the smartest people i know are quietly quitting the life they worked the hardest for.

i wanted to be the woman in tech. i just didn't want to actually do tech.

i need to tell you something a little embarrassing.

for most of my life, i was the quintessential creative kid. eleven years of bharatnatyam. painting. singing. instruments. martial arts. public speaking. model UNs. philosophy at 2am.

i picked up hobbies the way some people collect receipts. i was constantly curious, constantly making things and constantly in my head about ideas that had nothing to do with circuits or code.

and then i chose engineering as my degree.

not because i loved engineering, or tech, or the job roles it offered. i want to be really honest about that part, because i think a lot of people are in the same boat and nobody talks about it.

i chose engineering because i wanted respect. i chose it because i loved what being an engineer said about me. i wanted status wrapped in the language of achievement.

it wasn’t in a cynical, calculated way. it just felt like the shape of a good future. my parents didn’t force me into it. they were just too happy when i talked about engineering. comfortable. supportive.

they didn’t explicitly push me into it. they just made every alternative feel like a gamble i would have to answer for alone. they gave me freedom, but not confidence. engineering came with their automatic belief. everything else came with a quiet, "well, let's hope you know what you're doing."

when you’re young, that’s enough. you don’t need explicit pressure. sometimes approval does the whole job.

so i followed the script.

i enrolled in a BTech in Electronics and Telecommunications at one of the best engineering colleges in the state.

on paper? it was everything i was supposed to want. a respected degree. a respected college. a respected future.

the choice that made relatives nod approvingly and tell me they were proud of me. the choice that came with a ready-made identity. the choice nobody would question if things went wrong.

at eighteen, that felt a lot like certainty.

so i walked onto campus convinced i was building the life i wanted.

i just hadn’t realized yet that i was building a life that made perfect sense to everyone except me.

i. the girl who actually meant it

the funny thing about mimetic desire is that it rarely feels like imitation while you’re living it. it feels exactly like your own choice.

i landed on campus surrounded by people who genuinely loved this stuff. and none of them showed me that more clearly than bhakti.

bhakti is the real woman in tech. not in the way people use that phrase on linkedin as a brand statement. i mean it literally. she is someone who will spend a weekend afternoon tinkering with a drone component for no reason other than she finds it genuinely interesting. she doesn’t perform her passion for it. she just has it. she builds things because building things is fun to her. she’ll troubleshoot hardware at 2am not because a deadline is looming but because the problem is itching at her brain and she needs to solve it. she’s the kind of engineer who makes you understand why engineering exists in the first place.

bhakti with her baby :)

bhakti really wanted to get into our college’s robotics club. she worked incredibly hard for it. and seeing someone pursue something with that much intensity made me want it too. i mistook her certainty for my own interest. i confused proximity to passion with passion itself. she wasn’t even trying to convince me to try. she didn’t have to. watching someone chase something with that much conviction made me want to start chasing it too.

ii. the project that proved the wrong thing

i didn’t get in the first time. i cleared the technical round after spending nights awake until 2, 3, sometimes 5am. then got rejected in the interview round. most people walked away.

but a friend of mine who wanted in just as badly as i did, we decided to build a project anyway. outside the club. within the same timeline as the selected candidates. we worked on it together, pulled the all-nighters, went through the crash-outs, presented the project and finally got in together.

sept 2025, the final pitch that got us in.

looking back, i don’t think i wanted the project. i wanted what the project represented. because every ambitious person i admired was in that club. every high performer. it wasn’t just a robotics club. it was a gathering of people who seemed intelligent, agentic, capable. and i desperately wanted to be one of them.

so i worked on machine learning. robotics. taught workshops. mentored juniors. collected all the evidence i thought i needed.

and then something strange happened.

iii. “i can do this. i just don’t want to.”

i realized i didn’t enjoy any of it.

not because i wasn’t capable. capability was never the problem.

and that realization made everything much more difficult than it was supposed to be. because it’s easy when you’re bad at something. you just tell yourself it wasn’t meant for you. it’s much harder when you’re good at something. when opportunities exist. when people respect you for it. when you’re succeeding by every external measure. and then you have to sit with this quiet, uncomfortable truth:

i can do this. i just don’t want to.

