I jabbed at the screen. I stopped Mozart mid-syllable. The room filled back up with the small, unimportant sounds: a sports car taking the corner too fast on the wet road outside, the fridge in the kitchen doing its low anxious hum. The sudden lack of "content" felt like someone took a heavy, buzzing light out of my face. I just lay there, fully awake and completely done, thinking that I got my next book concept. Relaxed.

That's how 2025 started for me—not with fireworks, not with a new routine, not with a crisis. Just that small, oddly quiet refusal in the dark: I don't want one more voice trying to fix me. I don't want to fix myself—my brokenness is contributing more than anything to my writing. This is the creation of suffering Nietzsche might have mentioned.

The year itself didn't arrive as catastrophe or promise. It just…continued, carrying the previous year's suffering along with me. The next morning, my alarm dragged me out of shallow sleep with the same default tone I'd been too lazy to change for years. When I unlocked my phone, the news app was already open in the background like it had been waiting all night. The headlines had updated, but the feeling hadn't. Climate graphs, election scandals, think-pieces about "our fractured attention"—like opening an old tab and realizing it had been auto-refreshing this whole time. I didn't read anything, closed the phone, drank coffee (I was still drinking coffee at that time[3]) and went to my menial job.

Earlier that February I created my very first Substack and joined a few philosophical groups, posted, engaged in comments and all. I posted one review of The Godfather (one of my favorite movies of all time) as my first Substack post. As I was going to work, group chats blinked awake: recycled memes about the same politicians, the same "we really need to touch grass this year" jokes typed from beds like mine. Someone sent a screenshot of their screen-time stats; someone posted that "262 days sobber" worthless reminder; someone else replied with the crying-laughing emoji we all know is lying. On Letterboxd, people were already building "2025 watchlists," giving themselves homework with star ratings. What an awful way to start anything—I thought.

Among all this hither and thither, films introduced themselves with the same handful of words: "unmissable," "essential," "urgent," "the movie we need right now." Every platform tried to sell me something as if it were medicine for a condition I hadn't finished describing. Book newsletters (Mostly Australian Book News from ASA) arrived in my inbox in polite, hopeful fonts, offering "perspective," "healing," "clarity"—neatly stacked covers promising that if I just read these 7 or 10 or 30 things, the year would make a little more sense. Doing all this and that, months dragged themselves to March already.

It felt, from the first week, like everything around me was certain of its own necessity. The urgency to do anything productive blinked like needy pets. Articles and podcasts and films and books standing in digital queues, each one radiating "you no need to understand me this time." Every day I was going through YouTube philosophical videos, podcasts and interviews. And then there was me: sitting at the wobbly kitchen table in my Costal share-flat, staring at the top of a coffee, scrolling (I just scrolled YouTube and Substack; don't have other social media handles) with that dead, sideways thumb. I knew how I was supposed to respond—curious, engaged, "in the conversation." Most days I couldn't even fake it for the length of a notification preview. Just like that, doing nothing, May had already knocked on my door.

So this isn't a record of a productive year, yes?—no neat list of publications, no reading challenge screenshot, no word-count graph. It's not a noble confession of failure either; that would still give the year a narrative it doesn't deserve. It's closer to an inventory of traces. A folder of screenshots of sentences that felt too sharp to lose. Half-formed paragraphs written on my phone at 1:17 a.m. Full paragraphs written while changing bin liners or wiping coffee tables. Books that didn't match my mood and therefore turned out to be exactly what I needed. Films I watched knowing full well they'd probably betray their own darkness in the third act, and that I'd be annoyed enough to write about them.

I'm not trying to organize these things into a stable shape. I just want to admit they were there, that I was there, moving through them—sometimes awake, sometimes half-numb, sometimes both at once in that weird split-screen way where part of you is taking notes and the other part is just tired. It looks like I didn't do anything, but—surprisingly by May I had written 38 essays on Substack consisting of around 80,000 words, so I thought, okay, why not publish this as a book? I started looking for agents and publishers.

