Hello there. Before starting these weeknotes, I’d vowed to myself that I’d keep them as inconsistent as possible, hence the long-drawn gap. I didn’t want them to become a chore. I also wanted to ensure I wrote this in vacuum-silence. I’m chasing a church-quiet feeling I’ve been drawn to for the past month or so, and writing is the closest thing to God, in my humble opinion.
Sunday: Flesh and emotional inertia
I’ve been reading Flesh by David Szalay, and at first I was honestly just frustrated. The protagonist’s complacency confused me so much. But as I kept reading, something clicked. The book is really about a feeling I’ve been thinking about a lot lately—the feeling of being estranged from your own agency.
This character isn’t a pushover in the traditional sense. He has opinions, desires, and judgments. But he never acts on any of them. There’s this constant split between what he thinks and what he actually does, and it leaves him moving through the world like “flesh”—present, but not really driven by intention.
The more I sat with it, the more I realised how familiar that feels. He’s shaped by habit, social pressure, and this deep tiredness that comes from living without much conviction. And honestly, in such an overstimulated world, it’s easy to slip into that kind of emotional inertia—your body keeps going, but inside you feel muted.
I see it in myself when I give up in arguments, contained by impulse, routine, and a kind of slow internal decay that makes it exhausting to push against the grain. As a designer, that’s pretty self-sabotaging, and I know it. You start to see the gap between what you mean to do and what you actually end up doing. It raises questions you don’t really want to face, because you already know the answers. Flesh captures that feeling a little too well.
Monday: To-dos and scheduling friendship
I’ve fallen into the habit of spending my mornings with friends lately—sometimes for brunch, sometimes just walking around the lake near my house. I met a friend from college after almost a year, and there’s always something strangely fascinating about reconnecting with people after a long gap. After the usual comments about the café interiors, I asked her what she had planned for the rest of the day.
Her answer caught me off guard:
“I’m meeting another one of our mutual friends. Since you’re both in the area, I thought I’d get that done with at once.”
Now, I know she meant it harmlessly—she’s genuinely sweet. But the phrasing lingered. It made me wonder how many of us have quietly become slaves to our own to-do lists. How many things do we mentally memo? When did hangouts and tiny catch-ups turn into items we need to “slot in” between tasks?
I get it. In a culture that runs this fast, anything slow either dissolves or is forced to adapt—habits, hobbies, even ways of being. Unless intention steps in to counterbalance it. But that loops me back to the previous note: how much of our intent actually manifests in the physical world?
It’s exhausting to think about.
Long story short, I laughed and asked her what other “area-efficient activities” she planned to complete while she was here. She didn’t have many, so I suggested the nearest bookstore. Because if we’re talking about intention, literature is something you may struggle to pick up, but it never stops being one of the best ways to spend unstructured time.
Sidenote, that croissant sandwich was godsend.
Tuesday: Cats, no, not the musical
I learnt how to play a new card game at work—Exploding Cats. My co-workers are wildly competitive, the kind of people who can summon chaos out of thin air, and honestly, I love it. The game itself is bizarre, like if Bluff and Uno had a child and decided to slap cats on every card. I say this, but I also skipped lunch just to keep playing.
There’s something hilarious about how the newbies are always the first casualties of the seasoned players. But the moment a beginner wins a single round, the energy shifts—the game suddenly becomes serious business. The entire premise is essentially about maiming your opponents with exploding cats while trying to strategise your way out of your own inevitable doom. I found myself laughing through most of it, partly because of how inane the whole thing is—but that’s exactly where its charm lies.
There’s an appeal in its pointlessness, in its deliberate absurdity, in its willingness to exist without logic or structure. That’s where joy tends to live anyway. The most boring games are the ones burdened with instruction manuals, airtight rules, and loopholes that take ages to uncover. As someone who lives for RPGs, I adore a well-hidden loophole. I love a game that evolves with the player. This wasn’t quite that, but it humbled me nevertheless.
I’ve been trying to understand why I resist things that are overly pragmatic or relentlessly logical. Maybe this game offered a small revelation: there’s a kind of beauty in oblivious chaos. Sometimes, meaninglessness is the point.
Wednesday: The joy in anomalies
I’ve been mentoring a junior colleague at work lately—yes, he’s six years younger than me, fresh out of college. This past week, he talked my ear off for hours, and I think it was the most enjoyable conversation I’ve had in months. It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to someone genuinely curious about everything, someone who agrees with the sentiment that almost 80% of the ways things function are illogical, is okay with it, romanticizes it, and even adds more problems to fuel the fire.
As a designer, it’s exhilarating to see someone play with the idea of things being “too perfect” and then actively figure out how to break them. It’s like a skewed form of reverse psychology, a deliberate fascination with disruption. It dusted off some cobwebs in my brain—reminding me of school, when we learned principles like the Inversion Principle (Charlie Munger talks about this a lot), Heuristic Reduction, and Elimination in SCAMPER. We’d figure out what didn’t work quickly to make room for what did.
This kid isn’t just applying frameworks—he loves anomalies. His guiding principle seems to be: things must not exist exactly as they appear. How can we disrupt the balance they sustain? What tips the scale? How can we exist within it? Who decides what can and cannot be done? His portfolio, by the way, was an absolute pleasure to dive into—brainpower-draining in the best way.
Conversations like this feed into my love for irrational gratification in general. I realize more clearly that I hate living confined by rules, theory, and objective facts. They will always exist, of course—but who am I to conform? A cynic might disagree. Yet there is invention and discovery in asking what if. And it’s in the playful pursuit of that uncertainty that real joy—and design—exists.
Thursday: Tis the season for plum cake
It’s that time of the year again. How do I know? Not by the calendar, but by my family’s ritual of buying way too much plum cake. My mum loves a good Christmas plum cake, and the holidays are the perfect excuse to indulge. Over time, the rest of us have come around too—turns out, we like it more than we thought.
Funny enough, I used to hate plum cake. All that fruit and nuts packed in—yuck. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Maybe it’s age, or maybe it’s memory and sentiment adding their own flavour. Dark chocolate, papaya, eggplant—foods I once avoided now feel quietly romantic. In my head, every food has a season, a person, a place, a memory attached to it.
There’s something strangely intimate about it. Eating becomes more than nourishment; it’s a way to revisit moments, people, and places that shaped you. Holidays amplify that feeling. In India, so much of tradition revolves around food—a single dish can chase away homesickness in an instant.
Plum cake, though, is a curious thought.
Yeah, my calendar week ends on Thursday, because I say so.
Here’s me exerting irrational gratification for my own benefit.
See you in the next one!