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)

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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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Are you time-poor?

June 1, 2026 Leave a comment

Somewhere between the invention of the pressure cooker and the arrival of 5G, we Indians collectively misplaced something really important: Time. Not lost in a dramatic, cinematic way, without violins or slow motion, but more like a wallet lifted from your back pocket in a crowded Metro. One moment it was there, lazy afternoons, unplanned conversations, the comforting stretch of doing nothing, and the next moment, gone. In its place, we now have Google Calendar reminders, WhatsApp notifications, and a persistent feeling that we are always slightly late for something, even when we are sitting still. Welcome to the era of time poverty, where your bank balance may look respectable, your Zomato order history may be thriving, and your LinkedIn profile may be aggressively inspirational, but your time account is permanently overdrawn.

Let’s rewind a bit, not to some sepia-toned village fantasy, but just a generation ago, in the same cities we inhabit today, where life had a different rhythm. Time was not abundant in a literal sense, as people still worked hard, commuted, raised families, but it felt less fractured. Evenings were events in themselves, when people sat outside their homes discussing politics and cricket over multiple cups of tea, and that one neighbour who always seemed to have too many visitors. Children played gully cricket until the ball inevitably landed in someone’s kitchen, leading to heated negotiations that doubled as character-building exercises. Mothers called out from balconies and verandahs with a mix of authority and affection, summoning children home before darkness turned into parental anxiety. There were fewer choices, yes, but also fewer decisions to make. Dinner was whatever was cooked, and nobody spent fifteen minutes comparing paneer butter masala across twelve delivery apps while reading 237 reviews written by people who clearly have too much time.

The great unifier, television, had one channel, Doordarshan, maybe two if you were fancy. If you missed your favourite show, you missed it, as there was no replay, no binge-watching, no existential spiral at 2 AM where you question your life choices while watching the fourth episode of something you don’t even like. And waiting, ah, waiting was a legitimate activity. We waited for letters, for phone calls on the clunky telephone sets, for exam results. Waiting was not seen as wasted time; it was just part of time itself, like monsoons or power cuts. Our minds wandered, conversations happened, and occasionally, we even ‘thought’ our own thoughts without an algorithm suggesting what to think next!

Now fast forward to urban India today, where time is not just scarce but seems to be actively hunted. A typical weekday begins with negotiation between you and your alarm clock, which has now evolved into a relentless life coach with a snooze button. Before your feet even touch the ground, your thumb has already scrolled through emails, news updates, Instagram reels, and three subtle reminders that everyone else seems to be doing better than you at 7:17 am in the morning. We often eat breakfast alongside a call that begins with ‘Can you hear me?’ and ends with ‘Let’s take this offline,’ a phrase that has single-handedly consumed more human hours than traffic jams.

If time poverty had a national symbol, it would undoubtedly be the urban traffic. Whether you are inching along the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway, contemplating your life choices at Bengaluru’s Central Silk Board junction, or performing advanced geometry in Mumbai’s local trains, your commute is not just a journey, but a full emotional experience. You begin with hope, perhaps even optimism, maybe today will be different, maybe traffic will be lighter, signals more cooperative, humanity kinder. Ten minutes later, you are recalibrating your expectations, bargaining with Google Maps, and listening to podcasts or FM radio not out of curiosity but as a coping mechanism. By the time you reach your destination, you have experienced a full spectrum of human emotion and possibly learned a new cuss word, none of which you will remember by lunchtime.

And then come the meetings, those sacred rituals of modern work culture where time doesn’t exactly die, it dissolves. Meetings to prepare for meetings, meetings to debrief previous meetings, and meetings that exist solely because someone somewhere feared the silence of not having a meeting. Entire hours are spent discussing action items that could have been bullet points in an email, that could have been a message, that could have been… nothing. Ironically, in our relentless pursuit of productivity, we have created systems so elaborate that they ensure we have no time left to actually produce anything. Efficiency has become a performance, and everyone is performing.

Of course, technology was supposed to save us, and in many ways, it has. Tasks that once took hours now take minutes, information is accessible instantly, and communication is effortless. But somewhere along the way, technology stopped being a tool and started behaving like a very needy companion. Your phone, that sleek little rectangle of promise, is now a workplace, an entertainment centre, a social hub, and an anxiety generator rolled into one. You pick it up to check the time and resurface twenty-seven minutes later, having watched three reels, replied to two messages, ignored five, read half an article, and completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place. Time isn’t just being spent; it is being nibbled away in tiny, invisible bites.

