The biryani was getting cold and I was running out of answers.

Not because the question was hard. Because it was four words. "Why do you do it?" And I, the guy with a backup plan for his backup plans, the guy who could map a five year career path on a napkin, had absolutely nothing.

Kesaru was sitting across from me, the same guy I'd met at a tech event two years ago, ended up on the same campus with, and somehow became the kind of friend who says the thing nobody else will say. He'd been watching me disappear into commitments for weeks. It was just a matter of time before he said something.

IEEE had been eating me alive for weeks. The editorial deadlines. The rewrites. The hours that disappeared into work that paid me exactly nothing. I complained about it constantly. To Kesaru, to myself, to the ceiling at 1am.

And still I showed up. Every single time.

Networking. Working with a team. Sharpening my skills.

I said it proudly. Like I'd been waiting for someone to ask. Three clean answers, no hesitation.

Kesaru nodded slowly. Then leaned in with that sarcastic half-smile: "Bro, you're already working for free. Why not just find a real job? You have good skills. At least you'd get paid."

And that's when it happened. Not silence. Not a blank mind. Something worse: I heard my own answers echo back and they sounded hollow. Like I'd rehearsed them so many times they'd stopped meaning anything. Like words that had been repeated until the meaning fell out.

I just sat there. Blank. For the first time in a long time, I didn't have a next step. I didn't have an option B. I just had a plate of cold biryani and a question I couldn't answer.

WHY

To understand how I got there, you have to go back to 2019. To the worst website ever built by human hands.

My mom was doing her bachelors at the time. She used to write code. I'd sit nearby and watch her, her fingers moving across the keyboard, the screen filling up with things I didn't understand, and I thought it was the most powerful thing I'd ever seen. Telling a machine exactly what to do. Watching it obey. Not magic, but better: magic you could understand.

I asked her to teach me.

She didn't write me a curriculum. She pointed at W3Schools and said: read. Very warm. Very nurturing. She went through the first few pages with me, then left me to it.

So I read. I tried things. I broke things spectacularly. I fixed them. No assignment, no deadline, no future employer in mind. Just me and a browser and syntax that was slowly starting to bend to my will.

And then I built my first website.

Objectively, criminally terrible. A background image that had no business existing. My photo slightly off to the left, since I had no idea how to center it, but I was too proud to notice. My name underneath in bold white text, like I was announcing myself to the entire internet and the internet owed me its attention.

It was past midnight. Everyone was asleep. I went and woke my mom up anyway.

She squinted at the screen. Then she did that face, you know the one. The excitement face moms pull when their kid shows them something ugly and they love you too much to say so.

And somehow that was enough. That face, at midnight, over the ugliest website in existence, made it feel like the whole thing was real. Like I had actually made something. Like I mattered.

Not because it was good. Because it was mine. Because I made a thing that didn't exist before I sat down. Because somewhere between the broken code and the fixed code something had clicked into place that felt like it had always been there, just waiting.

That feeling, that right there, was the real thing. The original signal. Before anyone told me what to want.

And then I discovered LeetCode and HackerRank. Hours would disappear into DSA problems, especially recursion. There's something about looking at a single frame of a problem, knowing only what you know at that exact moment, and deciding what happens next. Like the whole world narrows into one beautiful, solvable thing. It was an escape from reality that somehow felt more real than reality.

I just didn't know that somewhere along the way, the hours I was pouring into other people's work were quietly swallowing the only thing that was truly mine: the freedom to build, design, and create for myself. Kesaru saw it before I did. He used to tell me how much he adored my personal designs and videos. And there I was, spending all that energy editing someone else's publications for free.

It started with a YouTube recommendation.

A day in the life of a Google engineer. Sunlit open office. Standing desk with three monitors. A micro-kitchen with every snack known to mankind. Ambitious projects. The sense that every day you were working on something that mattered.

I watched one. Then another. Then twenty.

And somewhere between the office tours and the whiteboard interviews, something installed itself quietly. Join Google. That became the destination. The answer to every question about what I was working toward.

And if you ask me now why I wanted that, I can answer it. Freedom. Space to experiment. Room for new ideas without someone shutting them down before they breathe.

But here's the question that hasn't left me alone since that lunch: do I actually need Google for any of that?

No. Not really.

And that crack split something wide open. Because if I didn't need Google for what I actually wanted, where did the dream come from? I started pulling on that thread. The Google dream, absorbed so gradually I mistook it for my own voice. The IEEE volunteering, the kind of thing that photographs well, reads well, signals all the right things to all the right people. The plan, the backup plans, the ranked list of scholarships sorted by deadline, all assembled piece by piece from the outside.

Here's the thing about the world around you. It doesn't come at you aggressively. It doesn't sit across from you at lunch with a sarcastic smile and ask you hard questions. It just surrounds you. Quietly. Consistently. Every LinkedIn post about someone's internship. Every YouTube video about someone's dream job. Every conversation where someone older tells you what a good career looks like. And it keeps speaking, patiently, until one day you open your mouth to explain your own choices, and something else comes out.

You reach inside yourself for the answer.

And you pull out someone else's.

Borrowed lives are comfortable. That's the problem.

The goals make sense. The plan looks solid. The answers are polished and ready. Nobody questions you because everything looks exactly like it's supposed to look.

Until someone asks why.

And you realise the clothes don't fit. They never did. You've just been wearing them so long you forgot what your own size was.

The kid who built that terrible website in 2019 wasn't optimising for anything. He wasn't building a network or padding a resume or signalling ambition to a future employer. He was building because the thing itself was electric to him. Because making something from nothing felt like the closest thing to magic he'd ever found. And I did get good at it, good enough to build the site you're reading right now. But somewhere along the way the feeling that started it all got quietly replaced.

That's the version worth finding your way back to.

Not what looks good. Not what the algorithm decided you should want. Not the answer that sounds right when someone asks at lunch.

I'm still sitting at that table with Kesaru. The biryani is long cold. The rehearsed answers are gone.

If your life feels like it's moving fast, like you're always one step behind yourself, always onto the next thing, always almost there, take a break.

Ask why. Not out loud. Not for anyone else. In the quiet, when nobody is watching, when there's no right answer to perform.

Why do you want what you want. Why you're chasing what you're chasing. Whether the dream you're running toward is actually yours.

That's the question Kesaru asked me over a plate of cold biryani.

I'm still working on the answer. But at least now it's mine.