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ANCHIT TO TAKE STEPS OVER MONDAY’S MURDER AFTER BEING LATE (AGAIN)

Kafka's diary and my Monday

2026-09-29 · 4 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/anchit-to-take-steps-over-mondays-murder-after-being-late-again · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/anchit-to-take-steps-over-mondays

Dear founder,

Like July, and like every school and college examination ever, I write this at the last minute.

I know. I gave you my word that I would write to you weekly.

But the imaginary principles about writing quality that I have acquired bounce around in my head. Mixed with the imaginary operating principles of Anchit's Blog, they make a deadly cocktail of mental diarrhea — like a suit of armor made from excuses.

I had the entire month.

Had all of yesterday's Monday to write a letter to you. For you.

Now it feels like I am writing at you.

My calendar was clear. No calls. No sound in my room except the ceiling fan. No pressing deadlines. No rush to do cold outreach because God brings you rich qualified inbound leads out of thin air.

There was nothing between me and this blog.

Yet still, I wrote nothing.

I gave some tasks to the gracious armies of the Claude. Listened to 3 podcasts. Scrolled X to keep up with the planet. And pissed off a 6'3" pizzaiolo to gather lore for the grand launch post of my website.

But I wrote nothing.

I even read an article from a millionaire ghostwriter who writes 10,000 words every morning.

THAT'S 30 PAGES BEFORE LUNCH! EVERY DAY!

I read the number twice, only to realize I am eons away from the "great writer" I aspire to be, so I close my laptop out of spite. Then open it again. I can't even string 3 words together. So I write the same word thrice. Delete delete. Make another crappy sentence. Backspace again. But all that came out were pieces of shite.

I produced nothing but a few clicks on my creamy Keychron K2 mechanical keyboard.

And I consumed all kinds of shit and told myself what I always tell myself — tomorrow.

114 Augusts ago, Franz Kafka’s boss left the office for a few weeks.

Kafka had all the time. And the desire. He had, he writes, a "tremendous world" inside him. "I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead."

There is a feverish concentration about him. He sees writing as a form of prayer. A trial. A psychological compulsion.

Yet over and over he criticizes himself for falling short of his desire, for thwarting his talent with insecurity and lack of discipline.

“Wrote nothing,” he laments, entry after entry.

"Nothing, nothing."

"Have written nothing for three days," he sulks, absorbed in his creative block.

“Bad,” he declares a perfect orangey day for having produced no writing. And proceeds to stretch out on his bed to watch the light cross the floor while his desk sits empty. He has blamed his desk before. 2 Christmases earlier he inspected it and decided "nothing good can be done on it." His other excuses too — the day job, the long hours, the exhaustion, the boss — are on leave.

Franz has a case of the blues. And he sure sings a lot like yesterday.

You are always acting.

Even when you do nothing. Especially when you do nothing.

3 things must align before you act:

  1. A dissatisfaction with your current situation
  2. A mental image of something better
  3. The belief that your effort can bridge the gap between 1 and 2

Belief precedes action.

Belief is precisely what breaks within. Not your desire. Not your vision. But the conviction that putting your name and pen to work will produce something worth reading is what breaks within. When it breaks, you don’t stop wanting, you don’t stop seeing — you stop believing that the distance between wanting and having can be walked.

So you lie down. Not out of laziness. But because the bridge is broken.

Whenever I consume more than I create, something as small as a familiar stranger who can fill 30 pages before lunch while I've barely spilled 300 words and backspaced the entire time can feel like the bridge is cracking.

And I cannot do anything about it because I, in unawareness, have chosen paralysis over production.

If you are your own worst invigilator:

Maybe the business is having a tough time as you read this. Growth is stalled. The welcome email campaign has been sitting in drafts for 6 months. How does your infrastructure change in the exponential age? There is an abundance of operational challenges.

You know the drill. As an audacious founder, you signed up for putting out fires on a daily basis.

But audaciousness is a lonely luxury only a few can afford. And it shan't cause you to mistake the distance between me and the millionaire ghostwriter for light years when it is a short stroll between me and the version of me who sits down at his desk.

It shan't.

The belief that your effort can close the gap between your dissatisfaction and desire will not come through intellectual understanding. It will come through one completed action.

Not the entire book but a paragraph of 6 sentences.

Not the perfect draft but 1 really bad paragraph that exists instead of the perfect pleasant prose that does not.

NOTES ON “MONEY”

What is money? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Who makes it?

2026-08-31 · 22 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/notes-on-money · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/notes-on-money

The purpose of these notes is to plant the question — What is money? — in the reader’s mind such as Michael Saylor and Robert Breedlove did in my mind 12 months ago.

Anyone who has been alive for more than 15 seconds will tell you how influential money is in life. Just put Gandhi’s face next to a number — even 11-year-old Anchit, who sucks at both numbers and words, will turn into a smooth capital allocator and tell you exactly the number of 100 rupee notes you need to steal from your dad’s wallet to seamlessly earn the fake trust of fake friends, while simultaneously eroding all real trust within your real family. But that’s the problem. Because any and everyone knows what is money, no one knows what is money.

For this and a few other effects of living in complex embedded systems such as — being the least preferred stock market in the world; thinking that being on the top 5 global AQI leaderboards increases our immunity; the many attempts to invade India through history; or the modern wisdom to drive the opposite way down on a one-way street with high beams blazing at 7 AM — I have reason to believe we have abstracted, distorted and corrupted the nature of money in the collective consciousness of India.

Never have I ever met anyone able to provide me a coherent answer to the question — What is money?

Or maybe I’m just being emotional. Had I stumbled upon handsome individuals such as Robert and Michael and known the true nature of money like a good boy with all the answers — I would have not stolen money from my family. Maybe father would be alive. Maybe the act of stealing money to take my fake friends out for lunch in the school canteen so people would talk to me, added that little extra peri-peri seasoning that was required to make his third heart attack the final one. Maybe I would actually have a friend instead of going through the tedious process of which WWE card would be my best friend and which one would be my second best friend. Maybe, despite being surrounded by abundance, I would not have burned my childhood years festering in a perpetual state of shame, lack, torment and isolation. Maybe I would not have misused the power of words to cast hateful spells towards other people.

That’s a lot of maybes.

But had I not stumbled upon such handsome individuals — I definitely would have remained forever imperceptive to the effects of money on oneself — for until you make the unconscious conscious, it continuous to direct your life and you call it God’s destiny.

Before we start, I would like to repeat that the purpose of this post is simply to encourage you to ask yourself — What is money? Handsome individuals have spent years wrestling with what money is, whereas I have merely shifted to stealing other, more challenging things (aka your heart) so that you can give me money without me having to jump through hoops to figure out the password to your bank account. The purpose of this post is offer a question. Not an answer. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A FINANCIAL EXPERT. The only thing that qualifies me to write this post is how unqualified I am to write this post.