Essays Written On Substack as Resistance

Most of the essays I wrote in 2025 didn't start at a desk. They started in stupidly ordinary places—bus stops, supermarket aisles, the sticky plastic chair in my GP's waiting room. One afternoon at Woolies on Ocean Street. Some other day at work, lunchtime, I was standing in the staffroom next to the fridge holding a cold gallon of milk in my left hand to make coffee. Suddenly the milk gallon thrashed itself to the floor. I wasn't worried, but I got the idea about 'Vayantara.' Like that, every tiny not-quite-ordinary moment—some were about grief—beautifully shot, serious faces, muted colors—and then, in the last five minutes, it twisted everything into a neat little "essay grown from this" moment with swelling strings. That must be something to write. Most of the paragraphs of Vayantara: A Metaphysical Framework of the Friction-Zone were written outside staffroom at my job, on my phone.

One day me and my wife went out for a leisure walk to the nearest beach and I saw some kid whining about ice cream two meters away, saying something about the ice cream with dissatisfaction to his mother. Actually I couldn't hear anything; the words were lost in the middle of sentences. Exactly, I can recall that from that month I was losing my sense of words, paragraphs, subtitles of foreign movies. Without really deciding to, I opened the Notion app and typed: "THE ART OF LOSING WORDS." That was it. Just that one irritated, lost sense of losing meaning in my ears. I wrote another line—

"Suppose I am reading this sentence: 'I am going out for coffee today.' Here, 'I' dances with 'o' and it makes the 'ff' and 'ee' dizzy. Later, 'y' comes to the front of the sentence, and 'ing' collapses with 'ut'. It is all blending together to create total nonsense—derealization of the text." — THE ART OF LOSING WORDS, Mar 29, 2025

I shoved the phone back in my pocket. My wife was paying for caramel ice cream. A few days later, that coastal-ice-cream-parlor-incident turned into the spine of an essay about DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER'S DESCENT INTO MADNESS.

Just like that, the essays started to pile up like sediment—thin layers of annoyance and confusion settling over each other. Each one began with something almost embarrassingly small: after a festival dinner at a friend's house as "ultimately hopeful," when watching a movie, brushing aside the single bleak scene that had actually felt honest—and I jotted down "CATERPILLARS IN THE TEMPLE" while watching my favorite movie My Dinner with Andre; a philosophy talk on YouTube where someone sold "Stoicism" as a productivity hack, and I jotted down "WHY OPTIMISTS DIE YOUNGER?"; and somewhere a review that praised a novel's "quiet optimism" like optimism was automatically a virtue, like anything harsher was a moral failing, and I picked up my pen and jotted down "MY SOUL FOR A METAPHOR—AND OTHER CYNICAL MEDITATIONS ON HOPE AND DESPAIR."

None of these moments were scandalous. No one was cancelled; nothing "blew up." They were just little needles under the skin of my attention. The world kept asking for acceptance, for gratitude, for "choosing joy," and I kept feeling an itch to say: maybe not.

Somewhere mid-year, late at night, I was rereading a passage from the Gita on my cracked-screen phone (later I replaced that iPhone X with a Motorola, planning to gradually downgrading for dial-up phone), the one about niṣkāma karma—"You have the right to perform your duty, but not to the fruits thereof." I had seen it a hundred times quoted in pretty fonts online. That night it hit differently. It didn't sound like spiritual self-help. It sounded like a kind of refusal: do the thing, but don't let them bribe you with outcomes. Don't make your action depend on the promise that it will all "work out." I scribbled in the note section on my Kindle later: "Not optimism—refusal," and underneath it I wrote, "What language should we speak?" and I completed that confusing essay in a few days.

That one substitution followed me into my essays. I wasn't trying to "disprove" anyone's hope. I was trying to keep my own attention from sliding into that soft, sleepy perspective where everything, even pain, is seen as secretly good "for growth." Writing became a way of putting a small wedge of language into the gap before the tidy lesson snapped shut, and until November I was playing with this Gap (which I had tried to fulfill in my next book, which I had started in February and submitted to one of the Big Five—remember my second paragraph on top?), and one morning reading that already-submitted manuscript, I cringed, felt something wasn't good about the manuscript's ending and wrote "reality of bestselling books" in anger.

