What’s wrong with me?

My life started to shift a little when I got my first computer in 2013. By that time, I had watched the movie Iron Man. I don’t know what it was, but the AI, robots, and advanced technology sparked something in me.

I wanted to build those things for my own life. To be honest, I wasn’t impressed with the glamorous life Tony Stark was having, but with the tech he had. I thought, if I had my own computer, I would be able to build my own Jarvis (it’s still a dream) and those futuristic technologies.

But as a 15-year-old kid, I was clueless about it. I researched a little to find out how I could build that. I later discovered that I had to learn code. I didn’t know what code, so I started with the easiest one, HTML and CSS, using codecademy.com.

I used to spend most of my time on that platform learning and experimenting with various things. Later, I fell in love with dribbble.com, and I started browsing the platform every morning religiously. It’s been over a decade, and I still open Dribbble with the same excitement, expecting to see new mind-blowing designs.

Throughout my teenage life, I explored a lot of things, including digital design, cinematography, photography, motion design, coding, web design, etc. I tried to build YouTube channels across these topics.

In fact, I still have Cinematography videos that I recorded on my Asus Zenfone Laser 2. I used to capture pictures of leaves, butterflies, golden hours, etc.

I had a YouTube channel where I used to upload screen recordings of me designing various illustrations using HTML and CSS. I was a little consistent on this channel and ended up having 200+ subscribers, but I again drifted and left it.

I was hungry to learn new things in my teenage life. I loved knowing the how and why of almost everything.

Time passed, and in 2020, during COVID, I thought it would be nice to build a business. So I registered a company with my younger brother to sell printed T-shirts. I was inspired by Bewakoof.com.

But this idea didn’t sustain and didn’t work for a while. In fact, I didn’t even start the business. I wasted over five lakhs of my parents’ money planning and perfecting things, and never went to the market.

But that taught me one thing I will never forget: first build, test, and sell before planning to establish a company name or anything.

My biggest learning from this is that you shouldn’t wait for things to be perfect, and you shouldn’t take action on an idea you’re not confident enough about. Don’t try to build a business based on the ideas of others, but on what is truly yours.

Time passed, and on February 10, 2021, I got my first-ever full-time job.

Point to be noted: I didn’t go to college for a professional degree. I hadn’t even completed graduation yet. This was because I don’t like the education system we have. It is based completely on rote learning.

In fact, I think it is a corrupted education system where you can have a PhD degree for ₹25K. I heard this once when my Physics tuition teacher narrated his experience about a professor asking him to pay ₹25K and get the privilege to use “Dr.” before his name.

It sounded disgusting to me. Although he was already an engineer and could get the degree by completing the course or writing a thesis, the concept that he could get that degree just by paying ₹25K moved me.

I decided I would not follow the traditional career.

Now, continuing, in 2021, I got a full-time SEO content writer job in an ed-tech company. I was getting INR 16K/month.

I thought I would learn how a company runs and then save some amount to build the business I was trying to do in 2020 by registering a company.

It didn’t land well.

I was so consumed with the ed-tech growth that I ended up with burnout. I started having self-doubt, brain fog, my health started to drift, and my lifestyle became terrible.

The job was funding my life. I was buying several things I had always wanted in my life, but I was hating the life I was living.

I always wanted to build something of my own. Something I could call mine.

I worked there for more than 2 years, and since I was not feeling happy with my life, I was trying to build several things. I was writing content for my own registered business. I had also tried to create a travel website, theunsure.com.

I worked on it for a few years and got about 3–4K visitors per month, but I wasn’t happy. I wanted to be big and build bigger things. But it was a mediocre project that I was not enjoying.

Later, in 2023, I resigned from that company and joined Graygraph Technologies because I got that job on the day I left the ed-tech platform.

So, I joined this marketing agency, which was paying me less than the previous company. It was only INR 25K per month.

This job became another nightmare for me.

I was a robot there.

I used to receive an Excel sheet with keywords and ChatGPT prompts to generate articles and website content and send them for the clients’ approval.

I was not using my analytical skills there, which was making me more frustrated.

My relationship and health again started to suffer.

To satisfy my creative and analytical mind, I was trying to build that travel website and looking for shortcuts to build something I would enjoy. But the numbness in life was blocking me.

However, life keeps moving, no matter how you feel.

So, later, in October 2024, I was contacted by the founder who gave me my first-ever full-time job. He asked me if I was available for freelance content writing.

I said yes because I wanted to use my brain and the thinking that runs 24/7 in my mind.

He also contacted me because I had contributed to taking his ed-tech platform from 60K monthly visitors to over 7 million visitors during my tenure.

So, I started working for him after my day job. I was getting 4–5 hours of sleep per night.

For a certain period, I sustained it, but it didn’t last long.

Then I asked him if he could assure me that he would give me content work for at least 6 months. If he could, I would leave the current company and work for him.

I wanted assurance and the freedom to work.

So, I resigned from Graygraph on August 28, 2025.

And I thought I would spend the remaining time working as a freelance writer while building my own agency.

Now, because of AI, the growth of the ed-tech company is declining, and the founder said he can’t offer me much work now, which means I have to find another job because I haven’t built any agency yet and haven’t got any client to work for apart from that ed-tech company.