  • Money is pure optionality. It affords you the widest set of options in any given scenario in life. When you are dealing with uncertainty, as you always are — not knowing what the fuck will happen in the future — the only strategy to deal with the conditions of uncertainty is to have options. Is it going to rain? Or is there going to be a drought? You don’t know what you will need. Uncertainty is always around the corner, but if you save in money, you can buy the umbrella and you can buy the water.
  • Optionality is a good definition for money, and a damn good synonym for freedom. Freedom, not philosophically, but in very a pragmatic sense. What purchasing power can you bring to bear? Purchasing power being the economic jargon for what goods and services can you command in the marketplace. Money determines your degrees of freedom as a human — your access to good food and healthcare, your ability to move from one place to another, so and so forth. Money determines A LOT of things.
  • “Money talks” ; “Put your money where your mouth is” ; “Let your money talk for you” — all these adages we have are because money is the strongest communication tool that we have in the physical world. I can sit hear and say that I will send you a million dollars. But wiring you the money on the spot is considered as a stronger signal of trust. Money is the language of power. Money is the language of value. Money is the language of human action itself. Whether you save your money or buy a car — you are communicating to the market that you want to abstain from consumption or that you want it to make more cars. People constantly communicate their preferences with one another in the language of money. Language broadly being any system that we use make sense of the world. Like literacy is used to describe subjective experience, and numeracy is used for objective experience — money lies somewhere between the subjective and the objective and used to describe transjective experience. Money is liquid. It is neither subjective or objective. It can be in cyberspace or it can be parked in a beachfront property. It can be gold or it can be in rupees. Money reflects the difference in the structure of reality in New Delhi vs the structure of reality in Dubai.
  • Money is that which you use to buy goods — basic definition, perhaps the only definition I remember from all the economics teachers I have disappointed in life. But in order to produce goods, it takes labor, energy and time that are scarce resources. So in a sense, money is a representation of scarce resources. But money is also optionality. It can buy you the goods. Therefore, money is always scarce. We will always want more money than there is money because we will always want more goods than there are goods, forever.
  • What you really want in money is an inflexible supply. Gold became money because its supply increases slowly and predictably over time, which is why people stored their hard earned money in it to protect their effort and livelihood from getting inflated and debased because you cannot produce gold rapidly. This begs the question as to why then do we have money that can be produced so easily while goods are scarce and hard to produce?
  • The Federal Reserve prints dollars — USD. US government prints treasuries — UST. US government prints as much UST as it wants, to borrow USD, which is what the Fed prints, as much it wants. Now that the government has USD and the Fed has UST — the Fed is being paid interest by the government on the UST they hold. In what? In USD, the same USD that the Fed printed and the government borrowed. So before any dollars go into circulation, you are already paying interest to the currency counterfeiting cartel i.e. the Fed. The dollars themselves are born into existence at an interest. Which brings us to another definition that money is the final extinguisher of debt. If I owe you, I can give money to you to satisfy the debt. The problem with this UST-USD ad infinitum circlejerk is that it creates a “debt based money.”
  • Goods are good solutions to life’s problems, which is important if you want to survive on this planet. The amount of rupees and dollars in my bank account directly dictates my survivability in the world.
  • Hermetic principle no. 1: All is Mind. Everything we say, do and make started out as an idea. The purpose of an economy is to generate and share useful ideas through trade. As we trade more and more, our ideas get better; giving everything we say, do and make “specialized” qualities. In trade, everything is valued at a certain ratio with respect to everything else — my house can be worth 6 cars, my car can be worth 600 guitars, so on and so forth. Money is the medium through which we can easily calculate this exchange ratio — a medium of exchange — a medium through which economic actors communicate their preferences which then further drives human action. By choosing to buy a house or car or a guitar, the economy responds accordingly by producing more houses and cars and guitars.
  • Like any other tool, money saves us time. Generating time savings itself is the purpose of all tools. You can use your hands to dig a hole in an hour or you can use a shovel to do it in 10 minutes.
  • Money is NOT a government creation. Yes, central governments print money out of thin air. But there is no pressing need for such thugs and cartels, for money emerges naturally in any trading society. It is simply the most tradable thing. The most marketable good in the world. Why are the best sales letters of all time always about money? Because everyone wants money — tis the good that buys you all the goods. As societies advance, they coalesce around precious metals as money for their superior monetary traits — durability, divisibility, portability, recognizability, and the most important, scarcity. Gold which is the most scarce monetary metal dominated the world because its supply is the most inflation resistant. Governments co-opted gold, and over time, built a pyramid scheme on top of gold called fiat currency or fiat money.
  • The dollar was originally issued to make gold more convenient, more portable and more transactable. Because who wants to carry blocks of gold in their pocket, right? I can only imagine the trust issues in settling a transaction in gold. If you abstract gold into paper, it gets easier to transact. But my trust issues still act up because now you have to deposit your gold with a custodian that then issues the papers of trust that are redeemable for the gold. Over time, I can only imagine how alluring this power has turned out to be for governments or for anyone that can command force. Who would not want to control raw economic energy? Who would not want “the call option on everything” that is money? We went from a full reserve currency where each paper issued could be exchanged for a unit of gold; to fractional reserve banking where there are more paper notes in circulation than the gold reserves can justify themselves; to post 1971 fiat currency where it is not redeemable for gold whatsoever. Essentially, fiat currency is an irredeemable government debt certificate undergoing slow motion default via inflation while its use is forced on all of us.
  • Why would anyone voluntarily hold fiat currency? Why would you choose to hold a money that someone can arbitrarily diminish with a click of a button? Because people trust the government — some critical thinkers even call them gods. Because your parents did it. Because it is considered as stable and secure. And given how complicated and abstracted money has become, one would simply choose to trust the government out of laziness and terror. You see, we are all prone to cognitive expedience — a fancy word for the mind’s tendency to favor mental shortcuts that require less effort over more thorough, accurate reasoning, the tendency to favor habits over decisions, guesses over calculations, old shit over new shit — essentially, taking the “path of least cognitive resistance” when processing information or making decisions. We think in {insert your home currency}. Like a typical schrodinger’s bird, whenever I fly out of my nazi gas chamber to visit another country, I’m constantly adjusting and converting my expenses into rupees. I can’t help it.
  • Money is a psycho technology. You think you need dollars. But what you really need is purchasing power. We are actively pursuing dollars but what we are really pursuing is what those dollars can get us. Money is a software implementation. It is programmed in you. You use it to communicate, negotiate, strategize. Money is deeply embedded in our machinery.
  • Money is the most important form of property. All the houses, schools, businesses and governments are property strategies — ways to reach a consensus on property, distribute property in a way that’s fair and equitable. We typically think property is the house, the car, the stock, etc. But the true nature of property is a relationship between the owner and the asset. The fact that you own your house and a stranger cannot enter it and if they do, you can call the police force or the government to remove them; the fact we can take our first and most personal property i.e. ourself and our body anywhere with us — is the foundation of civilization. I know I am taking bad examples because we, as Indians, are known to be spiritually evolved and believe that we can hijack anyone’s property, rape a teen girl at will, or drive over anyone if we are driving a bigger vehicle than them. But bare with me. As an owner, what you choose to do with your property when you go out into the world, whether it’s planting a tree or starting a business or trading your expertise, is how you add value to society and create wealth. So, the basis of civilization is the relationship between the owner and the asset which we call property. And money is a reflection of the wealth we have created in the world. When you give one organization legal monopolistic privileges to control the issuance of money, they have a stupidly simple mechanism to violate the property rights of all other economic actors that are using dollars. This is so fundamental because it contradicts the very meaning of self-ownership and responsibility.
  • Money is energy. And this goes back to my point earlier on its transjective nature. It is a more abstract and higher form of energy and you can’t really analyze it through a model. You can model how much energy will be released when you burn gasoline. But there is no physics model for money as it operates on this higher, more abstract space of human action.
  • When the measurement scale that is money is getting inflated and an inch is not an inch anymore every 12 months, there is no way to measure anything accurately, thereby corrupting every human action that follows. With inflation, you cannot expect to have rational economic actors. If there is more money in the economy, the honest premium wine seller will go out of business because the not-so-honest premium wine seller will dilute the wine with water and sell more bottles at a lower price. When we print money, we don’t debase our currency, we debase our morality.

