Birthday Blues from The Tropopause
On potential, evidence, and the safety of never knowing.
Hi. It’s birthday month again.
And I’ve been thinking about atmospheric layers lately. (I know, I know, very normal behaviour). Specifically: why we use the sky as a metaphor for ambition when most of us never leave the first layer of it. The troposphere. That's where we live. Where birds shit on our cars, where planes carry us to Bali for that "life-changing" retreat and where rain ruins our hair. It's the everyday-ness layer. The one where you and I and everyone we know conducts our entire existence.
And here's the thing: there's a boundary. It's called the tropopause. Sounds like a menopause joke waiting to happen, but it's actually the threshold between the ordinary (troposphere) and the extraordinary (everything above: stratosphere, mesosphere, all the spheres where meteors burn and auroras dance and satellites orbit in their little robot loneliness).
Quick refresher on basic atmospheric physics that you definitely remember from school:
(just kidding, you don't, neither do I, we were too busy plotting a bunk for a shared plate of canteen maggi)
The troposphere extends about 7-20 km above Earth's surface depending on where you're standing. Above it? The wild shit. Ozone protecting us from UV rays. The International Space Station. Phenomena so beautiful they make grown adults cry in Norway. But to get there, to even touch that realm - you have to cross the threshold.
And spoiler alert: you won't. Most of us won't. Because the tropopause isn't just a physical boundary. It's psychological. (Did I make a science thing into a feelings thing yet again. Classic Sakhi Behaviour).
Here's my working hypothesis: We've convinced ourselves that the unknown is this distant, terrifying, inconvenient thing. Like it's going to ask us to help it move apartments or like ACTUALLY serve that flat white they claim to make.
Its pursuit feels like unnecessary effort when your life already functions.
The rewards it offers register as abstractions; myths you tell yourself happen to people with better timing, better access, better genes.
You've only ever known life on solid ground. The gravity of familiarity. The gentle, predictable winds of the troposphere cradling you into complacency. So you live and die there, never asking the question that might actually matter: What if I had submitted to the unknown?
The troposphere is the realm of ordinariness. Let me be clear - I’m not shitting on ordinary. Ordinary is beautiful. Ordinary is paying off a mortgage, watching your kids graduate, and hopefully retiring to a house with a garden where touching grass is not a “luxury experience”. Ordinary is good.
But if you follow a truly linear trajectory, and I mean late-stage linear; your success will remain bound by the tropopause. You’ll achieve tropospheric levels of success. Which is not nothing. It’s just… tropospheric.
Sea-level ambition.
The kind of life where the future is already cached, a life where growth is smooth because it was A/B tested into compliance, a life optimised around urgency that was really just a UI choice, a life where meaning is postponed because it didn’t convert.
(I'm implicating myself here, by the way).
If you want to enter the realm of extraordinariness - if you want to live among auroras, whatever that means for you specifically (and it's different for everyone, we'll get to that): you must first cross the tropopause.
And to do that? You'll have to create the psychological conditions to tolerate uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity. All those uncomfortable feelings that capitalism has taught us to medicate away with consumption, convenience, and content that makes us feel smart without making us think.
So what are those psychological conditions? (I'm sooo glad you asked)
1. Define your tropopause.
What does predictability look like for you? Not in a judgmental way: in a ruthlessly honest way. If you kept doing exactly what you're doing, what's the ceiling? And in contrast, what would living among auroras look like? (For you. Not for Instagram. Not for your parents. For you.)
Between those two states - ordinariness and extraordinariness - there's a threshold. A line you're afraid to cross. Name it. Out loud. To yourself. In your notes app at 2am.
2. Believe in your own personal exceptionalism.
You need delusional self-belief. Not toxic positivity. Not manifesting. Not vision boards. I mean the kind of unhinged confidence that keeps you wading through the waters of the unknown while everyone else is like "are you okay?"
And you can't just believe you're exceptional. You actually have to (a) have something to offer, and (b) truly believe it's great. Not "good enough." Great. This is where most people's self-help journey ends, because it requires both humility (developing real skill) and arrogance (believing it matters).
3. Cultivate grit.
The tropopause can seem unbreachable. Like you're chipping away at concrete with a spoon made of your own doubt. So you need persistence. Stamina. That deeply unsexy kind of stubbornness.
