Sulabh Rastogi

Spotlight articles

How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day

Instead of chasing a distant purpose, you learn to bring purpose, joy, and engagement into today, moment by moment. Rather than treating life’s meaning as something abstract or remote, Burnett and Evans invite you to think like a designer: Embrace curiosity: Explore life with a beginner’s mind rather than certainty. Prototype experiences: Test different ideas (work, hobbies, relationships) to discover what feels right. Iterate often: Refine your life choices based on real experience.

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In, Out, and Held: What Reading, Writing, and Being Heard Do to a Mind

Here's a strange fact: people who read books for just half an hour a day tend to live longer. Writing about the hardest thing in your life for fifteen minutes changes your body. And being truly listened to changes you more than any advice ever could. Three quiet habits — reading, writing, being heard — and what the research says each one does to a mind.

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The Weather Talk Comes First for a Reason

Twelve experiments. Over 1,800 people. Strangers paired off to talk - some about the weather, some about the last time they cried in front of someone. Nearly everyone guessed the deep conversation would feel awkward. Nearly everyone was wrong. The stranger discovery: the small talk wasn't wasted either. It was quietly doing the work that made the deep part possible.

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The People Who Skip Small Talk Know Something We Don't

Some people skip the weather and the weekend plans and go straight for something real. It's easy to call it a personality type. But there's a stranger explanation. They aren't braver or wired differently — they've just stopped believing the quiet lie the rest of us still tell ourselves: that other people don't want to go there. The truth turns out to be almost the opposite, and it changes what depth actually is.

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The Tally I Didn't Know I Was Keeping

Lucius Sulla had this carved on his tomb: no friend ever served me, no enemy ever wronged me, that I haven't repaid in full. He meant it as a flex. I read it on a Tuesday and felt sick — because somewhere in my head, I had been carving the same thing. The tally costs something. Not them. You.

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How to Find Out What You're Actually Good At, According to Peter Drucker

Most of us think we know our strengths. We are usually wrong. In a quiet 1999 essay, Peter Drucker laid out a method so simple it sounds like a joke. Write down what you think will happen before you decide something. Seal it. Come back nine months later and read it. Do that for two or three years and you will know yourself better than most people ever do. The strangest part is where the method came from — and how long people have been doing it.

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What Do You Want?

Ask a woman who has spent her life on everyone else one small question. What do you want? She goes quiet. She smiles. She turns it back to you. Somewhere along the way she learned that her own wishes were the one thing she was not allowed to have. This is about that slow disappearing act, and the women in every man's life who have forgotten the answer to the smallest, kindest question there is.

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A Man With No Friends

We see a man with no crew and assume something in him is broken. Often it's the opposite — he got tired of fake. But the comforting version skips a line the research draws sharply. A small circle you chose is one thing. No one at all is another, and the body doesn't read them the same way. So before you pity him, or hand him a trophy, ask the quieter question: did he choose the quiet, or did it choose him?

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Times Are Changing: People Are Starting to Talk to AI About Their Feelings

A 2026 study from JAMA Network Open followed 995 university students for 12 weeks. Some talked to an AI. Some went to group therapy. Some got nothing. The AI group did better than both other groups on anxiety and well-being. I read this carefully because I build writing tools and have a bias to manage.

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What Happens When AI Writes the Doctor's Notes? I Couldn't Stop Thinking About My Journal.

An AI is in the room with the doctor now. It's listening, drafting the notes, and giving the doctor's eyes back to the patient. Half of clinicians who tried it stopped feeling burned out within a month. But there's a quieter finding underneath the numbers — and it's the one I can't stop thinking about. Because if writing about your own life is also a kind of medicine, then the question is no longer about doctors. It's about us.

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Why People Write in Wartime

In the middle of an active war, with sirens going off and the power out, people sit down and write. Nearly 1,500 Ukrainians did it during the invasion. Hundreds of Britons did it as the bombs fell in 1939. Why do we reach for a pen exactly when the world is hardest to hold? The answer turns out to be stranger than "it helps" - and it begins with a clockwork pattern nobody chooses.

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Launching Hurroz

A founder's daily journal from the other side of shipping — what it actually feels like to build alongside AI, where the friction lives, and what gets easier once the code starts working.

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The Things We Don't Say — Raw Confessions From India's Overworked Professionals

We say "main theek hoon" four times a day and mean it zero times. We stare at the ceiling at 2 AM replaying every mistake. We dread Sunday evenings because another 60-hour week starts tomorrow and not a single hour was ours. This is a collection of three raw, unfiltered confessions about what it actually feels like to be a young professional in India today — and what happened when we stopped pretending and started writing the truth. No advice. No gyaan. Just honesty.

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Why 15 Minutes of Gardening a Day Can Rewire Your Brain — What Research Actually Says

96 phone checks a day. One in four remote workers lonely. Cognitive decline set to double by 2060. We optimise routines, subscribe to apps, and stack productivity systems — yet the simplest interventions sit ignored because they seem too ordinary. This five-part series follows four people navigating stress, focus collapse, isolation, and brain fog. They found it in soil. Each chapter pairs a real scenario with cited research — the final one asks what happens when you tend your mind the same way.

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The Expressive Writing Paradigm: How 15 Minutes a Day Can Strengthen Your Body and Mind

Discover the "Expressive Writing Paradigm," a scientifically proven biological intervention. In the 1980s, psychologist Dr. James Pennebaker discovered that writing about emotional experiences for just 15 minutes a day can strengthen your immune system, lower stress, physically heal the body and reduces visits to the doctor. Learn how to turn your journal into a tool for wellness

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