Author: Srihari

I’ve been spending my days performing a very specific kind of construction work. I am building a person.

It happens in the micro-moments. My son picks up a block, and I say, “You did it!” He grabs a truck, and I ask, “Whose toy is this?” He smiles, and I tell him, “Good boy.”

I am handing him bricks. I am mixing the mortar. With every compliment and every possessive pronoun, I am teaching him to build a wall around a space that used to be wide open. I am teaching him to be a “Me.”

And as I watch him absorb this, I realize there’s a private joke running through the entire human experience—a joke so enormous and so obvious that almost nobody sees it. We spend our whole lives inside the punchline without ever quite hearing it.

It begins right here. Not with a letter. Not with a sound. But with the story I am currently feeding him.

A tiny narrator appears, claiming authorship of every movement, every thought, every desire. A center forms—not because there is one, but because society needs one to exist. And so he learns to walk around wearing a mask he doesn’t know is a mask, rehearsing an identity he will eventually defend as if it were his soul.

No one tells him that this “self” is a kind of hallucination with a mailing address. I hand him the fiction and forget to mention it’s fiction. And by the time he is old enough to suspect anything, the mask will have already fused to the nerves.

Later in life, if someone begins to sense the seam—that slight wobble in the machinery of “I, me, mine”—they often mistake it for enlightenment. But that’s just another mask, another role, another illusion of solidity wearing a spiritual accent. The moment anyone becomes too certain about the nature of illusion, you can be sure the illusion has simply become more sophisticated.

Because the only thing we can be truly certain of is this: nobody is certain about anything. Not really. Not ultimately. Not in a world built on stories pretending to be facts.

And yet—here is the wonderful, ridiculous part—the game works. The fiction doesn’t break. Society runs perfectly well on these improvised identities. It’s a marvel of evolutionary theater: we are masked beings asking one another to be sincere about our masks.

We must be honest about a structure that’s fundamentally dishonest. We must commit to a character while quietly knowing the script is being written in real time. We must build a personality out of vapor and defend it like property.

And the funniest part? We see the deception perfectly clearly in others.

We can instantly spot someone else’s ego-flare, insecurity, identity crisis, self-narration, or emotional blind spot. We watch their masks slip with the precision of seasoned detectives. We know exactly where their story is thin, where their illusions are patched with tape, where their confidence is just well-lit fear.

But our own mask? That one we take to be the face itself.

This isn’t a hypocritical glitch. It’s a structural necessity.

If we saw our own performance as clearly as we see everyone else’s, the suspension of disbelief would snap. The game relies on this specific asymmetry: we need the texture of other people’s artifice to make the world interesting, but we need the blindness toward our own just to keep the scenery from falling over.

And when we finally do notice our own accent, our own mask, our own stitched-together identity, something strange happens. First, a moment of vertigo: “Wait… if that isn’t solid, what is?”

Then, if you look closely enough, an even stranger revelation: there is no face under the mask.

Just awareness. Just sensation. Just processes unfolding without an owner. Just experience happening, without a fixed “experiencer.”

And if there is no face, the whole conversation about “masks” collapses. You can’t mask a vacuum. You can’t hide a void. There is nothing to protect and nothing to expose.

Which leads to a paralyzing question:

What are they doing?

I look at the people around me—the road-ragers, the poets, the politicians, the anxious lovers. I have assumed, arrogantly, that they are asleep. That they are trapped in a delusion I have somehow stepped outside of.

But treating detachment as insight might just be a different kind of performance—one with worse reviews.

Maybe they have all reached the exact same conclusion. Maybe they have all seen the void, realized there is no “self” to sustain, and decided that the only respectful thing to do is play the game with absolute, feral intensity.

If you were truly sincere about the game, you wouldn’t play it half-heartedly. You would scream when you were hurt. You would defend your imaginary territory with imaginary guns. You would weep over the plot twists.

We assume the world is a mess because people are lost. But maybe the world is a mess because everyone is a professional.

There is no “ego problem.” There is no insincerity. This is what a perfectly executed performance looks like.

And I am the only one standing in the wings, wondering why nobody else is breaking character.

It was late night, but not the empty kind. There were still people on the streets—other auto-rickshaws weaving through the dark, figures on motorcycles, someone walking quickly with a bag. But I had the sense that we were all moving in the same direction, even if our routes diverged. Homeward. That invisible gravity pulling everyone back.