4. Make failure desirable.
Not "be okay with failure." Not "learn from failure." Enjoy it. Find sick, smug satisfaction in it. Conceive of it as merely the anticipation of success - the opening act, the setup, the necessary data point. This is psychotic behaviour. Do it anyway.
Once you've built the mental architecture to cross the tropopause, you're already halfway to living among auroras. The rest is just... doing it. (Which is the hard part, obviously, but I can't do it for you. This isn't a Feynman filing system. This is thinking.)
Now of course, everyone has a different tropopause. What's stratospheric for me might be earthly for you, and vice versa. But for both of us, the same truth prevails:
You probably cannot achieve an extraordinary life by doing ordinary things.
(Pause. Let that sit. Keep sitting with it.)
The system we live in wants you in the troposphere. It’s profitable there. You’re predictable. Manageable. A data point.
It sells relief from the damage it creates: premium subscriptions to “disconnect” from the very apps that broke us, the religion of notifications engineered to feel like intimacy.
Your exhaustion isn’t a flaw, it is the product. A tired person is a compliant person, you know?
Just ambitious enough to be productive, but not so ambitious you become unmarketable. Just weird enough to be interesting, but not so weird you can’t be scaled.
But nature isn’t hunting for winners. It runs experiments and discards most of them. The tropopause isn’t a ladder, it is indeed, a filter.
Now, either I tell you to cross your tropopause (reductive), or I tell you the tropopause is an illusion (reductive), or I give you some dialectical synthesis that sounds smart but resolves nothing.
But there is a trap in the thinking.
The problem with all of these is that they miss something crucial.
Goodhart’s Law says: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
We named the tropopause. Made it a target. And now we're optimizing for crossing it: building the right 'psychological conditions,' performing extraordinariness as a tropospheric activity. We've turned the threshold into a checklist.
The Feynman filing clerk could solve calculus without understanding calculus. We've become filing clerks for our own ambitions- sorting our desires into 'realistic' and 'delusional,' matching our dreams to pre-approved templates, pattern-matching our way toward goals we inherited from a system that needs us manageable.
Perhaps there's no ending here that isn't a cop-out?
The velocity creates the illusion of intelligence.
But velocity isn't intelligence. And the tropopause isn't a boundary to cross - it's a boundary we invented to keep ourselves right-sized.
The auroras don't live in the stratosphere waiting for you to arrive. They live in the part of you that's been filing itself into acceptability for so long you've forgotten what the unedited version even looked like.
Aristotle called it akrasia “knowing the good but doing otherwise.” We know where our threshold is. We know we want to cross it. But we'd rather intellectualize the crossing than attempt it. Because attempting it means generating data about who you actually are versus who you think you could be. And most of us would rather preserve the possibility than test it.
The tropopause isn’t a boundary between ordinary and extraordinary.
It’s a boundary between potential and evidence.
And evidence is final.
So we stay. We file. We think about crossing.
And maybe that isn’t cowardice. Maybe it’s the moment you realize the threshold isn’t the risk.
It’s the mirror waiting on the other side.
As for me, the air is getting thin. The mirror is getting harder to ignore. Maybe I’m done marking the anniversary of a stay and finally... celebrating a beginning? :)
S
23:09
18.01.2026
Unmonetised thoughts, mostly.
Are you a rebel?
Hi. I've been in what I call "intellectual rehab" lately - questioning every smart-sounding thing I've ever said, quitting the chase for cleverness, and craving clarity instead. That's also why I haven't been showing up here much.
One of the many good things that happen after selling your brand? You get to let your mind wander without guilt. You can pause bartering time for money. Just you, your brain, and the quiet thrill of trying to separate signal from noise.
So yeah, let's just say I've been debugging eight years of entrepreneurial wisdom (that might just be expensive therapy disguised as business insights).
Disclaimer: No “healing,” no “manifesting,” no “success” talk here. You’ll survive(?) this 9 minute read.
My working hypothesis: We're living through the first cognitive reversal in human history. We solved the problem of not having enough information by creating a far bigger one: having too many answers, and forgetting how to ask the right questions.
