life · reflection · money · twenty

Twenty feels strangely close.

It was just an year back when I got my first paid gig / internship. And then there were no look back. Here I am, before twenty, with a company, registrations, GST, documents, signatures, meetings with lawyers and CAs, government offices, and a startup that is going to launch soon. Sometimes I genuinely stop and think — how did this happen this fast?

It was literally just a year.

I keep repeating this because it still does not register properly in my head.

One year ago, I was looking at my first paid gig / internship as this huge thing. Someone was actually going to pay me to build things. Someone trusted me enough to give me work. I was excited, nervous, and honestly just trying to not mess it up.

At that point, I was still thinking about what the next project would be. I was not sitting there imagining lawyers, CAs, company registration, GST, government offices, signatures, documents, invoices, startup launches and all the other things that now somehow sit inside a normal week.

There was no single day where I woke up and became "that person". There were just hundreds of small decisions, late nights, random opportunities, mistakes, conversations and a lot of saying "let me try this".

₹1K and ₹4.2L are not just numbers to me.

I HAVE SEEN both of these amounts in my bank account.

And of course, whose late night work?

Mine.

There were nights sleeping at 3 after convincing my parents that this is what I wanted to do, and then waking up around 6:40 and going to college to attend some random lectures while having absolutely zero idea about the chapters.

Then there was asking help from friends for CTs and semesters. And honestly, thanks to the bestest friends group I have got. I feel lucky.

Looking back, it feels almost stupidly drastic. There was me one year before thinking ₹1L was some big, huge amount and wondering how would I ever become even close to that kind of figure.

Cut to recent times.

I have seen ₹4.2L in my account. I have met people with net worths of more than ₹100Cr. I have seen businesses with turnover numbers that are just insane and mind-blowing.

That experience does something to your brain.

Not because suddenly you become rich. Not because a number in a bank account magically defines you. But because your definition of "big" changes.

Financial freedom is a different kind of freedom.

There was me who had not spent on some random days enjoying things. Like having some panipuris. Any sort of chaat items from the local shops. Just because.

Not because I did not like them. Not because they were expensive. Just because I kept thinking about money differently.

And then there is me now, sometimes spending on a random day because I feel bored.

That sounds tiny. But to me, it is not.

Having some amount of financial freedom gives you a sort of different freedom in all sorts. It lets you say yes to things without first doing the entire mental calculation. It lets you help someone sometimes. It lets you buy something small just because it makes the day better. It makes you slightly less scared of every unexpected expense.

And weirdly, I think it also allows us to become more vulnerable.

When you are constantly worried about whether you can afford the next thing, it is harder to relax, harder to be open, harder to think beyond survival. When there is at least some room, you can start thinking about what you actually want.

And yes, money changes the way you look at yourself.

I do not think money made me a completely different person. But it definitely changed the way I think about possibility.

A year ago, some things looked completely out of reach. Now I have at least seen the distance between where I am and where I want to go.

And after meeting people with businesses that are operating at a level I genuinely find mind-blowing, I have stopped thinking that certain things are "impossible".

They are just difficult.

There is a very big difference between those two words.

College did not disappear. It just became the side quest.

This is probably one of the funniest parts of the whole thing.

I am still a student. I still have attendance. I still have CTs. I still have semesters. I still have chapters I should probably know.

But there have been so many days where I have gone from discussing an actual business problem or some deployment issue to sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture on something completely unrelated.

Sometimes I would literally ask friends what chapter the class was even on.

And somehow these friends kept helping me through CTs and semesters anyway.

The late nights were not glamorous.

There is a version of this story you can post on LinkedIn where late nights look romantic.

This is not that version.

Sleeping at 3 because you convinced your parents that this is what you wanted to do and then waking up around 6:40 is not some beautiful founder ritual. Sometimes it is just being tired.

Sometimes the laptop is open because you are actually doing important work. Sometimes it is open because you are stubborn. Sometimes it is open because you do not want to admit you have no idea what the next step is.

Sometimes one bug takes two hours. Sometimes one email takes twenty minutes to write. Sometimes a stupid little thing breaks and ruins the mood. Sometimes an entire day disappears into "just one more thing".

But then there are nights where something works.

