Author: Navneet Shukla
The Courage to Be Ordinary
The courage to be ordinary sounds simple until you try to live it. There is a version of your life that exists only in comparison to other people’s. It is the version that is always slightly behind. Always in the process of becoming something more impressive, more significant, more worthy of being taken seriously. It…
The Anxiety of Being Replaceable
The fear of being replaced at work rarely announces itself dramatically. You did not see a headline that triggered it. It arrived more quietly than that. A tool at work that handles something you used to handle. A meeting where someone younger spoke with a confidence that reminded you of yourself, but faster and with…
Nobody Trusts the Future Anymore
Economic uncertainty is shaping adult life more quietly than most people realise. It is not that people are panicking. There is no single moment of crisis, no dramatic turning point, no event that explains it cleanly. Just a quiet, persistent reluctance to commit to things that previous generations committed to without much deliberation at all.…
Why Do I Feel Like a Background Character in My Own Life?
Why do I feel like a background character in my own life is probably a question that all of us have faced at some point in our lives. You are sitting in a meeting, or on a bus, or at a family dinner you have attended twenty times before. The conversation moves around you. People…
Why Does Everyone Suddenly Want to Move Abroad?
Why everyone wants to move abroad in 2026? It feels like the question of the moment. Someone you know has left. Maybe it was a colleague who relocated to Lisbon. A cousin who packed up for Canada. A university friend who now posts photographs from a balcony in Medellín, captioned with something vague about finally…
The Illusion of Free Will in Modern Society
The illusion of free will in modern society is the great unspoken reality of our time. We wake up, consume, and scroll, entirely convinced that we are the conscious authors of our own lives. But when you strip away the algorithms predicting your next move and the ingrained habits dictating your desires, how many of…
Why Everything Feels Either Right or Wrong Now
Binary thinking is what makes most days feel like a long row of small switches. You say yes or no to a message. You swipe left or right. You clock in or walk out. The grill is on or off. The order is right or wrong. The food is raw or cooked. The phone unlocks…
Do Jellyfish Sleep? What Scientists Found Changes Everything About Rest
Do Jellyfish Sleep? A jellyfish does not have a brain. No cortex. No hippocampus. No circadian clock ticking behind two eyes. Just a translucent bell, a nerve net spread through its body like lace, and the open ocean. And yet. Every night, something changes. The pulses slow. The gaps between movement stretch. When the water…
Sheffield Boy Flies Abroad Because the Train Made No Sense
The platform was ordinary. Grey floor. Faded signage. People standing with bags that looked heavier than they should be. A phone came out. A price was checked. The screen stayed open a second longer than expected. The number did not make sense. Not because it was high. Because it was familiar. This is how it…
Why Life Breaks When Everything Becomes a Goal
Living by rhythms instead of goals modern life is often easier said than done. Life was not organised around arrival. It was organised around return. That difference is easy to miss now because modern life trains attention forward. Forward motion. Forward planning. Forward success. Time is treated as something to be spent correctly, and goals…
