Antifragile

Life doesn’t follow a syllabus. There’s no neat PDF telling you what chapters to prepare for. You think you know how things work - work hard, stay disciplined, play by the rules, and life rewards you. And for a while, that illusion holds.

Until one day, it doesn’t.

I grew up believing in meritocracy. Study hard, score well, and the world will make space for you. And for a long time, it seemed true. I was always at the top. Always winning. I felt invincible.

Then, I failed UPSC.

Not a small failure. The kind of failure that that turns you from a rising star into just another statistic. And the scaffolding I had built around my identity collapsed like a house of cards in a monsoon.

At first, I did what any rational person does when reality refuses to cooperate - I fought it. I kept asking Why? Why me? I don’t deserve this.

But suffering has the patience of a stone. It just sits there, waiting for you to stop struggling.

Eventually, I did. And when I did, I started seeing things differently. Maybe failure wasn’t the end. Maybe it was an opening. Ram Dass said, “The wound is where the light enters you.” I used to think that was poetic nonsense. But then life hit me hard enough to leave cracks, and suddenly, I understood.

Then I took jobs I never thought I’d take. Worked under horrible bosses. For the first time, I was not the golden child. I was just another worker, another cog in a machine. And it would have been easy to become bitter.

But suffering is clarifying. It burns away illusions. It shows you what’s real.

Dostoyevsky wrote, “Pain and suffering are inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” At first, that felt like a consolation prize for the chronically miserable. I didn’t want it.

But suffering is like sandpaper. It scrapes and grinds, but if you let it, it polishes. Pain isn’t the enemy. It’s the sculptor.

For a long time, I was invisible. I went from being someone to being no one. But invisibility is just transformation in disguise. When no one is watching, you’re free to dissolve to become something new.

Dostoyevsky also said, “Man only likes to count his troubles, he does not calculate his happiness.” For years, I only saw what I lost. But something else was happening - beneath the surface, beneath the suffering. I was growing - resilience, clarity, an unshakable core.

Now I don’t need the world to notice me. I don’t need validation. Recognition is a byproduct, not the goal. The goal is to do the work, to refine yourself, to strip away everything unnecessary until what remains is undeniable.

I let life shape me for who I am today.

And that’s the real lesson. You don’t have to chase recognition. You don’t have to beg the world to notice you. Just do the work. Trust the process. Add value over visibility. Because one day, you’ll look back and realize - suffering wasn’t a punishment. It was the path.

Or, as Dostoyevsky put it, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness