Notes written at 35,000 feet
There's one mug at home that does everything. Morning tea, afternoon coffee, the third coffee I shouldn't have had. It lives next to my laptop, and I couldn't tell you the last time I used a different one. I'm 26, I live alone, and I spend most of my days glued to a chair, working with AI tools, half on autopilot. By most people's standards, I'm not doing life very "well." I've started to wonder who decided what "well" means.
If I could have one long, honest conversation with my dad, this is probably what I'd tell him: how I see the world today. Today, because it keeps changing. I've always said I optimise for stories, so let me tell it like one.
Right now I'm on a flight to Delhi with my laptop open, doing something I rarely do: thinking about my life without thinking about work. My thoughts don't walk in a straight line. They jump. But I've noticed they keep jumping back to the same place. So maybe that place is worth writing about.
Life on prescription
Here's the thought I keep landing on: most of us live on prescription.
Someone hands us a script early on. Fall in love. Get married. Have two kids. Build a career. Find your purpose. Find your ikigai. Make the world a better place. Believe in something. We take it the way we take medicine from a doctor, without really reading the label.
I've started thinking of beliefs as subscriptions. Every idea you adopt about love, God, success, or what a good life looks like is something you signed up for, usually without noticing. And like the subscriptions on your phone, most of them renew automatically.
Lately I've been trying to cancel a few. Call it belief budgeting. I don't believe in God. I don't buy that you need to fall in love to be complete, or that parenthood is the point of life. I've drifted away from people who are too intense about any idea at all.
But here's the catch, and it's why this piece has the title it does: refusing every subscription is also a subscription. "Don't follow anyone else's way of life" is itself a way of life. So am I free? Or did I just sign up for a different plan?
I've also noticed that most people live two lives. Inside their own four walls, inside their own heads, they can be messy, strange, even filthy. Outside, in front of society, they're someone else entirely. I keep asking why. Why bother with the context switch?
Are we just AI agents?
I build with AI every day, so maybe it's no surprise I see it everywhere. But the parallels are hard to ignore.
An AI model is shaped by the data it was trained on. So are we. I'm human like everyone else, but what makes me me is 26 years of experiences and decisions. People who grew up on similar "data" turn out similar. Of course they do.
An AI agent works inside instructions someone else wrote. It has a limited memory, a few sources of information, and it sometimes hallucinates: it confidently believes something wrong and then builds everything on top of it. Tell me that doesn't describe half the people you know. Tell me it doesn't describe me.
When I set up an agent for a task, I build a little world for it: rules, context, a goal. Sometimes I wonder whether someone did the same for us. If so, they're not a great operator. Look at how many of us drift, contradict ourselves and lose the plot. Me included. Whoever is running this simulation is clearly a bit crazy, and their agents aren't great either. Look at me: I re-prescribe, context-switch and hallucinate all day.
And if that's true, what does it say about me? Maybe I'm not original at all. Maybe I'm just an agent shell: good at writing code and spotting patterns, decent at remixing ideas from whatever I was trained on. AI can do all of that now too. So what's left that's actually mine?
But I have to be honest about this metaphor. Every era describes humans using its newest machine. In the 1700s we were clockwork. In Freud's time we were pressure and steam. In the '80s we were computers. Now we're AI agents. I see agents everywhere because agents are my world, my dataset. The metaphor is useful, but it's also just my latest subscription.
And there's one place it breaks. My "instructions" don't feel hardcoded. I can read them and argue with them. Whatever we are, we're agents who can question our own programming. That's either the most human thing about us, or the best illusion ever built.
The things we build to forget death
There are only two certain facts about my life: I was born, and I will die. Everything in between is open.
The first 18 years feel like a launchpad. We go deep into life without even noticing, absorbing everything, building ourselves up subconsciously, setting our trajectory. I can barely reach that version of me now; my childhood comes back only in broad strokes. Then, as we grow up, we slowly learn detachment. From society, from life, sometimes from ourselves.
When I look at what humans have built (religions, careers, love stories, slogans like "live like there's no tomorrow"), a lot of it looks like ways of not thinking about the end. Even the values we're taught, like detachment and selflessness, might be ways of making that strange arrival and departure feel lighter.
Later I found out a writer named Ernest Becker wrote a whole book on this in the 1970s, The Denial of Death. Someone always got there first. Oddly, I find that comforting.
Sometimes I imagine it like this: an engineer wanted to run a task forever, then realised no single agent's context window could ever hold the whole of existence. So instead they built agents that make more agents, with an instinct never to die. Maybe that's all our urge to fall in love and have kids is: a survival instinct so deep we mistake it for meaning. Even the universe seems built on it. Energy changes form, things replicate, creation keeps going. I don't know how anyone is supposed to make sense of that.