TL;DR: The machines aren't becoming more human - we're becoming more machine-like.
Some of you might argue that I've earned the right to retire my ambition. And yet, here I am, writing this on a flight to Montpellier to see le mother, who moved to the South of France at the age of 60 to chase her PhD dream. My genes won’t let me rest :)
This is #2 of In-Transit, and my thoughts are once again fighting for legroom.
Tbh, being a recovering smart-person addict is not easy. But it gives me the bandwidth to make more meaningful observations about our collective stupidity. Based on the idea that being wrong in public is more engaging than being right in private, I developed a theory this year: "Admitting you don't know anything can lead to understanding more predictably than pretending you know everything."
So grab your matcha latte, Labubus, avocado toast (or whatever else you're convinced is doing the right signaling). No puns intended. Maybe.
I think that in 2025, our information ecosystem is eroding our capacity for systematic thinking more impressively than ever before. This has a lot to do with how we anthropomorphize our tools, which has a lot to do with AI, algorithmic influence and surveillance capitalism.
Hi. I've been in what I call "intellectual rehab" lately - questioning every smart-sounding thing I've ever said, quitting the chase for cleverness, and craving clarity instead. That's also why I haven't been showing up here much.
One of the many good things that happen after selling your brand? You get to let your mind wander without guilt. You can pause bartering time for money. Just you, your brain, and the quiet thrill of trying to separate signal from noise.
So yeah, let's just say I've been debugging eight years of entrepreneurial wisdom (that might just be expensive therapy disguised as business insights).
Disclaimer: No “healing,” no “manifesting,” no “success” talk here. You’ll survive(?) this 9 minute read.
My working hypothesis: We're living through the first cognitive reversal in human history. We solved the problem of not having enough information by creating a far bigger one: having too many answers, and forgetting how to ask the right questions.
TL;DR: The machines aren't becoming more human - we're becoming more machine-like.
Some of you might argue that I've earned the right to retire my ambition. And yet, here I am, writing this on a flight to Montpellier to see le mother, who moved to the South of France at the age of 60 to chase her PhD dream. My genes won’t let me rest :)
This is #2 of In-Transit, and my thoughts are once again fighting for legroom.
Tbh, being a recovering smart-person addict is not easy. But it gives me the bandwidth to make more meaningful observations about our collective stupidity. Based on the idea that being wrong in public is more engaging than being right in private, I developed a theory this year: "Admitting you don't know anything can lead to understanding more predictably than pretending you know everything."
So grab your matcha latte, Labubus, avocado toast (or whatever else you're convinced is doing the right signaling). No puns intended. Maybe.
I think that in 2025, our information ecosystem is eroding our capacity for systematic thinking more impressively than ever before. This has a lot to do with how we anthropomorphize our tools, which has a lot to do with AI, algorithmic influence and surveillance capitalism.
But before we start, here is a quick refresher on some basic ideas:
Our brain follows thermodynamic principles: it seeks the lowest energy state possible. Thinking burns cognitive calories. So we evolved shortcuts - heuristics, narratives, pattern matching; to avoid this cost. As information gets more complex, these shortcuts get more seductive and adapt accordingly. We get better at feeling informed without actually thinking, because real thinking costs energy we’d rather save for survival.
Now that the refresher is over, we can dive in.
Our brain follows thermodynamic principles: it seeks the lowest energy state possible. Thinking burns cognitive calories. So we evolved shortcuts - heuristics, narratives, pattern matching; to avoid this cost. As information gets more complex, these shortcuts get more seductive and adapt accordingly. We get better at feeling informed without actually thinking, because real thinking costs energy we’d rather save for survival.
Now that the refresher is over, we can dive in.
Picture this: You’re running a business and need to hire a math-savvy clerk. You find someone
brilliant - let's call her Geeta. She can multiply, add, read instructions, solve complex problems.
But she’s painfully slow. So you hire Clerk #2 Seeta - much faster, but she can’t multiply. No
problem. You give her multiplication tables on flashcards. She looks up 3×9, finds 27, writes it
down. Faster overall.
Then comes Shanaya (yes, it’s an all-girls fleet). Even faster, but she can’t multiply or add. So you give her addition tables too. She’s just playing an elaborate matching game with cards - but wow, she’s quick.