If there is any coherence to those essays (from February to May), it isn't in the themes (cinema, philosophy, spiritual language, whatever). It's in the mood. They are suspicious of conclusions. They take the long way around when everyone else is speeding toward the takeaway. They like questions that stay open and a bit uncomfortable. When I look at them now as a published book, linked on a website, they don't look like "my work" in a proud way. They look like a medical file or obsession with higher realm: here is where the year pressed too hard; here is what flared up when someone said "redemption" one time too many. I didn't write a book this year; I wrote another manual to fix my complicated head, or Double.

Reading as a Series of Moods

Reading in 2025 felt less like climbing some noble mountain of knowledge and more like sitting in the same room while the light kept changing. This year, again like other years, I pretended more than I read. The names on the spines were mostly the usual suspects—Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, the Gita, bits of the Upanishads, Greek tragedies—and the way they landed was not different because the background hum of the world was the same as the previous year in my head. Same laceration in the skull. Same urges to fulfill from philosophy, same answers or solutions I was seeking from century-old philosophy. I could not read more. I finished At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell early in the year; after that I bought I May Be Wrong: And Other Wisdoms from Life as a Forest Monk by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad at the airport; the next one was Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets and the last one was The Widow by John Grisham. That's all I finished reading this year. And what did I reread? A lot. Same. Yes, same books, same philosophy—about 50 books or more.

Kierkegaard's famous "leap of faith" didn't read like a leap this year; it read like pacing at a cliff edge in the dark, going back and forth, testing the ground with the tip of your shoe. I used to write or wrote this "leap of faith" in my essays many places in different ways, but the romantic drama of Either/Or blurred into something more like anxiety this year. Schopenhauer, who used to seem almost cartoonishly pessimistic, started to feel—dangerously—like the only one in the room not pretending. In a culture where every app and ad and newsletter leans toward some version of "you've got this," his bleakness was indecently honest. I don't know—the only philosopher I read seriously this year was Nietzsche again. I felt more tired this year; I don't know why. I read almost every day: Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human. As usual the Gita and the Upanishads came back into my life not as "spiritual guides" but as serious, slightly stern teachers about action.

Greek tragedy slipped in sideways one night on my phone in bed; other times while riding buses. I was too tired to sit upright with a paperback anymore, so I opened Sophocles (and this one is still open while I was writing this) in a web browser, the screen dimmed to the lowest brightness, text a bit too large, way too large. The grandeur people always talk about in those plays barely registered. What registered was how normal it all felt: people making decisions half-blind, trying to do the least bad thing with incomplete information, with meaning only arriving—if it arrived at all—later, for someone else. The structure was horribly familiar: you act; consequences ripple; explanation limps in afterwards and calls it "necessary."

Oblomov stayed with me in a new, unnerving way this year. His famous inertia—lying around, not committing, avoiding letters, collecting just tabs—stopped feeling like just a literary joke about laziness. I wrote a few unpublished essays about this laziness and stored them instead of publishing on Substack or on my website. It started to feel like a weirdly accurate description of what it's like to live over-informed and under-convinced: so full of news, takes, warnings, choices, that your will just quietly lies down on the couch and pretends to sleep. Pangloss, with his "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," only showed up in my head occasionally, mostly as the voice I now wanted to kick out of any room I was reading in.

This year headaches and nausea intensified. Only when I recalled this moment it gave me hope. Almost the whole year they roamed around my skull like they had permanent rule over my health. I have to mention it here: I was working on my important book I called Nauseous, for four years, so this year I wrote and revised a few chapters here and there—it almost reached 150,000 words, densely written in vague metaphors, lots of philosophical-hyphenated jargon to maintain my nausea less intensely, planning to finish by 2027.