Urban India today offers an abundance of choices in the form of food, experiences, careers, and content. But abundance comes with a hidden tax in the form of decision fatigue. Earlier, dinner was simple, and now it is an exercise in research, comparison, and occasional soul-searching. Even leisure has become labour, as watching a movie involves navigating multiple platforms, genres, languages, and algorithmic suggestions, each insisting it knows you better than you know yourself. By the time you decide what to watch, you are too tired to watch anything. The freedom to choose has quietly transformed into the burden of choosing.

Friendships, once spontaneous and effortless, are now managed with the precision of project timelines. ‘Let’s catch up’ translates into checking calendars, blocking slots, rescheduling due to unforeseen commitments, and finally meeting for exactly sixty minutes before someone inevitably says, ‘I have an early morning tomorrow.’ Even weddings, those grand celebrations of chaos and joy, have been optimised for efficiency. Destination weddings over long weekends, carefully curated guest lists, and itineraries that resemble conference agendas. Nothing says romance like a well-managed Google Sheet.

But perhaps the most insidious aspect of time poverty is lack of attention rather than the lack of hours. You may technically have free time, but your mind is rarely free. You are at dinner, but thinking about work. You are on vacation, but checking emails. You are resting but feeling guilty about it. The boundary between work and life hasn’t just blurred; it has politely excused itself and left the building. What remains is a constant hum of ‘I should be doing something,’ a background noise that turns even moments of rest into opportunities for anxiety.

In India, this phenomenon feels particularly intense because of the unique cocktail of factors at play. Rapid urbanisation has stretched infrastructure beyond its limits, turning simple commutes into endurance tests. Aspirational pressure ensures that everyone is constantly striving for better jobs, better salaries, better lifestyles. Digital adoption has been fast and enthusiastic, compressing decades of technological evolution into a few short years. And social expectations are layered on top of all this that rarely reduce, even as professional demands increase. The result is a society trying to operate at first-world speed with third-world infrastructure and fourth-world patience.

So are we truly poor in time? Or have we simply allowed time to be colonised and constantly interrupted? The uncomfortable truth is that it is a bit of both. We are busier, yes, but we are also more distracted. We have more tools, but less control. We are connected, but not always present. Time poverty, then, is not just about scarcity, but more about how we experience the time that we have. It is the difference between a long, uninterrupted conversation and a series of half-hearted replies. Between a meal savoured and a meal consumed while scrolling. Between living time and merely passing through it.

The solution, if there is one, is unlikely to be dramatic. Most of us are not about to quit our jobs and retreat to the Himalayas like some of our friends have, and even if we did, we would probably post about it online. But small shifts are possible, like protecting pockets of uninterrupted time, reducing unnecessary decisions, and occasionally allowing ourselves the radical act of doing nothing. These are not grand gestures, but they are meaningful ones. They remind us that time is not just something to be managed but something to be experienced.

We often say, ‘I don’t have time,’ when what we really mean is, ‘Something else has taken priority.’ Time poverty is not just a condition but a consequence of choices, both ours and the systems we inhabit. In a country that has mastered the art of jugaad, perhaps it is high time we apply that ingenuity to time itself. Because somewhere between the past we romanticise and the present we rush through lies a simple, almost rebellious idea that what if we stopped trying to save time and started trying to live it?

If this essay made you pause and think about how you spend your time, subscribe to my blog for one article every week in your mailbox.

(Cover image is generated using AI)

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The cost of ‘free’ in India

May 4, 2026 Leave a comment

The word ‘free’ carries a unique emotional and political charge in India. It signals relief, generosity, access, and sometimes even justice. In a country marked by deep inequality and historical deprivation, the idea of receiving something without having to pay for it feels not just attractive but morally right. Free school meals, free healthcare camps, free ration, free mobile data, free apps, free advice—these are not fringe phenomena but central features of everyday life. Yet as ‘free’ becomes more pervasive, it becomes more urgent to interrogate what it actually costs in reality. Because nothing in this world is truly free. Even when money is not exchanged, value is still transferred, quietly, unevenly, and often invisibly.

