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I have this #kvetch with messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or whatever new messaging is out there.

When someone from my kid's school group messages me, they see the same name and profile photo as my old work colleagues do. Same as my book club friends. Same as people in my PKM communities who only know me as someone obsessed with note-taking systems.

In real life, I'm a slightly different version of myself in each of these spaces. Different contexts, different modes. I don't talk about Zettelkasten methods in my kid's school meetings. I don't use the same tone with former coworkers as I do with people I knew in college.

But messaging apps don't get this. They give you one name, one photo, one bio, and that's your identity everywhere inside the app. You can have different profile photos in each app, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Discord sort of tries—you can set nicknames per server and change your avatar. But your username still percolates through. Slack's slightly better, lets you customize per workspace, but then you're locked into that same identity in every channel, whether you're in #random or #doc-ops.

What I actually want: let me define who I am per group. Different name, different photo, maybe even a different bio or contact info depending on the context. Let me be "Xavier (Max's dad)" in the school chat and "Xavier" in another and "that person who won't shut up about Obsidian" in a third.

I contain multitudes, as Whitman said. So why can't my messaging apps?

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Last Saturday night, Max and I were watching a movie. It was already a bit past 10:45 when we started the movie. We were shifting between watching on TV or the laptop. We snuggled up on his bed with pillows piled up, snugly ensconced in blankets and began watching.

As the movie played on, we talked about scenes, characters, and dialogues. I pointed out the lore and he asked questions or asked to rewind to watch a missed scene or two.

About midway through the movie, I noticed his breathing pattern had changed — deepened. He had fallen asleep. I called out his name to verify that he was fast asleep. I slowly extricated myself from the intertwined blankets and proceeded to arrange the bedding around him when he woke up.

He wanted to continue the movie which I refused as he was sleepy and groggy. I told him we could watch the rest of the movie later. As I was tucking him in, he said, "Sorry pa" and "Good night," and fell asleep.

As I returned to my bed, his words were still on my mind, 'Sorry pa'. And it took a long time for me to fall asleep as I kept on thinking about it.

Was he sad because he fell asleep or was he sorry that we couldn't have the father-son bonding time?

Countless other thoughts kept circulating in my mind. I ran through all of our interactions throughout the day — words of praise (He had yet again got 97% in his music theory), words of frustration (at each other), words of advice, words about word origins (we had a discussion on why science usually uses precise terminologies to mean something) — and words unsaid.

The next day at church, we're sitting together and I asked him why he said sorry the previous night. He was embarrassed and said it was something he doesn't remember saying. As he turned away after complaining about his too-tight shirt, I remembered a poem by Wordsworth about fathers and sons: "O dearest, dearest boy! my heart / For better lore would seldom yearn, / Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn."

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A couple of days back, I was reading a story where a high school teacher asks her students to write an essay on the opening line of Moby-Dick: 'Call me Ishmael'. Not on Melville's style, not on the voyage or the whale, but on the name itself. Why Ishmael? Why not Bob, or John, or any of the thousands of other names that could have stood in that place?

The next day, I remembered the phrase 'stranger in a strange land', and it pulled me straight into Heinlein's novel of the same name, with its protagonist Valentine Michael Smith. Smith, the plainest of surnames, is a mask of anonymity attached to a figure who was anything but ordinary.

Together, the two encounters left me turning over the question of how much weight a name can carry. A name is never neutral. Ishmael suggests exile, wandering, survival. Smith is just Smith, which is almost the point. Names can be riddles, or half-hidden prophecies, or sometimes just a joke slipped in by the author when you're not looking. Before we know anything of a character's deeds, their name already speaks.

And then I caught myself wondering: what is my own favourite fictional name? I remember listening to Snow Crash during my commutes, grinning every time the narrator announced 'Hiro Protagonist'. The name was so audacious, so perfectly ridiculous, that it made the Chennai traffic around me feel a little less grim. By contrast, when I first encountered Severian in The Book of the New Sun, his name struck me like something unearthed—ancient, weighty, stark. I was reading it whilst my mom lay in the hospital, her sister newly gone, though she never knew. In that silence, Severian's name became more than fiction; it felt like an invocation, heavy with memory and meaning.

Perhaps names are the oldest form of worldbuilding—and the first spell an author casts over us.

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I read Naval Ravikant's post Be Incompressible - Naval's Archive, and I found myself thinking about personal mythology. Not the grand, heroic kind, but that quiet narrative shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Taste, I've come to see, is more than surface preference. It's the visible signature of who we are in the music that stirs us, the books that linger in thought, the ideas we return to. But taste doesn't exist in a vacuum. This signature is shaped by personal mythology, the inner story quietly guiding our choices.

