The Slow Death of Big Dreams
from bezos giving up physics, to me chasing comfort, to how dreams die quietly in meeting rooms.
One of the best videos on the internet, and I say this without exaggeration, is the one where Jeff Bezos talks about changing his career path.
He was once stuck on a partial differential equation, so he went to the smartest guy at Princeton, a student named Yasantha, for help. Yasantha took one look at the problem, thought for a few seconds, and said, “The answer is cosine.” That was the moment Bezos realised he’d never be the best at theoretical physics; someone else already was. So he switched. From physics to electrical engineering and computer science.
Now, before we go deeper into that madness, you need to understand the man a little differently. Yes, he’s the founder of Amazon, AWS, and Blue Origin. But that’s not the point.
Here’s the context nobody talks about:
He was a Star Trek fanboy - read everything, watched everything, and wanted to travel across galaxies.
At ten, when nobody in his school knew how to use a terminal, he and a few friends were already playing a Space game on it.
His valedictorian speech ended with the line: “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”
Bezos wasn’t living in the world we know. He lived inside a nerdy, sci-fi-coded reality distortion field. His goals weren’t “clear CAT,” “do a master’s in the UK,” or “onboard 10,000 developers.” He wanted to leave Earth.
Those kinds of goals aren’t easy to say out loud and definitely not easy to execute, but if you zoom out, he did exactly what he said he would. He literally built rockets to leave Earth.
And that’s cool.
Because I remember being that kind of kid too.
In 7th or 8th grade, I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to figure out time travel, teleportation, and build pretty cool cars.
Then, sometime in 8th grade, I made my first girlfriend, got my first low score (76%), lost a bit of confidence, and told myself, “Fine. Maybe I don’t have that kind of brain - I’ll be an automobile engineer instead.”
It sounded close enough - cars, machines, innovation. Still science, right?
Then my family told me that wasn’t realistic. I’d first have to do mechanical engineering, then a master’s in automobile, and maybe a PhD after that - the so-called “proper path.” I was 13 and already overwhelmed.
They said medicine was safer. “India needs doctors,” they told me. “It’s stable, it pays early, you’ll thank us later.”
So there I was, from dreaming about time travel to preparing for NEET.
And if we fast-forward through the boring middle, today I write copy, grow startups, and pretend to be the engineer I never became.
But that’s still okay; most of us wanted to be something else and ended up somewhere adjacent. Maybe close, maybe not, but not too far either. Very few of us, though, became the exact thing we once swore we’d never be.
I became that. I’m a month-end paycheck addict now.
I love my comfort net. I overspend. And whenever someone sees me frustrated, anxiously typing, muttering at my screen, turning my video off mid-meeting - I just say, “It pays.” And that’s how I rationalise it all.
And sure, I have a roadmap to break out of it to go do whatever the fuck I actually want, but then I look at the bike I want, the car I want, the Europe trip I promised myself…
That’s exactly what happened to Bezos, too. He left his theoretical dreams behind, moved to New York, and became one of hundreds of hedge fund guys under David E. Shaw. When he told David about his idea for an online bookstore, his boss tried to talk him out of it, they even went on a two-hour walk through Central Park.
He still quit.
Meanwhile, I don’t even have to fight anyone to keep my job or my clients. When I told my parents I wanted to leave everything and start on my own, they just said, “Okay, go ahead.”
Looking at all of this - Bezos, my parents, me - I realised something.
It’s not about talent. It’s not about luck. It’s about the threshold of shame you’re willing to carry.
Because being the person who says, “I’ll stay for one more year, build some savings, and then go all in,”
is the same as being the person who’ll never go all in.
And it’s shameful, honestly, to be just another month-end paycheck junkie.
To live like your company’s North Star metric is your life’s purpose.
To let your imagination shrink until your only dream is hitting next quarter’s target.
That’s the slow death of people who once dreamt about time travel.
Bezos once said,
“When you think about your life in your 80s, you want to minimize the number of regrets.”
And maybe that’s the whole point.
To not settle for the safe job.
To not let the world shame you into shrinking your dreams.
To not let your kid-self - the one who dreamt of teleportation and galaxies - die quietly in a meeting room.
Because the older I get, the more I see how rare it is to keep dreaming like that.
And how much easier it is to convince yourself that being “safe” is being “smart.”
It’s not.
Onto everything I have been consuming lately:
1/ This post was by an engineer who just joined Thinking Machines by Mura Mirati after spending 192 weeks at a company called Modal.
But the transition wasn’t the real story; it was about permissionlessness. About how much agency he carried, and what it truly means to perfect your craft in a world that never stops shouting about shiny new things,
2/ One new thing I’ve been doing lately is dumping every source of information about whatever I want to learn into NotebookLM and then generating audio and video overviews to get a quick, non-boring summary.
If it still feels interesting after that, I read or watch the full thing.
3/ Lastly, I’ve been catching up on all the banger Hindi movies I somehow never watched lol
It started with Ba**ds of Bollywood, and I remember thinking, “Damn, there’s so much context here I know nothing about - can’t be me.”
Since then, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole - finished that series, watched Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Blackmail, Madaari, and by the time you’re reading this, I’ve probably ticked off a couple more.
And the best part about consuming anything - films, books, podcasts - is how every time you revisit something, it teaches you something new. I really believe that applies to all forms of media. You start seeing your own problems mirrored in them, drawing analogies, taking lessons, and somehow finding clarity from the most random places.
That’s all for this issue. Hope you liked it, and if you did, I’d really appreciate it if you subscribed (if you haven’t already) and shared it with a friend who’s closest to you.
Until next time,
— t
Nicee !. Bads of Bollywood was epic