Just the way I swiped cash from the family stash, to prevent an abrupt ending to this post, following is an excerpt I have shamelessly stolen from the badass novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.”

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more.money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.”

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgement, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?”

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?”

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.”

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.”

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization, and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.”

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.”

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.”

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”

ON DISCIPLINE

Training to be a king so I can meet my kid

2026-08-10 · 5 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/on-discipline · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/on-discipline

If you are my son/daughter: Family, relatives and acquaintances keep hinting towards marriage, arranged marriage to be specific. They tell me that I’m running out of time. That I won’t have the energy to play with you if I don’t get married in the next 2 years. Their concerns seem valid. And I see how my lackluster responses and disagreeable mannerisms affect them in mysterious, abstract and intangible ways. I tell them that I’m not against marriage. That I need to become something first. But there appears to be a manufactured urgency around this topic. It feels like people are asking for a wedding in the name of marriage. I write this letter so these people can understand that no human, ideology, government or condom — no one but my own delusions — can come in the way our meetup.

If you tell God you want to become the best shooter in the city of Gurgaon, he does not give you a medal, he gives you a smartphone so you can watch Kobe Bryant videos on YouTube.

In order for my prince/princess to arrive in my life, a queen has to arrive first, and for such miraculous divinity to occur, I must become a king.

It only makes sense to borrow the Vedic principles to ensure that I take the right steps to become a king — for the security and welfare of life around me depends on my self-discipline as king.

Discipline can be inborn and acquired. But there must be an innate willingness for self-discipline. No amount of instructions or corporate training programs or YouTube tutorials or mindfulness apps can cause discipline to happen if I’m simply unwilling from within. Learning transmits discipline only when I am willing to exercise my mental abilities — obedience to my teachers, desire and ability to learn, capacity to retain what is learnt, understand what is learnt, reflect on what is learnt, and make inferences by pondering on the knowledge I acquire. I am a disgrace to my mother and mother earth if I fail to exercise my mental abilities. If I were to be king, I must acquire discipline by being a delusionally devoted student of the science of art and the art of science.

The soul aim of all branches of knowledge is to transmit discipline over the senses. Self-control, which forms the basis of knowledge and discipline, is acquired by giving up lust, anger, greed, conceit, arrogance, and recklessness.

Living in accordance with the Vedic principles means avoiding overindulgence in the pleasures of the senses i.e. hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. A king who has no self-control and gives himself up to his hedonistic pleasures shall soon perish, even if he is the ruler of all 4 corners of the earth.

Only a king who is wise, disciplined and devoted to the welfare of all beings in his kingdom shall enjoy the fruits of mother earth unopposed.

A wise king:

  • Has self-control, having conquered the temptation of his senses
  • Cultivates the intellect by associating with elders and ancestors
  • Keeps his eyes open, is active in promoting the security and welfare of the people
  • Improves his discipline by continuing his learning in all branches of knowledge
  • Creates a net positive change in society
  • Keeps away from another’s wife
  • Does not yearn for someone else’s property and possessions
  • Practices non-violence towards all living beings
  • Avoids engaging with harmful and shady humans

There is no need to deprive myself of all sensual pleasures; it only breeds thoughts rooted in lack. I have been single since I was born and having a lot of amazing {redacted} with {redacted} as long as it does not interfere with my dharma or material wellbeing is totally fine. Many teachers say that the 4 aims of human life (dharma, artha, kama, moksha) are interdependent and they should be pursued equally; excessive importance given to any one interferes with the others.

Kautilya, however, says that artha (economic energy) is the most important, for dharma and kama are both dependent on it. If the king is economically activated, the people of his kingdom will be equally energetic and activated. If the king is lazy in performing his duties, the same laziness will carry over to the people around him and they will eat into his wealth. Lazy kings also have a high chance of falling into enemy hands.

So focus your energy. Guard your time. Train your mind. Train your body. Think for yourself. Curate your friends. Curate your environment. Keep your promises. Stay willing and devoted. Upgrade the world.

Relevance of Kautilya

There would be no reason for me to borrow Kautilya’s precepts if I were not convinced of their applicability in my life. At face value, many of his precepts are irrelevant to us in 2026, therefore, they must be applied judiciously while keeping the core characteristics of his work in mind.

Arthashastra is a treatise about an ideal state — not that such a state ever existed or is even likely to exist now or in the future. To the extent of any of the 6 constituent elements of a state — the ruler, the ministers, the urban and rural population, the economic power and military might — differ from the ideals Kautilya has set out, to the extent his advice needs to modified and customized by its consumer. Since it is a treatise on the art of government, it is, by nature, instructional. It seeks to instruct all kings and is meant to be useful at all times wherever dharma is held to be preeminent.

As far as the nature of human beings remains the same and states behave as they always have, Kautilya’s teachings remain relevant. When it comes to specifics like the Code of Penalties or on Battle Formations, the Arthashastra may only interest history buffs. But when the author discusses the economy, administration, or relations between states, we can learn from his wisdom.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF WRITING GOOD LETTERS

Don't overwhelm the reader with thou brobdingnagian bullshittery

2026-07-30 · 7 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/the-first-principles-of-writing-good-letters · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/the-first-principles-of-writing-good-letters

Dear reader, July 2026 was quite eventful, emotional, terrorizing and transformational. I could not find the words for what I had initially planned for you. But I must not default on my promise to write to you at least once a month. So I’m compromising on my delusional quality standards and jerry-rigging this one to honor my commitments.

Words can turn your life upside down, build it up and burn it to the ground. Words of encouragement, spoken to a kid, can inspire her to grow into a better woman. Words of recognition, spoken to an intern, can infuse him with swag and prod him to take the extra step. Unkind words can do irreversible damage, even destroy entire families within moments.

Similar to knocking down a jump shot off a curl, arranging words into sentences is something humans enjoy deeply, right from the preparation till the end. Like fans arrive to the arena 2 hours before the game just to watch Steph Curry shoot, everyone likes to read, write and hear a good fucking sentence. A good fucking sentence hits you right in the keister. You can feel the satisfaction spread through your body. It is the basketball equivalent of a “Swish.” Though good writers, like good basketball players, don’t just appear fully-formed. As a guard spends hours in the gym, working on his jump shot, as a writer, you sit at your table and devote long hours to throwing words on the page, honing your form, your rhythm, precision, the fluidity in your prose — whether it’s homework, a shareholder letter, a job application, or a letter to catch up with your friend in Tegucigalpa. Like jump shots, the more painstaking the effort, the more effective and rewarding the writing becomes. To talk myself out of a shooting slump, I would mentally repeat to myself that the purpose of being a shooter was not to be a shooter, but to be shooting. I like to think the same is true in case of writing good sentences, for effortlessness can only be known through effort.

Writing successfully to any company, public figure or friend requires you to be sensitive to one fact — the person you’re writing to is stressed, rushed and anxious. He is not a kundalini yoga master with alchemical abilities. At best, he is a weekend yogi. All his ‘mindfulness’ knowledge comes from last year’s spiritual retreat in Dubai, and the breathing exercise app that Karen from HR wants everyone to use for work-life balance. His boss is on his back. His peers wonder if he really knows his business. His brain is fried from social media. And his subordinates, he is sure, are “incompetent af” or angling for his position. Anything you say that makes his job easier helps you get an answer.

What can you do to make things easier for him? Go back to the first principles of writing good letters — the ABCs.

