There comes a time when one has to admit, perhaps reluctantly, that there is a real need to think for oneself. Not the shallow kind of “thinking for yourself” that is fed to you in every corporate keynote, TED Talk, or undergrad philosophy class, but something deeper, more dangerous, and infinitely less palatable to those around you. It is the kind of thinking that requires you to separate, even if momentarily, from the tightly woven fabric of expectations spun by your immediate family, your closest friends, and the people who, with all the best intentions, insist on telling you who you are and what you ought to do.
To be clear, this is not a manifesto for abandoning obligations. The bonds of family, of love, of friendship, of community — these are not things to discard. They are real and important, and the work we do in tending to them is essential. But to confuse them with one’s own internal compass is to live forever in a fog. The idea here is not to flee from duty but to achieve clarity — a kind of ruthless, crystalline recognition of what it is that actually indulges your own thinking, your own being, without interference.
For me, this comes most clearly through music. It is not play, it is not “for fun,” and it is certainly not entertainment. Music, as I understand it, transcends the worldly worries that cloud my days and the false prophecies of fulfillment that society dangles before me like carrots on an infinite stick. To sit with the guitar — not on a stage, not in front of an audience, but in that private, unlit corner where sound meets silence — is to arrive at a kind of selflessness. A paradoxical thing: through sound I become expression, and through expression I dissolve the need for self. The notes I play are not a product but a stripping away; they are, in some ineffable way, the truest form of my being that I have ever known.
The irony is that this state does not arrive when I play gigs, or when I am on display in any public sense. It is not in the applause or the recognition or the “career” moments. It happens in the unobserved hours, when presence overtakes performance. To call it meditation would be inaccurate. That word has been flattened into something unremarkable — a lifestyle accessory, a productivity hack, something people download an app to simulate while waiting for their oat milk latte. What I mean is something quieter, something that resists commodification. The mind in that state is not focused, not disciplined in the way self-help gurus sell the term. It is emptied, weightless, stripped of all pretences. A quietness so complete it is nearly indescribable.
And yet, it is only when one learns to step back and examine the architectures of expectation that press in on us from birth that such moments can even be recognized. When you are young, the weight of expectation is invisible. You take it for granted that the things demanded of you — the good grades, the career path, the respectable relationship, the dutiful obedience to whatever your family holds sacred — are natural, inevitable. You believe these things are yours, that they were always part of your personality, your “nature.” But in truth they are scaffolding, built and rebuilt by forces external to you: your parents’ fears, their parents’ disappointments, the unspoken anxieties of entire generations.
Society is sly. Its conditioning is quiet, nearly imperceptible. It does not shout, it does not coerce in obvious ways. It whispers. It suggests. It builds grooves into your mind so slowly that by the time you recognize them you think they were always there. The impact of environment on our sense of self is so subtle that most never even consider interrogating it. They call it “just the way things are,” and in doing so they surrender to it entirely.
But if you stop — if you truly pause and examine every layer of activity that makes up your day, every aspiration you chase, every compromise you’ve internalized as “just how life works” — you begin to see it differently. You see that much of what feels natural is not natural at all. It is inheritance. It is social construction wearing the mask of selfhood. The danger is that if you do not see this, if you never make space for this kind of radical clarity, you will live your entire life as someone else’s echo.
To think for yourself in any real way is therefore not a matter of rebellion for its own sake. It is not about severing ties or living in permanent opposition. It is about the possibility of returning to something fundamental — the rare experience of existing, for a moment, without the weight of performance or duty dictating your every move. And once you know what that feels like, once you have touched that quietness, everything else becomes suspect. The job, the relationships, the supposed “dreams” you were handed like prepackaged products — all of them must be held up against the standard of that inner clarity.
For me, again, music is the key. It is not therapy, it is not work, it is not art in the way institutions define it. It is the one arena where self and society cannot interfere, where expression is not mediated by expectation. And in that sense it is not only freedom, but a kind of proof. Proof that the self exists apart from the scaffolding. Proof that there is still a voice within us that belongs to no one else.
The tragedy is that so few people are willing, or able, to carve out the space necessary to listen for it. And so they confuse noise for truth, duty for purpose, and expectation for identity. But if you can find even one activity, one place where the quietness overwhelms all else, then you have something no system, no family, no society can fully claim. You have yourself. And that is enough.
With peace and insight,
Ameya