← Cover

Chapter 10

2020/21

Europe is defined by a fierce brand of individualism — people mind their own business so thoroughly that they rarely intrude into anyone else’s affairs. Neighbors can live side-by-side for years without exchanging more than a nod. In global cities where transients constantly cycle through for work, building lasting roots is rare. Add to that my reserved nature and the language barrier, and it was a recipe for a social life disaster.

Turning 30 brought familiar pressure from family to marry. I was adamantly opposed to the traditional arranged marriage route; it simply didn't align with my worldview. Desperate to put myself out there, I turned to Bumble and Tinder, resulting in zero luck aside from a single, forgettable date that did not go beyond a single date night.

That Friday-evening gathering on Nik’s terrace became my sole social outlet in an otherwise lonely city where making friends wasn’t easy. But most of them had moved with their families; I was the only single one among them. Nik offered to set me up with someone he knew, which I thought was very kind of him, but I declined.

I didn't necessarily feel a lack of friends; rather, the breakup was fresh, all my peers were settling down, and the societal drumbeat was deafening. I knew I had to force myself out of my shell, transforming from an introvert into an extrovert — a metamorphosis that demanded immense courage.

And then, just as I resolved to change, the pandemic struck. Germany enacted some of the strictest lockdowns in Europe, slamming shut whatever meager windows of opportunity I had to meet someone. God must have been watching from the clouds with a grin, reminding me once again that nobody gets everything in life.

Loneliness crept in thick and fast. My social life came to a complete standstill — just like the empty Berlin streets under lockdown.

I had plenty of time to think about my past relationships and my own contribution to them. I realized that all this time, I had been fooling myself with childish infatuations I dignified by calling "relationships." Every past connection had been marred by doubt, long-distance absences, and near-nonexistent intimacy. What I forced with Nat had never had a real chance to thrive; it wasn't a healthy relationship. During the six to eight years when I should have gracefully moved on and built something genuine, I clung to her out of a stubborn refusal to lose. A real relationship begins with mutual sexual attraction — the initial spark and the glue that keeps people together — followed by exploring life side-by-side with the intent of eventually making it official, living together, and building a future.

Just as I thought I was wiping the slate clean, I found myself trapped. Berlin wasn't going to be the place where I found a partner. Watching everyone around me move on, settle down, and start families while I remained single haunted me, yet I refused to cave to societal pressure. My parents kept fielding calls from potential alliances, all of which I bluntly rejected. I wanted to "marry out of love" — a phrase I first heard from Ola, a long-term friend from New Zealand I met online playing chess in my teens that stuck with me ever since. I realized that finding one's own mate is a fundamentally innate human trait, and I wanted that.

In January 2020, I started teaching. I launched an online platform called jsDrome and taught around 100 students in batches. I did it mostly out of sheer boredom. I didn't want to socialize, I knew nobody, the Berlin winter was brutally cold and dark, and I had empty evenings staring at the walls. Teaching came naturally; after enduring four grueling years in college, I had developed strong convictions about how knowledge should actually be imparted.

To cope with the evenings, I fell into a lazy routine of ordering food — usually a comforting chana bhatura paired with beer from a local spot. What started as an occasional treat quickly snowballed into a habit. Cigarettes in Germany were also considerably cheaper than in the UK, anchoring me deeper into the habit. Every time I needed a five-minute break from work, I lit up. The toxic cocktail of a sedentary lifestyle, chronic loneliness, high stress, smoking, heavy drinking, pandemic lockdown, and greasy food finally caught up with me. To make matters worse, the ankle injury I neglected back in 2018 flared up due to inactivity, forcing me to adopt a stiff, awkward gait to spare my right foot. For the first time in my life, I felt my physical vitality actively degrading rather than improving. It was a stark biological reminder that the human body peaks around 30 and begins its slow, natural descent. Muscles tighten, backs ache, hair greys. It suddenly made sense why most people prioritize starting families in their twenties before dedicating their lives entirely to their children. Yet here I was, pushing past 30, still single, having staked everything on career supremacy. I was paying an exorbitant price for professional success.

