What if the deepest wound inside you is not that you are broken, but that some part of you remembers where you came from? The Katha Upanishad tells the story of Nachiketa, a boy who stands before Yama, the god of death, and refuses every pleasure offered to him in exchange for abandoning his question. He wants to know what remains when the body is gone.

The whole architecture of formal education conditions you to believe that the point is to finish — that there's a destination, and that the destination is the degree. You spend years optimizing for the finish line, and then you cross it, and there's nothing on the other side except the sudden, uncomfortable silence of a life that's now entirely your problem.