And those are dangerous because they make you want to do it all again.

The AI chapter is its own story.

There was a month when I did not have any AI subscription and honestly felt like I could not do things as fast or as effectively.

Obviously, I could still code. Obviously, I could still think. But after building a workflow around AI, losing that extra layer of iteration felt surprisingly painful.

And now at this point I have Claude Pro, Gemini Pro and ChatGPT Pro.

I have spent so much time using these models that Claude alone has crossed roughly 9.5B tokens in the usage I have seen.

9.5 billion is such a ridiculous number that it stops sounding like a real thing. I do not even think of it as a productivity flex. To me it is just a timestamp for how much of this year was spent asking, testing, fixing, rewriting, generating, debugging and trying again.

There were highs. There were lows. There were threats.

I do not want to turn this into one of those posts where everything looks perfectly planned.

There have been threats. There have been uncomfortable situations. There have been moments where I did not know what the right response even was.

And lately, I have felt more withdrawn.

"Depressed" is probably not the right terminology for what I mean, and I do not want to diagnose myself through a blog post. It is more like... I feel kind of left-out sometimes.

Like I could have enjoyed certain moments more if I was not constantly somewhere else in my head.

There are days where I know I should go out. I know I should meet people. I know I should just sit somewhere and have a conversation without thinking about the next task.

But sometimes the brain has already opened another tab.

Lately, I have also started understanding values.

This is probably the most important part of the whole year, because none of it shows up in the bank statement.

Calmness.

Being a little responsive. I am still not.

Listening. Saying thank you. Not reacting instantly to every small thing. Understanding that other people also have their own life and their own problems.

Being able to build something is one thing. Becoming someone people can trust is another.

I am still very much in the first draft of the second one.

I think the drastic part is not the money.

The drastic part is me.

I feel like I have changed.

Not completely. Not perfectly. Not even in a way I can explain properly.

But something shifted.

A year ago, I was mostly thinking about whether I could become something. Now I spend more time thinking about what I should become.

There is a big difference.

I do not want to stop this hunger.

This is probably the simplest thing I can say after everything.

I would do better.

I want to learn more. Build more. Meet more people. Join different things. Go to places. Travel. Roam around. Talk to people who think differently. Build things I have never built before.

I do not want this one year to become a comfort zone.

I want the hunger to stay. Just with better judgement. Better calmness. Better values. Better people skills. Better balance.

And then there is turning twenty.

Twenty.

Two decades.

That sounds huge.

One year ago, I was nineteen and thinking ₹1L was a huge number. Now I have seen ₹4.2L in my account, met people operating at completely different scales, worked until 3 AM, gone to college at 6:40, signed documents I never thought would carry my name, met lawyers and CAs, gone to government offices, built a company, dealt with difficult situations, and somehow kept attending lectures.

And I still feel young.

That is probably the funniest part.

I think I spent a lot of this year trying to become "successful" without really stopping to ask what kind of person I wanted to be while doing it.

Maybe the next part is about figuring that out.

More experiences. More people. More places. More failures. More random plans. More walking around without a reason. More things that never become projects.

Because I do not want every memory from my early twenties to be a Git commit, a PDF, a WhatsApp conversation, a payment notification or a government document.

I want some of them to be stupid.

I want some random evenings. Some panipuri. Some chai or coffee. Some long conversations. Some getting lost. Some joining things just because they sound interesting. Some travelling with no productivity objective attached to it.

I think I need that too.

I changed a lot this year.
I still have a lot to change.

One last honest note.

Of course this post is made by AI.

I might have changed a lot, but I am still lazy and irresponsible sometimes. I am not going to defend that. I am not going to take pride in it either.

The goal is to improve this.

To become more responsive. More calm. More present. More reliable. More aware of people. More willing to step outside the screen.

I want to get into different things. Join things. Meet people. Roam around. Try weird ideas. Say yes to experiences. And still keep this hunger to build.

Because maybe the point was never to become twenty with everything figured out.

Maybe the point is just to enter twenty with enough self-awareness to know what needs fixing, enough gratitude to recognise what went right, enough courage to keep going, and enough hunger to not stop.

See you in the next decade.

Twenty, I guess we're next.