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A modified excerpt from Mo Hayder’s ‘Jack Caffery’ books, which seems to speak to those who have ever known what it’s like to keep holding on.
“You’re supposed to have let it go by now… moved on.”
Wasn’t this what they’d all been saying in their own ways, all the acquaintances, friends, partners, advisors, over the years? Maybe they had been justified in their fury, maybe they knew better than him about what to hold on to, or what to allow to drift away.
Here he was: thirty-four years old. Thirty-four and according to them, he still didn’t know how to play the game, the real, big, important game. According to them, he hadn’t fully inhabited his life at all, and instead had sat looking the opposite way, thinking, planning, trying to make amends, trying to trap the past, while his life played itself out over his shoulder. And even now, he could still let it go on, continue to scratch at it, rise to their bait, allow them to reinvent ways to keep the torment fresh, and trek on, alone without anyone to call his own in this life. Or he could choose to drop the battle.
They said that without a real purpose or close bonds, the energy he was putting into life was wasted – going into a dead hole. When he asked what that meant they said: ‘The energy you put into finding answers about what happened, the energy you put into the job – it means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It goes nowhere and creates nothing.’
Which was funny, because he’d never thought of his job or finding answers as wasted energy.
But whenever he thought of a real bond, a family, or a purpose, the only thing he could imagine was a glimmer of water in a vast empty desert. A mirage that promises life but does not exist in reality.
‘And so you have chosen death. On this course it will not be a painful thing, your death.’
‘What does that mean?’
He didn’t take his eyes off him. His voice was very quiet when he spoke, but every consonant and vowel came lightly through the clean air.
‘It means…’ he whispered. His eyes reflected the firelight. For a moment he looked all things at once: he looked monstrous, he looked sad. He looked old and he looked wise.
‘It means that it’s not too late. It’s not too late for you. You can change your mind. You can still care about a different purpose, a different person.‘
‘You,’ his eyes locked on an inescapable truth, ‘you… can still care. You can care about the life that might be.’
But he couldn’t.
All he could think of was: if he had been born a different person, would the world have hurt less than this?
*Edits in blue
I remember when I finished the HBO series Chernobyl, the impact I felt was not just about the physical horror of the radiation, the human/wildlife suffering and the countless number of deaths. Though those were surely very deeply disturbing outcomes, there was an even more disturbing matter underneath: the why behind the true cause of this disaster.
What I found most fascinating was the depiction of the control room during the immediate aftermath. We see the operators, and especially their superior Dyatlov, completely sure that the matter must not be such a big deal. We see repeated messages exchanged between various people like, “You must be mistaken, Comrade.. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode.” Which continues to go on, even as they are literally staring at the evidence of the open core and the destroyed building.
At first, it would seem like the total refusal to believe in the reality of the explosion was some kind of overconfidence or stupidity. But the show makes it clear that this repeated denial wasn’t just confusion or arrogance, but rather a systemic procedural failure, where their training, their manuals, and the entire Soviet state insisted RBMK reactors were so stable that the explosion was literally ‘impossible’ in their operational model.
We see two opposite types of responses in the aftermath:
1. The Plant Managers/Dyatlov: Faced with a reality that shatters the social script they chose to believe in, their first priority is blame avoidance and ego preservation. Dyatlov’s ongoing bullying and ridicule despite the visible suffering of the plant operators (“you’re panicking, you’re wrong”) wasn’t about not knowing the truth; it was more like an attempt to re-assert dominance in the chaos.
2. Legasov: Initially, he too starts by repeating the same line which has now become an online meme: “RBMK reactor cores cannot explode”. But what’s different about him is that his core motive isn’t denial. He is driven by a need for truth and factual coherence, not blame avoidance. He must make the effort both towards damage control and towards personally reconstructing the entire cause-and-effect chain, forcing him to eventually conclude: “It wasn’t just an unfortunate human error – it was the system.”
The sequence of events show that the initial ignorance or disbelief of the engineers wasn’t an accident. It was manufactured, because the RBMK design flaw was already known, documented, and buried. Buried, because the USSR needed the operators not to know the flaw; because anyone knowing and attempting to fix it would mean admitting that Soviet engineering, the symbol of their ideological perfection, was fundamentally flawed. But this admission was a shame-event they could not afford.
The system then chose the immediate and easy solution: Let’s suppress the truth and protect the story of our perfection.
The suffering of the miners, firefighters, animals, wildlife and the environment that followed is the direct, physical consequence of the system prioritising its fictional stability over the harsh reality. The possibility of an explosion, the radiation, several deaths and environmental ruin was preferable to the system than admitting a mistake. The fate of Legasov, the truth-seeker, becomes the final warning when he demonstrates and reveals the flaw to prevent future disasters, and is immediately sentenced to institutional denial and his reputational/social death, by the very system he served. His final recordings and suicide is the price he paid for demanding accountability in an environment built on blame avoidance.
Chernobyl is a powerful narrative for anyone who has experienced the damage caused by a controlling, blame-avoiding authority that insists on its own false story. It’s a reminder that the real catastrophe isn’t the disaster itself, but the chain reaction of the system’s ego-defense that follows.
It is a peculiar form of isolation, to live within a species yet claim no kinship with it. For a long time, I believed much like the idealistic Professor Charles Xavier that the minority’s gentle conduct might soften the hard edges of the majority’s heart. But one learns, eventually, that the dream of peaceful coexistence is not a failure of hope, but a failure to diagnose the fundamental drive of the species among whom we walk.