A thought experiment: what if the state raised the kids?
Imagine a world where every married couple has to give one or two children to the government to raise.
Having children would become ordinary, almost like casting a vote. Parenthood would stop being a default and become a role taken on by people who actually want it: dedicated guardians for minds that are fragile and need care. Marketing, schooling, housing, inheritance, so many systems would break and have to be rebuilt.
It would probably be a grey, uniform world. But aren't we already halfway there? Every child spends about 16 years in school learning the same standard summary of the world, on the same schedule, from the same syllabus. Families are what add the colour.
It has even been tried, sort of. Plato imagined it more than two thousand years ago. Israel's kibbutzim raised children in communal houses for decades, and most eventually gave it up because parents wanted their kids home at night. Which tells me something: either the prescription runs very deep, or some of it isn't a prescription at all.
The case for a quiet life, and where I'm a hypocrite
So here's where I've ended up, for now. I want to live low-key. Do my work, use whatever I'm good at, contribute something, and leave, without the marriage, the kids and the tethers. It sounds peaceful. Most stress seems to come from outside, from obligations we signed up for.
I'm not in a dark place saying this. I don't want to escape life. Maybe I just don't want its bad parts. I've already had a few.
I've also never been good at relying on people. Real partnership seems rare, and yet everyone is looking for the same thing: someone to lean on. Somewhere along the way I lost that need. I've always been like this. I don't ask for help. Telling people my problems, or even my ideas, feels unproductive. By the time I say something out loud, I've already run the whole chain of thought in my head, and very few people can step outside their own sandbox long enough to follow it. I don't know how this will play out when I'm older and can't handle everything alone. I just know it's how I've always worked.
But honesty is the point of this, so let me turn it on myself.
I call love a "low-level desire," and in the same breath say I want to give something to the world before I go. Wanting to contribute is just as social, just as wired in, as wanting a partner. I picked which instinct counts as noble. That's a prescription too.
I say I won't feel lonely because I don't subscribe to the idea of loneliness. Then I catch myself thinking: maybe that's just loneliness talking. A feeling doesn't need my permission to exist.
I say right and wrong are human-made, as if that settles it. But so is language. So is medicine. So is the code I write every day. Human-made doesn't mean fake.
Here's the strangest part. I call myself an atheist, but sometimes I wonder if all this refusing is just my own search for God, on my own terms. Religions look a lot like frontier labs to me: different teams, different models, all claiming to be closest to the truth. Maybe some of the people building AI are searching too, and AI is their version of finding God. Indian philosophy has a word for the trap of wanting truth only in a shape you already understand: Maya. If that's what I'm doing, I'm a hypocrite twice over.
And if we really are all stuck in our own sandboxes, then an outside voice (a friend, a reader, even a therapist) is exactly the thing we can't generate from inside.
So here's the test I've landed on. An escape is defined by what you're running away from. A way of living is defined by what you're moving toward. Most of my list is "don'ts": don't bother with love, kids, career, God. The "toward" list is shorter: writing, telling longer stories, building things, leaving something useful behind.
If I want to stop being the hypocrite in my own title, that's the list I need to grow.
The view from the cabin roof
There are about 240 people on this plane. None of them really care about me, and I'm not sure I care about them.
Maybe that's my limited worldview talking. I was raised, trained really, to be Indian and to follow a certain way of life. Maybe that's what keeps my own system manageable, because taking in all of humanity's diversity at once would be too much context for one person to hold.
A Hindi song with an Arabic-sounding beat has been on repeat in my headphones for an hour.
Something strange happened while I was writing this. I felt aware of everything around me - the seat, the engine hum, the people in their rows — and that awareness came from inside. At the same time, I felt like I was watching myself from up near the ceiling: a guy hunched over a laptop, typing too fast. Two of me. One feeling, one watching.
Old traditions have names for this. Indian philosophy calls the watcher the sakshi, the witness. Osho, whose talks I love, spoke about it constantly. I'd heard the idea plenty of times. I'd never felt it this clearly.
Maybe that's all this was. Not answers. Just a moment of seeing my own programming from a little distance: close enough to know it's there, not far enough to escape it.
Am I a philosopher? Probably not. That's another human-made label. I'm a 26-year-old on a flight to Delhi who finally stopped working long enough to think.
Right now I feel fearless, maybe. Definitely detached. More in touch with my soul, and less with the world.
I'll figure out what this was in hindsight. For now, signing off.
