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.

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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 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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Mouse Trap

June 29, 2026 Leave a comment

For nearly twenty-five years, my right hand lived under the dictatorship of a small plastic rodent. Ever since I started using a laptop in the early 2000s, the external mouse became less of an accessory and more of a prosthetic extension of my personality. I carried one everywhere with the seriousness of a surgeon transporting medical equipment. If the mouse stopped working, productivity stopped. I would stare helplessly at the laptop screen as though civilisation itself had collapsed. The cursor would sit frozen somewhere on the desktop while I performed the ancient ritual familiar to millions of people who are now in their 40s and beyond: unplugging, reconnecting, blowing imaginary dust from USB ports, replacing batteries, muttering mild abuses at technology, and questioning the moral decline of modern electronics.

Then, a few months ago, I migrated from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook and, almost overnight, stopped using the mouse altogether. This was not a carefully researched productivity decision inspired by Silicon Valley minimalism. It was partly convenience, partly curiosity, and partly the exhaustion of carrying chargers, adapters, dongles, cables, and a mouse that increasingly seemed like emotional baggage from another technological era.

The first few weeks were humiliating as the trackpad felt impossibly sensitive and suspiciously intelligent. My fingers moved awkwardly across the smooth surface as tourists would get lost in a foreign airport! Every gesture seemed to trigger unintended consequences. I would attempt a simple scroll and accidentally open Mission Control, launch three applications, rotate an image, zoom into microscopic text, and somehow arrive at a screen asking whether I wanted to configure developer settings for something I did not even know existed. The laptop appeared to possess psychic abilities combined with a dark sense of humour.

For someone in their south side of 40s, this discomfort carried a peculiar emotional weight. Young people experience technological incompetence casually. They tap randomly, experiment fearlessly, and assume mastery will eventually arrive. Older people experience incompetence as a threat to identity. We belong to a generation raised on the belief that adulthood means expertise, and by middle age, one is expected to know things. One manages organisations, handles finances, raises children, negotiates contracts, supervises teams, and gives life advice to younger people. Then, suddenly, a glass rectangle on a laptop defeats you because your fingers cannot perform a three-finger swipe correctly.

So naturally, the instinct is to retreat, return to the mouse, restore dignity, and re-enter familiar territory. But I persisted, partly out of stubbornness and partly because carrying the mouse now felt faintly embarrassing, like travelling with a typewriter ribbon in the age of cloud computing. Gradually, my hand learned before the brain consciously understood, and the fingers adapted. One morning, I realised I was gliding across applications effortlessly. Switching desktops, zooming, scrolling, highlighting text, navigating browsers, previewing files, and moving between workflows happened with a fluidity that felt almost elegant. The movement resembled playing an instrument and not operating machinery. And suddenly I realised that after 25-odd years, I had escaped the mouse trap!

The phrase sounds trivial until one recognises what the mouse actually symbolises for people my age. It represents an entire category of inherited habits that once made sense but now quietly reduce efficiency while masquerading as professionalism. In the early days of laptops, external mice were genuinely superior. Trackpads were terrible inventions that were tiny, unresponsive squares apparently designed by engineers conducting experiments on human frustration. Using a mouse was rational, productive, and serious. But technology evolved while our habits remained frozen in time.

Modern trackpads are astonishingly sophisticated. Yet millions of middle-aged professionals continue carrying wireless mice around with almost ceremonial devotion. Entire coffee shops are filled with grown adults performing elaborate setup procedures before beginning work: laptop out, mouse out, mousepad out, Bluetooth paired, dongle inserted, batteries checked, table space negotiated. Some carry ergonomic mice that resemble futuristic sculptures designed by Scandinavian orthopaedic surgeons. Others own travel mice, office mice, gaming mice, backup mice, and emergency spare batteries, all to avoid learning a slightly different movement of the fingers.

I realised that the mouse is not merely hardware, but more of a psychological infrastructure. People accumulate systems that once solved problems but eventually become obstacles disguised as preferences. We continue using workflows developed in another technological century because familiarity produces emotional comfort. The brain loves efficiency, but it loves predictability even more.