The digital revolution has made ‘free’ feel natural, even inevitable. India’s smartphone explosion, driven by affordable devices and some of the world’s cheapest mobile data, has brought hundreds of millions online in a short span of time. For first-time internet users, free apps are often the internet itself. Messaging platforms, video-sharing apps, digital wallets, navigation tools, shopping platforms, and learning apps promise unlimited access at zero cost. Downloading them requires no financial transaction, only a tap on a screen. This apparent absence of cost masks a different economy altogether, one where data, attention, and behaviour are the currencies being traded.

Every free app extracts value as it collects personal information, tracks usage patterns, studies preferences, and monitors behaviour across platforms. In return for convenience and access, we surrender fragments of our digital selves, often without fully understanding the implications. In India, where digital literacy has not kept pace with digital adoption, this exchange is especially asymmetrical. We routinely accept terms and conditions that we cannot realistically read or comprehend, granting permissions that would be alarming if framed in simpler language. Location data, contact lists, browsing habits, voice samples, and even biometric identifiers become assets in a vast data economy. We do not pay in rupees, but we pay in terms of our privacy, autonomy, and long-term exposure.

This is not a small concern, as data is power, and not merely information. When aggregated at scale, it allows companies to predict behaviour, shape consumption, influence opinion, and nudge decision-making. In India, where hundreds of millions engage daily with free digital platforms, this concentration of behavioural data in private hands has far-reaching consequences. It affects what we see, what we buy, how we think, and even how we vote. The cost of free apps is not just about individual privacy but collective vulnerability to influence and manipulation. What appears to be a harmless trade in terms of free services for data becomes a structural imbalance when we lack meaningful choice or awareness.

Free apps are designed to maximise engagement because engagement drives advertising revenue. Endless scrolling, autoplay videos, push notifications, algorithmic recommendations, and gamified feedback loops are not accidental features; instead, they are engineered mechanisms to capture and hold attention. Time spent on these platforms is monetised elsewhere, converted into impressions, clicks, and behavioural insights. For us, this translates into hours lost daily to digital consumption. The opportunity cost is immense in terms of time not spent on learning, work, rest, relationships, or reflection. In a country where time poverty is already acute for large sections of the population, the extraction of attention is a high but rarely acknowledged cost of ‘free.’

Alongside free apps, free government schemes occupy a central place in India’s public imagination. Welfare programs offering free food, free electricity, free healthcare, free education, and direct cash transfers are often framed as moral imperatives in a society with widespread poverty. And indeed, many such schemes have had transformative impacts. Free school meals have improved nutrition and attendance. Subsidised healthcare has saved lives. Social security schemes have provided safety nets in times of crisis. To dismiss free schemes outright would be both inaccurate and unjust.

However, the scale and politics of ‘free’ in governance demand scrutiny. Government schemes are funded by public money, either through taxation or borrowing. When services are offered for free, the cost is distributed across society, including future generations. Fiscal resources are finite, and every rupee allocated to a subsidy is a rupee not spent elsewhere. The real question is not whether the state should provide support, but how that support is designed, targeted, and sustained. Poorly designed free schemes can strain public finances, crowd out long-term investments, and create distortions that are difficult to reverse.

One of the most persistent risks associated with free government schemes is the shift from empowerment to dependency. When benefits are delivered without clear pathways to capability-building, translating into skills, livelihoods, ownership, or agency, they can trap beneficiaries in cycles of reliance. This is not a failure of intent but of design. Welfare that does not evolve into opportunity risks becoming permanent relief rather than temporary support. Over time, political incentives can encourage the expansion of free entitlements without corresponding investments in productivity, institutional capacity, or economic growth. The cost, then, is borne in slower development, rising debt, and reduced fiscal flexibility.

There is also a less visible social cost when citizens begin to relate to the state primarily as a provider of free goods rather than as a facilitator of opportunity, and expectations shift. Accountability becomes transactional, and long-term policy thinking gives way to short-term appeasement. This dynamic can erode democratic deliberation, reducing complex governance challenges to simplistic promises of free distribution. In such an environment, the language of rights is often mixed with the politics of giveaways, weakening the deeper idea of citizenship rooted in participation, contribution, and shared responsibility.