that’s the hardest version of the sentence. not “i couldn’t do it.” but “i could. i simply didn’t enjoy it.”

those are completely different things. and for a long time i didn’t let myself say the second one, because it felt like ingratitude. like laziness. like i was acting ungrateful about something that other people would kill to have.

iv. the questions that broke everything open

around the same time, i became obsessed with first principles thinking. ironically, i learned about it through robotics. a senior used to talk about breaking problems down to their most fundamental truths instead of just accepting inherited assumptions.

i started applying it to engineering. then i started applying it to my life. and everything started falling apart in the best possible way.

why was i in engineering? because i loved it, or because i loved being respected for it?

why did i want to work in machine learning? because i found it genuinely fascinating, or because it sounded impressive in conversations?

why did i feel guilty whenever i spent time thinking about management, strategy, psychology, business, writing, communication, people? why was i treating the things that naturally energized me like distractions from the real work?

why was i trying so hard to become someone else?

first principles thinking didn’t give me answers. it gave me better questions. and better questions changed everything.

v. the world will not let you leave quietly

here’s something nobody warns you about: when you work in tech, there’s a particular kind of ego that grows in the environment. it’s subtle. it’s not always malicious. but there’s a quiet, shared belief that what you’re doing is the hard thing. the real thing. you’re solving problems. you’re building systems. you’re thinking rigorously. everything else like writing, business, people work, creative careers, starts to feel like the soft option. like something people do when they couldn’t hack it.

and when you start moving away from that world, people WILL make you feel exactly that way, like you chickened out.

and it’s not always loud. sometimes it’s just a look or a joke that lands a little too close. a comment about how you’re “wasting your technical background.” someone asking if you’re sure, in the tone that means they don’t think you are. people who are deeply invested in their own path will sometimes need yours to be the wrong one. it validates their sacrifice. if you leave and it works out, it asks an uncomfortable question about why they stayed.

i had people i respected look at me differently when i stopped pursuing technical work. juniors that came to me for technical advice stopped doing so. and i won’t pretend that didn’t sting. it did. for longer than i’d like to admit.

but i’ve come to understand that the gatekeeping was never about me. it was about the story they needed to tell themselves. i don’t mean the ones that actually enjoyed what they did, the ones that convinced themselves they did.

vi. the part where i have to be honest about my privilege

i want to say this clearly, because if i don’t, this whole essay sounds like a manifesto for people to quit things irresponsibly and call it self-authorship.

i could make this choice partly because of my circumstances. i come from a family where i am not the financial backbone. there are no direct obligations on my shoulders. i don’t have to send money home. i don’t have to settle fast. i have parents who, even when nervous about my choices, gave me the space to make them without catastrophic consequences waiting on the other side if i got it wrong.

a lot of people don’t have that. and if you’re someone who needs to make money quickly, have people depending on you, who cannot afford a detour, please don’t read this as a universal instruction. it isn’t one.

what i will say is this: even within tight constraints, the question of what you actually want versus what you’ve been conditioned to want is worth asking. even if the answer doesn’t change anything immediately. knowing the difference matters. it changes how you carry the work. it changes what you build toward, even slowly.

and for me, the longer goal is this: i want to be the first in my bloodline to actually do what i enjoy and still make bank off it. not just survive doing it. build something real doing it. that’s the thing i’m chasing. not just happiness as a concept, but proof that the two don’t have to be at odds.

vii. the world is already moving. are you?

and honestly, look around. the signs are everywhere.

consultants who spent a decade climbing to partner are leaving to start newsletters. bankers who survived the 80 hour weeks and actually made it are walking away from the bonus cycles to build something they care about. big tech engineers with the resume everyone wants are taking pay cuts to work on problems that feel real to them. people who did everything right, got the degree, got the job, got the title, are quietly dismantling it all in their 30s because they woke up one day and realized they’d optimized for the wrong thing.

this is not a coincidence. this is a pattern. and it’s accelerating. it’s all around us.