Accuracy

Accuracy is important, to an unhealthy extent for some, because the person you’re writing to does not know you. Nor is he likely to be familiar with the tingling sensations that caused you to write. Therefore, be as specific as possible. Give all the relevant information to the best of your abilities.

For example, in the late evening of May 26, 2022, I wrote, “My jaw is broken” on a tissue Horatio handed to me. If you want to hear more about the 3 cracks in my lower jaw and the heroics of Horatio Velveteen, let me know and I will get back to you mediumly with the full story. My point however, is that no one (including Horatio) had any idea where the endless blood was coming from. The slit in my chin was hidden underneath my sexy, black Belarusian beard. Only I was qualified to share the breaking news. I could not talk about the fall. Nor the sound I made after. Not the pain, which was like a 1000 lances piercing into my brain. Each of those facts were true. But I could not think about any of them despite being a 10x Nobel Prize winner in Overthinking. It’s like my body ‘just knew’ that none of those facts would give the medical staff of NIIT University any idea about the urgency of the situation.

You see, accuracy is not about being thorough. It is what saves time and annoyance and decides what happens next. It is about the specific truths within the truth that set the frame for action. The reader does not know you. And he will not ask. So give him the facts and figures that will help him make his next move. Not to mention that most business communications today are influenced by agents, which exponentially amplifies the demand for being accurate.

Brevity

In my early 20s, when I used to plan how my Instagram profile should look, write the copy for my profile and do cold outreach to women on Tinder — I came to face the cold truth that no one has the time to read anything written by you.

People will never refuse to read your writing. But if your letter is more than a page, they will “see to it later” because they are “busy.” And you better believe that they will never read your letter. As a general rule, if your reader cannot decide, the answer is no. Don’t blame them. You would probably do the same. Just stick to the essentials and destroy anything that creates ambiguity.

If you’re not an AI agent, you might feel a tension between Accuracy and Brevity. This is a good sign. There is nothing more boring and annoying than the slow process of writing, followed by the slower process of taking it apart and destroying most of it. You might even lean towards an AI agent to help you. But the ambiguity within you will only be amplified in the answers it spits out. Because AI cannot feel this tension that exists in the dark depths within you.

Before you write “Brevity is the soul of wit” into ChatGPT, massage this mental model into your temple first:

1. Tell why you are writing

Telling the reader why you’re writing hands him a frame of perception. So he does not have to work at building his own just to understand you.

Say a bank sold you something you never walked in for. The first line carries the letter: “I am writing about Monday’s visit to your branch. I came in for some paperwork but I was coerced by one of your salesmen into buying the “Fortune Builder” fund. I wish to withdraw the entire amount as the details of the fund on your website don’t align with what was shared by the salesman...”

If you were in your feelings, you might write something like: “I’d like to raise some concerns about my recent terrible experience at HBI Bank. Your salesman is a liar.”

Both are true. One gets your complaint resolved. The other gets a “Thanks for your feedback. We will get back to you.”

2. Give the important facts

Facts are what separate a letter that’s tangible from a feeling that’s transitory. Giving the important facts to support your first sentence will show that you are thoughtful. I have found it useful to reserve a separate paragraph for each fact.

Keep the one or two or three facts that matter most. If you give a long list of reasons why, the letter becomes boring, annoying and performative. You don’t want to irritate the reader. You want to get him on your side.

3. Describe what you would like the reader to do

Just say it. Plainly. Tell it like it is.

Don’t let all the energy you have harnessed from the facts and arguments die. Close your letter by naming exactly what you want: “I believe you should refund my purchase” or “I want to exchange this for a different size.” Whenever you ask the reader to do something for you, ask shamelessly. You will want to soften it, sugarcoat it. Don’t.

Clarity

It’s easy to say, “Go out and be clear.” It’s like saying, “Be yourself” or “Don’t overthink it.” Normally, I would think of examples of what clarity looks like. But it’s not that simple when it comes to the real world. No matter how much I follow suggestions from writers on accuracy and brevity, I have failed spectacularly in trying to get my point across. On the other hand, getting someone to hire me for a project, being accurate and concise in my emails has resulted in business deals that were once unimaginable.

Clarity is a double-edged sword. When you are declarative and blunt in your intentions, you are putting your name on the line. People who don’t want to devote themselves make their writing muddy and deceptive. But take my words with a grain of salt. They say the average IQ in India is 70-80. Because I’m a delusional egotist, I like to think I’m in the 84s and 86s. The best advice I can produce is to be delusionally devoted to write so unmistakably that your readers can’t possibly misunderstand or misinterpret a single word. Anything that requires unnecessary effort from your reader will be ignored — and is bound to be misunderstood.

A few tactics to simulate clarity:

  • Keep your paragraphs within 6-10 lines. Break down the walls of text. Even if it is not easy to understand, the white space makes it look easier, and encourages the reader to continue reading.
  • Keep your sentences short. Like we discussed, the reader was not bit by a radioactive spider and does not possess great powers of concentration. Even if he does, he is probably too busy and cute to exercise them for you.
  • Keep your words short. Don’t overwhelm the reader with thou brobdingnagian bullshittery.

A compass for the confused

4 ancient coordinates to unparalyze yourself and recalibrate

2026-06-26 · 14 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/a-compass-for-the-confused · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/a-compass-for-the-confused

In no shape do I possess the required qualifications to impose this framework on the reader. Nor does the reader who sees life as random and meaningless possess the required throughput for these ideas to enter their skull. I only write this to commence the dismantling process of the programs of fear and shame that are woven in the fabric of the collective consciousness of India. In my opinion, these programs of fear and shame are the reason for the country’s current collapse, buffoonery, identity paralysis, and its takeover. The eternal, authorless, and infallible Vedic principles that materialized on this land have been preserved till date, and they are still being practised in lineages, and I’m extremely blessed to be born literally on the land on where Krishna gave his teachings to Arjuna. But the sacred knowledge from the sages has been diluted and distorted and weaponized over time. So has the land, with its meteoric rise to the global pollution leaderboards. India is confused! Wait, I’m getting carried away. My bad. Let’s stick to the sacred framework so the dismantling process happens the right way, the right time. When I’m in my feelings, I will channel all my Mars energy and dedicate an entire treatise like Ludwig von Mises — to rant about the state of India.

The word Purushartha combines 2 terms — Purusha (person, human being) and Artha (purpose, goal, meaning) — hence “the 4 foundational goals of human life.” Together, the 4 Purusharthas — Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha — form the complete map of human aspiration — ethical, material, emotional, and spiritual.

This is not just abstract and philosophical, but a practical framework that anyone in the world can borrow and use to live a well-balanced and meaningful life. According to Pythagorean number symbolism, represented by the square, the number 4 is associated with order, practicality and organization. It is the basis of all practical construction. The 4 Purusharthas are like the 4 legs of a table, even if 1 leg is weak or missing, the entire structure becomes unstable. Before I fully committed to writing, my own life structure was unstable. Though I had (still do) a beautiful jumpshot like Steph Curry that I worked really hard for 5 years to develop by watching YouTube videos — after a series of injuries, I started to settle with the fact that my hoop dreams were a long shot. Other than basketball, I was simply drifting on the lifeless school-to-college-to-job path to success. Come to think of it, my hoop dreams were more of an escape from reality. I gave up my hopes of studying abroad because of a stupid girl, joined an Indian college, dropped out of that college to join another college for a stupid piece of paper that says I’m an MBA — not because I was always obsessed with human nature and buyer psychology, but because I wanted to fulfill family expectations for their validation, just so my grandpa could shut up. But he died before I could prove to him that I’m not entirely useless...