You keep going. Clerk #4 can’t read - only recognize shapes. Clerk #5? She can’t even do that. All she can do is tell the difference between two things: brown dot or orange dot. One or zero. That’s it.
And yet, by the end, you’ve built a system so fast and so dumb that it’s somehow solving calculus - just by following millions of tiny, mindless steps at lightning speed.
That’s a computer, “a high-class, super-speed, nice, streamlined filing system.” as Feynman called it (for all the fans in the house!)
The world’s most sophisticated filing system, run by the world’s most efficient idiot. It’s not thinking. It’s filing. Sorting. Pattern-matching. Over and over.
The “Intelligence” is just an illusion created by velocity.
Here's what we've missed: this filing system logic isn't just confined to computers.
We started with just our brains - curious beings that asked questions, connected odd dots, and sat (somewhat patiently) with uncertainty. Then came Google - handling information retrieval. Then came algorithmic feeds, (“astrologers for our data” as one of my students called them) - filtering what we see before we even ask. And now, it’s AI - stitching together answers before we’ve finished the question....
Every time a disruption like this shows up, we wonder: “Will this make us dumber?”
Then comes Shanaya (yes, it’s an all-girls fleet). Even faster, but she can’t multiply or add. So you give her addition tables too. She’s just playing an elaborate matching game with cards - but wow, she’s quick.
You keep going. Clerk #4 can’t read - only recognize shapes. Clerk #5? She can’t even do that. All she can do is tell the difference between two things: brown dot or orange dot. One or zero. That’s it.
And yet, by the end, you’ve built a system so fast and so dumb that it’s somehow solving calculus - just by following millions of tiny, mindless steps at lightning speed.
That’s a computer, “a high-class, super-speed, nice, streamlined filing system.” as Feynman called it (for all the fans in the house!)
The world’s most sophisticated filing system, run by the world’s most efficient idiot. It’s not thinking. It’s filing. Sorting. Pattern-matching. Over and over.
The “Intelligence” is just an illusion created by velocity.
Here's what we've missed: this filing system logic isn't just confined to computers.
We started with just our brains - curious beings that asked questions, connected odd dots, and sat (somewhat patiently) with uncertainty. Then came Google - handling information retrieval. Then came algorithmic feeds, (“astrologers for our data” as one of my students called them) - filtering what we see before we even ask. And now, it’s AI - stitching together answers before we’ve finished the question....
Every time a disruption like this shows up, we wonder: “Will this make us dumber?”
And each time, the answer is trickier. More layered. Maybe even worth sitting with?
I think this time, we're not just losing a skill, we've willingly abdicated the very thing that makes us human.
Instagram, for instance, was once built on the promise of “connecting us to each other.” And for a brief, golden moment, it wasn’t a lie - we shared, and we shaped each other’s choices, thoughts, and shopping carts. But Instagram exists to make bank. And it realised that the more time we spent on it, the more money it makes. This is because more scrolling means more ads, more data about who we are, how we behave; our impulses. So it sells us millions of shots of dopamine, in exchange for our attention. The algorithmic gods curate our interaction patterns and serve us more of what we’re likely to stick around for.
But it’s a closed loop.
→ We consume information that confirms our beliefs (validation) → We encounter contradictory information (friction) → We either dismiss it or scroll away (back to validation)
The system isn’t built to inform. It’s built to retain.
Not for truth. Not for merit. But for certainty.
The mirroring result is predictable, you and I? We feel like we’re getting smarter. We confuse agreement for insight. In our pretty little echo-chambers decorated with pop-psychology, 5am productivity hacks, fix-the-gut revolution, 30-day manifestation rituals or whatever else fills your Stanley cup with social validation. The system doesn’t care if you’re thinking. It just needs you to be consistent - so the filing clerk can keep up. And here’s the kicker: the Instagram logic isn’t confined to Instagram. It’s the blueprint now. Our entire ecosystem is built to simulate the feeling of smartness - fast, confident, low-friction conclusions that trick our brains into thinking we’re thinking. And since our brains are wired to save energy, we latch on. Not because it’s true, but because it’s easier.