Becoming "incompressible" feels less like a fixed state and more like ongoing practice. A continual aligning of outward expression with inner truth, refining both taste and story toward authenticity. Maybe this practice is our best defense against being replaced by algorithms that can replicate tasks but not the deeper narrative that makes us who we are.

The question becomes: How do I deepen this alignment so that what I create reflects the story I truly want to live?

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Last night as we finished our pre-bed ritual of Wordle, Max said, 'Appa, did you know that you would be called a Xenial? You belong to a generation that grew up without the internet but became its first users. And then there is another group between Millennials and Gen Z called Zillenials.'

"No, I didn't know that," I replied.

As he decided to read a chapter or two on his Kindle before he fell asleep, I made my way to the bed and looked it up. He was right! I can be termed a Xennial (with a double n).

That led me down a path of reminiscence.

The best moments of my childhood coincided with the twilight of a world before the internet; I remember clearly that such a time existed, and it had its own unique benefits.

I thought... Of friends who drifted away from me and ones I drifted away from. Of faded memories of playing football and cricket on streets, dried lakebeds, and unoccupied plots of land. Of places, now changed beyond recognition, once familiar, now strange. The past is indeed a foreign land and its customs bizarre1.

Later, after I've tucked Max in and the house has settled into quiet, I return to Joseph Jebelli's The Brain at Rest. Reading about boredom as a neurological necessity, about how the unstimulated brain actually works harder, creates new connections, solves problems we didn't know we had—I think about those long afternoons of my childhood. The ones that felt endless, oppressive even. Hours spent staring at ceilings, wandering empty lots, waiting for something, anything, to happen. What seemed like emptiness was actually my brain at work. I wonder what Max's brain does in those moments between stimulation, if such moments even exist for him anymore. He hates being bored.

🎶 Background music whilst writing: Music to write Faster & Better (YouTube)

  1. The opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between ↩

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Today, Max asked me to look at his descriptive writing assignment from school. He didn’t really want help. Not really. He just wanted a quick fix. A skim-and-sign-off.

But he chose the wrong parent.

He flopped beside me on the bed, reluctant. I scanned his draft and saw the usual: a decent attempt, a few bright spots, but mostly scaffolding, words and phrases repeating. It read like someone trying to finish a thing, not someone trying to say something. To show something.

I quipped, “Writing’s easy. Rewriting is the hard part. And it always takes more time than we want it to.”

That didn’t go down well.

Luckily, his book had a passage from Jane Eyre. I asked him to read each sentence out loud and then tell me what that sentence was about and how things were described. His reading was flat, each sentence dropped like a stone. I could tell he wasn’t listening to himself.

“What does that sentence say?” I asked. A shrug. “Something about... the unoccupied bedroom?”

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Later that evening, I kept thinking about it — not just the parenting part, but the writing part. That kind of descriptive writing — the kind that wraps an image around you, the kind that slows you down — feels rarer these days.

Outside of fiction and the occasional well-written essay or newsletter, you don’t find sentences like that often. Even in long-form spaces like newsletters and blogs — places without social media character limits or Instagram's visual priorities — writers seem to default to shorter, punchier sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Shorter sentences. Quick hits. Fast reads. Sometimes that’s good writing. Often, it’s necessary. But something gets lost in the speed and efficiency of it all — the layering, the rhythm, the careful unfolding of an idea or a scene.

Maybe our attention spans are to blame. Or maybe we’ve been trained by character limits, previews, and scroll-friendly design to read in blinks and fragments.

I found myself wondering if I was witnessing the end of something almost medieval — the notion that a sentence could be a dwelling place rather than a thoroughfare, somewhere you might pause and unpack your thoughts like settling into a favorite armchair, letting clauses accumulate and ideas unfold in their own unhurried time, the way this very sentence insists on taking the scenic route while Max's generation has already moved on to the next notification, the next swipe, the next dopamine hit.

Quick, clean, done.

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The Sirens imploring Ulysses to stay

So I turned 45. What does this mean? Am I considered middle-aged?

The advantage of owning your domain is that it is an eternal sandbox that you can always play with. You can build it up or raze it down to rebuild again (and again).

As I start off my 45 th year, I am looking at this refresh as a new chapter still trying to make sense of blogging again.

I've stopped posting on social media for a few years now. Most of my accounts are gathering dust and a shadow of what it was in their heydays. Social media was interesting when it was still in its nascent stage. My dissatisfaction with what social media promised at the start and what it has become now is another reason why I'm trying to start writing again on my own site.

But then again, I'm considering it a new start for the my #year45.

Let's see where this odyssey leads. And I hope I can resist the siren call of social media and use this more.