I just realized I am too lazy to turn this riff into a short cohesive story about how I lived my past lives in unconsciousness. The point is I have always been the black sheep, the outcast, everywhere I went, even in the case of basketball, which, for a long time, was the only area where I could be of some utility to anyone. I did not know the answers to the constant questions I got everywhere I went — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” or “Why are you so quiet?” I have burned my entire childhood in a self-induced psychosis, a deep loneliness and depression, well before all the “mental health awareness” propaganda started creeping into social media feeds during COVID. My mom took me to a shrink once, and before I could utter a word, she said “Anchit you are 18 but why do you think like a 40-year-old?” I was shocked. I didn’t show it. It was more of an internal ‘huh?’ And that was my first and last meeting with a psychologist. I had this belief of “Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me?” I rather chose isolation, developed the habit of locking myself in my room at a young age, became a textbook nihilist, living in my own distorted reality — a reality where I don’t deserve love and only deserve pain. Of course, I have graduated to higher level of delusions now that everyone knows psychiatrists are not real. I have come to realize that once I believe something, it essentially means death of inquiry, which is not good for my business and my internal climate. If you’d asked me then, I would have told you life is pain without any aim, backed by various stories of my victimhood.

Aimlessness and paralysis is what this framework exists to catch. Besides the steadiness and practicality of the 4 legs of a table, the 4 Purusharthas operate on a level of metaphysical abstraction that they can be used as a compass to unparalyze yourself and recalibrate in the real world.

1. Dharma

Righteousness. Moral values. Duty. Right conduct. The pursuit and execution of one’s nature and true calling, thus playing one’s role in the cosmic concert.

“Duty is just social programming,” says the modern objection. “It’s how they keep you in line.”

It’s partly right. Duty has been bent into obedience for as long as there have been people with something to gain from your compliance. But that isn’t what Dharma is. Dharma comes from the root dhri — to hold, to bear, to uphold. It’s the thing that keeps your entire compass pointing true. Dharma precedes Artha and Kama. Duty precedes wealth and pleasure — if there’s a conflict, Dharma should prevail.

I started by telling you I’m unqualified because I am still in the dharmic phase of my life, building Devoted Media to serve my readers and customers. I drifted aimlessly throughout the first half of my life, precisely because I had not found my duty. Without Dharma, one cannot live a conscious life, and is bound to live an accidental one, in a constant state of reaction, as a slave to outer stimuli.

For example, gold is produced by nature. It is classified as a metal or mineral. Mineral production is a geological process and, according to the Vedas, forms part of nature’s bounty. Hence, nature produces minerals and metals such as gold on a continuous basis. The more mankind lives in accordance with natural laws, the more minerals are produced and the more prosperous human society becomes. The actual purpose in printing paper money is recognized as counterproductive by Vedic authorities, not just Austrian economists. This, we can understand, is because, through paper currency, man wants to override nature’s mechanism, and steal from the future as a short-term band-aid solution. Whenever man follows the laws of Dharma and lives a righteous life, society is benefited and nature automatically produces ample supply of wealth. Whenever man flouts the laws of nature, he finds himself facing the uncertainties of nature and inevitably we find how, nature withholds its supply of natural resources. We find adverse climatic conditions, geopolitical tensions, and scarce resources — these are the ripple effects of non-observance of the foundations of Dharma or righteous life by humanity.

On an individual level, depending on your role, stage of life, and situation, Dharma can mean different things for different people. For a doctor, the Hippocratic Oath is Dharma. For a marketer, finding creative ways to sell the truth instead of creating fake fear and fake scarcity is Dharma. For an entrepreneur, earning profit by creating (not extracting) value is Dharma. For a seeker, a systematic inquiry into the nature of truth and reality is Dharma. But the common theme remains that Dharma never supports selfishness or harm. It always points towards truth, compassion, responsibility, and integrity.

Considering the chaos and uncertainty the earth is currently in, living by Dharma is stupid simple:

  • Choose honesty. I learned this the hard way. Before I turned a teenager, I stole Gandhis from my family to gain the transitory trust of fake friends in school, thereby eroding all the permanent trust in my real family. As it turns out, honesty really is the best policy.

  • Lower your time preference so you can expand your time horizon. Don’t be a hedonistic twat.

  • Give respect, even when they say 6 + 9 = 69.

  • Be sincere and kind, donate your old clothes to people without turning the whole act into Instagram content.

  • Be loyal. Keep your promises. You can break the shitty promises you made with fake people, or never intended to keep in the first place, just because you were in a happy mood. Never promise anything when you are in smiley mode.

  • Pay people well, tip the food delivery guy if you can, treat them like a human — duh.

2. Artha

The means of life. Wealth. Career. Economic energy. Financial security. The proper pursuit of Artha is considered an important aim of human life.

“Money is either cope or corruption,” says the objection. “Either you rise above it or it owns you.”

I have never understood the shame Indians attach to wealth. Because our own texts don’t share it. In fact, they acknowledge the inevitable game everyone on earth has to play — the economic game. Kautilya, writing his treatise on statecraft over 2000 years ago said, “Poverty breeds vice and hate, while prosperity breeds virtues and love,” and treated material security as the foundation everything else is built on. The Gita, meanwhile, calls greed one of the 3 gates to hell.

This only sounds conflicting but it’s not. One is describing the floor, the other the ceiling. Dharma governs — those are the riverbanks. Artha enables — that’s the water. A river with banks and no water is a dry ditch. Water with no banks is a flood. And Artha is the single word my ancestors used for both wealth and meaning. Your means and your meaning were never supposed to be enemies and the sages made sure of that. They were the same word. Without financial stability, it becomes impossible to think of anything, let alone higher goals. On the other hand, absolute power corrupts absolutely and there are many examples — both dead and alive. This is why Dharma precedes Artha. The crypto scammers might look sexy to the naked eye — but deceit, exploitation, altering other people’s reality and perception (just because you’re a hedonistic twat) comes with an emotional and spiritual cost. How you earn is more important than how much you earn.

The wisdom of the Purusharthas make it explicitly clear that money is not evil, greed and attachment are. Artha becomes a problem when the means becomes the end — when you no longer have money, money has you, and your “enough” always seems to be one installment away. If earned and used correctly, Artha becomes the soil that sustains your Dharma and Kama.

Balancing Artha is also stupid simple like asking yourself:

  • Am I compromising my ethics just for more money?

  • Am I ignoring my health and relationships in the name of “career”?

  • Is my worth completely dependent on my bank balance?

If the answer is “yes” to any of these, then welcome to the club young man/woman. Instead of support, Artha is becoming a source of bondage and it is time for us to recalibrate using the wisdom of the Purusharthas. Also, I can’t believe I’m saying this but don’t ask your AI agent answer these questions for you. These prompts are for the LLM inside your skull.

3. Kama

Desire. Pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment. Love. Affection.

This is not only sexual desire but all forms of refined enjoyment — art, beauty, companionship, comfort — when pursued consciously. In unconsciousness, I have struggled the most in this area throughout my life, more than Artha. When Kama goes out of the bounds of Dharma, it only leads to attachment, suffering, and disorder.

Now, we have reached the point in the essay where, if I write anymore, instead of serving you, I will start revealing secrets I only gossip about with my dog and God (like the recurring appearance of S-named girls from my teens till my early 20s). I’d rather tell you a story on lust and desire rather than my own struggles with desire to get my point across.