X-Men: First Class serves as a case study and a perfect illustration of the friction between two distinct modes of being. The drama unfolds upon a beach, the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis – where the mutants, having just averted a global catastrophe for the humans, are met not with gratitude… but with a unified strike of military fire. The US and the Soviets, who were moments ago mortal enemies, instantly merge their intent toward a single goal: the removal of the new, unknown variable. The scene demonstrates how the human species will always prioritise the destruction of an unknown ‘threat’ over integration, in fear of their known ‘human way of being’ becoming obsolete.
Charles Xavier believes wholeheartedly that when the mutants demonstrate their goodwill by stopping the nuclear war, they will overcome the defenses of the human beings. Until the moment of the missiles turning towards them, he still believes in trying to prove their worth to a jury that has already decided their existence is the crime.
But Erik, forged in the ultimate environment of human aggression, views the professor’s strategy not as grace, but as a slow form of suicide. He argues, with a cold and procedural correctness, that to “pass” as one of them, to mask one’s true nature for the comfort of the aggressor, is a violation of one’s own worth and existence.
When the missiles fly toward that beach, Erik stops, deflects, and returns them to the ships from where they came. Charles is horrified and reminds Erik that they have it in them to be the “better ones”. But Erik has made up his mind, because he finally treats the humans with the same transactional finality with which it has always treated the Other.
What Erik did was not unprovoked aggression, but self-defense against an unprovoked aggression against the mutants. To be the ‘bigger person’ against a collective decision to erase you is a suicide pact disguised as moral superiority.
This dynamic echoes a far older, more ancient fact – that the Homo sapiens were the evolved, superior successor to the other hominid species like Neanderthals. But I think a closer examination suggests that different truth could be equally plausible: that the Neanderthal was a more evolved, perhaps more peaceful species. Their remains show larger brains, different muscular structures, ability to survive in smaller groups, and the skills to make advanced tools. I wonder if they were displaced not by inferior evolution, but by the irrational aggression of the human species that cannot tolerate another peer. Maybe the Neanderthal was not selected against by genetics or naturally out-competed; maybe they were erased, facing a larger group whose need to be the Apex and the Only intelligent species manifests as a relentless drive to remove all difference.
The scientific community looks to the stars and asks, “Where is everyone?” This is the Fermi Paradox, and perhaps the “Great Filter” that prevents species from reaching the stars is not a physical barrier, but a psychological one: the Xenophobic Ego of the collective human species. Perhaps any species that prioritises harvesting, dominating, and destroying the Other inevitably destroys the very diversity it needs to survive, when it can only see another Kind of peer as a resource or a threat.
In sci-fi Alien films, the purpose of experimentation on the aliens is largely to find the biological cause of their difference for two goals: to create weapons to defeat them, and to integrate their new powers into the collective human species. For those of us who have experienced the other side, the scientists in Alien films poking and prodding the alien in the name of progress and security, is an analogy for the systemic erasure attempted every day: stigma campaigns, narrative hijacks, harvesting any outputs produced through that difference, but pathologising of such difference and attempts to medicate away an inconvenient existence. Some of us have learned the hard way that the professor’s path leads only to exhaustion and internal collapse, and still resulting in the same exclusion.
Erik’s view is that the only working strategy is a surgical one: which may be psychologically represented as zero engagement with their erasure attempts, personal independence, and the inversion of their own psychological weapons when necessary.
When a species requires all their members to be the ‘same’ and needs the permanent status of the apex predator, it cannot accept a different neighbour – it can only recognise a subject or an enemy. Therefore, separation is not a political goal; it is a biological human necessity. When Erik understood this, he did not seek to conquer; he sought to ensure that he would never again be at the mercy of those who view difference as a disease to be cured.
In that moment on the beach, he was not “becoming the same as the monsters he opposed”. When the only language that halts the monster is the monster’s own, then to refuse to speak it is not virtue but complicity in one’s own erasure. Erik had finally decided to turn to the most lethal form of self-defense, where those who refuse to see him as anything other than an enemy could never strike again.
The way Tang Lici’s life unfolds in the new Xianxia drama Whispers of Fate at first appears excessively cruel and almost arbitrary. He faces one tribulation after another with little pause for recovery, creating the impression that fate itself is against him.
When he loses Fang Zhou, who was his core emotional anchor and the reason he began to believe in humanity, Tang Lici is barely given time to grieve before the next rupture occurs. His best friend turns hostile and begins a long journey of unwarranted revenge, leaving Tang Lici to confront humiliation, confusion, and disbelief simultaneously. Along with his grief for failing to save Fang Zhou, he must also process being betrayed, being suspected, and being denied all at once, without explanation or closure.
While in recuperation, he is then framed by the same best friend and public suspicion follows where he is watched, judged and whispered about. His motives are questioned, his past reinterpreted, his silence taken as guilt.
With his resilience, calm wisdom and deep insight into those around him, Tang Lici slowly uncovers many truths, builds alliances, and rises in rank, power and recognition. Yet his fate refuses to let this rise function as reward. When he falls again, the forces against him only become more cruel, more painful, and more isolating.
Each experience, bond or loss introduces a different emotion: sorrow (悲), anger (怒), grief (哀), fear (惧), longing (思).
