Chapter 13

2023/24

Jan 2023—A trip to Stockholm to see Lin. A trip to remember.

According to the Dead Internet Theory, the internet is mostly just bots disguised as humans.

I decided to split my personal, professional, and public life into distinct silos. There is nothing inherently special about being a software engineer; the world is overflowing with them. One way to stand out is by building a personal brand. Some contribute to open source, some write technical blogs, and others post relentlessly on LinkedIn, pushing to extremes that make you wonder what drives them.

I refused to be pulled onto that bandwagon out of sheer peer pressure. Peer pressure coerces people into behaviors they'd otherwise reject, and it took intense introspection to realize its toxic toll on myself and those around me.

So, I engineered a different system: splitting my private, professional, and public personas so rigidly that no one in one sphere knew anything about the others.

I wanted people in my personal life to judge me for who I am, stripped of my professional prowess or public footprint. I wanted colleagues to evaluate me purely on my engineering contributions, not my personal life. I wanted the public—you—to judge me by my story, not my private identity. And, pragmatically speaking, I didn't want government bots flagging my thoughts in some database as "controversial."

Everyone judges you one way or another. "Not giving a fuck" is a popular coping mechanism, but it never came naturally to me. I wanted the multifaceted experience of all three worlds combined with absolute privacy. This was the only way to achieve it.

Siri was a nickname given to me by colleagues in Germany back in 2020. I adopted it as my public persona—a blank slate devoid of color, nationality, or religion. I scrubbed years of digital history to build it from scratch. Siri could be anyone. It could be you just as easily as it could be me. It’s a conceptual framework I developed, and this real-world story gives that concept weight.

Owning my own flat was a game-changer. I finally had a secure home base from which to orchestrate the rest of my life. With a home near one of the world's most famous parks, a free gym in the building, and a 30-minute commute to Central London, there was simply no excuse not to live well. I had reached milestones I never dared dream of; complaining would have been the height of arrogance. What more could anyone ask for? I made a vow: be happy, or systematically eradicate the root causes of unhappiness.

I quit smoking after 11 years. It finally clicked that paying a mortgage to build a future while systematically destroying my body with cigarettes and alcohol was entirely counterproductive. I doubled down on the gym and picked up yoga, utilizing the building's complimentary facilities and perks from work. The early months were brutal—my body was still paying the price for that 2018 injury and years of sedentary desk work.

I dove headfirst into financial investments.

I also ramped up my travel. I took trips to Turkey with Lin, and traveled to Dubai and India solo while she headed back to Sweden.

Dubai had long been my standard stopover on flights to India. Ever since a dizzy spell at the Delhi airport in 2020 made me dread grueling, uninterrupted long-haul journeys, I always broke up the trip there. Besides, I was already eyeing Dubai for my next major property investment. Now that I understood how the game worked, that move would happen sooner or later.

Professionally, I leaned heavily into mentorship. I rebranded jsDrome into Siri's School of Web (which eventually evolved into webdeepdive.org). Work hit a comfortable stride, and I started interviewing at other companies purely for sport and calibration. I built a continuous-learning framework grounded in seven pillars:

Reading (articles, blogs)

Listening (podcasts, audiobooks)

Writing (Medium)

Speaking (at events)

Attending (workshops and conferences)

Interviewing

Teaching

Inculcating this habit paid massive dividends over time.

Meanwhile, I was still talking to Liz in secret. I was neck-deep in a dangerous double affair, growing increasingly desperate to find a way out of the deadlock.

Just as I had systematized my knowledge acquisition, I built a systematic engine to compound my wealth. Unlike knowledge, money is pure math—the easiest thing to manage once you know the rules.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand how to maximize the £20,000 annual tax-free allowance in a UK Stocks and Shares ISA. I had ignored them for the first eight years I lived in the UK (including years in Germany when I could have utilized them). ISAs offer the ultimate tax-free compounding vehicle for the working class—though part of me still wonders why the system allows it. Prior to that, I had parked my cash in Indian fixed deposits, which weren't terrible, but missing out on ISAs was a massive missed opportunity. If only someone had clued me in earlier, my capital would have worked much harder.

I finally grasped the golden rule: Time is the ultimate variable. Everything compounds if given enough runway. Patience is the rarest virtue, creating a compounding snowball effect that delivers exponential returns in the long run. It isn't a secret, but human nature rarely registers it until visible numbers force the issue.

I consolidated all my accounts into a master spreadsheet tracking investments across India, Germany, and the UK. Suddenly, I was significantly wealthier than I realized. That visibility rewired my habits. I stopped pissing away money on minor impulses like cigarettes and chocolates. Seeing numbers grow became its own addiction. I evolved from a passive saver into a ruthless strategist.