the world is shifting in a way that actually makes this possible now. you can build an audience. you can monetize a skill directly. you can create something from scratch and get paid for it without needing a corporation’s permission or a prestigious institution’s stamp on your forehead. the gatekeepers are weaker than they’ve ever been. the tools are cheaper. the access is wider.

so the question isn’t whether it’s possible anymore. it clearly is. the question is whether you’re willing to stop waiting for the “right time” to start doing work that actually means something to you.

because the people who spent 5, 7, 10 years building credentials in fields they were lukewarm about are spending those same years figuring out what they actually want. the cost of waiting compounds too. just differently.

you don’t have to blow up your life. but you do have to ask the question. honestly. without performing the answer you think sounds responsible.

what do you actually want to do? not what sounds good. not what your parents would feel comfortable explaining to relatives. not what the version of you who wanted to prove something would choose.

what would you do if the only thing you were optimizing for was genuine interest and the ability to make real money from it?

that’s the world that’s opening up. and this is exactly the time to walk into it.

viii. what happened after i stopped

early this year, i left the robotics society.

it sounds clean now. at the time it felt like standing at the edge of something. everyone i knew there was doing incredible things. getting internships. building insane projects. publishing research. winning competitions. i genuinely believed leaving meant falling behind. that it meant failure. that i was walking away from the future i was supposed to want.

none of that happened.

instead, i made one simple decision. from that point, i would only work on things that genuinely interested me. not things that sounded impressive. not things that earned validation from people whose approval i’d been quietly chasing. things i actually enjoyed.

because here’s what i’d finally understood: you cannot compete against someone who loves what they do. you just can’t. they will outlast you, outlearn you, outwork you. not because they’re more disciplined. because they enjoy the game

while i was forcing myself through hardware and tech sessions, the people around me were genuinely fascinated by it. they weren’t fighting themselves every day. i was. and that gap compounds quietly until one day you look up and wonder why everything feels so hard.

i started writing. i explored business, strategy, finance, operations, product, the creator economy. all the things that intrigued me for years and kept filing away as “not serious enough.”

within months, things genuinely started opening up. three internship offers this summer. interviewed with one of the big 4s and a huge creative company. conversations with founders and operators and people building things i was actually excited to think about.

today i’m writing this sitting in bangalore, where i’m interning in product management at an AI startup. they flew me here. covered my accommodation. gave me problems i genuinely enjoy thinking about.

none of this happened because i became someone else. it happened because i stopped trying to.

ix. the thing i actually want to say

people talk about agency like it’s productivity. or discipline. or ambition.

i don’t think that’s what it is anymore.

i think agency is the ability to self-author. to question the scripts you’ve inherited. to examine your desires closely enough to understand which parts actually belong to you and which parts you borrowed from everyone around you without realizing it.

and here’s the thing i didn’t expect. i never actually left tech. i just stopped pretending i wanted to be the version of it that looked most impressive.

i’m still a woman in tech. i work in an ai startup. i sit in rooms with engineers and understand what they’re building and why it matters. i obsess over the problems technology is trying to solve. i care deeply about the impact it has, the lives it changes, the power it holds. i just don’t write the code. and somewhere along the way i realized that was always okay. the engineer in me never left. she just found the part of the work that actually fit her.

i love tech for what it does to the world. i love working with the people who build it. i love being the person who sits at the intersection of what’s technically possible and what actually matters to humans. that is still tech. it always was. i just had to stop measuring my value in the language of someone else’s contribution.

you don’t have to be the person writing the systems to be the person who shapes what they’re built for.

the older i get, the more i think real growth is less about adding things and more about removing them. removing borrowed ambitions. removing identities that no longer fit. removing the stories you’ve outgrown. until eventually you’re left with something closer to yourself.

x. i’m still figuring things out

i wish i could tell you this story ends with certainty. it doesn’t.

i still don’t know exactly where i’ll end up. i still change my mind. i still get lost in ways i didn’t expect.

but the decisions finally feel like mine.

and maybe that’s all self-authorship really is. not knowing exactly where you’re going. but knowing you’re the one choosing the direction.

for now, that’s enough.

Yours imperfectly,

Nush <3

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letters from nush runs on caffeine and the life left in me after being a full time woman in tech, support my work and keep the coffee coming <3

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