In India, ‘free’ advice is abundant and rarely priced. Friends, relatives, colleagues, social media influencers, and anonymous online forums dispense guidance on everything from investments and careers to health, parenting, and mental well-being. At one level, this reflects strong social bonds and collective problem-solving. Knowledge-sharing has always been part of Indian society. But in the contemporary context, the proliferation of free advice, especially online, has begun to undermine the value of expertise itself. Professional knowledge is produced through years of education, training, practice, and ethical accountability. When expert advice is expected to be free, its perceived value diminishes. Professionals are pressured to give away labour without compensation, while advice-seekers are encouraged to treat complex problems as easily solvable through quick opinions. The result is often superficial guidance applied to situations that demand nuance. In fields like finance, law, and health, the consequences can be serious, resulting in misdiagnoses, financial losses, legal complications, and long-term harm.

Digital platforms have amplified this problem dramatically. Social media rewards confidence, not competence. Algorithms favour content that is engaging, simplified, and emotionally charged. As a result, the loudest voices often drown out the most qualified ones. Free advice becomes entertainment, stripped of context and accountability. Influencers monetise indirectly through advertising, brand deals, or lead generation, while audiences consume advice under the illusion that it is altruistic. The hidden cost here is the ability to distinguish reliable knowledge from persuasive noise.

Behavioural economics shows that people disproportionately favour free options, even when they are inferior to low-cost alternatives. The absence of price triggers a sense of gain that overrides rational evaluation. In India, this bias plays out repeatedly when users choose free digital services with weak privacy protections over modestly priced, safer alternatives,  beneficiaries prefer immediate free benefits over long-term investments in capability, or individuals trust free advice over paid expertise because payment itself is mistaken for bias. These patterns are not signs of ignorance but of how human psychology interacts with scarcity and aspiration.

Free social media platforms, while enabling connection, intensify comparison. Carefully curated images of success, beauty, and happiness circulate endlessly, shaping aspirations and insecurities. The cost is stress, anxiety, and diminished self-worth, especially among young users. These effects are not accidental side-effects but structural outcomes of platforms designed to maximise engagement rather than well-being.

When platforms subsidise services to gain scale, smaller players struggle to compete. Local businesses, creators, and service providers are often forced into ecosystems where they generate value but capture little of it. Revenue flows upward and outward, concentrating power in a few large entities. Price signals weaken, making it difficult for sustainable, high-quality alternatives to emerge. Over time, consumers accustomed to free access become resistant to paying for quality, undermining the viability of independent work and innovation.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that free is inherently harmful. Free education, free public healthcare, free libraries, and free public infrastructure have historically been among the most powerful tools for social progress. The issue is not free versus paid, but opaque free versus conscious free. When free services are transparent about costs, respectful of users, and oriented toward empowerment rather than extraction, they create genuine public value. When free becomes a strategy to harvest data, attention, votes, or dependency, its costs far outweigh its benefits.

The challenge for India is to develop a more mature relationship with ‘free.’ This requires stronger regulation of digital platforms, particularly around data protection, transparency, and competition. It requires better design and evaluation of welfare schemes, ensuring they build capabilities and not just deliver consumption. It requires cultural shifts that restore respect for expertise and recognise that paying for knowledge is not exploitation but investment. And most importantly, it requires citizens to ask harder questions when something is offered at no cost.

Who is paying for this? What am I giving up? Who benefits in the long run? Is this making me more capable or more dependent? These questions are not cynical, but are of utmost importance. In a complex society, the absence of price does not mean the absence of cost. It only means the cost has been displaced onto privacy, time, dignity, judgment, or the future. India’s relationship with ‘free’ will shape its developmental trajectory in profound ways. If used wisely, then free access can level the playing field and unlock human potential; else it can deepen inequalities, hollow out institutions, and quietly extract value from those least equipped to see it. Free is never just an economic choice; instead, it is a moral, political, and social one. And in a country as large and consequential as India, the true cost of free is something we can no longer afford to ignore.

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Algorithmic Self

September 29, 2025 1 Comment

In today’s digital landscape, our identities are increasingly shaped by algorithms. These complex sets of rules and calculations determine the content we see on social media, the advertisements we encounter, and even the news we consume. This phenomenon, often referred to as the ‘algorithmic self,’ highlights the interplay between technology and personal identity. Algorithmic mechanisms on digital media are powered by social drivers, creating a feedback loop complicating the role of algorithms and existing social structures. 