So, reading new books was not possible due to poor vision and health. I actually started listening to audiobooks from mid-year (I used to hate listening to books but…) and the good thing is I finished my unfinished book (In Search of Lost Time) by listening. I was reading Proust for a few years now (because it has seven volumes and is a big-slow-book) and after all, between reading new things or not—what stayed when I shut the books wasn't a list of positions I now "hold." It was tones and textures: sarcasm worn thin with overuse, irony that had gone brittle, sincerity that felt genuinely risky to attempt. Hopefully I will get my hands on new books and literature next year if my health allows me.

Cinema: Nights Before and After

Cinema in 2025 mostly came into my life sideways, through tiredness. The decision to watch a film[4] was rarely brave. It happened at 11:40 p.m., when the idea of starting a new book felt like agreeing to another job, or on a Sunday afternoon when the rain made the traffic outside sound like a continuous shhh and the couch seemed like the only defensible position.[5]

The suspicion that contemporary films are terrified of tragedy didn't arrive as an abstract theory. It showed up as a pattern my body started to recognize before my mind had named it. A late-night Netflix-like website choice that opened with genuine bleakness—the camera lingering in unpleasant places,[6] the music wisely quiet[7]—and then, somewhere in some movies around minute 88, lurched into an improbable reconciliation. A film about grief that spent 90 minutes circling the fact of loss and then wrapped it all up in a montage of "healing" set to a sad-but-uplifting track. A festival screening at the Dendy where the packed room laughed in pure relief when the ending reframed all the suffering as necessary for "growth." Although everything suffocates me these days. Not even a single day did I go to the cinema this year.[8] Latest cinemas bother me. They lack aesthetic pleasure.

It wasn't that I begrudged people comfort. Sitting there in those dark rooms, I knew exactly why everyone wanted the lights at the ending to come up warm. What bothered me was the rule underneath it: sell anything these days. Greek tragedy never insisted that catastrophe had to earn its keep; it allowed disaster to simply happen, and then watched what that did to people. The Gita doesn't promise that correct action leads to a pleasant outcome; it just tells you to act, and to let go of the fruits. Cinemas these days have no soul in them. Sartre's whole point was that existence has no guarantee of external meaning. Watching film after film dodge that exposure started to feel like watching a tightrope walker who keeps insisting there's a net underneath when you can clearly see the floor.

There were a few stubborn exceptions that kept me engaged. A small film where the camera stayed with a character in the kitchen after everyone else had left, no music, just the open fridge casting its stupid white light on her face as she stared at the inside like it might answer for what had happened. A film that ended in the middle of an unresolved conversation, cutting to black just when a speech about "moving on" might have been expected. These moments didn't feel clever; they felt like genuine risk—like someone, somewhere, had decided not to flinch. They were rare enough that when they happened, I felt a physical reaction: shoulders dropping, something like respect.

Practically, my "cinema year" looked like this: see a trailer at lunch on my phone, think "I'll watch that tomorrow," forget, remember again at 11 p.m. while brushing my teeth. Some days a single shot from a review—a long static view of a road, a close-up of someone's hand tapping a table—would sit in the back of my mind all day, like a promise. Other days I'd press play already half-resentful, convinced the film would betray its own premise with an upbeat cheat at the end. When it did, the annoyance didn't feel righteous; it felt oddly personal, like being stood up by someone who had promised a difficult conversation and then changed the subject.

Writing about those films became its own kind of damage-control. Not "I hate cinema now," but "I loved you once, I know what you can do, why are you doing this?" By December, dragging myself to a cinema or opening a streaming app didn't feel like choosing entertainment. Anyway, long ago I had stopped bothering myself with new cinemas, so it was no matter of importance. It felt like testing a tiny, specific hypothesis: will this film allow despair to sit there, unredeemed, or will it force everything into a moral or a lifehack or a brandable twist? I hate that, and most nights, the answer was yes. Every cinema is trying to teach lifehacks; that bothers me. The nights it was no felt like secret handshakes from strangers, but yes, I rewatched a lot of movies this year, like White Nights, Taxi Driver, The Godfather trilogy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Doors, 12 Monkeys, Pi (1998), Solaris, The Seventh Seal, etc. etc.

