprise economy. We celebrate entrepreneurship and tell young people to become entrepreneurs, women to start enterprises, rural communities to build businesses and small producers to enter digital markets. Yet entrepreneurship is, by definition, an encounter with uncertainty. A person with substantial capital can afford entrepreneurial failure, but, say, a woman investing her family’s only savings in a small enterprise cannot. When a rural woman starts a tailoring unit, food-processing business, handloom enterprise or digital service centre, she is not merely creating income but is taking a financial risk on behalf of her household. This is why access to credit alone is not enough and entrepreneurs need markets, digital access, business capabilities, working capital, insurance, peer networks and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to fail without falling into destitution.

And then there is the instability coming from new-age technology. AI may create extraordinary new opportunities, but it will also change the value of many existing skills. We tell older workers to remain employable in a labour market changing faster than the institutions designed to train them. But learning itself requires time, money and psychological space. The person working ten hours a day to pay rent cannot effortlessly become an AI-enabled professional at night. The person supporting a family cannot always afford to experiment with a new career. Adaptability is not simply an attitude; it is an economic resource.

This is where our understanding of resilience needs to change. We have increasingly turned resilience into an individual virtue of being adaptable, keep learning, diversify your income, build an emergency fund, exercise, take care of your mental health, prepare for the future, etc., etc. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but we risk creating a society in which structural instability is increasingly privatised. At some point we have to ask whether we are confusing resilience with the ability of individuals to absorb risks that should partly be shared by institutions.

How to prevent uncertainty from becoming catastrophic for ordinary people, perhaps, will be the central economic challenge of the next few decades. We cannot promise a farmer that the monsoon will behave, a worker that her job will exist for thirty years, or that the next pandemic, financial crisis or geopolitical shock will never happen. But we can design systems in which these events do not permanently destroy a person’s future. That would require a different conception of social protection. The welfare state of the industrial era was largely built around protecting people from particular risks of unemployment, old age, illness, disability and poverty. The unstable world ahead may require something more dynamic, like systems that help people move through disruption. 

The cost of living without psychological certainty is another hidden cost of instability that economists struggle to capture, where uncertainty consumes mental bandwidth. When you don’t know whether your job will survive, whether a medical emergency could wipe out your savings or whether your child’s education will remain affordable, some part of your mind is permanently occupied by contingency planning. And that has implications beyond individual wellbeing. A society in which people are perpetually afraid of falling backwards is unlikely to be as entrepreneurial, innovative or creative as a society in which people know that failure will not destroy them.

This produces a fascinating paradox as we want an innovative economy, but innovation requires risk. Perhaps, therefore, the goal should not be stability in the conventional sense. We should stop trying to build a world in which nothing goes wrong, as such a world does not exist. The goal should be recoverability, where the capacity of people, families, businesses and communities to recover when something inevitably goes wrong should be present. This is ultimately a question of what kind of social contract we want. The price of stability will rise as the world becomes more volatile. Governments will spend more on resilience. Companies will pay more for redundancy and security. Families will save more. Individuals will invest more in skills and insurance. But if we allow every emerging risk to be pushed downwards from governments to companies, from companies to workers, from institutions to families and finally from families to individuals, we will create a society that appears economically efficient while becoming increasingly fragile.

We have become obsessed with efficiency precisely when the world is demanding resilience. We have spent decades removing buffers because buffers looked like waste, including excess inventory, spare capacity, multiple suppliers, idle infrastructure, permanent workers, and generous social protection. Everything had to be optimised, become leaner, faster and cheaper. Until the world reminded us that the things we call inefficiencies are sometimes the very things that keep systems alive when they break. So, the question we should be asking is not how much stability we can afford. It is how much instability ordinary people can afford to absorb before a temporary shock becomes a permanent change in their lives. Because the future will not belong to those who successfully predict every disruption. Nobody can. It will belong to societies that make disruption survivable. And if we fail to build those societies, we may discover a deeply uncomfortable truth that the poor will not merely be the people with the least money, but they will be the people who can afford the least uncertainty.

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The cost of saying Yes 

June 8, 2026 Leave a comment

I used to think that saying ‘yes’ was a virtue as it made me feel useful, reliable, even noble at times. I often ended up saying yes to a meeting, yes to a request, yes to a friend, yes to a ‘quick call,’ yes to a ‘small favour,’ yes to that extra responsibility that would ‘hardly take any time.’ My life looked like a well diversified portfolio of yeses. And like many portfolios built on optimism rather than fundamentals, it was collapsing. No one teaches you this early on in life, but every yes is a transaction. It has a cost, a return, and often hidden liabilities. Unlike money, the currency you are spending here is time, attention, and energy, and those accounts don’t send monthly statements! They just end up depleting until one day you find yourself staring at your calendar, wondering why everything feels full and nothing feels meaningful.