At one point, Tang Lici even attempts to reverse time to prevent his first loss and what he believes was the beginning of his tribulations (saving Fang Zhou). He believes that if he can correct this single event, then he can prevent the resulting suffering. But then he finds out that it was this attempt to reverse time which caused the very events he was now trying to prevent.
We finally uncover that it was not his fate guiding his life, but someone who deliberately engineered this sequence of events: Ye Mo, who orchestrated these events so that Tang Lici could become the perfect celestial body – a feat which Ye Mo himself failed to achieve.
In his view, a perfect celestial body cannot be formed through cultivation or having high physical power alone. It must be additionally capable of containing emotional depth and experiencing life’s worst tribulations, without becoming corrupted by them.
This requires full exposure to the seven emotions and six desires (七情六欲): — 喜 (joy), 怒 (anger), 哀 (sorrow), 惧 (fear), 爱 (love), 恶 (aversion), 欲 (desire).
Where Ye Mo’s emotional structure became fixated in 怨 (resentment), Tang Lici allowed his anger to resolve into understanding, his grief to settle into acceptance, and all his attachments to be released. Thus, Ye Mo cannot become what Tang Lici is becoming.
This is the critical distinction between the two.
Ye Mo has the highest possible level of physical power and has understood the necessity of emotional depth, but is unable to embody it. He can design the path for Tang Lici, but he cannot walk on it. Tang Lici, by contrast, is shaped precisely because he neither avoids pain nor allows it to turn into hatred. His deep emotional structure complements his high physical power level, bringing him closer to “perfection” than Ye Mo could be.
I think this message from the drama really resonates with me: that to become whole, one must experience all that can be felt, without becoming imprisoned by any single feeling. This is what ultimately makes Tang Lici “perfect”: his capacity to feel fully and still remain capable of compassion & choice afterward.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often considered a story about humanity’s hidden ‘dark side’. The common takeaway from this story is ultimately simple: if the rules of society were removed, everyone would become a monster. But I think to read the story this way is to miss something important. I think this story is conducting an autopsy of a specific kind of moral failure rather than a generic human tendency.
If the story’s claim were truly about universal depravity, Hyde would be a mindless force (random, chaotic, a primal storm). But Hyde isn’t any of those things. He, instead, is chillingly specific: directed, intentional, and sophisticated in his pursuit of unrestrained pleasure. This tells us we are not looking at generic “human nature”, but at something that has grown in specific conditions.
I think the story’s real claim is narrower and more personal. It’s a case study of Dr. Jekyll’s specific inner architecture, where his error was in believing that he could manage his darker impulses through dissociation. So, he suppressed his impulses deep within a corner of his mind, treating them as a foreign substance to be kept locked rather than a native energy to be integrated. Hyde, therefore, is the resulting sum of Jekyll’s own unchecked wants, now liberated from the specific pressures that once constrained them: shame, empathy, and the fear of losing his social reputation.
Hyde does not begin as a killer. His progression is a grim slope: first, he experiences the thrill of freedom from social rule; then, the enjoyment of acts with (finally) no cost to his public reputation; and then, a growing desire to cause harm without consequence. With each step, the inner mechanism of restraint breaks down. His final violence was never his original goal, but an outcome of this unchecked escalation. The restraint was only ever a mask; remove it, and you find not a true face, but a void where limits used to be.
So the story’s warning is not “suppress yourself or else”. It’s a far more demanding prescription: that restraint must be integrated as a habit of character. It warns against the peril of living a split life, where you deny parts of you instead of learning their shape.
A Confucian scholar may examine Jekyll and see a man who neglected integration. In this view, desires are not inherently evil, but must be guided and shaped until right action becomes second nature. But Jekyll’s “goodness” was an external title rather than an internal discipline. He never did the steady, humble work of building an inner structure, so when the external scaffold of his reputation fell, he had nothing left to hold him up.
A Daoist philosopher may offer a different diagnosis. Daoism distrusts rigid control and sees the self as a natural system that seeks balance. By violently repressing part of his own nature, Jekyll not only failed to eliminate it but also created a worse imbalance: a pressure that had to erupt. Hyde became a rebound reaction – an explosive return of all that was forcibly denied. Like water held back by a brittle dam, the force of the release is proportional to the strength of the obstruction.
So we end up with many critiques of a single life. Confucianism warns against the danger of neglecting practice and Daoism cautions against the peril of forced repression. Yet all conclusions converge on the same essential truth: that a sustainable self cannot be built on division. Whether through cultivated habit, wise balance, or honest self-knowledge, our wholeness depends on an integrated restraint – one that comes from within, and can therefore survive even when the world outside stops watching.
Modern medicine rests on an assumption that with enough data (decades of clinical studies, millions of patient records, and now the immense pattern‑matching power of artificial intelligence), medicine can finally outsmart the body’s complexity.
Yet patients continue to cycle through specialists, accumulate diagnoses, and take ever‑more medications while their underlying health declines.
I think the reason is not a lack of enough data, but that both the academic data doctors are trained on, and the mass data that powers ‘proxy medical’ AI, operate with the same bias or incomplete mapping of the human body. As a result, they both have chances to lead to specific kinds of failures: misdiagnosis, treatments that make things worse, unsustainable costs, and the exhaustion of patients who are told by a second or third doctor that the first two were wrong.