Two Books: Where They Actually Came From

The two books (The Outsider and The Unknown Existence of Being) that came out under my name this year still feel slightly unreal when I see them stacked finely on my bookshelf. They didn't arrive as projects with timelines and clear shapes. They arrived as scattered bits of language that refused to stay in the places where they first appeared—on trains, in hospital corridors while I was arguing with my emergency doctor early this year, in the notes field of my phone. Yes, it all came hurried and unnoticed.

Whole pages of the second book of this year (The Unknown Existence of Being) started their life in those nowhere moments. Actually I started conceiving this book's idea when I had finished my book Anugami in the year 2019, yes, and it took many years of slow writing to finish this up. Some paragraphs came while I was waiting in a hospital hallway on one of those plastic chairs that steal the warmth from my legs. Some paragraphs about time, Kālah (time), came while I woke up screaming from dreams. The air in the story smelled like antiseptic and bad coffee. Somehow I managed, years later, to finish that and was able to make it a philosophically rich story. I typed a sentence about the way time goes thick in those places and then stopped because my name was called. Years later, scrolling through old notes, I found it again and recognized the exact heaviness of that afternoon. The book collected dozens of bits like that: a sentence written on the Melbourne North line as the train stalled (somewhere around the year 2018) between North Melbourne and Kensington; a line about "refusal" and "afterlife" or "the concept of Avyakta," scribbled at the back of a Coles' grocery dockets;[9] a thought about resistance recorded in the Notes app (I used Evernote at that time) at 2:03 a.m. after a fight I never turned into a story.

The first book is even more soaked in night. Lines like "I'm so tired of being okay about everything," which seemed too melodramatic to write but too honest to erase entirely, so they got saved in a private note. There is a passage in that book that started as three words typed in the dark: "I am tired." No metaphor, no context. When I came across it months later, I built outward from that small honest center instead of smoothing it out into something more "literary hole."

When the books finally arrived as physical objects—covers, blurbs, that slightly chemical New Book Smell—they didn't feel like answers or endpoints. They felt like containers for unresolved tension. They didn't "explain my journey" or "wrap up a phase." They just gave doubt, fatigue, resistance and a weird, unfashionable persistence a place to sit together without being forced into a neat arc.

Seeing them in the world didn't feel triumphant. It felt like finally exhaling after realizing I'd been holding my breath for years and years—not because anything outside had changed, but because my body couldn't keep doing that half-held thing. Release is not closure, but it's something. So, as far as publishing two books, the year is a success.

Writing as Staying Visible to Myself

Writing in 2025 never felt like an act of salvation. The idea that "writing saves," that mockery of self-help kind, has always sounded to me like something you'd find printed in cursive on a mug in a bookstore café. If writing was necessary this year, it was for a smaller, rougher reason: it stopped me from quietly agreeing to things I didn't actually believe. For me, writing starts with unconsciousness and finishes with extreme nausea.

Not writing started to feel, almost physically, like consent. Consent to the endless churn of takes. Consent to the way every hard thing gets flattened into a moral lesson. Consent to the demand—implicit in posts, in talks, in marketing—that the correct response to the world is still "hope." On days when I didn't write anything, especially after watching a film that pulled its punches or reading an essay[10] that sold acceptance as enlightenment, or after working eight-hour shifts, or honestly days with long extreme-death-like-headaches and eye pain, I felt like I'd nodded along when I should have at least shrugged.

So writing became less about inspiration and more about discipline this year. A small, semi-boring discipline: sit down, open the desktop even when the keys feel sticky from last night's chicken drumstick while watching movies, and the white of the document feels aggressive, and put into words the discomfort that followed me around all day. Sometimes the most honest thing I could write was a single, flat sentence: "I did not like that ending." Or: "I do not want to be healed by this." Or simple as it is, many notes of mine filled with such: "I don't feel like writing today, having a headache." No wisdom, no flourish. Just a line in the sand. Headache and nausea.