When someone says, ‘Can you just hop on a quick call?’ it sounds harmless, as ‘quick’ is a very reassuring word. It suggests efficiency, minimal disruption, and a small and contained transaction. In reality, a ‘quick call’ is rarely just a call. It is context switching, mental preparation, the call itself, the afterthoughts, and the residual distraction that lingers long after the call ends. Economists would call this a hidden cost, and I call it the reason my day disappears in fragments. I remember agreeing to review a document for a colleague. ‘It won’t take long,’ they said, and they were technically correct, as the act of reviewing took about only 20 minutes. But the real cost was closer to an hour. I had to pause what I was doing, understand a different context, switch cognitive gears, and then find my way back to my original work. The 20-minute task came with a 40-minute tax. Multiply that across a week, and you begin to understand how entire days vanish without a trace.

Then there is the opportunity cost of the yes you don’t see. In economics, every choice comes with the value of the next best alternative you give up. When I say yes to a meeting at 6 PM, I am not just committing to that meeting, I am also saying no to my evening unwind, a conversation with family, reading, thinking, or simply doing nothing. The problem is, I don’t feel that loss immediately, and so I consistently undervalue what I am giving up. This is how you end up living a life where your time is fully allocated but poorly invested. I once agreed to attend a weekend workshop because it sounded interesting and, more importantly, because it felt rude to decline. That weekend, I missed a relaxing lunch at home that I didn’t realise I needed. The workshop was fine, but if I am honest, it wasn’t worth what I gave up. The return on that yes was modest, but the opportunity cost was high. The economy of my time had a deficit, which I wasn’t accounting for properly.

If saying yes were purely an economic decision, we would all be much better at it, but it is also deeply social. We say yes because we want to be liked, and we don’t want to disappoint someone. We say yes because somewhere along the way, we learned that being agreeable is a sign of being good. There is also a subtle reputational economy at play, and saying yes signals availability, cooperation, and enthusiasm. It makes you look like a team player, a dependable friend, a responsive colleague. Saying no, on the other hand, feels risky as it might signal disinterest, arrogance, or boundaries. And so, we keep saying yes, not because it makes sense, but because it feels safer. I have done this more times than I can count—agreed to calls I didn’t need to be on, events I didn’t want to attend, responsibilities that stretched me thinner than I should have allowed. Each yes was small, reasonable, and socially acceptable, and together, they created a life that felt crowded but curiously unfulfilling.

There is also the law of diminishing returns quietly operating in the background. The first few yeses in your day are productive as they move things forward, create value, and strengthen relationships. But beyond a certain point, each additional yes adds less value and more strain. The sixth meeting of the week on the same thing is not as useful as the first. The fifth commitment in a day is not as meaningful as the second. The twentieth favour you agree to does not make you twenty times more helpful, and only makes you feel exhausted. I realised this one evening when I found myself in a meeting, nodding at the right moments, contributing just enough to appear engaged, but mentally somewhere else entirely. I wasn’t adding value anymore and was just present in body, absent in mind. That was a negative return on yes, a clear sign that my internal economy was out of balance.

There is a phrase I have used liberally in my life, ‘I will manage.’ It is a beautiful phrase because it is optimistic, confident, and slightly heroic. It suggests resilience, capability, and a willingness to take things on. It is also, more often than not, a lie. ‘I will manage’ is what we tell others when we overcommit. It is what we tell ourselves when we ignore constraints. It is the verbal equivalent of taking on more debt without checking your balance, which keeps accumulating steadily. Until one day, you are not managing, only barely coping, moving from one commitment to another with a vague sense of urgency and a constant feeling of being behind.

If saying no is so rational, why is it so difficult? Because no is final and forces you to prioritise. Yes, on the other hand, keeps options open as it delays decision making. It allows you to feel helpful without immediately confronting the cost. There is also a psychological discomfort in saying no. It creates a moment of tension, however brief, between you and the other person, and we are wired to avoid that tension. But every time we avoid that small discomfort, we create a larger one for ourselves later. The stress simply shifts location from a brief external awkwardness to a prolonged internal burden.

What I have slowly come to realise is that no has compounding benefits. The first few noes feel awkward, even slightly uncomfortable. You second guess yourself, wondering if you were too blunt, too inflexible, or too selfish. But over time, your calendar starts to breathe, your days have space, and your work becomes more focused. Your relationships become more intentional because you are choosing them, not squeezing them in. When I started saying no more consciously, I noticed a real shift. I had time to think, to read, to do things without constantly rushing to the next commitment. The quality of my yeses improved because they were fewer and more deliberate.

