This isn’t a straightforward “Set up your Mac” guide, and it isn’t a philosophical dissection of anything either. It sits somewhere in between, just like me. I love tech, and I love to observe, to be slow with things in this fast-moving world. I am trying to find joy in the most boring things life can present me.

So here we are with a boring task, trying to have fun with it.

Before anything is installed, the screen is just the usual mac “Tahoe day” wallpaper. No files, no history, no cookies, no cache, no version of me I left lying around in folders I named “misc” or “untitled.” No sign of the 1001 different project ideas I have been procrastinating on.

It’s tempting to fill that space as fast as possible, the way we do with iPhones: sign in, sync everything from the cloud, get back to your old self in a few minutes.

I decided to resist that, just this once.

A tool shapes the hands that use it. You already know this about a kitchen, or a garden. Somehow, we forget it about the machine we spend more waking hours inside than almost anywhere else. So, this isn’t really a setup guide. It’s an invitation to set up slowly enough to notice what you’re choosing, and why.

The ground

I signed in but skipped the sync and started this one empty. Then, since I prefer dark mode, I went to System Settings → Appearance → Dark Mode (Auto). Comfort first.

I installed Microsoft Edge, my favourite browser believe it or not 😁.

Then I needed the infrastructure to install everything else and for me, that’s Homebrew. I opened the terminal and installed it first:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

The terminal is where I live as a developer for my job, and I wanted it to be more than just what my machine gives me by default. I installed iTerm2, a font, and a few tools so the space I live in feels cozy:

brew install --cask iterm2
brew install --cask font-jetbrains-mono-nerd-font
brew install zsh starship eza bat fzf zoxide fd ripgrep git gh git-delta 

Then I created my ~/.zshrc file inside my Home folder and opened it.

touch ~/.zshrc
open -e ~/.zshrc

Added these lines (tab-completion setup first, then prompt/tool init) and saved:

# Tab completion
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}'   # case-insensitive matching
zstyle ':completion:*' menu select                            # arrow-key navigation through matches
zstyle ':completion:*' list-colors "${(s.:.)LS_COLORS}"       # colored completion menu

# Prompt + tools
eval "$(starship init zsh)"
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"
alias ls="eza --icons"
alias cat="bat"

Then, in iTerm2’s settings: Profiles → Colors → Solarized under Color Presets, and Appearance → Minimal theme.

Final look of my terminal 👩🏽‍💻:

The workspace

Next, I needed to set up a few things for my work that involves Node but many versions of it. So I installed it through through nvm (node version manager).

brew install nvm
mkdir ~/.nvm

Added below to .zshrc file:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"

Then reloaded the termnial and installed latest Node:

source ~/.zshrc
nvm install node      # installs latest
nvm alias default node
node -v

Next, I installed Python, for MkDocs / GitHub Pages workflow: for my work related to courses creation, my tech blogs etc.

brew install python@3.12 pyenv uv

Then I carefully installed my editor of choice for code, good old VS Code

brew install --cask visual-studio-code

To set it up, I chose Solarized theme, the Material Icon set, the same Nerd Font from your terminal, to be consistent with my terminal (Edit the settings.json)

{
    "workbench.colorTheme": "Solarized Dark",
    "workbench.iconTheme": "material-icon-theme",
    "git.autofetch": true,
    "editor.fontLigatures": false,
    "editor.fontFamily": "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font",
}

Final look of my editor 📝:

The shelf

Somewhere for the thinking, like new blog ideas, articles for Substack, side projects, and everything in between, I chose to install Obsidian. The Minimal theme, and a folder structure with room to grow rather than one I’ll outgrow by September:

brew install --cask obsidian

My initial set up of folders looks like this, I hope it stays clean for sometime.

And by that, I came to the end of my minimal setup and I felt happy, genuinely happy, with it. It turned out exactly as I wanted it to.

I won't remember most of what I did to set this up by next week, which is why I documented it. But I know I'll feel it, every time I open the lid to work on something.