My living situation shifted again. I landed a tiny studio in Neukölln for just €300 a month. Renting in Berlin is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. You need a stellar Schufa credit score — which I didn't have — and listings routinely draw hundreds of applicants. Word on the street was that some viewings drew up to 1,000 people. The cheaper the flat, the longer the queue. At €300 a month, this was as cheap as it got, and as a newly arrived expat, I figured my odds were zero. I scored it through pure luck. Overhearing a conversation in the office breakroom, I learned that my Finnish colleague from finance, Mik, was vacating his apartment to move a floor up and needed someone to take over his contract. There was a massive catch: the apartment came completely bare. It lacked lighting, a kitchen, and even bathroom fixtures. Mik had custom-built them, and taking over the lease meant signing an agreement to inherit his custom fittings — promising to either pass them on or sell them when I eventually moved out. I also had to source my own furniture, Wi-Fi, electricity, and water connections. If London had taught me anything, it was to run away from such chaotic deals. But the rock-bottom rent made it entirely worth it. Neukölln wasn't exactly a pristine neighborhood, routinely ranking at the bottom of Berlin's livability lists. But I trusted my colleague over a stranger, figuring that if he could live there comfortably, so could I. After submitting my mountain of documents and signing the fixture-inheritance waiver, I somehow got the apartment.

The studio flat was modest — one square, spacious room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. For €300 a month, I gladly sacrificed luxury. I kept things ruthlessly minimalist. I inherited the basic kitchen and bathroom fixtures, bought a wardrobe, table, and chair from IKEA, and left it at that. I refused to buy a proper bed, opting instead for a mattress placed directly on the floor. A beanbag served as my sofa. My monitor from work acted as my TV, hooked up to a Chromecast resting on a cardboard box covered with a cloth. A €5 speaker produced tinny, distorted audio, and a third-hand washing machine sat right in the living room because it wouldn't fit anywhere else. I used magnetic whiteboard sheets taped to the wall for notes. I cheaped out to the absolute extreme. Ever since leaving home in 2012, I had craved absolute independence — an unshared territory of my own. Paying €300 for a minimalist studio was the best investment I could have made, freeing me from the friction of incompatible roommates and clashing standards of cleanliness.

Even though I was making 80K a year, I was extremely averse to spending for comfort. My deeply ingrained scarcity mindset paralyzed me. Having grown up in a household where every penny was squeezed and non-essential spending was treated as a sin, I had no idea how to spend large sums of money. A person conditioned by extreme frugality will continue living like a pauper even when they prosper financially unless they take a concious decision to change it. Its Siri's First Law of Wealth. The superficial numbers change, but the spending psychology remains trapped in survival mode.

There is a silver lining: extreme frugality is an unmatched engine for wealth accumulation. Financial advisors swear by it. But it raises a fundamental existential question: What is the point of making money if you never actually live? I was simply completely unequipped to manage success healthily.

So throughout 2020, working by day and teaching by night left me completely drained. Cooking required time, energy, and an elaborate cleanup I simply didn't have the bandwidth for. I defaulted to ordering takeout. I fed myself a steady list of excuses: too exhausted after work and teaching, ordering only cost around €15, I was in pain due to the ankle injury, there was a pandemic on, I shouldn't be going out anyway, and so on. Excuses are weapons for the coward seeking justification. And so, a destructive habit took root: ordering food almost daily, invariably paired with beer or wine. I would eat, drink, and watch TV until I passed out. Without realizing it, I had wired my brain to associate alcohol with sleep. From the hyper-active athlete of 2014 dreaming of the World Cup, I was well on the path of self-destruction.

All my stressors peaked simultaneously: work pressure, societal, family and peer pressure to marry, career ambitions, chronic injury pain, heavy smoking, drinking, sleep deprivation, pandemic isolation, skipping meals, and crushing loneliness.

Though Mik lived just a floor up, we barely crossed paths more than once a week. My routine had devolved entirely: working from home in isolation, eating greasy takeout, and drinking myself into unconsciousness.

Day-to-day changes are imperceptible; you look the same in the mirror today as you did yesterday. But stacked over a year, the deterioration is stark. Bad habits compound silently, and they kill. The COVID-19 virus had a cruel habit of preying on bodies broken down by neglect.

Within months, my exciting new chapter in Berlin had inverted into a nightmare. It was the dark side of the Indian success dream that nobody discusses: professional and financial triumph does not equal a successful life.