The following is my view as a general patient, and as someone who has observed many other patients experiencing a specific case of cascading failures in medical treatments.
1. Diagnostic Knowledge, Data & Tests
The knowledge that guides medicine comes from two sources in the modern times.
The first data source is the body of knowledge doctors acquire in training and practice: textbooks, clinical trials, peer‑reviewed literature, and the accumulated experience of specialists. This data is filtered through a fragmented view of the body. Cardiology knows the heart; endocrinology knows hormones; gastroenterology knows the gut. The connections between these systems are treated as secondary, often discovered only when a patient’s experience contradicts the textbook.
The second is the mass data used to train artificial intelligence: electronic health records, billing codes, lab results, and millions of de‑identified patient journeys. AI learns to replicate the patterns it finds in this data, including the very fragmentation and errors that exist in routine practice. If most doctors treat a certain set of symptoms with a particular drug, the AI will recommend that drug. If the system routinely mislabels a medication side effect as a new disease, the AI will learn to do the same.
In both cases, the data reflects only what medicine measures, not what it misses. A doctor’s differential diagnosis is shaped by the specific specialties they were trained in. An AI’s recommendation is shaped by the narrow fields in the electronic record like labs, vitals, or prescription history, while the patient’s lived experience, the sequence of events, and the subtle ways one treatment altered the body’s response to the next are either missing or reduced to disconnected codes.
Inconclusive Test Results: Then a known and documented discordance is that medical tests evaluate readings within “normal range”, which makes the tests show Normal while body doesn’t function normally.
Standard reference ranges are population averages. “Normal” means within the range of the general population, not optimal for someone’s specific baseline before damage, and not accounting for:
– Any pre-medication baseline which is unknown because it was never tested
– Functional thresholds varying individually, e.g., some people need TSH at 1 to function, others at 3, but both “normal” on paper
– Some tests e.g., prolactin is frequently not included in standard hormone panels unless specifically requested
– Neural situations e.g., dopamine pathway disruption doesn’t have a direct test
– Metabolic set-point changes don’t appear as abnormal insulin on a fasting test if the issue is receptor sensitivity
This often puts patients in situations where:
– Doctors say tests are normal, therefore nothing is wrong
– But body clearly demonstrates something is wrong
– Standard testing cannot see the actual problem or the root cause
– Changing treatments didn’t help with visible symptoms or added more
2. Cascade: When the Treatment Becomes the Problem
One of these failure patterns is the cascade that begins with a reasonable intervention and ends with a patient far sicker than when they started, yet still under the care of a system that insists on adding more treatments.
Example:
· Linear Assumption: Drug A treats Symptom B.
· Non-Linear Reality: Drug A alters the overall state of the body, making its response to all future inputs (food, stress, other medications) fundamentally different from the population average.
Consider a few examples of this failure pattern:
· A misdiagnosed root cause: A patient presents with fatigue, weight gain, and brain fog. The first primary care doctor diagnoses depression and prescribes tests. When the fatigue worsens, a psychiatrist adds a stimulant. When anxiety develops, a second psychiatrist adds sedatives. Two years later, a different physician runs a comprehensive thyroid panel and discovers thyroiditis. The original cause was autoimmune hypothyroidism, but by then the patient is dependent on three psychotropic medications, each with its own metabolic and neurological side effects. The system treated the downstream symptoms while the root cause went unidentified.
· A specialist cascade: A man with mild psoriasis sees a dermatologist who prescribes a biologic. The biologic works well for the skin but, months later, the patient develops recurrent sinus infections and a persistent cough. He is referred to an allergist, who diagnoses new‑onset asthma and prescribes inhaled steroids and a rescue inhaler. When the patient gains thirty pounds and his blood sugar rises, he is sent to an endocrinologist, who diagnoses type 2 diabetes and starts metformin. No one connects the cascade back to the biologic, and the patient now carries three chronic disease labels that did not exist two years prior.
· Psychiatric: A patient is prescribed changing antipsychotics for what looks like symptoms of depression or mood instability. The medicine set affects thyroid function or raises prolactin levels, leading to hormonal dysfunction and significant weight gain. The system then treats the “new” weight with metabolic drugs & the “new” hormonal issues with hormone control, never resolving the neurotransmitter damage from the original prescription. The patient visits a second doctor who now identifies that the antipsychotics were not necessary since the patient was autistic or ADHD, simply requiring different care.
· Conflicting expert opinions: A young man with chronic abdominal pain sees a gastroenterologist who performs a scope, finds nothing conclusive, and diagnoses irritable bowel syndrome. The prescribed medicines provide no relief. A second gastroenterologist suggests small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and prescribes antibiotics, which temporarily improve symptoms but leave him with worsened bloating and new food intolerances. A third doctor, a functional medicine practitioner, points to a history of antibiotic use and poor gut motility, recommending a low diet and prokinetic agents. By this point the patient has spent money, undergone three conflicting treatment protocols, and remains with the original condition.
Once the body has been loaded with conflicting chemicals and shifted into a defensive state, the data becomes useless because the new data points (blood markers, weight, hormone levels) are no longer signals of a simple “disease,” but rather markers of structural damage that the system is not designed to measure.