There is a famous story of Lord Shiva (aka the deity who kidnapped me 2 years ago) about destroying Kamadeva — the god of lust and love. After Sati’s death, Shiva withdraws from the world into fierce tapasya in his penance grove, high in the Himalayas — indifferent to creation and completely absorbed in meditation. At the same time, the demon Tarakasura is terrorizing the three worlds, and a prophecy states that only a son of Shiva can kill him. So the Gods must somehow bring Shiva and Parvati (Sati reborn) together. Parvati is sent to attend him, bringing flowers for his daily worship. But he remains inwardly detached. Therefore, Indra (Vedic god of weather) and the other gods decide to enlist Kamadeva (the deva of desire) to gently stir love in Shiva’s heart. Kamadeva arrives at Shiva’s retreat, creating an untimely spring — flowers bloom, bees hum, and the whole atmosphere becomes charged with sensual beauty. Armed with his flowery bow — its string a line of bees — and five arrows tipped with blossoming flowers, Kama aims at the meditating Shiva and releases his arrow of love toward Shiva’s heart. Shiva’s meditation is disturbed, and a flicker of desire arises, directed toward Parvati, who is nearby. This is exactly what the gods wanted but it violates the sanctity of Shiva’s meditation. Recognizing this, Shiva opens his third eye — which, if I had to imagine, is the equivalent of an anger that’s 1000x worse than the Younger Dryas impact — from it bursts a blazing fire that instantly reduces Kamadeva to a heap of ashes.

Now, this is a problem. The world cannot run without desire. There is no life without desire.

Kamadeva’s wife, Rati, is devastated at his sudden destruction and laments bitterly. The gods console her — telling her to gather and preserve his ashes — and plead his case before Shiva, explaining that Kama acted not out of malice, but in obedience to them for the welfare of the universe. Moved by her devotion and the larger cosmic purpose, Shiva grants a boon and Kamadeva is reborn, but without a physical body — the bodiless one. Which is a way of saying that you cannot point at something and call it desire, yet it is encoded in every cell of your body. For example, I find myself a Diet Coke very desirable. In our last illuminati meeting of writers, we learned how David Foster Wallace, in Consider the Lobster, gives a maximalist expression to the lobster’s desire to live as they are about to be tossed into the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker. If you look around, you will find infinite scenarios of desire at play — in the yogic lore, in Diet Coke — for it is the invisible glue that binds us in many ways.

How I think you can measure the health of your Kama goes back to my point on time preference, because we live in world where you can basically “get off” with the click of a button. There are billion dollar companies actively competing for ways they can traumatize you so they can monetize you — and I don’t just say that because it rhymes.

4. Moksha

Liberation. Self-realization. Freedom from samsara. The equivalent of transcending the matrix like Neo.

Let’s be real, neither of us are at this stage. I can give you examples of things I find liberating, like hitting the publish button. Also, there was a bug in my meditation app and for some reason, all my progress got reset after yesterday’s session so I can’t show-off even if I wanted to. My point is, the line between a buddha and a buddhu is extraordinarily fine. I am most probably the part of the latter crowd. If you are at this stage, shoot me a DM or email me at hello@anchits.blog, I would love to interview you.

Notes

The Arthashastra — India’s First Economics Treatise

  • Full title: Kautiliyam Arthasastram — “Kautilya’s compendium on worldly affairs.”
  • Considered as one of the upavedas.
  • In the very first mantra, the author declares that it is not his work but a combination of many treatises on the Science of Politics as have been composed by ancient teachers for the acquisition and protection of the earth.
  • 15 books, 180 sections, 150 chapters — covering statecraft, economics, taxation, trade, military strategy.
  • Attributed to Chanakya (375-283 BCE), counsellor of Chandragupta Maurya.
  • Disappeared after 12th century. Rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry. Published 1909.
  • India had a comprehensive economics treatise 2,100 years before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).
  • The foundational chain from Chanakya’s Arthashastra:
    1. Sukhasya Mulam Dharmah — The root of happiness is Dharma (ethics)
    2. Dharmasya Mulam Arthah — The root of Dharma is Artha (wealth)
    3. Arthasya Mulam Rajyam — The root of Artha is the state/organization
    4. Rajasya Mulam IndriyaJayah — The root of the state is mastery over senses
    5. IndriyaJayasya Mulam Vinayah — The root of sense-mastery is humility
    6. Vinayasya Mulam Vriddhopaseva — The root of humility is serving the wise
    7. Vriddhopasevayah Mulam Vijnanam — The root of serving the wise is competence
    8. Vijnanena Atmanam Vindet — Through competence, one discovers the Self
  • The chain traces happiness THROUGH dharma BACK TO artha. You cannot skip the wealth step. Spiritual realization requires material foundation.
  • Kautilya declared Artha MORE important than dharma and kama on practical grounds. Without economic security, you cannot practice virtue, and you cannot enjoy life. This is the OPPOSITE of the “spiritual people don’t care about money” narrative in the zeitgeist.

Poverty breeds vice and hate, while prosperity breeds virtues and love.

Be ever active in management of the economy, because the root of wealth is economic activity; inactivity brings material distress. Without any active policy, both current prosperity and future gains are destroyed.

Material gain is the most crucial of the three ends of life, as it supports the realization of Dharma and Kama.

Bhagavad Gita on Wealth and Action

Chapter 2, Verse 47 — The Core Teaching:

“Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits.”

Chapter 3, Verse 35 — Svadharma:

“It is far better to discharge one’s prescribed duties, even though they may be faulty, than another’s duties.”

Chapter 18, Verse 46 — Work as Worship:

“By worshipping through one’s own duty Him from whom all beings originate, man attains perfection.”

The Isa Upanishad Resolution

Act and enjoy with renunciation, do not covet.

Indian philosophy resolved the tension between wealth pursuit (pravrtti) and renunciation (nivrtti) through “action with renunciation” — act without craving for results. This is not anti-wealth. It is wealth pursued with Dharma.

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was an Austrian economist who wrote Human Action — a 900-page treatise on Economics. It is unlike me, but for various reasons, I actually bought this physical book last year, and made it my responsibility to internalize. To my surprise, Mises’s work relates a lot to the knowledge in the vedas.

Relax. I’m kidding!

Psychiatrists are very real. And the world definitely needs them. I absolutely love Dr. K and his work.

Dharmo rakshati rakshita

One who protects Dharma is protected by Dharma. This holds true on an individual level but it also holds true on a wider national and international scale.

You can't have a 4-year plan when Karen has a 4-week plan

On time preference and toadies

2026-06-11 · 7 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/you-cant-have-a-4-year-plan · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/you-cant-have-a-4-year-plan-when

2 years ago, in the bullshiatic grasslands of Money Twitter, a wild copywriter appeared:

LMAO you’re such a jeet. English isn’t your first language and you want to write copy in the American market? You’re going to have a tough time. I am going to skin you alive. You are competing against guys like me and probably 1,000 other people who are better than me. I will eat your liver.

He went on to advise against hiring Indians to his flock of followers. I was annoyed. That’s some racist bullshit. But who am I to judge? I literally learned English from rappers and comedians and Family Guy. All of them engage in racial bullshittery in their own artful ways. But still, why should I listen to this marketer who has named his Twitter Space “the cum zone?” What am I even doing in “the cum zone?” Easier to judge than think. Let the crabs compete I thought to myself as I left the cum zone. Mr. Copywriter’s words were not as Jesus as he claimed to be. Also, his Donald Trump impression was terrible.

“Bro Twitter is a mental hospital.”