I was in the back with my wife and son. My one-year-old was half-asleep in my arms, his weight settling into that particular heaviness that only comes when a child surrenders completely to rest. His eyes would flicker open occasionally, unfocused, then close again. I wondered what was going on in his mind—if anything we’d call “thought” in the way I think of it.

And then it occurred to me: he was already home. Not in the sense of destination, but in the sense of being. He didn’t carry the strict definitions I’ve built up over the years—home as a place with walls and a door, safe as a condition requiring certain coordinates. For him, safe was home. My arms, the rumble of the rickshaw, the dark—it was all the same country. He was drifting, untethered to categories.

That was a heavy responsibility, to be someone’s entire geography. But I liked it. It grounded me.

Still, I wanted to drift like him. I wanted to remember what it felt like to be home without needing to arrive anywhere. And as I thought that, something unexpected surfaced—memory fragments, sudden and vivid. Similar episodes: me as a small child, drowsing in my own father’s arms in the back of some vehicle, the night passing outside, the hum of motion, the sense of being carried.

But then—and this is where it gets strange—I caught myself. I was calling it memory. As if it were something archived, something over there in the past, separate from this moment. But the process I call memory is happening now: the neurons firing, the images assembling, the feeling of recognition—it’s all present-tense. I was making the experience secondhand by labeling it memory, as if the past were a different room I was peering into, rather than a texture of this very moment.

In that moment, I was neither the father holding my son nor the child drifting in my father’s arms. I was observing both experiences. I had labeled one as memory, though they were both happening in the present. It was the same play, the same scene, running concurrently. I was just watching it from two different seats.

I envied that drift. My version of home was a mortgage and a location pin; his was just skin and temperature. I was observing the coastline from a plane—I knew intellectually it was beautiful, but I couldn’t feel the salt.

The auto-rickshaw continued through the streets. My son stirred slightly, then settled again. I looked down at his face, then out at the passing lights, then back again. There was road ahead. The map on my phone showed a few more minutes to arrival. But the strange thing was, even if just for a moment—I no longer felt like I was waiting to arrive.

The sense of home had already settled in, quiet and unobtrusive. It wasn’t attached to the gate we’d eventually reach or the rooms behind it. It was here, in this rattling motion, in the small sleeping weight against my chest, in the strange doubling of experience that made past and present the same theater.

The labeling continued—father, son, memory, home—but for a flicker, the labels felt transparent. Not gone, but porous. And in that porosity was the grace: not in recovering what was lost, but in recognizing that the same play was still running, and I was still in it. I let the night carry the rickshaw, the rickshaw carry me, and me carry him. A nesting doll of tired bodies, hurtling toward a destination that didn’t really matter anymore.

The rickshaw moved on.

There are nights when the world feels too big to take seriously. Nights when you look at the whole human enterprise—wars, satellites, ad-tech, kitchen appliances that connect to Wi-Fi—and think, “Really? This is the best we came up with?”

Somewhere between two yawns and a YouTube rabbit hole, the realization hit. We’ve done something extraordinary as a species:

We’ve outsourced paranoia.

Once upon a time, paranoia was artisanal. Homegrown. Like sourdough.

You personally worried about burglars, omens, divine judgment, and whether your neighbor’s goat was plotting against you. It was a craft, passed down through generations.

Now?

We have entire institutions doing it professionally—militaries, intelligence agencies, predictive policing, algorithms, threat matrices, analysts who haven’t slept since 2004.

Humanity said:

“Being terrified of low-probability catastrophes is time-consuming. Here, take my taxes. You worry on my behalf.”

Paranoia as a Service™

Think of it: somewhere, right now, someone in a windowless building is sweating over a potential scenario in which a suspiciously shaped cloud might threaten national security.

Someone else is analyzing metadata to conclude you might be radicalizing because you googled “pressure cooker.”

Meanwhile, you’re lying on the couch, watching a video titled The 10 Cutest Baby Ducks You Won’t Believe Are Real.

This is the arrangement. Everyone seems fine with it.

The Sacred Machine That Sells Socks

Here’s the funniest part: the surveillance machinery, with all its cosmic ambition and omniscient aspirations, keeps giving itself away in the stupidest possible moments.

You search for running shoes once.

For the next three weeks, every digital surface suggests you might enjoy:

• shoes
• socks
• sock organizers
• socks that are also shoes
• shoes that are also socks (innovation!)