In each case, the interventions were rational given the fragmented data each doctor saw. But because doctors or AI often are unable to connect the dots across time and specialty, the treatments are accumulated, the side effects multiplied, and the patient’s overall trajectory worsened.
The cascade is a recursive failure.
The medical system’s structure tends to maintain its own assumptions. When a patient experiences a net-negative trajectory despite ongoing treatment, the fragmented system does not conclude that the model is broken. Instead, it classifies the patient as a “non-responder,” adds new diagnoses, or attributes the iatrogenic damage to a “new condition.”
The medical system and by extension the AI are both also biased to assume every patient has the average statistical neurological or body type, which makes outliers at a greater risk of treatments which harm more than help.
This creates a recursive loop, seen across multiple clinical scenarios.
3. The Cost and the Fatigue
These failures carry a heavy toll beyond health outcomes. The financial burden grows as multiple specialist medications are added but rarely removed, expensive diagnostic procedures that yield little actionable insight, and, for many, a slow erosion of personal stability as chronic illness takes hold.
The mental and emotional toll is equally profound. Patients learn to navigate a system where each new doctor starts from scratch, where their own detailed history is often dismissed as “too complicated,” and where they are implicitly expected to be grateful for interventions that leave them worse off. The experience of being told by a second doctor that the first doctor was mistaken, and by a third that both were wrong, creates a deep sense of uncertainty. Many patients begin to feel that the system is not designed to solve their problem but to manage their participation in it.
4. Why AI Cannot Break the Cycle
There is a widespread belief that artificial intelligence, trained on vast datasets, may overcome the limitations of human doctors. But AI learns from the very same fragmented, incomplete records that human practitioners rely on. It cannot see what was never documented.
Moreover, AI is trained to reproduce the most statistically common patterns in the data. If the dominant pattern is to treat elevated blood sugar with medicine A, the AI will recommend medicine A, even in cases where the patient’s problem originates from another cause, or if their body does not respond positively to this treatment. If the data shows that most patients with a given symptom cluster receive a certain psychiatric diagnosis, the AI will propagate that diagnostic bias, even when the symptom cluster has an organic origin.
AI does not solve the problem of fragmented care; it scales it. It offers the same narrow solutions at greater speed and with the added authority of algorithmic certainty, making it harder for patients to argue with a recommendation that is presented as statistically optimal.
5. The False Certainty
I believe the first step is acknowledging that the current data, both the knowledge base of medical education and the massive datasets used to train AI, has not yet “solved the human body” with 100% certainty.
It is a knowledge system that has partially mapped many mechanisms, has interventions that work probabilistically across populations, and operates on incomplete models. But the medical system has not solved the human body completely yet.
The confidence with which it presents itself, including the “consult a doctor” directive in every conversation, is not proportional to its actual resolution rate for complex or chronic or iatrogenic problems.
Where it does work:
Acute trauma, infection with identified pathogen, some surgical problems, some single-mechanism diseases. These are areas where the intervention-to-outcome link is clean and the model is accurate enough to be useful.
Where it has chances for cascading failures:
•Multi-system chronic conditions
•Iatrogenic damage (the system has no good framework for undoing what it caused)
•Conditions where the patient is the outlier from population averages
•Neuorologically different patients who are frequently misread, overmedicated, and whose symptom reports are then treated superficially or dismissed
Until the underlying framework changes, both doctors and AI will continue to offer the same kinds of fragmented, reactive care. They may treat the blood sugar without asking why it rose. They may manage the insomnia without investigating what destabilized sleep or identifying the neurological type of the patient.
They may add medications to treat the side effects of other medications, all while the patient accumulates new diagnoses, mounting bills, and the feeling that the medical system is not functioning to fix the root cause, but only to keep responding to its own uncertainty.
I remember when I was watching a drama, I came across a character who supported genetic engineering: altering human DNA, not just to remove illness but to create “better” versions of future generations. We’ve seen glimpses of this concept in sci-fi films like Jurassic Park. These stories reflect both our fascination and our fear of how far science can go, and these capabilities are becoming less fictional each day.
Today, the possibility of removing genetic defects, boosting immunity, or designing specific strengths in babies is no longer a distant dream. Technologies have brought us closer than ever to reshaping human life before it even begins, making it possible to remove “genetic defects” or even add “desirable strengths or characteristics”.
At its core, the motive behind gene editing appears compassionate: to spare children the burden of inheritable diseases, to give them a healthier start in life, and perhaps even allow them to thrive beyond what nature may offer. For families with histories of genetic disorders, the idea of being able to prevent suffering in future generations may be appealing.
But can all possibilities be converted into practical, safe realities?
Science, especially at the present stage, is not perfect yet. The understanding of genes, their functions, and the interactions they have with each other or with the environment is still evolving. A single “correction” could have cascading effects elsewhere in the body, many of which we may not be able to predict.
The risk is not merely of unintended side effects but of irreversible harm, developmental abnormalities, or even the death of the fetus. The line between healing and harming is thinner than it seems.
But it’s not just about medical risk. It’s also worth thinking of how these possibilities may change how we begin to see human life itself. When we start modifying babies not just to eliminate illness but to design personalities, appearance, or intelligence, we risk losing sight of what makes us human: our unpredictability, our differences, our individuality.
Children may begin to be seen less as unique beings to be discovered, and more as products to be customised and perfected. In chasing an ideal, we may unknowingly erase the beauty of human diversity, only to turn it into a factory blueprint.