I agree. But similar situations started to happen at work as well. Karen cackled in her cuckoo voice when I told her I started ghostwriting. “Ghost what hahaha. Most of what you write will never see the light of day hahaha,” she said. “Do you even know anything about running a business?” Kendall added further. Oh how they quacked and quacked. I literally gave them logical ways they can stop spending thousands of Benjamins and Gandhis on stupid marketing agencies and they laughed it off because AI is “a gen z thing.”

If I had not been sensitive to these divine signals from the universe, I would have never grown the frustration and audacity to start my agency.

My very first briefing on long-form Copy was to copy, not even winning Copy but the previous failed Copy, and stuff it with keywords for “SEO-optimization.” Karens and the Copywriters spent 3 hours talking about definitions. I can’t describe the physical pain in my ears and my eyes. Typing bullshit everyday that’s technically correct but (you know within) communicates nothing to the person who will read it. I was traumatized.

Once upon a time, I had to deliver 7 blogs to my corporate overlords. Without reading a single word, Karen saw an em dash — a punctuation mark Emily Dickinson used so much they named her the Queen of Dashes, a mark scattered through Shakespeare’s First Folio, a mark that has existed in English since the 1700s — and dismissed my entire work as slop. But I don’t blame Karen. She had already made it clear that she does not care what I have to say when she welcomed me into the team. I had not delivered on my commitment. She asked for 7. I barely managed to deliver 6. But it all could have been settled with a classic corporate-speak tete-a-tete about “deadlines” and “bandwidth” and “responsibility” and “synergy.” But that em-dash became a judgment about my character, credibility and competence — all fabricated from a piece of punctuation that predates the lightbulb. I got ‘Best Debut’ in Q3 and turned into AI slop as soon as Q4 started. You don’t know dear reader. That day, Karen used all her journalism and copywriting skills, all her linguistic acrobats to write a flawless email about my flaws. I was more impressed than annoyed. When I first met Karen and asked her about our content systems and approach, she shoulder-shrugged at me with a look of confusion and disgust. But not today. Karen was sharp as a tack. Ready for war. It was on sight.

I am gossiping like a Karen to tell you that — never have I ever seen a good business or a creator that is less than 4 years old. You need to stay in the trenches long enough. The math is straightforward. If you have a lower time preference than those you work with, especially those who live by ancient hierarchical models of the inferior and the superior — YOU ARE DOOMED!

Just so I can write “YOU ARE DOOMED!” again, let me gossip like Michael Saylor if Michael Saylor graduated from a small village in Rajasthan:

At MIT, I built non-linear dynamic computer simulations. I studied engineering and control theory. In those non-linear dynamic systems — their feedback is important. And one of the most important parameters is the time constant of the feedback. For example, algae in a pond. If it’s doubling every day and it fills up the pond on day 30, when will you notice you have any algae, right? The time constant, or the life cycle, in dynamic systems — how long does it take for deer or wolves to breed, how long does it take for algae to grow, how long does it take a virus to spread in your body? All of those things figure prominently in sophisticated dynamic simulation models. So the idea of time constant is important.

I wrote my thesis at MIT — a mathematical model of a renaissance Italian city-state where I created (but I didn’t) a computer simulation of Machiavelli’s Discourses. And the Discourses describe the dynamics of government when you have a judiciary branch, a legislative branch, and an executive branch. If the judges serve for life, they have a long time constant. If you change the legislative branch every 2 years, it’s a short time constant. If you have the senate and it’s every 6 years, it’s a longer, more conservative time constant. If the executive is a ruler or a king and rules for life, that’s a very long time constant. But if they’re elected for 4 years, it’s a shorter time constant. So I actually programmed that on a computer and I actually showed all the dynamic patterns under which a political economy melts down. Or thrives.

I am channeling my inner Saylor just so I can repeat — if you have a longer time horizon (or a lower time preference) than Karen/Copywriter — YOU ARE DOOMED!

Say you are building a brand and you want it to be successful over 4 years. And your Karen gives you 12 weeks. She checks you in 12 days and fires you if you haven’t got your cost down and your ratings up in 12 days. You can’t have a 4-year plan when Karen has a 4-week plan. So you have to learn about time preference and time horizon. Anything you do in life or business, you have to have the right time horizon. Some players think it’s the last time they will ever get the ball and only think of shooting the ball no matter how shitty their shot selection. Some players focus on making the right decisions because they trust the game plan and end up making historical comebacks such as the one today in Madison Square Garden.

On another note, Karen has been tasked by her own Karen/Copywriter to assess your performance. She has no way of articulating your value as a marketer. By the em-dash incident, she has already proved to you that she is behind on her daily reading. Karen is paid to grade your economic fate. Because a job is basically doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company. The work you do is averaged together with other Karens and Copywriters in your team. You may not even know that you are doing something people want. Your contribution may be subtle, and goes unnoticed, especially if you are introverted. But this averaging becomes a problem in big companies where most jobs are fake. Assigning value to each person’s work becomes a game of politics and visibility and compliance that defies all logic. Companies are not set up to reward people who want to take initiative. They reward the toadies. You can’t go to your boss and say, I have automated key marketing operations and saved you 10x costs, so will you please pay me ten times as much? The company simply has no way of measuring the value of your work. They will just dump more of the shit that they themselves don’t want to do so they can focus on being toadies.

If my entrepreneurial ventures tank, I cannot plead to God or Claude that I did put in the work and the capital. I cannot tell Murphy that he won’t go to the dog spa anymore because the government can’t stop printing money.

If Anchit’s Blog does badly, I have done badly.

Karen and the Copywriter are not separate individuals. They represent the female and male archetypes of all the people I have worked with when I was a boring marketer.

Why I can't pick a niche

And why I choose to die a blissful failure

2026-06-02 · 9 min read · canonical: https://anchits.blog/posts/why-i-cant-pick-a-niche · also on Substack: https://anchitsblog.substack.com/p/why-i-cant-pick-a-niche

You are only reading this because I can’t hold it anymore. The bricks need to be stacked. The shits need to be shat. Every word here is a consequence of a spell that was executed in the higher realms well before I was born. People have died, sacrificed their dreams, devoted their energies — just so I can click keys on my MacBook for a living.

If you just want the TL;DR: I talk to God and talk to Claude and talk to myself on this blog.

The titans of the creator economy want me to “write like I talk,” articulate my place in the marketplace like Hemingway.

For a long time, I believed the digital gods. Niche down. Pick a lane. Find your one thing and beat it to death. “The riches are in the niches,” they said, while they captured the masses with their Twitter threads on Rick Rubin — back when growth was just posting a thread and sharing it with your engagement groupies.

Then the creator economy matured into a multi-billion dollar industry. We started harnessing the power of digital tools, to build income streams which created the market for online courses and info-products. Moms. Grandmas. Kids. People all over the world started building their suite of digital offerings. But not me. I was in college doing non-college things. Like grinding for the global ranked leaderboards on Call of Duty. I had not yet committed to writing on the internet.

And now, we find ourselves among armies of agents. Wasting tokens to save time. I never thought I would ever use the terminal of my computer. Forget about writing like Hemingway. Now you can burn 2476x more tokens than The Old Man and the Sea and turn Hemingway into a full-stack marketer and engineer. Yet still, the whispers of online gurus saying “Pick a niche” linger in my psyche.

This is why Devotion is my core operating principle.

3 years ago, I started writing so I can selfishly grok and make money. Very soon, I realized those 2 things don’t go together in the business of online writing. It made me go into a deep paralysis followed by a deep inquiry for months. The fact I had quit my certain niche 9-5 job to start an uncertain niche 24*7 job, did not sit well with me. I was still addicted to the monthly salary.