It’s like the universe revealing itself not as an all-seeing deity but as a clingy salesman standing too close at the mall.

Ancient gods watched us to judge our souls. Modern algorithms watch us to sell us ergonomic foot cushions.

Humans reinvented omniscience and turned it into a discount coupon engine. I swear we deserve a prize for this kind of thing.

The Tyrant Who Trapped Himself

Kautilya warned that kings who use too many spies end up living inside their own anxieties.

Modern version: presidents who can’t use their own phones. Or tech CEOs who are technically masters of the digital universe, but practically servants of “engagement metrics.”

No one is really in charge anymore.

Everyone is employed by the same big machine that nobody fully understands—not even the people running it.

It’s like watching a puppet show, and halfway through realizing that every puppet is pulling the strings of every other puppet, including the puppeteer.

Very soothing. In a chaotic way.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Ah, the existential question. And here’s the beauty: I have absolutely no interest in answering it.

I don’t think we’re doomed. I don’t think we’re liberated. I don’t think we’re livestock or revolutionaries or data points or anything remotely cinematic.

Mostly… I think we’re funny.

We built a system so vast that no one can escape it, and then stuffed it with so much pettiness—ads, notifications, pointless metrics—that it keeps tripping over its own cosmic robe.

We are being “watched,” sure. But it’s the kind of watching where the watcher is too distracted by its own spreadsheets to notice anything interesting.

Not dystopia. Not utopia. Just… a comedy of scale.

A giant surveillance panopticon funded by sneaker ads. A global intelligence apparatus powered by our desire to share dog photos. A web of paranoia held together with duct tape, dark fiber, and half-finished machine-learning models.

This whole thing—the militaries, the data brokers, the algorithmic gods, the accidental indignities of personalized ads—is so absurdly human that I can’t bring myself to be anxious about it.

Sometimes it feels like the entire world is a cosmic sitcom, and we’re all extras wandering through the background while the main plot gets lost in buffering.

This happened some time ago, on an ordinary morning. I was commuting to the office—no special occasion, no hurry, no urgent meeting waiting on the other side. I was breaking orbit—leaving the home office to actually see people in 3D. A rare occurrence.

On the way, I stopped at a traffic signal near the metro station. The trains run overhead here, so you can see them clearly—coming, going, sliding in and out of view like some effortless machinery of the sky.

As I waited at the red light, an empty train glided in. Completely empty. And something in me pinched: Ah, missed it.

It made no sense. Another train arrives every five minutes, and every alternate one starts from this very station—empty trains are not rare at all. I had all day. Waiting ten more minutes wouldn’t have changed a single thing in the shape of my morning.

And yet, for a brief moment, I felt a real sense of missing out. Not dramatic, not long-lasting, but unmistakably real—like a small muscle tightening somewhere inside. The feeling passed quickly, but the question stayed: what exactly had I missed?

I wonder how many times this happens in a day—these tiny false-losses that flicker through us unnoticed. Moments where the body reacts as if something slipped away, even though nothing was ever ours to lose. A phantom ache for a phantom event.

Maybe the mind can’t tolerate a gap. It fills every neutral moment with an imagined alternative: a train I could have caught, a timing I almost made, a version of the day that briefly existed in imagination and then dissolved without consequence.

And then I mourn that dissolved version, as if it had ever been real.

What interests me is not the specific instance but the mechanism behind it—the quiet machinery of expectation and comparison that keeps running beneath awareness. It’s as if the mind is constantly generating micro-scenarios, laying out faint, almost-invisible possibilities, and then reacting to their disappearance with the same reflex it uses for real loss. A kind of shadow arithmetic of what might have been.

This moment was mine: a day with no urgency, no consequence, and still a sting of loss. A loss that wasn’t even a loss.

The unsettling part is that this was just one instance where I happened to catch myself in the act. One tiny flicker that surfaced long enough for me to notice it. There are probably hundreds of such moments scattered through a day, slipping under awareness—the rush of “almost,” the pinch of “just missed,” the faint melancholy of arriving a heartbeat too late to something that never really mattered.

Individually they’re nothing, but together they form a sort of emotional sediment: a low, constant sense of having fallen behind in ways we can’t name. An accumulated sorrow with no actual event behind it.

How do you resolve a deficit that isn’t real? I’m not sure you can. You cannot reclaim an object that never existed; there is nothing to retrieve, nothing to fix.