This explains why otherwise intelligent professionals stubbornly cling to outdated habits with almost ideological passion. One proudly announces, ‘I still do all my accounts manually in Excel.’ Another insists, ‘I need every document printed before I can read it properly.’ Someone refuses cloud storage because physical folders feel ‘safer.’ Others maintain endless email chains, paper diaries, complicated filing systems, or insist on in-person meetings for conversations that could be resolved in three messages and a shared document.

These are rarely productivity choices but are comfort rituals. The irony is that people above forty are often fully capable of adapting quickly. In fact, they frequently learn faster than younger users because they understand systems, context, and patterns better. The barrier is rarely intelligence and more of an emotional resistance to temporary incompetence. Somewhere after forty, many people unconsciously stop allowing themselves to become beginners. I know senior executives who manage budgets worth millions but cannot merge PDF files without assistance. I know academics capable of explaining complex philosophy who panic when asked to collaborate on online documents. I know entrepreneurs who built businesses from scratch but still call younger employees to ‘fix the Wi-Fi.’ These are not incapable people but are simply trapped inside technological identities formed decades ago.

The deeper issue is that modern economies increasingly reward adaptability over accumulated procedure. Knowledge now expires faster than ever, and entire industries transform within a decade. Artificial intelligence is already automating tasks that many professionals considered permanently human only a few years ago. In such a world, the most dangerous sentence after forty is not ‘I don’t know.’ It is ‘I have always done it this way.’That sentence quietly closes the future.

The strange thing is that our generation has already proven its adaptability many times over. We are perhaps the only generation that experienced analogue childhood and digital adulthood simultaneously. We used landlines, pagers, floppy disks, fax machines, CDs, USB drives, cloud storage, smartphones, and now invisible synchronisation systems operating somewhere in distant data centres we barely understand. Yet somewhere in middle age, many professionals unconsciously declare technological retirement while still expecting to remain professionally relevant for another twenty years.

What surprised me most after abandoning the mouse was not improved navigation speed, but the psychological shift that followed. Once the discomfort barrier was crossed, I became less intimidated by unfamiliar systems generally and started experimenting more freely. Keyboard shortcuts stopped feeling annoying and began feeling liberating. I approached software with curiosity instead of caution. One begins questioning inherited inefficiencies elsewhere in life, too. Do meetings really need to last an hour? Do I really need to check my email constantly? Do I really need fifty WhatsApp groups? Do I really need to preserve every professional habit developed in 2004 simply because it once worked?

Watch a child interact with new technology and understand it instinctively. There is no shame in experimentation, no fear of appearing foolish. They touch everything, fail repeatedly, laugh, retry, and eventually master the system through curiosity. Adults, especially middle-aged adults, approach new interfaces like diplomats entering hostile territory. We seek guarantees before experimentation because failure now feels reputational.

But perhaps productivity after 40 is not about optimisation at all. Perhaps it is about preserving beginnerhood. The willingness to temporarily appear incompetent may now be one of the most valuable professional skills of modern life. The transition is always awkward. During my early trackpad days, I frequently muttered at the laptop like an ageing cricket fan complaining about T20 leagues. I missed the mouse clicks, triggered accidental gestures and zoomed into absurd screen magnifications. At one point, I somehow rotated an image sideways and spent several minutes trying to restore civilisation. But adaptation has an invisible curve. Frustration suddenly became fluency, and my fingers learned what the ego resisted.

Now, when I see professionals unpacking increasingly elaborate mouse arrangements beside ultra-modern laptops, I feel less judgment and more recognition. I see a smaller version of the same human tendency that affects all of us, of carrying unnecessary tools because they once solved genuine problems. The real trap was never the mouse itself but was the assumption that long familiarity automatically equals permanent necessity. Finally, after 25 years, I finally escaped the mouse trap, and the amusing part is that the cage door had been open for years.

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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.

(Cover image is generated using AI)

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