Brain Stew

There are approximately seventeen things I should be writing about right now.

There is the strange feeling of watching people I once knew become strangers in real time. There is the absurdity of having spent most of my childhood wanting to grow up, only to discover that adulthood mostly consists of replying to WhatsApp messages, finding misplaced documents, and remembering that some bill is due. There is mortality, obviously. There is love. There is loneliness. There is India. There is capitalism. There is the increasingly convincing possibility that everyone in charge of everything is simply making it up as they go along.

Usually, any one of these would be enough.

Give me one mildly uncomfortable interaction at a supermarket and I can somehow turn it into eight paragraphs about alienation under late-stage capitalism. A bad drive home could become an essay about grief. Somebody not sharing their popcorn, under the right circumstances, could become a philosophical investigation into the impermanence of human relationships.

But right now, I have absolutely nothing.

Not nothing in the romantic sense, either. Not the tortured-artist kind of nothing where I stare dramatically at a blank page while rain runs down the window and Leonard Cohen plays somewhere in the background.

So naturally, I have begun investigating.

Perhaps it is sleep.

This would be convenient because sleep is one of those things people love blaming everything on. Sad? Sleep. Angry? Sleep. Existential crisis? You probably haven't been getting your eight hours.

I have not been sleeping particularly well, so this remains a credible suspect.

But I have written while sleep-deprived before. In fact, some of my most enthusiastic writing has happened at two in the morning when I should have been unconscious. So sleep is released due to insufficient evidence.

Perhaps it is because I don't have a concrete path ahead of me.

For most of my life, there has always been a next thing. School, College, Degree, Exam, Job. Another exam. Another degree I could convince myself was the messiah, sent down from some accreditation body to finally explain what the hell I’m supposed to be doing here.

Right now, the future is less of a road and more of one of those Google Maps screens where the GPS has stopped working and your little blue dot is floating somewhere inside a lake or a ditch. Maybe writing requires some illusion of direction.

Or perhaps the problem is that I spend too much of my day doing things that feel aggressively inconsequential.

Call this person. Pick up that thing. Send this document. Go there. Come back. Find the receipt. Ask somebody about the electrician. Remember something you forgot yesterday. Forget something you were supposed to remember today.

By evening I usually have somehow completed twelve tasks and accomplished absolutely nothing. This might be the most impressive innovation of adulthood: the ability to remain constantly busy without ever feeling like you have actually done anything.

Maybe somewhere inside my head there is a small unionized workforce refusing to produce metaphors until working conditions improve. Fair enough, I guess.

Then there is the more dramatic possibility. Have I simply given up on my humanity? This is admittedly a significant escalation from “maybe I need more sleep.” But the evidence is worth considering.

Things that should make me angry now make me tired. Things that should make me sad sometimes make me scroll Instagram. Horrible events arrive on my phone between a badminton reel and an advertisement for a credit card only to be followed by Malayalam vegetable brain-rot.

Some batshit crazy idiot decides to bomb someplace. Somebody fought over pappadam in Kollam. There is a famine somewhere. An AI-generated golden retriever enjoys an Onam sadya. A real dogfluencer shows off its custom-made Onam attire. Apparently there is also a virus that could wipe out humanity, or something similarly trivial. “Get ready with me to go to a funeral.” An analysis of capitalism and political collapse. Never mind, someone famous is getting married.

Et voilà, a thick, lukewarm brain stew.

Perhaps human beings were not designed to receive the suffering of the entire planet in chronological order while on the can.

There was a time when I believed writing came from feeling things too intensely. Now I wonder whether there is a point at which you feel too many things for too long and the whole system just shuts down. Maybe there is a point where caring becomes too exhausting.

And unfortunately, exhaustion is not especially literary. Nobody wants to read: “I woke up slightly tired, completed three errands, felt vaguely uneasy about the direction of my life, and then watched YouTube Shorts for forty minutes.”

There are no metaphors there. There is barely a plot.

Which brings me to capitalism. Eventually everything brings me to capitalism.

Perhaps the real problem is that even our inner lives have somehow acquired performance metrics.

Rest must make us productive, hobbies must become side hustles, exercise must produce measurable progress, reading must improve us, writing must be published, sadness must become art. Apparently it is no longer enough to suffer. One must also package the suffering attractively, give it a title, and post it at an optimal time for engagement.

I mean maybe I’m onto something here.

Maybe I will be fine if I can make my brokenness entertaining to the rest of the world. Maybe I can sell this brain stew in some form if I package it attractively enough—you know, call it a Bouillabaisse from the South of France or whatever it takes to get people to pay top dollar for goop with vegetables and seafood in it.

After all, all of you wasted a couple minutes of your time reading this bullshit. Bon appétit, I guess.