My mission was to find something distracting yet productive instead of doom scrolling through my photos app to look at Bhooma and cry all day. And I heard there was a retreat at our ashram for adults on that day. I decided to go. The retreat was to learn and discuss about Sadhana Panchakam, a beautiful work by Adi Sankaracharya, a fellow Mallu, which honestly makes me disproportionately happy inside. Of course, if a living, breathing Acharya caught me feeling this pleased about “regional pride”, he’d probably just quote the man himself back at me:

deśakālaviṣayātivarti yad brahma tattvamasi bhāvayātmani

(Vivekachudamani v:254 second part), translated as - That you are the Brahman transcending space, time, and sense-object; meditate on this.

Message seen ✔️✔️, Acharya. I’ll go back to transcending my ego now, right after this one small moment of Mallu pride.

The retreat was such an amazing way to spend Bhooma’s birthday. It gave me so many lessons to learn and apply in life, but a story on surrender became the most important takeaway for me.

This story is about Tapovana Maharaj, a Hindu saint and Vedanta scholar, still admired and loved by many Vedantins. Did I mention he’s another Mallu? Okay, at this point I’m just flexing.

Now, the story - Tapovan Maharaj decided to undertake a Kailash yatra. It’s an incredibly difficult journey, and along the way, he ran out of food and water. Exhausted, he was caught in the rain. Yet through all of it, his faith in the Lord was strong and his surrender was just beautiful to witness, even generations later.

As he lay down, unable to go on, the thought that arose in him wasn’t - “Will God save me?” but “How will God come to save me?” Such an innocent, honest form of surrender! I still get goosebumps thinking about it. He was so sure of help coming to him but just curious in what form or through whom.

Maharaj ji was eventually found and cared for by robbers, who had come to rob him. That’s how the story ends. But what stayed with me wasn’t the ending. It was the form of his surrender.

That single shift made me question myself - how arrogant I actually am in my own moments of misery, convinced I’m all alone, even while I keep saying the words I surrender to God or I surrender to the universe. I say the words, but I still worry. My only emotion in those moments should be curiosity, like Maharaj ji’s, not worry.

Surrender is not asking “will I be saved,” but wondering “how beautifully will I be saved.”

Now, what do curry leaves have to do with any of this? Okay, let’s get to that. That same weekend, my stash of curry leaves also ran out. It’s not very common to find curry leaves in regular stores here in Australia, and while I’ve had a curry leaf tree in the past, I don’t have one now. My stash always comes from friends who generously bring them to me from their own trees when I ask. So, this week, when my stash ran out, I simply did nothing. I left my curry leaves dealers completely in the dark. And just like that, a friend showed up with a big bag of curry leaves, the same evening!

I smiled inside, thinking - did I just pass one small test? Not worrying about something I don’t have, but might need later (and oh yes, we use a lot of curry leaves in our food). And I smiled at the Lord too, thinking, if He can tend to something as trivial as curry leaves, how much bigger and better must His plan be for when my whole world crumbles before me.

So really, the theory on July 4th and the practical on the 5th taught me that

surrender isn’t a one-time declaration I make and then forget.

It’s a daily, sometimes hourly, choice to trade worry for curiosity. Curry leaves today, something far bigger tomorrow.

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo'stvakarmaṇi 
The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47. 

Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. 

Lord Krishna said this to Arjuna, a warrior, frozen on a battlefield, paralysed by calculation on what he would lose or gain if he picks up the bow to fight his teachers, relatives and friends standing on the other side, as the enemy. Sound familiar?

This is us right now. The battlefield is a Teams or Slack channel, and nobody's frozen. Everyone’s moving very fast. Just not towards anything they actually care about.

The Start

It starts with a single message from a team-mate. A prototype, a strategy document, an analysis which took days or weeks, produced in an afternoon using AI. The thread goes silent, not in admiration, but into a silence of recalibration. The recalibration of survival.

The New Scoreboard

Everyone knows the new rules.

Whose project made the rest of the team look slow and lazy?

Who got the most visible AI centric initiative?

It’s like people are buying domain names for words that don’t exist yet. Everyone’s busy racing to own territory before anyone else names it. And the tragedy is that the people doing it were once known for their ethics, credibility, and craft. Now they live by a single measure - pace.

And pace is a brutal thing to measure a human being against.

A river moving fast in every direction is a flood.

The Work Became a Move on a Board

Every idea feels like a chess move now. Everything is a strategy to get noticed. Every thought gets filtered through questions, "How does this make me look to the leaders?" , “Do I still matter here?”

