Oftentimes we hear people say they find it overwhelming to mix friend groups because they get overwhelmed by how to present themselves. I strongly resonate with these people. The thought of being in a room with everyone I have ever known, everyone who has come to know and love different parts of me, feels strangely daunting. Does this mean you’re fake with any of these people? I don’t think so. In fact, I think it means the opposite. People are multifaceted. We’re complex, dynamic people who are constantly changing as we move through life. Different people know different versions of us because they met us at different points in our journey. Still, there is something about that hypothetical situation that scares me.

“I was a different version of myself when we first got close.”

I’ve been thinking about that sentence a lot lately.

I like to think that longtime friends can loosely be put into two buckets. There are the people who are still active parts of your life, the people you can talk to about things happening right now. You know what’s going on in their lives, they know what’s going on in yours, and your friendship continues to evolve alongside both of you. Then there are people who, at least within the context of that friendship, feel frozen in time. Whenever you talk, the conversations somehow find their way back to old stories, old gossip, old inside jokes, and old versions of yourselves. A version of you that doesn’t particularly exist anymore.

A lot of times, this works perfectly fine. You meet once every few months, catch up, reminisce about the good old days, laugh about things that happened years ago, and then go back to your separate lives. No group chats, no active conversations, no real involvement in each other’s present. And maybe that’s because the longer you’re together, the more you realize something uncomfortable. They didn’t become who you thought they would become, and neither did you.

You’ve both lived entire lives beyond the phase when that friendship was active. You’ve had experiences the other person wasn’t there for. You’ve met people who changed you. You’ve made choices, developed new interests, changed your opinions, and had your personalities shaped by experiences the other person knows nothing about. At some point, both of you became people the other never really got to know.

For the most part, I think I’ve come to terms with this. But every so often something happens that stirs those thoughts up again. Maybe I see pictures from a trip. Maybe there’s a meetup. Maybe the people who remained close continue making memories together while I quietly(sometimes dramatically) drifted away. And even though I have my own people, my own friendships, and my own life, a small part of me still wonders how things could have been. I wonder if I’m the problem. I wonder why they all remained close while I didn’t.

I don’t think those questions ever have satisfying answers because I only know my experience, not theirs. The version of them that exists in my head is built from old conversations, old memories, and old assumptions. The version I remember is the version that existed when we knew each other best. But people are their choices. People are the lives they’ve lived when we weren’t around. People are all the experiences we never got to witness.

The person standing in front of you isn’t who you remember. They’re so different. They’ve lived an entire life without you in it. But what makes it even stranger is that the version of you that had something to say to them doesn’t exist anymore either. You’re both trying to interact through memories of people who no longer exist.

I think that’s the part I struggle with most. It’s possible to know that a friendship has run its course and still miss it. It’s possible to know that neither of you are the same people anymore and still wonder what could have been. It’s possible to understand exactly why you drifted apart and still feel sad when you realize everyone else continued writing chapters in a story that you quietly stopped being a part of.

The strange thing is that I don’t necessarily want those friendships back, at least not in the way they existed before. The more I think about it, the more I realize we probably wouldn’t fit into each other’s lives the same way anymore. We’ve grown into different people with different priorities, different experiences, and different ways of seeing the world. And yet I still miss them.

Not because I think we’d be the same friends we once were, but because for a period of time our lives overlapped in a way that mattered. They were important to me. They helped shape who I became. Just because the friendship no longer fits into my life the way it once did doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Maybe that’s why nostalgia feels so heavy sometimes. I don’t think we’re always missing people. I think sometimes we’re missing versions of people. Versions that only existed at a very specific moment in time. Versions shaped by shared experiences, shared environments, and a shared understanding of the world. The person standing in front of you is real, but so is the version you remember. The difference is that one kept growing while the other remained frozen in your memory.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been struggling with all along. Not losing people, but learning that sometimes the people we miss most are people who no longer exist, including versions of ourselves.

The other day, I saw a packet of chips in a vending machine advertising “10g Protein” in huge bold letters across the front. Out of habit, I turned the packet around and looked at the nutrition label. The numbers weren’t exactly lining up with the claim on the front.

Now, as someone who has a history of stress eating and binge eating during difficult periods of life, this stuff fascinates me. The more I got into fitness, the more educated I became about nutrition. I learned how to read food labels, what macros actually meant, and how to build a balanced diet instead of obsessing over individual foods.

Ironically, the more I learned about nutrition, the more I fell in love with food itself.

I love exploring cultures through food. Food carries stories. It comes from rich histories and cultures, and often tells you more about a place than a travel guide ever could. The ingredients, flavours, and methods of preparation all reflect something about the people who created them. Some of my favourite conversations and memories have happened around food, and some of my favourite ways of learning about the world have involved trying something new.

Which brings me back to the chips.

