Thin Blurred Lines

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On 22nd April 2025, my partner and I were in Tokyo on a holiday, drowning ourselves in copious amounts of delicious ramen and strolling through cherry blossom lined streets having the silliest but most interesting conversations. After a brilliant day, when we reached our hotel to rest, we saw the news notification. Nothing felt the same again. At this point, it is hard to not take things personally.

There’s a strange heaviness in the air these days. A kind of invisible fog that clings to skin and thought alike. You feel it when you scroll through the news. Wars, again. Genocides, still. This is what we had studied as history. They weren't joking when they said it repeats itself. National pride is flaring up like an untreated infection, and somewhere between Gaza, Ukraine, and our own backyards in Kashmir, empathy is dying a slow, quiet death. Like all of us, India too, walks a tightrope; righteous, proud, but anxious. Distracted by noise, but dangerously close to forgetting what humanity sounds like. We’re told to pick a side, to scream louder than the other, and in the cacophony, the lines between truth and propaganda, between right and wrong, blur. Paper-thin.

Meanwhile, our personal relationships are fraying like old denim, familiar but torn at the knees. We swipe right more than we speak, ghost more than we grieve. The concept of permanence has aged poorly; lovers don’t promise a forever anymore. Infidelity, separation and divorces are no longer a rarity. People I know closely are going through this and it is heartbreaking for me too. Friendships have become transactional, shared stories traded for likes and validation. “Let’s catch up soon” has become the new “I miss you,” and we’re all experts in polite distance. Connections now come with expiry dates, and trust has become a luxury good; rare, expensive, and usually unavailable.

The irony is, we’ve never been more connected. Ping. A reel. Ping. A meme. Ping. A crisis. But what’s the point of connectivity when there’s no connection? Loneliness is no longer an occasional visitor, it’s a permanent housemate. A silent companion at dinner, a shadow during Sunday mornings. It has outlived the pandemic and grown roots in our bones. Like all epidemics, it doesn’t discriminate. CEOs, interns, influencers, retirees; we’re all infected. We pretend we’re fine with productivity tools, checklists, WhatsApp groups, glossy pictures and gym subscriptions, but deep down, we’re just spinning in circles trying to outrun a feeling we refuse to name.

In all this chaos, enters nihilism, the quiet thief of meaning. I heard of it years ago, but chose to ignore it back then. Now, it fails to leave my thoughts. At first, it seduces you with logic. What’s the point, really? You work, love, try, fail, die. Repeat. A few billion times. It whispers in your ear when the world burns and your coffee still brews. When a child dies in a bombing and you keep scrolling. A planned call is missed and you just shrug. Everything starts to feel staged. Recycled. You start to wonder if hope is just another marketing strategy packaged in self-help books and serotonin supplements, just like everything else these days. Something to be showcased on Shark Tank, with no one considering its importance.

Even in the spiral, there’s humor. Dark, sharp, necessary. How else do we cope with absurdity? We joke about late-stage capitalism while ordering overpriced cold brew. We meme our existential dread. We laugh when we should cry, because crying feels like defeat, and who has the time for that anymore? Somewhere along the way, we learned to accessorize our suffering, to aestheticize our numbness. It works, until it doesn’t. So here we are, tiptoeing on thin, blurred lines. Between sanity and survival. Between cynicism and sentiment. Between wanting to believe in something and being too tired to. Maybe we don’t need answers. Maybe the point is to keep asking the questions, to sit with the discomfort instead of escaping it. Maybe the thin line between hopelessness and healing is the sheer audacity to care; even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s where the revolution begins. In not letting the blur turn to blindness. In choosing to feel when feeling seems foolish. In daring to love in a world that’s forgotten how. Because if everything is meaningless, then meaning is ours to create. Perhaps that’s not so futile after all.