We outsourced our “intelligence” to podcasters who get their opinions from other podcasters, we gave in to our therapyspeaking GPTs, we learnt from people who talk aesthetically sophisticated nonsense that’s never been stress-tested against reality. (God bless if you’re a Linkedin thought leader). At some point, we stopped resisting, and maybe even started enjoying it?
We stopped asking why, because the system made us feel informed without the inconvenience of investigation.
The thing is that by giving ourselves a moral ‘yes’ to epistemic commodification, we treat knowledge like a product to be consumed rather than a process to be engaged with. We become the brand ourselves. And the brand becomes the commodity. And under capitalism, the templated version of you is the one that scales. Because as the supply of any commodity increases, its value goes down. That’s just how the market works. Sameness scales.
I think this time, we're not just losing a skill, we've willingly abdicated the very thing that makes us human.
Instagram, for instance, was once built on the promise of “connecting us to each other.” And for a brief, golden moment, it wasn’t a lie - we shared, and we shaped each other’s choices, thoughts, and shopping carts. But Instagram exists to make bank. And it realised that the more time we spent on it, the more money it makes. This is because more scrolling means more ads, more data about who we are, how we behave; our impulses. So it sells us millions of shots of dopamine, in exchange for our attention. The algorithmic gods curate our interaction patterns and serve us more of what we’re likely to stick around for.
But it’s a closed loop.
→ We consume information that confirms our beliefs (validation) → We encounter contradictory information (friction) → We either dismiss it or scroll away (back to validation)
The system isn’t built to inform. It’s built to retain.
Not for truth. Not for merit. But for certainty.
The mirroring result is predictable, you and I? We feel like we’re getting smarter. We confuse agreement for insight. In our pretty little echo-chambers decorated with pop-psychology, 5am productivity hacks, fix-the-gut revolution, 30-day manifestation rituals or whatever else fills your Stanley cup with social validation. The system doesn’t care if you’re thinking. It just needs you to be consistent - so the filing clerk can keep up. And here’s the kicker: the Instagram logic isn’t confined to Instagram. It’s the blueprint now. Our entire ecosystem is built to simulate the feeling of smartness - fast, confident, low-friction conclusions that trick our brains into thinking we’re thinking. And since our brains are wired to save energy, we latch on. Not because it’s true, but because it’s easier.
We outsourced our “intelligence” to podcasters who get their opinions from other podcasters, we gave in to our therapyspeaking GPTs, we learnt from people who talk aesthetically sophisticated nonsense that’s never been stress-tested against reality. (God bless if you’re a Linkedin thought leader). At some point, we stopped resisting, and maybe even started enjoying it?
We stopped asking why, because the system made us feel informed without the inconvenience of investigation.
The thing is that by giving ourselves a moral ‘yes’ to epistemic commodification, we treat knowledge like a product to be consumed rather than a process to be engaged with. We become the brand ourselves. And the brand becomes the commodity. And under capitalism, the templated version of you is the one that scales. Because as the supply of any commodity increases, its value goes down. That’s just how the market works. Sameness scales.
The marketplace is becoming more efficient, and in my humble opinion,
we are getting collectively DUMBER.
High-speed, super-efficient information filling clerks with a 12 step-skincare routine.
it is a strange kind of madness, we know it’s toxic.
We’re experiencing an overstimulation without processing, overabundance of gratification without reflection; we are present without really being present...you and I? We feel the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the ambient grief of living through collapse. It’s in the loneliness we can’t fight, the climate crisis we can’t control, the rents we can’t pay, the hatred we can’t understand.
So we sink into our screens, we sedate ourselves.
we are getting collectively DUMBER.
High-speed, super-efficient information filling clerks with a 12 step-skincare routine.
it is a strange kind of madness, we know it’s toxic.
We’re experiencing an overstimulation without processing, overabundance of gratification without reflection; we are present without really being present...you and I? We feel the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the ambient grief of living through collapse. It’s in the loneliness we can’t fight, the climate crisis we can’t control, the rents we can’t pay, the hatred we can’t understand.
So we sink into our screens, we sedate ourselves.