Here I was, crammed into an obscure corner of Berlin, isolated, unable to speak the language, physically broken down, drowning in work stress, sleeping irregularly, unable to make friends or find a partner, estranged from my support network, increasingly absent-minded, and anxious to the core. The domino effect of these compounding stressors wrecked my peace of mind. I was miserable, anxious, and deeply terrified that my body was giving out under the strain.

It was around this time that Liz entered my life. She was an American I met on Instagram who had followed my journey for some time. By March 2020, our acquaintance crossed over into something more intimate. Concurrently, I was swiping aggressively on Tinder. Realizing that swiping manually was a massive drain on time and energy — and wanting to avoid bot profiles likely training AI models — I wrote a simple JavaScript automation script to auto-swipe through profiles while I slept. That was how I met Lin, a Swedish woman, that same year. Neither connection was strictly romantic at first, so I maintained contact with both. But that dynamic was about to explode.

I noticed a trend in the kind of relationships I was forming. I was literally and metaphorically born with the web; the World Wide Web was created in the exact year of my birth. I grew up inside it, built my career on it, made lifelong friends through it, and also found romantic entanglements there. I was simultaneously its beneficiary and its victim.

These were real people I connected with deeply over digital lines. Living alone in unfamiliar cities with no local social circle, the web was my only portal to human connection. Anyone who crossed the threshold of a conversation quickly became an anchor. Deep down, I had tied my entire self-worth to having a romantic partner, allowing emotional attachments to form rapidly, and the web was the means to it.

Professionally, things were moving at lightspeed. A high-pressure initiative to launch a grocery delivery platform dropped in our laps with an aggressively tight deadline. On top of building it, I was tasked with leading my team to merge the Austrian business unit into the global platform — after which team members would either need to internalize new roles or exit the company. The anxiety of managing displaced colleagues, especially those who had relocated to Berlin specifically for our team, weighed heavily on me. I struggled immensely to balance individual coding contributions with people management, doing the impossible job of shielding the team while satisfying executive demands. I was paid a hefty lump sum for pulling it off, but by the end of it, I was mentally shattered.

Financially, however, my position was fortified. Living in that €300 Neukölln studio meant my savings exploded. But making money was only half the battle; managing it proved to be a separate minefield. Every time I visited India, insurance agents materialized at my doorstep — tipped off by automated data brokers — shamelessly badgering me to lock into opaque policies. Realizing I was being emotionally blackmailed into poor financial products opened my eyes to the broader reality of wealth management: much of the retail investment ecosystem functions like a legalized Ponzi scheme. Commissions trickle upward while inflation erodes the base, leaving everyday investors footing the bill for institutional profits. The brutal truth of the financial world is that real capital is usually accumulated by getting paid to do the difficult, unpleasant work others avoid.

Around that time, Meta reached out via a cold email from a recruiter for a software engineering role in London. My heart soared. FAANG companies occupy an almost mythical status in India; every tech worker treats landing one as the ultimate validation. Remembering how I once pranked college friends with a fake acceptance email from Facebook, I saw this as a golden opportunity to wipe the slate clean and escape Berlin. I requested a three-month preparation window. Until then, I had never practiced LeetCode puzzles or formal systems design interviews — I had climbed purely on raw practical experience. I needed time to master the six-stage loop, knowing a failure meant a mandatory one-year cooling period. I went all-in. Any spare minute outside of my brutal work hours was poured into preparation. I skipped meals, slept for hours at a time, abandoned weekends, ordered cheap food to save minutes, stopped cleaning my apartment, skipped haircuts, and cut off human contact entirely. I isolated myself with study materials like a madman possessed. When the interview day arrived, they skipped the standard algorithmic puzzles entirely, drilling deep into advanced JavaScript fundamentals instead. Paralyzed by nerves, I choked on round one and bombed out completely. I was devastated.

That failure forced a hard realization: brute-forcing interview prep through sheer panic wasn't going to cut it. I needed a sustainable philosophy. I dropped a message to my brother, who was deep into preparing for India's grueling Civil Service Exams: "Small things done over a long period yield the best results." That simple truth became one of my foundational life rules.