I introduced strict budgeting. I leveraged salary sacrifice schemes to slash my tax bracket and pump more cash directly into my pension before the taxman could touch it. I automated 80% of my monthly outflows, setting up a system where every fixed commitment was wiped clean on the second day of the month, leaving me a tightly capped allowance for living expenses. I divided my cash flow into two distinct pots:

Monthly Committed Spending: Mortgage, investments, bills, subscriptions—all auto-paid on the 2nd. This consumed 80% of my capital.

Monthly Regular Spending: Groceries, transport, personal care.

From there on, my only job was to let the system run.

Relationships, like everything else of value, require active maintenance. Neglect them at your peril. Modern society prizes individual freedom so fiercely that people often guard their autonomy at the expense of true partnership. A relationship is a sandcastle—fragile, exposed, and vulnerable to erosion. It takes maturity and hard-earned experience to recognize when it needs tending, patching, and rekindling. Those minor, ignored red flags eventually metastasize, cracking the foundation until the whole structure collapses under its own weight.

Lin and I were exceptional partners burdened by a crumbling foundation. What kept our castle standing was intense physical chemistry and the shared, gritty bond of being immigrant outsiders.

But her refusal to fully commit, paired with my restless desperation to find my permanent person, drew me closer to Liz. That internal shift poisoned my behavior toward Lin; I grew irritable over trivialities, cut our phone calls short, and let my attention wander while she spoke. When we were together, she caught me awake at all hours glued to my phone, occasionally suspecting someone else—suspicions I easily brushed off. I hypocritically used her initial deception about her marriage as moral cover for my own web of lies.

In mid-2023, Lin visited London again. This time, she discovered the truth about Liz. I decided it was time to drop the charade, face the music, and lay everything bare. Headstrong as always, she packed her bags and cut her trip short. On her way out, she looked me in the eye and asked if I genuinely loved Liz. For once, I wanted to offer absolute transparency and told her the truth: yes. I wanted to purge all lies and force a clean break to see if we could rebuild. But for Lin, that betrayal was an absolute horizon. She never forgave me.

Months later, when we finally spoke again, she admitted she wished I had simply lied to her or given her a comforting "no."

As for Liz, she pulled away as well. For her, it had all been online amusement. Poetic justice, I suppose.

Looking back, I believe the universe dropped Lin into my life to shatter my narrow worldview and pull me out of my psychological rut—and sent Liz to pull me away once that transformation was complete.

The aftermath forced deep introspection:

Know what you want: Define your relationship non-negotiables early and state them plainly. Transparency stems from respecting another person's autonomy to make their own informed choices. Let them decide if they want in; if not, let them walk.

You are not the center of the universe: Never enter a relationship expecting a partner to complete you or serve as your missing puzzle piece. Be their missing piece instead. Neither person exists merely to service the other's existence.

Co-travelers: Everyone is on their own distinct life journey. A partner is a co-traveler for a chapter. When their destination arrives, they must step off while you press on. The only true mark you should leave on their life is making their journey slightly easier, happier, and more content. Nothing more, nothing less.

Perfection is a myth: The ideal relationship doesn't exist. It's simply a functional partnership where both parties give and take equitably, resolving friction through mutual compromise. When a relationship reaches a point where maintenance is no longer possible, dignity lies in parting ways.

Earn loyalty: Trust isn't demanded; it's earned through absolute trustworthiness. Embrace the sacrifices required along the way.

Once the dust settled, we cut all contact. We both understood that our mutual purpose in each other's lives had been fulfilled, and the only logical path forward was separate roads. Even so, I know we remain quietly rooting for each other in spirit.

December 2023—Following that major personal wreckage, family pressure to get married reached a boiling point. I relented and agreed to explore an arranged marriage setup. On day one, I was paired with someone I had zero conversational chemistry with, confirming instantly that this path was entirely wrong for me.

I wasn't socializing enough to meet people organically. Work, teaching, and travel consumed every waking hour, and dating apps felt increasingly hollow. Ironically, working for a dating app company gave me a front-row seat to the systemic shift in how modern society views romance. It was the undeniable reality check that I was no longer part of the youth demographic—I was officially a seasoned millennial.

It finally dawned on me: my social isolation was the exact toll I paid to achieve mastery everywhere else. Life is an unyielding ledger of trade-offs. You lose one thing to gain another; I had learned that lesson years ago.

Across all seven pillars of my life, I was firing on all cylinders—except for the two that mattered most: Relationship and Health. Those are the exact currencies the corporate machine extracts from you in exchange for success.

The equation stands proven: Relationship + Health > Career + Finance + Home + Travel + Entertainment.

Around the same time, my brother exhausted his final attempt at the UPSC exams. I had never witnessed anyone pour that level of unrelenting, solitary effort into a single objective against such astronomical odds. I had backed him through every failure, driven by my deep-seated belief that sheer perseverance eventually pays off—just as it had in my own life. But this time, it didn't.

To help us both decompress from the burnout, I booked a trip to Dubai for the two of us, followed by my customary solo reset in Antalya, Turkey.