This is what happens when people optimise for the scoreboard instead of the work itself. It’s the same mechanism as a writer who chases trending topics instead of the story they actually want to tell.

The Burnout Nobody Has a Name For

Usually, you burnout from too much work or empty work calls. But the new burnout is different. It comes from competition.

Healthy competition is good, don’t get me wrong, but this one, it comes from the particular loneliness of competing with people you once genuinely enjoyed thinking and working alongside.

Fear, when it has nowhere honest to go, becomes competition.

Nobody Here Is the Villain. Not Even the AI.

Nobody sat down one morning and decided to hollow out their team culture. They all just responded to instinct.

The problem is that the definition of team hasn’t been updated. Leadership is still measuring individuals the way it did before AI arrived, which means individuals are optimising on their own at the expense of the whole.

This is how aggression enters a team without anyone intending it. It may look like conflict but it’s actually a withdrawal. Someone going quiet in a meeting, an idea kept close and not shared, a collaboration that quietly stops feeling natural etc.

Do the Work. Drop the Fruit. ✅

The best work almost never comes from the person running fastest. It comes from the person who forgets to check the scoreboard because they are too absorbed in the work itself. This is what we call - flow.

There’s a reason for that. In Vedantic thought, which is my favourite direction to think, the ego, the I-ness, is also the part that gets in the way.

You cannot reach the flow state, which is the whole you, while monitoring how you are performing. When you’re doing something for the numbers, you’re always slightly outside the work, calculating the return, watching yourself, watching your back. But when you’re doing it because it genuinely pulls you, because the creative juice is real, you merge into it and you disappear.

That disappearance is where the best outcomes live.

Things somehow always work out for people who are genuinely absorbed in what they do, who keep showing up, keep noticing, keep being in the right room.

Arjuna’s problem on that battlefield wasn’t cowardice. It was that he had made the outcome the whole point. Krishna’s answer wasn’t to care less either, it was to return his attention to the only thing actually in his hands, the quality of the work itself.

Do the work because it’s the right work. Let the fruits follow.

We are Arjuna right now. Frozen yet frantic, in front of a battlefield we’re calculating rather than engaging. The flow will find us the moment we stop performing for the scoreboard and start focusing on the task at hand.

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo’stvakarmaṇi

Your right is to the work. The scoreboard will catch up 🪷.

Bhagavad Gita 2.47. Verse and translation sourced from shlokam.org

Yet it is only irony that the same species which uncovered this truth, carried it through every era, and handed it faithfully to the next generation has never truly internalised it. And when grief arrives, most of us simply and massively fail.

Anticipatory grief..

Grief, I have learned, does not always wait for loss. And to grieve before the real loss is suffering in its most merciless form.

I grieved my fur best friend across seven months of chemotherapy, holding hope and sorrow in the same hands, watching him fall in and out of life of quality, while I stood by, helpless until one day he left.

Somewhere along three years of layoffs in tech industry, I find myself grieving in meetings and inboxes for a job not yet lost.

I now grieve the way my loved one with terminal illness calls my name, because I already know the shape of their absence. I am grieving someone who is still alive and that, I have learned, is its own kind of death

… And what I learned from it

Every setback has been, in its own reluctant way, a teacher.

The suffering from watching my dog through seven months of treatment carved patience into me, a patience I did not know I was capable of. It taught me selflessness, servitude, and how to recognise love in forms I was not aware of before.

The fear of layoff did something unexpected too, it loosened the grasp of my job and its hold on me. I still give my work the best I have, but I realised I am more than my job title. A Sanskrit diploma, Advaita Vedanta, this writing, they all came from the part of me that needed to remember who I was beyond my job.

But it is the grief I am living now that has changed me most profoundly. Every moment with the one I am losing feels weighted with meaning. I am more present, more deliberate, more willing to diminish my ego. To love without condition, to give without reserve. I see in them a calm that humbles me. I see an acceptance of fate that has quietly become gratitude for the life they were given. And in their smile, in the way they meet each moment without resistance and with beauty, I am learning to let go. To surrender.

Grief is real and I do not deny it but I am determined to observe it, to let it burn through what is unnecessary in me and leave something stronger behind.