The desire to protect children from suffering is human. But so is the ability to embrace imperfection, to adapt, and to love without conditions. Genetic engineering may one day become safe, predictable, and ethically guided. But for now, it sits in a fragile space where the dream of control might cost more than we understand.
Until we know more, until science can truly ensure not just possibilities but also responsibility – caution becomes not just important, but necessary.
In our attempts to improve life, we must be careful not to forget how to value it.
When we picture a monster, we probably imagine something large, violent, and scary. Something that threatens our order, our people, or our world.
In the book Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, the orc fits that image on the surface: a powerful creature with green skin. But as the story unfolds, something more unsettling emerges – not about the orc, but about those who seek to kill him.
The orc, it turns out, values honour and peace more than many of the humans who want him dead.
It reminded me of the book Frankenstein. The creature was born gentle, and learned survival and even language by his own efforts, while all alone. But for all his efforts, he was still rejected, feared, and hunted, just because of his unfortunate appearance.
Over time, it’s not the creature who seems scary, but the people who refuse to see his humanity. The ‘monster’ isn’t the one with fangs, but the one whose heart has closed off completely.
There was an unsettling feeling when I finished reading Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke because of its idea: that humanity might one day meet a species so far beyond our understanding that people mistake them for gods or devils.
Arthur Clarke’s “Overlords” don’t destroy, enslave or invade the planet in the ways sci-fi usually warns us about. Instead, they arrive with calmness, power, and knowledge, assisting in changing the state of our world. But for some reason, they hide their appearance from the inhabitants of Earth.
And then there’s the twist: that these beings, with their dark, devilish appearance, have visited Earth before, explaining some of the myths and fears that shaped entire cultures. And being aware of what their appearance is associated with on this planet, they waited for the “right time” to show themselves to humans.
That idea is intriguing – that ancient stories of gods and demons weren’t imagination, but memories of misremembered contact with something so incomprehensible, that people turned it into religion.
It reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, also based on Clarke’s ideas, where mysterious alien monoliths appear at key moments in human history, guiding evolution at each stage. The idea here was that human evolution itself may have been sparked by contact with a superior intelligence which didn’t dominate or even communicate, but acted through silent and deliberate influence.
These ideas offer the haunting suggestion that our place in the universe, or humanity’s idea of celestial beings, may not be what we think it is.
It makes me wonder how people decide what is divine, and how much of it is about what we can’t yet understand?
I remember how I felt when at some point in life I learned something unsettling:
History is taught differently depending on where you live.
That different countries frame historical events in ways that align with their national identity or political priorities. They teach different versions of the same event in terms of facts, framing, and even entire omissions, to create a version that the citizens are supposed to believe in.
This was very unsettling to me because I used to think history meant something like… universal and objective recording of events.
(I know… I probably sound dumb for believing that.)
It made me wonder how easily “education” could become a form of propaganda. And how hard it can be for people to untangle what’s actually real from what’s just been repeated long enough to sound real.
For instance, I learned that in Japan, the Nanjing Massacre, which Chinese consider to be one of the worst atrocities, has long been downplayed or removed in many school textbooks.
In Britain, children often learned about the colonisation of India as a part of “the British Empire”. It is seen more as a time of trade routes and railways rather than a violent occupation or oppression. The language used (“bringing civilisation”, “administrative efficiency”, “infrastructure development”) erases the exploitation and cultural loss. Generations grew up believing it was a neutral or even noble chapter in history, not realising that for Indians, it was anything but that.
In the United States, many school curriculums focused on the founding fathers, while ignoring topics like displacement of Native Americans. This history is now slowly being included, but not without resistance.
Even in Germany, which is seen as a country accepting its history, the way the World Wars are taught today was not always like this. The shift came after years of restructuring the curriculum.
And we all know about Pak and China, right?
It made me think about the various kinds of things people are taught, not just in school, but by culture, by media, by family – which may just be one version shaped by a nation’s goals, pride or shame; based on what the people in power wanted to focus on or leave out.
And I wonder how easily they can become unquestioned “truths” if no one gives us the tools to look beyond them.
It’s interesting how there are contradictory messages in stories vs life about the society’s idea of an “Outsider” (someone who is different and doesn’t fit the established social roles or categories). In general, the society prefers those who fit into defined social categories / conform to the norms – and rejects those who don’t fit in. And yet, some of the same society’s most powerful stories celebrate the very people who are rejected in real life for being non-compliant or different.
Whether it’s a sci-fi movie alien or an honest employee in a corrupt organisation, we see glimpses of the general distrustful response to ‘outsiders’ in stories, reflected in the attitude of governments or institutions or media/public panic. Like in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the alien’s goal of saving his home planet is shown to be destroyed by addiction, with him ending up among scientists experimenting on him. Such endings convey the society’s initial message: That an Outsider is likely to be perceived as a threat to the majority’s stability, and may get contained or removed.
But then, society also promotes an entirely opposite narrative: such as the stories where the Outsider is a hero and the only one who can save the collective from the system. Like in PK, the alien’s innocent logic is the only tool that can see through the contradictory nature of human beliefs. Or like Good Will Hunting, where the protagonist is a high-coherence mind (a mathematical genius) trapped in a volatile, low-coherence state. The established institutions (the university, the NSA) don’t want to heal him but to use him as a functional asset; and his volatility and his Outsider status work against him. In these stories, the Outsider’s only friends [good] are a few individuals who believe in the Outsider, unlike the large institutions [bad].
