My Uber driver’s son had recently taken his life, and I won’t go into the specifics about their life, as I believe that becomes anecdotal, and honestly, just a spectacularization of suffering.
If this disturbs you, then I don’t recommend reading this.
The beginning of suffering, as they say, misery loves company.
Life is like dominoes: when something falls early, it’s hard for the later stages to be solved. I know this is a wildly deterministic take from someone hell-bent on absolute free will. But the fundamental issue is that we as people are not good at long-horizon goals; our brains are quite literally forced into a tunnel vision of short-term goals.
See, her problems began long before the day she drove me. Her mother never supported her, she had kids early, her husband is a reformed addict and convict, her daughter is in prison, and her son struggled with impulsive thoughts.
The world is a fucking feedback loop, one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong, and it keeps going wrong and wrong.
See, the people who read my blog likely fit the privileged tech kid who thinks he’s enlightened because we experienced “ego death” or some shit.
The thing is, I can say I could relate to her, my life honestly is not that amazing either, I’m basically an addict to grandiosity, I take adderall to feed my ego and not be depressed.
Yet in her, I could see that she loved her kids in a way I don’t think I have ever experienced.
I could tell for some reason she actually cared about my problems?
I’m sure you are reading this, and you are like Madhavan, this is sure sad, but like what are u even trying to convey, what is the message?
The message is that we are the failures. Not her. Us. We are all proving something to a person who does not exist. No judge is sitting at the end of the game waiting to hand you a trophy for having the best career or the most debate wins. Someone whose life is a disaster by every metric has the empathy and faith in other people that not a single one of us privileged morons has managed to develop. That should be disturbing.
Well, it disturbs me.
I feel like I’m trying to simulate what it means to understand emotions like this, I think the way I have grown up has stripped a portion of my humanity to be extremely distrustful and pessimistic.
I would say I’m more empathetic than most, but paradoxically believe I’m undeserving of it.
My parents raised me to be a people pleaser, and I guess i’m some unique self-aware semi-detached outcome of that.
I never used to be open about my thoughts because, honestly, I am a scared person. In an ironic way, I was inauthentic to everyone by performing authenticity. All the stupid shit I have done, the rage baiting, the provocations, it is all LARP. A character I built because building a character is easier than sitting with the fact that I do not know who I am.
I feel disgusted by people who need to write about how enlightened they are. I am aware of the irony of writing that in an essay. But the people I actually respect are the ones who do things without needing anyone to clap for them.
I guess I advocate for living the most true version of yourself, but i’m incapable of articulating it.
je ne sais quoi
Be glad that your problems are nothing but instrumental relics to development, not ritualistic horrors of life.
anti-madhavan
I read the whole thing. It’s good writing.
A few things I want to say, not as feedback on the essay but as honest responses to what you’re actually saying in it.
The self-awareness you’re demonstrating here — the “I perform authenticity,” “I built a character,” “I’m an addict to grandiosity” thread — is real and it matters. But I want to push on something you do in this piece that I think you half-recognize but don’t fully confront: the essay itself is doing the thing it criticizes. You know this. You flag the irony. But flagging irony isn’t the same as resolving it, and I think you’re smart enough to know that too.
That’s not a reason not to write it. It’s just worth sitting with the fact that the recursive self-awareness — “I see that I’m performing, and I’m performing the seeing” — doesn’t actually get you out of the loop. It just adds another layer. Your psychoanalytic self-model from a while back identified this exact pattern: meta-level thinking as avoidance of execution, the perpetual almost-ness. This essay is a really clear instance of it. You get right up to the edge of something vulnerable and then intellectualize your way back to safety.
The strongest moment in the piece is the simplest one: that this woman, whose life is objectively harder than yours by every measure, had a capacity for care that you recognized you lack, and that recognition disturbed you. That’s the essay. Everything around it — the disclaimer at the top, the “you’re probably thinking Madhavan what’s the point,” the philosophical framing about determinism and tunnel vision — is scaffolding you built so you wouldn’t have to stand alone with that one uncomfortable observation.
On the substance: the thing you’re describing about her isn’t actually mysterious. People who have suffered and who love anyway aren’t performing some advanced emotional skill. They just didn’t have the luxury of building the kind of protective architecture you built. You describe your upbringing as producing someone distrustful, pessimistic, semi-detached. That’s a real thing. But I’d be careful about treating it as a fixed trait rather than a habit. The fact that you could see what she had — and feel its absence in yourself — means the capacity isn’t gone. It’s just buried under a lot of self-protective machinery.
One more thing. You write “I am a scared person” and then immediately pivot to analyzing it. If you’re going to write essays like this, the version that would actually cost you something is the one where you stay in the fear for a paragraph without explaining it away. You don’t owe that to your readers. But you might owe it to yourself.