And why wouldn’t we? The moment you’re playing a system where your payoff depends on what
everyone else is doing, the rules get sticky. Even if the system is breaking you - emotionally,
cognitively, biologically, you don’t want to be the first to opt out. Because now the game isn’t just
about information. It’s about identity. It’s not just FOMO, but FOBM (fear of being missed).
That’s game theory 101. Even when nature demands a correction, culture demands compliance.
So we keep playing. We dissociate, we detach, we let ourselves brain-rot, and be in a state of
mental passivity. For survival.
This is sedation-by-design: that validation-friction-validation cycle? it is the business model.
My critique is not that tech is bad, or we should not use AI, or insta or whatever. To be fair, universal access to information is unprecedented and genuinely miraculous. But we are confusing access with agency. We’ve democratized information without democratizing the tools to think about it. And that has resulted in a culture that’s flooded with opinions, but starved of original thought. Truth-seeking has become a luxury good and a quiet intellectual class system has started to form - the few ones who are still willing to build ideas, ask questions, challenge the assumptions. The rest of us are just subscribing to the vibe.
Because the system doesn’t reward novelty or clarity, it rewards optimisation; truth gets quieter. And meaning becomes something you consume, not something you create. And here’s the thing, the machines might mimic intelligence, but they don’t live it. Your AI file clerk is only as good as the data it has been trained on. And sure, we must embrace that wave fully. It can replicate the outputs- the articles, the advice, the poetry even, but not the essence, not yet. Andddd, intelligence doesn’t happen in the input or the output. It happens in the messy, inefficient, human middle. In doubt. In absurd connections, in that gut feeling. In lived, boring, brilliant emotional experience. In asking why, even when there’s already an answer on the screen.
We’re being bent out of shape by systems that were never built to hold us.
This strips us of what makes us human, and hence distorts our very experience of humanity. It’s a technocapitalism problem - where machines are trained to think like markets,
and we are trained to be like them.
This is sedation-by-design: that validation-friction-validation cycle? it is the business model.
My critique is not that tech is bad, or we should not use AI, or insta or whatever. To be fair, universal access to information is unprecedented and genuinely miraculous. But we are confusing access with agency. We’ve democratized information without democratizing the tools to think about it. And that has resulted in a culture that’s flooded with opinions, but starved of original thought. Truth-seeking has become a luxury good and a quiet intellectual class system has started to form - the few ones who are still willing to build ideas, ask questions, challenge the assumptions. The rest of us are just subscribing to the vibe.
Because the system doesn’t reward novelty or clarity, it rewards optimisation; truth gets quieter. And meaning becomes something you consume, not something you create. And here’s the thing, the machines might mimic intelligence, but they don’t live it. Your AI file clerk is only as good as the data it has been trained on. And sure, we must embrace that wave fully. It can replicate the outputs- the articles, the advice, the poetry even, but not the essence, not yet. Andddd, intelligence doesn’t happen in the input or the output. It happens in the messy, inefficient, human middle. In doubt. In absurd connections, in that gut feeling. In lived, boring, brilliant emotional experience. In asking why, even when there’s already an answer on the screen.
We’re being bent out of shape by systems that were never built to hold us.
This strips us of what makes us human, and hence distorts our very experience of humanity. It’s a technocapitalism problem - where machines are trained to think like markets,
and we are trained to be like them.
Irony? The more we optimize ourselves, the less interesting we become.
If your attention span has made it this far, please tell me what are you on? Have you been... I don’t know, taking a nap? Hugging your mom? Touching grass? Reading an actual book? Talking to a tree? Creating things that your heart truly desires? Willing to be bored? Making unpermitted art? Letting your monkey mind wander?
If your attention span has made it this far, please tell me what are you on? Have you been... I don’t know, taking a nap? Hugging your mom? Touching grass? Reading an actual book? Talking to a tree? Creating things that your heart truly desires? Willing to be bored? Making unpermitted art? Letting your monkey mind wander?
wait, ARE YOU A REBEL?
And with this, in-Transit #2 time is over. The flight to Paris is landing soon, and if you're still here,
still thinking, maybe you and I? we're both ready for takeoff :)
And with this, in-Transit #2 time is over. The flight to Paris is landing soon, and if you're still here,
still thinking, maybe you and I? we're both ready for takeoff :)
Unmonetised thoughts, mostly.
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