On a practical level, this looked like setting a 20-minute alarm at 10 p.m. and telling myself: "Just write until it goes off." And actually I used to set alarms at those times because mid-year was so terrible for me—I had a troubling headache, constant nausea—and it looked like trudging from the couch to the kitchen table with my reMarkable under my arm like a reluctant pet. It looked like typing while the fridge hummed and my housemate's Netflix sounded faint laughter through the wall. A lot of what came out in those sessions was messy (that time was the year of writing Who Will Bury the Dead God) and repetitive and will never be published—a few sections from it because it was really a horrible confession even for me. The point wasn't to make anything beautiful. The point was not to let a day vanish unmarked into the blur. I wanted to capture everything in between my nauseating existence.

Ending Without Clarity, but Not Without Contact

By the time the year started thinning out into December, nothing big had happened to pull it all together. No life-event montage, no perfect coincidence. What I had instead were small, very specific memories that refused to dissolve: that line from the Gita about having a right to the work but not to the fruits, glowing on my phone early in the morning (because it's my regular email I get and I recite aloud); the one film that let its characters stay broken at the end (like Colonel Kurtz) and kept me awake long after the credits; the particular weight of a paperback facedown on my chest (like Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as I drifted off, words pressed against my sternum like a physical insistence.

I don't know what 2026 is going to ask for. I don't know which books will get under my skin enough to stay, which films will finally risk tragedy without apology, which sentences I'll again find myself highlighting half-asleep with the screen brightness turned all the way down. I don't know if my suspicion of optimism will soften or sharpen, or both, depending on the day. How many days I will have to fight with nausea or terrible headaches.

What I do know is that this year never explained itself to me, and I didn't manage to explain myself to it either. That feels, weirdly, correct. Some years are not for narrative arcs. They're for contact—with fatigue, with resistance, with the tiny decision, repeated in different rooms and on different days, to stay awake a little longer than is comfortable, avoiding lying face down on cold tiles on my apartment floor to make my temples cool (I deliberately lied there unconsciously this year many times).[11] And, to write one more stubborn, not-very-useful sentence that refuses to turn everything into a lesson or mind-blowing philosophical concepts.

That's all this is: a record that I was here, that I noticed, that I did not entirely agree. Or will be alive next year to write further.

Happy new year my friends!

NOTES

[1] I have always been a troubled sleeper. One day she saw me fall asleep while listening to Mozart, and then it became a ritual. But you know how it goes—when you do the same thing repeatedly, it loses its magic. Eventually, this music-medicine stopped working.

[2] Later, I realized the idea was perfect for a book, so I began writing. I struggled to recall the most vivid moments of my childhood and carefully connected all the dots, shaping them into a philosophical memoir. In the end, I created titles for a hundred memories.

[3] I quit drinking coffee because my mother said it was making my insomnia worse, so I switched to tea instead.

[4] At this stage, I can't watch films in full screen—it turns my double consciousness into outright torture. For the past few years, I've learned to watch movies in a small, split screen on my desktop, just so I can follow what's being said, how lips move, how meaning survives the blur, so on…

[5] Even on the couch, I have a specific spot where I sit so I can maintain a better visual position. That isn't always possible, though, especially when guests are over and courtesy demands flexibility. Even a few of my friends know which seat is "mine." So at night when its empty its all mine. No courtesy needed at all.

[6] Which I loved most—for example, Pi (1998), whose bleakness feels honest rather than performative, and whose visual cruelty serves thought rather than spectacle.

[7] Amadeus is an example of this kind of movie that I return to all year round, for its masterful storytelling, subtle restraint, and the way it lets music, silence, and human folly speak with equal weight.

[8] Last week, my wife and I went to see it for her enjoyment, after a year. That's why I wrote "Not even a single day did I go to the cinema this year". I spent nearly the entire time straining to concentrate on just a corner of the screen, as if that small patch could hold the chaos my eyes could no longer bear.

[9] I have a habit to collect all dockets in our kitchen bucket.

[10] One of my re-reading essay is "A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps.", It is a short, personal essay by Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf's father). When I feel low I often read this one.

[11] One day, while I was lying face down, half-naked, on the cold tiles of the lounge room, my friend came over and saw me. That moment has since become infamous in our group, especially whenever I try to explain how I manage my headaches.