An AI model works by predicting the statistically next best word to write and respond to you. When it lacks grounding information, that prediction can drift away from the truth (grounding information). This is hallucination in a nutshell.

Hallucination has become a common term in the world of AI, but the concept has always existed in human behaviour too.

Think of the time you only half-knew something but were asked about it anyway. You fumbled, then filled the gaps with invented details to complete the half-remembered story. That was your ego working hard to hold on to the “expert-on-this-topic badge.” This is the human version of hallucination.

You panicked at the follow-up question, edited the answer five times after hitting send, and lost sleep over having to justify yourself if your answer turned out to be factually incorrect. You knew perfectly well that your hallucination won’t be forgiven as easily as an AI model’s.

This is your opportunity to switch from reactive mode to responsive mode.

In such situations, you have two good options - respond later, after verifying the facts, or, if the question needs urgent acknowledgement, simply say: "Thank you for your patience while I gather the information needed to give you a complete answer." Honestly, the clarity and peace of mind this approach brought me is worth far more than any “expert badge”.

We all have enough burdens on our shoulders. Let's try not to add any more. After all, truth is the lightest thing to carry! It took watching an AI struggle with honesty to remind me of that.

If this helped, you know where to find me @ iknowthisfeeling.com . This world doesn't get easier - but we get wiser. Until next time. ☺️

When I first moved into the home near this tree, there were a few things that instantly made me fall in love, one of them was this tall gum tree that stood proudly just across the road from my house. Its shiny grey bark and its divine presence, patiently giving up its branches to the noisy Australian birds, all made me fall in love with it. We formed an unspoken bond instantly, one that takes years to form between humans.

However earlier in 2023, almost two years since our move, we received a letter from the council regarding a road expansion project. My heart sank instantly as I somehow sensed it could mean that they were cutting all the trees. Months passed by, and my husband and son reassured me that nothing might happen, that they might not go through with the expansion after all. While this brought me some relief, I remained sceptical whenever I spotted trucks or construction workers near my house.

Then, in a month, it all began. The construction work started, and they tied ribbons on the trees, green and pink. My tree was given a pink ribbon, a sign of its upcoming ill fate. Just as my intuition had warned, they started cutting down all the trees tied with pink ribbons.

Deep in my heart I knew it was time to say farewell. One weekend, I took a walk to my tree and said goodbye. I took a photo of it standing tall, gazing down upon me with what seemed like a sense of fulfilment. Perhaps it had been waiting all these years for this moment, to transition from being a tree to something more.

The following week it happened. They cut my tree, and it fell with a thud. The fall echoed both outside and inside my being ( I still have the video I took). I cried like I lost someone close, but I was more prepared on that day than I had been earlier in the year. I’ve grown accustomed to grief in recent months. In my head, it’s not gone but evolved, like all the souls who have departed from my life.

Sometimes I wonder whether my tree was cut down to test my strength, to see if I could weather the trial of letting go with grace which in two years I was to be tested again harshly, with my pet’s passing. Life has its own peculiar ways of teaching lessons, and I know this better now and I surrender to the teacher.

Adios amigo! Until we meet again, my friend.

I’ve experienced a lot of changes within me in recent years. My 20-year-old self would hardly recognise the person I am today. She might laugh at how my thoughts go, make very ‘intelligent’ arguments against my ideologies and even post on Instagram how weird I am. But both versions of myself are not wrong based on my respective phases of life.

What confuses me is, I’m unsure what people mean when they tell me to “be myself”, “be authentic”. I naturally absorb the behaviours and mannerisms of those around me. I “code-switch” though I’ve been doing this long before it had a name. I have different handwriting depending on my mood and what I’m writing. It might seem odd, but all of this is also me. My taste in music ranges from Dr. M.BalamuraliKrishna to Crosby, Stills & Nash. And then there are days I would only listen to “Tere Dar Par Sanam” by Kumar Sanu on repeat.

In many ways, I am a product of the people I interact with, the books I read, the music I listen to, the experiences, the places I live in and my whole state of mind at that time.

My current belief is that, as ephemeral as this body is, so is the illusion of who I am. This thought frees me from having to be one fixed thing. I’d rather keep becoming newer, better versions of myself and I will keep exploring that becoming.