Picking a niche works. It worked for me. Helped me make my first dollar from the internet. But it was setting a weak foundation for my brand.

What if I get bored with it like I usually do with most things?

“Just change your niche,” said my ghostwriting coach.

And bored is what I got. The euphoric high died after I saw my dream amount in my bank account.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of thinking that being a brand means your job is to sell products or cultivate engagement in your niche.

Which is load of dog shit mixed with cat shit.

Why do people buy from you? To be liked. To feel important. To be sexy. To gain knowledge. To make money. To be secure. To save time. To make work easier. To be right. Out of fear. Out of greed. Out of guilt. A hundred reasons.

Notice what’s not on that list? I’ll wait.

...

...

“Because you picked a niche.”

People don’t buy just because you’re selling. If you want a harsh example, every time I drive from my gated society to the nearest McDonald’s, I see homeless people selling very niche things. Like plastic fans and microfiber cloths and pens. Odd things. But I have never seen anyone buy them unless they’re in a charitable mood. People buy ideas, not products. And they buy when they feel like it, not when they can. If you show people their “desired self” and give them a pathway to get there, they will feel like buying.

Everything is energy. For a thing to exist, it has to exist as an idea. Products help you channel energy, ideally. So you can realize ideas. So that energy serves you.

Essentially, every product is really a service. Nobody buys “the thing.” People buy for the service the product offers. Yes, it might or might not serve its purpose later. But the key thing is people buy because they feel the product serves their “desired self.”

You take a literal shit every morning (I hope) because it serves your colon health.

You take electrical energy and turn it into intelligence that produces answers in real time because it serves humanity.

So the bulk of the work as a marketer is understanding the buyer, their “desired self,” the ideas that move them, and showing them the path. Marketing is more about cognitive fitness than writing prowess. 94% of it is obsessing over a problem more than the person who is experiencing the problem.

As a result, the ideas you create, share, and associate with — accumulate to form your brand — which is also why branding as a concept is sooo abstracted.

My point in all this is to dig deeper into my core principle.

When you have this big idea, it is like staring into this point in physical space (that we call a market or TAM). And then you take certain actions in alignment with this idea to serve your ideal customer. But human desire is limitless. Why must I rely on creating artificial scarcity in the age of abundance? Why stare into this point in physical space? What if my point, my big idea exists on a higher, overarching vector space? That serves a higher purpose beyond me and you. Why must I use cookie cutters and frameworks and funnels to keep people in fear, uncertainty and doubt? Why can’t I just say it like it is — the naked truth about what I’m trying to sell?

By design, I will never achieve this “higher” point. I won’t finish what I’m really building in one lifetime. I’m stacking bricks for someone who may never exist to meet me. But I get handsomely rewarded anyway. When I work like this, people actually want to work with me.

Why should I die a miserable accomplishment when I can die a blissful failure?

The digital gods of the creator economy need to pause with all the “jack of all trades is a master of none” and catch up on their reading because the full statement is: A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

Come on guys. We’re in the digital renaissance for god sakes.

When I was a kid, questioning things was seen as disrespectful. Only the kids who had the answers were the good kids. Everyone who was paid to grade my economic fate said that I didn’t write “the right way” because I wrote “in my own words.” But I refused to grow up despite multiple murder attempts on my curiosity...

And oh how the tables have turned. Answers are a commodity now. And all of a sudden, my tendency to “Why???” is an asset.

Yea yea, I (might) get replaced if AI somehow develops the ability to feel emotions and devote itself. But what’s funnier is that most of the knowledge gatekeepers who shoulder-shrugged my curiosity as “above my pay grade” will get replaced before me.

Really Karen? Asking how many newsletter subscribers we have is above my pay grade? Pointing out that we have a 100,000 followers and 0 engagement is above my pay grade? I’m supposed to just write stuff and wait for my next topic like a good boy?

The path of Devotion is a real, genuine search for truth — an inquiry beginning, continuing and ending in intense maddening love.

As the path of devotion requires you to employ your emotions, one can say my lifelong struggle with emotion led me to this path. Or it can be that I’m lazy. And the path of devotion is known to be the easiest and the fastest. Or it can be the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding debates with imaginary people. Or the feeling of being isolated and undervalued in society. It can be that, ever since God kidnapped me without my permission, I find myself under the influence of unhealthy amounts of devotion. It can be the disagreeable mannerisms I acquired as a young kid. Or my disdain for the buffoons that run this planet. It can also be the lore about one’s tendency to absorb one’s name for my name literally means Great Devotion. It can be my ability to face the unpleasant facts of life. Or it can be my obsession with marketing, human nature, rhymes, eloquence, persuasion — the sonic science of words — that brings me here.

But all it took was one. One moment of this intense maddening love.

This love. Oh this love. You keep this love. This love destroys your limited and rigid personas, your illusions of individuality, your tidy likes and dislikes, and your ability to “pick a niche.”

This love is all-inclusive. It does not discriminate.

The endless nature of human desire — making your first dollar, then a couple more, your first $100, then $5000, then the euphoric high, then the euphoria dies, then $10,000, then $30,000, then a bigger car, then another wife, then a bigger portfolio, then you want control over the world’s money supply — is an expression of this love.

This love you have for the infinite. This love that you seek in installments.

In the yogic sciences, Devotion is seen as the most spiritual path, but it has its own pitfalls. For instance, I truly don’t know if I’m moving forward or backward. When you’re under the influence, it can lead to all kinds of delusions. In its lower forms, devotion degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crews of various faiths and religions and ideologies are exclusively recruited because they dwell in the lower planes of devotion. Being so devoted to one’s ideal, but turning into a howling fanatic when it comes to any other ideal is a sign of a weak and immature mind. There is countless evidence suggesting that the mind works best as the engine, not the driver. The slave, not the master.

While using devotion as a tool to transcend logic, one can end up throwing logic out the window, and lo and behold, join the flat earth gang.

For me to serve you, dear reader, standing on a stable platform of logic is a no-brainer (no pun intended). It’s why Vivekananda said the bird needs two wings to fly — knowledge and love — and a tail, yoga, to steer. There isn’t much difference between knowledge and devotion as one might imagine as they inevitably converge at some point.

Through knowledge, you aspire to meet God “face-to-face.” You can measure your progress on the path of knowing. It is an “eyes-open” path. Devotion is more of an “eyes-closed” kind of path. “What’s fine and what’s not fine when everything is fine and divine eh,” the devotee says.

This makes me sound like a walking contradiction because writing is selfish and egoistic — it helps me keep my head above water so I can stack this bread for my unborn sons and daughters. While the path of devotion, is selfless by design. You are right, I am a walking contradiction. Anyone who says they’re not one is lying to you.

This devotion, this intense maddening love, is not between me and you.

The core principle of this blog is not to “love hard” or write bars on how deeply I care about your scars. No. This love is within you and me both. This love is boundless. This love does not need to be reserved for an exclusive list of things or people.

This love is its own fruition, its own means, and its own end.

Also, this love is not new. It is 5,000 years old. Devotion has been a constant theme among sages. So chances of me fetishizing old times on this blog are quite high.

There will also be times I brag about my swag, write poems like a New York rapper, tell you how I got molested, how I got arrested in Thailand — for this blog also serves as my resume, my dating profile, and the Library of Alexandria for my unborn child.

Rest assured, I won’t bother you with all my secrets. I tell most of them to Murphy, my Shih Tzu overlord. My selfish intent is to propagate the divinity of words, not propagandize it.