For me, saying no is not about rejecting others, but more about protecting something. Sometimes it is protecting my time, energy, attention, and occasionally, my sanity. Instead of thinking, ‘I am letting someone down,’ I think, ‘I am choosing where to show up fully with intent.’ Of course, saying no does not require bluntness or indifference. There is an art to it, though I am still in the learning phase. A thoughtful no acknowledges the request but remains clear about the boundary. You need not overexplain or apologise excessively. ‘I won’t be able to take this on right now.’ Or ‘I would love to, but I don’t have the bandwidth this week.’ Or ‘I am focusing on a few priorities at the moment, so I’ll have to pass.’ These are decisions and not rejections, and they make life coherent.

The goal is not to eliminate yes, but to make it meaningful again. A well placed yes to a project you care about, a conversation that matters, a moment that enriches your life has immense value. But for that yes to exist, it must be protected by many noes. In economics, scarcity creates value, therefore, if your yes is abundant, it is cheap. If it is scarce, it is meaningful. I still say yes, probably more than I should, as old habits die hard. But I am more aware now, as I try to pause a little longer before responding. I ask myself simple questions, like what is the real cost, what am I giving up, and is this the best use of my time right now? Sometimes the answer is still yes, but increasingly, it is no. In the end, the economics of saying yes is not about maximising how much you can take on. It is about optimising what truly matters, because a life filled with yeses may look productive from the outside, but a life shaped by thoughtful noes is a life that actually adds up.

If this essay made you pause and think about your life and the hidden cost of being a ‘YES’ person, subscribe to my blog for one article every week in your mailbox.

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Why can’t you have it all

April 20, 2026 2 Comments

We grew up on a promise that if we worked hard enough, planned carefully, and optimised intelligently, we could have it all. Modern culture reinforces this belief on a daily basis that we can have a successful career, a loving family, financial security, good health, lasting friendships, purpose, and inner peace. Social media displays curated snapshots of people who appear to be excelling simultaneously in every domain of life. We have been hearing since our childhoods that balance is achievable with the right morning routine of ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise’. Yet beneath this narrative lies a simple truth that you can’t have it all, at least not all at once, not at full intensity, and certainly not without significant trade-offs. The reason is not a lack of ambition or discipline, but scarcity, which is the most fundamental principle governing both economics and human life.

Scarcity is often associated with money, but today, the scarcest resources are time, energy, and attention. Every human being, regardless of wealth or status, receives the same twenty-four hours each day, making time the most democratic of all constraints. No one can accumulate unused hours or borrow from the future without cost. We speak casually about ‘managing time,’ yet time itself cannot be managed as it flows at a constant pace. Every hour invested in one activity is an hour unavailable for another, managing only the choices between time availability. The professional who chooses to work late trades time that could have been spent with family. The parent who prioritises caring for children may delay career advancement. The entrepreneur who pours weekends into building a venture sacrifices leisure and rest. These trade-offs are often invisible in the moment, but they accumulate quietly over the years. Life does not unfold in parallel tracks where everything progresses simultaneously. It unfolds sequentially, through seasons that demand different commitments.

If time is the vehicle of life, energy is its fuel. Two individuals may possess identical schedules yet operate at dramatically different capacities. Energy fluctuates with sleep, nutrition, stress, age, emotional well-being, and sense of purpose. Modern ambition frequently assumes that energy can be summoned indefinitely through willpower, caffeine/nicotine, or motivation. But biology imposes limits, cognitive fatigue reduces clarity and creativity, and emotional exhaustion diminishes patience and empathy, while physical depletion erodes resilience. Burnout is not a failure of time management but is the inevitable consequence of sustained energy misallocation. Many high achievers discover that even when their calendars appear optimised, their internal reserves are depleted. They attempt to excel in multiple demanding roles of being a professional, parent, partner, and friend simultaneously without acknowledging that each role draws from the same finite energy pool. Over time, the system protests, sleep suffers, health declines, and relationships strain. The pursuit of ‘having it all’ quietly converts into chronic exhaustion.

