I am reading a book. It's on the non-fiction side. I rarely read books in this category. I used to do it a lot, but now I don't, mostly because I don't like productivity slop getting in my way of thinking about characters and almost crying about them for what happens in the stories. Fiction has such a great sense of connection. You always find a character, a situation to relate to. There is something happening somewhere in the pages that you want to live, aspire, or feel.

I think overall, I like the part that stories stick longer in my memory. I don't care much about life lessons I can get out of them, it's more of a hobby, still nascent and pure. Although it rarely happens that I don't try to get an outcome out of my work, it's also rarer for someone like me, who would stop breathing or sleeping if he had a way to function without them.

But with this one it has been a bit different. I am 50 pages in and I already had to stop thrice. The book triggers a weird sense of anxiety in my brain every time I sit and read more than 10–15 pages. It has discarded all my assumptions about how to live life correctly. It has been a scary 50 pages.

Part of the problem is that, in general, you relate to good and bad ideas in a more balanced way, like 60–40 or the other way around. It's terrifying to think that it can be 10–90, let alone it actually happening. The writer pretty much reads out a description of me, on point, without missing a beat, and the conclusion is: you are fucked. Every idea that he discusses, I relate to, and then boom, he flips it in the end, saying that's the wrong way of doing things.

There is something deeply destabilizing about a stranger in a paperback invalidating all my coping mechanisms, ripping apart my architecture. I mean, okay, I should be fine handling conflicting ideas as an adult, but tell me the solution. Don't tell me the right way, tell me how to reach or make progress to shift momentum to the correct (questionable) side of the spectrum. That's a broader problem I have with advice. Most of the time you are told the right thing and the wrong thing (well, you are already doing it), so mostly what is right, but never or let's say it's very unusual, that you are told how to do it, the progress pointers, the processes, or the in-between steps to be on the correct side. And this writer also does that.

Well, honestly, I am being too rough on him. It's been 50 pages only. He might tell me in the end, or let's say he better tell me in the end, because otherwise the book should be placed in the horror of life section and not on the self-help shelf.

The only positive part is knowing something might be wrong is a good start to making it right. Otherwise, it has been a downhill ride. Although I have been told that if a book makes you stop three times in 50 pages, it's not horror, it's more of a mirror.

You see, they all hate me, man. Don't ask me the name, I won't tell. Some things need to be suffered alone. Apologies.