So, society seems to be running two contradictory messages at the same time:
1. A “fantasy” message that the system is mostly held back by corruption and only a non-compliant individual can save it.
2. A “real world” message that the system must reject the non-compliant individual to protect the collective.
It seems like the society is conflicted; on one hand it seems to recognize that even an Outsider can be beneficial to the society’s survival, but on the other hand it fears/distrusts such an Outsider’s non-compliance (even if their ‘differences’ can help find new solutions).
Sometimes, there are people who snap when the law doesn’t speak for them.
When someone you love – a child, a sibling, a partner – is brutally harmed, and the system meant to protect the innocent ends up protecting the guilty instead, something snaps. Law enforcement, legal process and courtrooms begin to feel meaningless, making it seem like ‘justice’ is more about what the current law allows than what is right.
And sometimes, that’s the space where the idea of ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’ walks in.
It’s usually uncomfortable and controversial to talk about. Because in theory, the law must be followed. Because vigilantism is, in theory, wrong. And yet, in stories where survivors are failed by courts, or when perpetrators get away with their crimes due to technicalities, corruption or protected status – it’s hard not to ask: Should the person seeking justice beyond the law really be blamed?
In The Hovering Blade (Japanese), a father finds out the men who brutally raped and murdered his daughter are juveniles, shielded by the law because of their age. The system sees their age and the idea of reform, but the father sees the remains of his daughter’s innocence and future. So he picks up a weapon and is hunted down by the police. But is he really the villain, or the only voice speaking for a child for whom the law won’t provide real justice?
In Chittha (Tamil), a few minor girls are raped by paedophiles. What follows is not just a revenge plot but an exploration of grief, helplessness, and what justice even means when the victim is a child. The man whose niece was one of the victims, feels like punishment within the law isn’t justice enough for what she suffered.
In Provoked, a woman burns her abusive husband alive after years of relentless domestic violence. The court initially sees only the murder of the husband, and not the screams that were never heard. Only when battered woman syndrome is introduced does the conversation even shift. Criminal Justice drama had a similar case where the woman is on trial for killing her husband who sexually abused her and made her feel crazy.
There are many stories like this, fictional and real, where the law either protects the wrong person, delays justice until it’s meaningless, or retraumatises the victim in the name of process.
In such moments, picking up a weapon becomes a language for the silenced. Sometimes, it’s action taken because of the inaction of the system supposed to be protecting them.
I often think about the premise of Death Note – the idea that someone could directly eliminate people who commit crimes, bypassing legal systems. Laws are bound by technicalities, procedures, and loopholes like insufficient evidence that often let culprits slip through the cracks. In that context, the Death Note feels like a way to restore balance when systems fail. Of course one could label such a figure a serial killer, since Light Yagami who begins trying to cleanse the world eventually starts killing anyone in his way. Maybe my idealist mind can’t help but wonder what that story would look like if the notebook had ended up in the hands of someone balanced, humble, and fair.
But since there’s no notebook in the real world, it’s the victims or their families who sometimes find themselves caught between the system and what feels right. There are indeed risks with vigilantism, and the line between justice and chaos can blur. But in cases where the law has clearly failed – where minors walk free after horrific crimes, or victims are punished for defending themselves – is it really wrong for people to feel like taking the law in their own hands?
Sometimes it’s the only way someone can say: What was done to us mattered, even if the law said it didn’t.
It’s the question that seems to get louder than ever in today’s conversations, from WhatsApp groups to Instagram comments. We’re told that feminism used to be noble, but now it’s become “toxic”, “man-hating”, or “unnecessary”. That women today don’t want equality but power, and they’ll lie or manipulate to get it.
But I didn’t grow up in a world where feminism was some social trend for popularity. I grew up quietly reading books, blogs and posts: by real women, who weren’t trying to manipulate anyone, but were just trying to deal with their experiences. They were women who felt like they had been treated unfairly, been boxed into expectations, suffered abuse, and had people make them feel blamed, dismissed, or silenced for it. Their writing didn’t teach me to fight men. It taught me to recognise patterns which are common all over the world.
Feminism, in its real form, isn’t about superiority – it’s about awareness. And awareness, once it enters your life, doesn’t leave quietly. Once you start noticing how often women are objectified, mistreated or made to apologise for existing, you can’t unsee that women are taught to internalise blame, accept society’s idea of gender roles, and stay silent.
But what about all the false cases?
These days, such conversations quickly turn into arguments about false accusations or divorce alimony. People argue that women are misusing feminism to file false cases, damage reputations, cheat men out of money in divorce, and escape accountability.
Let’s acknowledge a truth: false cases do exist. Any system can be misused. But it is also a fact that far more real cases go unheard, unreported, or disbelieved. For every woman who files a false case, there are hundreds who stay silent because they know justice won’t be served – or worse, that speaking out will bring shame, not support. And while some women may not need divorce alimony, there are far more cases where women do have genuine reasons, like having been unable to work or be financially independent due to marriage.
Focusing only on a few problematic cases distorts the bigger picture. When we center the conversation around a minority of misuses, we ignore the majority who still suffer in silence.
For every fake complaint, there are countless real ones that never see the light:
Real domestic violence dismissed as “family matters”. Severe injuries or even threats to life ignored.
