In the Eternal Pursuit of Happiness

A few months ago, in a moment that felt cinematic in its clarity, I realized I was living my dream. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing.

Dreams, like in Inception, distort reality. They exaggerate the good, blur the cracks, and convince you that what you’re seeing is exactly what you want. They feel vivid and intentional, but they’re not real. They’re curated illusions.

I decided to wake up. Took the red pill, so to speak. And I have been miserable ever since.

For years, I had been living what looked like an ideal trajectory. An IITian with a tech career in Bengaluru, working on challenging problems, shipping fast, learning constantly, and climbing the ladder faster than I had time to question what it was against. From the outside, it looked impressive and aspirational. From the inside, it began to feel strangely empty.

I asked myself a brutally simple question: If this company shut down tomorrow, what would change? The answer scared me in its clarity. It was nothing meaningful.

DevRev was not changing the world in a way that resonated with me personally. I was not driven by purpose, but by inertia. And momentum, I learned, is powerful enough to carry you very far without ever asking whether the destination matters to you.

So I hit the brakes, hard. I took a sabbatical, imagining it as a kind of reset. Three months away from the work circus, and surely I would figure things out. I believed clarity would arrive gently, maybe even confidently. I thought I would identify my “real” dream career and start building it within that neat window of time.

What I completely forgot was this: it took me twenty-six years to build version one of my life. Expecting the next one to reveal itself in a quarter was not ambition; it was impatience disguised as optimism. It is ironic that I call myself a builder, yet forgot what it takes to go from zero to one, especially when what I was attempting was not a reset, but a one-to-one-hundred journey!

In hindsight, this all feels obvious. In hindsight, everything does. But when you are inside the confusion, nothing is linear. Thoughts scatter. Sleep cycles drift. Days lose structure. To-do lists grow longer while direction dissolves. Introspection, which initially feels productive, slowly turns into paralysis when there is nothing concrete to anchor it to. I underestimated how destabilizing it is to unlearn an identity before having a new one ready.

Luckily, after dreams, you wake up. And I am at my best after rest.

Dreams may be vivid and consuming, but clarity returns when we wake up and see things as they are, not as we wish them to be. That quiet ability to return matters more than I once realized.

I do not yet know what I am coming back to, or how the next chapter will take shape. But I do know why.

Maybe this phase is not a failure, but a necessary unlearning. And maybe waking up is not the end of a dream, but the beginning of choosing deliberately.