The whole world, especially the internet, seems obsessed with protein. Every snack needs more protein. Every dessert needs more protein. Every recipe needs more protein. And while protein is important, sometimes it feels like we’ve reduced food to a single metric. Food becomes protein, and somewhere along the way we forget that it’s also culture, memory, art, comfort, and curiosity.

For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

And then I realized I’ve been feeling something similar about technology.

Over the past few months, I’ve started learning more about LLMs and trying to keep up with developments in AI. As someone who just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, it feels almost impossible not to. The strange thing is that I genuinely enjoy it. In fact, if you asked me today what area I’m most strongly inclined towards as a career, I’d probably say Human-AI Interaction. The idea of understanding how people interact with intelligent systems genuinely fascinates me.

Which is exactly why all of this feels uncomfortable.

I’ve always cared deeply about nature. It’s always felt like a safe space for me. Most of the things I enjoy somehow connect back to people, stories, cultures, or the natural world. At the same time, I genuinely love technology. I love building things. I love understanding how systems work. I love learning. And lately those two sides of me seem to be having a constant argument.

The thing is, these thoughts don’t usually start when I’m sitting down trying to think deeply about AI. They start because I go online.

I’ll open LinkedIn and someone is talking about how AI is going to replace entire industries. I’ll open YouTube and somebody is explaining why AI changes everything. I’ll see another startup raising money because they added AI to their product. Another company announcing an AI feature. Another headline. Another prediction. Another hot take.

And then the thought loop starts.

What about the data centres?

What about the environmental cost?

What about jobs?

What about my own job prospects as a fresh graduate?

What happens to the people who spent years developing skills that can suddenly be automated?

What happens when every company starts chasing the same thing?

What happens when every product starts looking the same?

What happens when everything becomes generated?

It’s not even that I have answers to these questions. That’s the frustrating part. They’re just there. Floating around in the background. And once they start, they’re surprisingly difficult to ignore.

Then eventually I remember that I actually like this technology. I enjoy learning about it. I enjoy building with it. I want to work in this space. Which somehow makes the whole thing worse.

What makes this even stranger is that AI isn’t actually new. My father studied AI as an elective almost thirty years ago. The ideas have existed for decades. Researchers have been working on these concepts for longer than I’ve been alive. Yet sometimes it feels like we’re being told intelligence was invented last Tuesday.

And maybe that’s another part of what bothers me. The loudest voices are rarely talking about the technology itself. They’re talking about automation, scale, monetisation, productivity, growth. Sometimes it feels like the people making the biggest decisions about these technologies are the people least interested in understanding how they actually work. They just see the next opportunity, the next market, the next thing that can be automated.

Maybe that’s the connection my brain was trying to make.

The problem isn’t protein.

The problem is when food becomes only protein.

And I think my discomfort with AI comes from a similar place. Not because I think AI is bad, but because it sometimes feels like technology is being reduced to AI in the same way food is being reduced to protein.

Maybe I’m romanticising the internet I grew up with, but I remember blogs, forums, personal websites, and weird little projects that existed because somebody cared enough to make them. You could tell there was a person behind them. Technology felt creative. It felt personal. It felt artistic. It felt human.

Now it sometimes feels like every conversation starts and ends with AI.

A rich, complicated thing gets reduced to a single metric.

I don’t really have a conclusion to any of this.

I’m still excited about AI.

I’m still worried about it.

I’m still fascinated by Human-AI Interaction.

I’m still going to keep learning.

All of those things are true at the same time.

For now, the only promise I’ve made to myself is that if I’m going to build technology, I want to build it with people in mind first. I want products with personality. I want colours. I want weird little details. I want technology that feels like there is a human being behind it. I want to contribute to technology that helps people without reducing them to numbers, and to systems that make people feel more human rather than less.

Maybe that’s naive.

Or maybe it’s just the compromise I’ve made with myself.

Either way, it’s the thought worm that’s been living in my head lately.

It’s been two weeks since my college ended and there’s been so much on my mind lately.

Especially now that I’m back in my childhood bedroom, where I feel like I had a much more balanced approach to life. Being here makes me feel like my old self again. Like I’m back in my safe space.

The biggest problem I’ve identified in my life is accountability.

For the longest time, I avoided accountability completely, and weirdly enough, I think that slowly destroyed my self confidence too. I reached a point where I genuinely started believing I just lacked potential. Over time, I lost parts of my identity, as i got too comfrtable to grow up.

But what I failed to do (like a lot of people my age)was stop blaming circumstances, people, and everything except myself for my situation.

Because honestly, it’s easier to convince yourself things were out of your control than to sit down and figure out what you can actually change about yourself.And besides, it’s comforting to know there’s nothing wrong with you.

So that’s kind of the intention behind this Substack, along with all the thought worms constantly running through my brain.

As much as I enjoy self improvement, this whole thing is really about trying to find myself again. The version of me I thought I’d grow into as a kid.

I want to grow intellectually, spiritually, physically, and creatively. I want to become less judgmental of others, more disciplined, and work on the things that are actually in my control.

Follow along :)

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