Women forced to quit jobs to ‘focus on the household and children’.
Working women having to balance their jobs with the full load of housework alone.
Girls not given the chance to be educated and made to learn housework instead.
Dowry issues, child marriage, human trafficking, abortion law debates.
Rape of women or even little girls normalised because “boys will be boys” and questions like “what was she wearing?”
We do not live in a country where women have too much protection. We live in a society where most women still think twice before stepping out alone or speaking out when they are unsafe in their own home, and often decide it’s safer to stay silent.
The raw honesty of feminist writers gives women context for their anger, and remind us that gendered power is more than individual behavior – it’s about structures that benefit one and punish another. These ideas help us draw boundaries, spot manipulation, and to question: Are the expectations placed on women really fair?
And often the answer is ‘No’.
Because the world I live in still tries to keep women small. And if asking for fairness, the right to be treated as human, or calling out injustice/power imbalances means feminism has gone too far, then maybe it hasn’t gone far enough.
During my early days of learning Chinese, I remember being surprised by how overly simplistic its sentences looked when translated literally. A sentence like “他昨天去学校” literally means “He yesterday go school”. While I could understand that it’s supposed to be said like this, something about it didn’t seem very.. sophisticated. It seemed less like a sentence and more like just bare essentials.
I often noticed how in Chinese dramas/movies, the English subtitles tend to be much longer than the actual, concise dialogues really being spoken. Even idioms turned out to usually be only 4 characters in Chinese.
Compared to English or Hindi, where language often feels built around structure and rules, where sentences have to include changing verb forms or connecting words – this simplicity felt almost unfinished. I kept wondering if these statements were really “complete”.
But over time, I began to see it differently.
Chinese isn’t about overly complicated structure. It relies on simple words, trusting that you’ll understand the message without spelling out every part. Rather than lacking completeness, it strips away the unnecessary. A sentence could seem basic and still communicate exactly what was meant, without all the layers I used to think were essential.
Its complexity in its context, tone, and idiomatic use, and it doesn’t need the kind of rules we have in our languages. Its minimalist grammar isn’t a lack of sophistication, rather it’s a totally different system that prioritises efficiency, context, and implied meaning.
It made me reconsider what I once associated with being “refined” or “complex” – and I guess, precision is a kind of sophistication too.
Gallery applications and social media these days have a feature of showing us old posts, pictures and videos of memories from last year. We all have a way of falling into nostalgia remembering the times we once lived, no matter how peaceful our current reality is.
Being from an army background, I was supposed to be trained in moving on to different cities within a year or two, leaving behind each temporary “home” and creating a new one in a new place. But I always had a way of becoming attached to every home and holding on to the memories of each phase of life.
Over the last year I re-visited some places including Mumbai, Varanasi and a few of the 8 areas of Delhi where I once lived. It was comforting to know that no matter how much my life and I changed, some places remain the same, reminding us of the memories we made there.
More than the memories of those times, I remembered the person I used to be in each of those phases. From a dreamy teenager to hopeless depression to what I am today, every place reminded me of the journey I took to be where I am. How in each phase I could never imagine where I would end up from there, doing the best I could with whatever I had.
We can’t time-travel yet but we can enter into a brief visit to the past in our own mind by walking the streets of a place we once called “home”. I am still wandering before I find my final residence and small trips down the memory lane keep me going!
Of all human emotions, anger gets an especially bad reputation. To display anger or aggression is almost universally condemned. Whether we’re dealing with authority figures, or engaging with our families, workplaces, relationships, or are in public spaces, the expectation is often the same: suppress your anger.
I guess in my case, trying to meet this expectation has flipped me over to the other side. Years of suppressing anger in the face of mistreatment and being unheard have now started to make me occasionally explode like a volcano. And of course, I’m usually blamed for it.
So I wonder, why is the expression of anger treated as the problem, rather than what caused it? Why does society treat angry people as the aggressors, while ignoring the aggressions that led to the reaction?
Anger is not an enemy but a friend, a signal. It tells us when our boundaries have been crossed, when something feels unjust, when we’ve been hurt or violated. Without anger, we may just as well be robots who cannot identify when something is unacceptable or when something needs to change. Anger is a response to something wrong, and yet what’s considered ‘wrong’ is the anger itself.
It’s not that I support extreme reactions, and I think exploding in anger is just as bad as total suppression of anger, as one fuels the other. But while I hope to someday remain calm even under extreme provocation or mistreatment, I also wish society would hold provokers accountable: those who misuse power, exploit dynamics, disrespect boundaries, or are inconsiderate.
Emotional control should not be a one-sided burden placed only on the person who breaks. Without shared responsibility, expecting the angry to ‘master their emotions’ while the aggressor is never held accountable is not only unfair but also creates an imbalance.
And now since thinking about this is making me angry, its time for deep breathing and usual techniques to calm down. One thousand, nine ninety nine, nine ninety eight….
The Jojo character is not played by Charmee Kaur. It was playec by Charmee Shah.
Bear hugs for your kind words. Still getting used to people actually being proud of me 😅
Aren't you a bright ray of sunshine! I am so glad you wrote this. It's like a whole new you.…
Well said as always. Thats food for thought to me that I'm going to definitely ponder.
So wonderfully said. I love your thoughts too much <3