At the core of the algorithmic self is the idea that our online behaviours and interactions feed into algorithms that, in turn, influence our future actions. Are we becoming the people our feeds want us to be? Scroll long enough on social media platforms like Insta, Tube, or FB and you’ll notice that the content feels uncannily tailored to you. Your feed seems to know what you crave before you do, an oddly perfect mix of travel destinations, recipes, memes, news, workouts, and political takes. This can lead to a more personalised online experience, but it also raises questions about the extent to which our choices are truly our own. What began as a convenience has evolved into something far more consequential. We are not merely using algorithms anymore; we are slowly becoming the selves they design for us.

Algorithms are built to predict and keep us engaged. Every click, pause, like, or scroll is recorded and analysed. In return, the system feeds us more of what we have already consumed. This sounds harmless. After all, who wouldn’t want relevant recommendations? But personalization is never neutral. When a platform rewards the content that hooks us, it amplifies our biases and shrinks our curiosity. Over time, the feedback loop begins to define our worldview, narrowing the range of opinions, art, music, or even relationships we encounter.

The unsettling part is that the algorithm’s goal is not truth, diversity, or personal growth. It is engagement. If desire makes you scroll, it will serve you love. If envy fuels your clicks, it will curate envy-inducing lifestyles. What feels like a reflection of your taste is often a reflection of what keeps you online.

Human behaviour is always shaped by culture, but algorithmic influence is different in speed and precision. Traditional media might set trends, but it never recalibrated itself in real time for every individual. Today, AI systems track micro-reactions—how long your eyes linger on a video frame, how quickly you swipe away, and adjust instantly.

This raises a disturbing question. When you decide to buy a product, support a social cause, or adopt a new hobby, how much of that decision is you, and how much is a carefully engineered nudge? We still feel autonomous because the algorithm rarely forces choices. Instead, it quietly limits what enters the realm of possibility. You can’t choose what you don’t see. Is this the erosion of free will?

Living in an algorithmic world also reshapes identity. Our “digital selves” are rewarded for consistency. The more we like certain posts, the more similar content we receive, and the more we feel pressure to maintain that version of ourselves, whether it’s the fitness enthusiast, the foodie, the activist, or the minimalist. The feed trains us to be predictable because unpredictability breaks the machine’s efficiency.

The rise of the algorithmic self also brings about ethical considerations. There are concerns about privacy, as the data collected to fuel these algorithms often includes personal and sensitive information. Additionally, there is the issue of transparency. Many algorithms operate as ‘black boxes,’ with their inner workings hidden from users. This lack of transparency can make it difficult to understand how decisions are being made and to hold platforms accountable for their actions.

Many people feel a subtle dissonance, their offline preferences drift, but their online persona stays fixed. We perform for the algorithm, optimizing captions, hashtags, even our emotions, to remain visible. Our feeds don’t just reflect who we are, they encourage us to stay who we were yesterday.

But then how do we break the loop?  The answer is not to reject technology altogether. Algorithms are not inherently evil; they can help us discover music, connect with communities, find a job we want, or learn skills we might never find on our own. The challenge is to reclaim agency within the system.

Practical acts of resistance can be quite simple, like, disrupting the feed by clicking on unfamiliar topics or following people outside your cultural bubble; time-box social media use or schedule ‘algorithm-free’ days; read newsletters or listen podcasts where engagement isn’t the primary metric. There could be several other ways to disrupt and reintroduce randomness. However, the most important step, is awareness. Algorithms will always evolve faster than regulations or ethical guidelines. The only lasting defence is a conscious user, someone who understands that every scroll is a form of training data.

The algorithmic self represents a significant shift in how we navigate our identities in the digital age. The question is not whether technology shapes us. It always has. As we continue to integrate technology into our daily lives, it is essential to remain mindful of the ways in which algorithms shape our identities and to advocate for greater transparency and ethical considerations in their design and implementation. The real question is whether we allow a handful of opaque systems to quietly define what we desire, believe, and become. If we don’t actively resist, our algorithmic selves may thrive while our authentic selves quietly disappear into the feed.

Cover image generated using AI

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