Perhaps more than time or energy, attention defines scarcity. In the digital age, attention has become a commodity aggressively competed for by corporations and platforms. Notifications, news feeds, emails, and endless streams of content fragment focus into micro-intervals, with us being connected to everything and fully present in almost nothing. Attention determines lived experience; whatever captures our focus becomes our reality. When attention is scattered across dozens of stimuli each hour, depth disappears, and conversations become half-engaged exchanges. Work becomes interrupted bursts of activity, and leisure becomes simultaneous scrolling. Creativity, which requires uninterrupted thought, struggles to emerge in fragmented environments. Intimacy, which depends on sustained presence, weakens under constant distraction. The desire to ‘have it all’ often leads to diluted attention spread thinly across many domains, leaving none fully nourished.

Technology reinforces the thinking that multitasking is efficient, but cognitive science consistently demonstrates the cost of task switching. Each shift of focus consumes mental energy and reduces performance quality. We may believe we are building a career, nurturing relationships, maintaining fitness, staying informed, and cultivating a side project all at once. We may be engaging partially in each, achieving adequacy but rarely excellence. To choose one path intensely is to decline others, at least temporarily, as excellence is exclusive by nature and rewards those willing to concentrate rather than diversify endlessly.

The pressure to ‘have it all’ is further amplified by comparison, especially as digital platforms present curated narratives where achievements are showcased without context. We compare our daily struggles to others’ peak moments and conclude that we are falling behind. Yet every visible success rests upon invisible trade-offs. The CxO with rapid career progression may have sacrificed personal time. The entrepreneur enjoying autonomy may endure financial uncertainty. The individual projecting calm online may be filled with anxiety privately. Role overload has become a defining feature of modern adulthood. We inflate our identities, attempting to be accomplished professionals, devoted family members, socially conscious citizens, physically fit individuals, and culturally relevant participants all at once. Without conscious prioritisation, this multiplicity breeds internal conflict.

Trade-offs are not signs of failure but are expressions of values. Every yes carries an implicit no. When we resist acknowledging trade-offs, we drift into reactive living, responding to emails, obligations, and external demands rather than intentional priorities. Economics teaches that scarce resources must be allocated toward what yields the highest perceived value. The same principle applies to life, and time, energy, and attention must be directed consciously. Without deliberate allocation, they will be consumed by urgency rather than importance. The question shifts from ‘Can I have it all?’ to ‘What is worth the cost?’ Clarity transforms scarcity from limitation into guidance.

Fragmentation carries hidden consequences as shallow engagement reduces satisfaction. When attention is dispersed continuously, creativity declines and emotional presence weakens. We may touch many aspects of life but rarely hold any deeply. The paradox of modern abundance is experiential thinness. Surrounded by options, we struggle to experience fullness. Having everything available does not equate to inhabiting it meaningfully.

Perhaps the problem lies in our definition of ‘having it all.’ If it means maximising every measurable domain simultaneously, which is unattainable. But if it means living in alignment with consciously chosen priorities, it becomes possible. Fulfilment may not require expansion in all directions, but it does require coherence. When time, energy, and attention align with core values, life feels integrated even if certain ambitions are deferred. We may not achieve extreme wealth, recognition, and perfect physical condition simultaneously, yet we may experience deep contentment through purposeful work, loving relationships, and sustainable health practices.

Designing a life within scarcity requires discipline and ruthless prioritisation to clarify which domains deserve peak focus. Protecting energy through sleep, movement, and boundaries preserves capacity. Practising attention hygiene, limiting digital intrusion and creating focused blocks enhances depth. Strategic neglect acknowledges that some areas will temporarily receive minimal investment without inducing guilt. Redefining success as alignment rather than accumulation reduces external pressure. These practices do not eliminate scarcity, but teaches us to navigate it wisely.

There is liberation in accepting limits, where comparison loses some of its sting when we acknowledge that no human can optimise every dimension simultaneously. Even the most accomplished individuals operate within constraints. Everyone trades something. The artist may trade financial stability for creative freedom. The corporate leader may trade time for influence. The activist may trade comfort for impact. The parent may trade professional acceleration for presence. No path is without a cost, and recognising this universal truth fosters humility and self-compassion.

Ultimately, the longing to ‘have it all’ often masks deeper desires for security, significance, love, belonging, or meaning. When these needs are identified clearly, excess pursuits lose their urgency. One may discover that respect matters more than status, intimacy more than visibility, and contribution more than accumulation. You cannot maximise career, family, health, wealth, friendships, and personal growth simultaneously at peak intensity. Human existence is bounded by time, powered by finite energy, and shaped by limited attention. Yet within those boundaries lies possibility. You may not have everything, but you can choose what receives your best. In a culture obsessed with expansion, the rare act is deliberately selecting what truly matters and committing to it fully. You cannot have it all, but you can have enough, deeply experienced and consciously chosen. And in the arithmetic of a scarce world, that may be the closest approximation of abundance available to us.

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