Why I Stopped Reading Self-Help Books, And What I Read Instead

I moved back to India in 2022 after spending five years in Melbourne, and within a few months, I found myself in one of those strange life phases where everything feels slightly off—but nothing is broken enough to demand immediate action.

On the surface, nothing was wrong.

I had a job. I had a place to stay. Life was moving.

But internally, it felt like I was floating through a version of life that didn’t fully belong to me.

A Startup That Tested Everything

I had started working at an early-stage startup in Chennai. And like many early-stage startups, it came with all the classic red flags—budget issues, delayed salaries, constant pivots, and office politics that could easily qualify for a reality TV show.

Every week felt like a new version of the same uncertainty.

Plans would change overnight. Decisions were often temporary. Stability was something people talked about in theory, not practice.

Still, I stayed. Like many people do in early careers, I told myself it was “experience.”

But deep down, it felt more like endurance.

The Daily Commute That Took More Than Time

Most days, I spent nearly 12 hours either working or commuting.

The commute itself deserves its own category of experience.

Riding a bike through Chennai traffic is not just travel—it is a full-body and full-mind event. It is a mix of concentration, survival instinct, and a strange acceptance of unpredictability. Horns, movement, heat, chaos—all happening at once.

If you’ve never experienced it, it’s hard to explain. It feels like a cardiovascular workout combined with a meditation on mortality.

Every ride reminded me that control is often an illusion.

Distance From the Life I Used to Know

Back in Melbourne, life had felt different. Not necessarily perfect, but structured in a way that gave space to think, breathe, and exist without constant urgency.

In Chennai, everything felt faster, louder, and more compressed.

To make things more complicated, most of my friends from Melbourne had either stayed there, moved to other countries, or settled into different cities entirely.

The ones who were still in Chennai were, understandably, busy building their own lives.

So slowly, without noticing it, I found myself in a quiet in-between space—connected to people, but not really part of any daily rhythm anymore.

Empty Evenings and Quiet Weekends

The hardest part wasn’t the job or the commute.

It was the silence that followed.

Evenings and weekends became long stretches of unstructured time. At first, that sounds like freedom. But when it stretches too long, it starts to feel like absence instead.

I was single. Slightly lonely. Constantly tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix.

There was always this strange mismatch between how much I was doing and how drained I felt.

On paper, I was functioning.

In reality, I was just moving through days without fully feeling present in them.

When Exhaustion Has No Clear Reason

What confused me most was the exhaustion.

It didn’t match the workload. It didn’t match the life I was living.

It felt deeper than physical tiredness—like something emotional or mental was slowly draining in the background.

I would wake up already tired. Work through the day in autopilot. Come home with no real energy left for anything meaningful.

And because nothing was dramatically “wrong,” it was easy to ignore.

That’s what made it complicated.

There was no clear problem to fix—just a general feeling that something was not aligning.

The In-Between Phase

Looking back, I now understand that this was an in-between phase.

Not a crisis. Not a success story. Not a turning point I could clearly identify in real time.

Just a slow adjustment period where my external environment had changed, but my internal world hadn’t fully caught up yet.

Moving countries, changing work environments, losing proximity to familiar people—these things don’t always hit immediately. Sometimes they arrive quietly, months later, as a sense of disconnection you can’t easily name.

What I Didn’t Realize at the Time

At the time, I thought I needed a better job, better routine, or better productivity.

But what I actually needed was something simpler to understand and harder to fix: reconnection.

Reconnection to people. Reconnection to rhythm. Reconnection to myself outside of work and exhaustion.

Not in a dramatic way.

Just small, consistent grounding in a life that didn’t feel like it was constantly in transition.

Final Thought

We often think life changes are obvious—big decisions, clear turning points, visible breakdowns or breakthroughs.

But some of the most important phases are the quiet ones.

The ones where nothing is technically wrong, but nothing feels fully right either.

And maybe that’s the part we don’t talk about enough—the middle space where life is still functioning, but you are slowly trying to understand what it is becoming.