Years prior, I had casually mentioned to my Greek friend Pol that my ultimate career ambition was to work for a FAANG company. To my utter shock, he laughed, dismantling my obsession with a series of sharp rhetorical questions. Growing up in India, the LeetCode grind and FAANG worship were cultural axioms — the ultimate status symbols. People plastered their company titles on LinkedIn, launched derivative YouTube courses, and worshipped tech CEOs on podcasts, treating brand names as substitutes for a personality. The corporations know this playbook backward and forward. They understand they can source cheap, obedient, intensely hardworking, pressure-absorbing engineers from India who will ask zero questions to protect their visas. Every so often, they promote an Indian executive as a PR crowning jewel, trotting them out on podcasts where billionaires praise foreign markets while local aspirants worship them like deities. Pol shattered my ignorance. For him, engineering was about genuine passion, not corporate feudalism. I realized I had been a willing slave to a system that traded authentic humanity for resume vanity. My Finnish neighbor Mik echoed the sentiment: "If it's the right job, shouldn't you get it naturally without months of desperate cramming?" It wasn't until much later in life, after actually landing a role at a certain FAANG company, that I witnessed firsthand the stark cultural divide between engineers who ground LeetCode to escape their circumstances versus engineers from developed countries who arrived through natural, sustainable pipelines.

Technical interviews are notoriously brutal — typically featuring four or more rounds with roughly a 50/50 pass rate per stage, translating to a daunting 1/32 probability overall. They are deeply subjective, easily manipulated by biased interviewers, and heavily prone to ego clashes. Surviving them consistently comes down to sheer volume. Over my career, I’ve spoken with thousands of companies, interviewed with 300+, cleared 55+, and accepted a dozen. You only need to succeed once for the world to notice the outcome.

By late 2020, I also applied for the UK's Global Talent Visa, convinced my multi-country engineering footprint qualified me. The application was swiftly rejected — a humbling reminder that my contributions weren't yet at the global elite tier. But I was moving in the right direction, knocking on major doors and learning through relentless rejection.

Cooking became my primary sanctuary — the one activity completely divorced from a glowing screen. I subscribed to HelloFresh boxes to eliminate grocery-shopping friction, turning my compact kitchen into a laboratory for Italian, Mexican, and Indian cuisines.

Despite the wreckage of my health and love life, my career and finances were stabilizing. I was genuinely curious to see how far my own raw talent could carry me without outside scaffolding.

Lin entered the physical picture. After matching on Tinder, our initial text banter spilled over into an all-night phone call that lasted until dawn. She was a Swedish schoolteacher — strikingly beautiful, intellectually formidable, widely read, and fiercely independent as an immigrant herself. We clicked instantly over our shared disdain for beating around the bush. After two months of intense intellectual and sexual chemistry over the phone, we decided to test our compatibility in the real world. Meeting someone exclusively online carries inherent risks; let a virtual connection linger too long in the ether, and the friction of physical reality can shatter it. (I learned that lesson painfully back in school with Nan). I flew to Stockholm — my sole trip of 2020. Lin took the train down from Uppsala to meet me.

The initial meeting was excruciatingly awkward. The electric, uninhibited intimacy we shared digitally evaporated under the microscope of reality, and let's just say my performance fell woefully short. By the next morning, mortified by the mismatch, Lin packed her bags from our Gamla Stan Airbnb to stay with a friend, effectively ghosting me and taking an early train home. Devastated, I cut my trip short and booked a flight straight back to Berlin that very afternoon. Sitting alone at Arlanda Airport, I felt like an absolute failure. If there was a God watching, He had delivered a masterclass in humiliation. 2020 truly could not get any worse.

After reaching home, I contemplated the mess of a life I was having. Every little thing in my life was up in the air, broken, or failed. I needed to sort my head, and to do that, I had to organize my life from scratch. I asked myself: What kind of a lead software engineer can't even manage his own existence? How can you solve complex organizational problems if your own internal systems are crashing? Software engineers understand how to optimize computer performance; it was time to apply those exact debugging principles to my own life. I had flirted with this idea back in London in 2018, but never followed through. I cleared my makeshift magnetic whiteboard and began mapping out my life to understand the scale of the things I had to fix.