The Man Who Refused to Decide
Arjun was thirty-something, technically an adult, practically a writer who couldn’t stay with one thought long enough to finish it.
On that Tuesday morning, his laptop looked like his brain had been split into tabs and left unattended.
“Q3 Content Strategy – Storage Solutions Brand”
“Jobs in: analyst, copywriter, sales” Basically anything that pays him more than his current job.
“Is 33 too late to change careers?”
An abandoned Google Doc titled New Book Idea, containing three sentences, all of them introductions, none of them brave enough to move forward.
He sat at his tiny IKEA desk in his small rental apartment, with hot tea on the desk, trying to come up with “fresh, lively ideas” for a brand that sold storage boxes.
The brief said:
Make clutter exciting.
Somewhere between “10 Creative Ways to Organise Your Socks” and rewriting the same headline for the fourth time, it occurred to him that his life was not moving. It was buffering; the progress bar was stagnant, and it was just a hope that something might load eventually.
There had been a time when he believed writing would save him and that words, if arranged honestly enough, would lift him out of mediocrity and into some meaningful future. Back then, he thought of his work as sacred. Special. Destined.
Now, most of his sentences were built to survive algorithms. He wrote for SEO, which he privately thought of as putting makeup on a website and calling it storytelling. He told himself it was temporary. He always told himself that.
Before he could spiral further, his phone buzzed. Mom.
He stared at the screen, weighed his options, then picked up.
“Hello, Ma.”
“Beta, what are you doing with your life?” she said, skipping the greeting. Straight to the point.
“Good morning to you, too.”
“It’s been five years since you left that stable job,” she continued. “Five years. You’re still doing this small writing work that pays you peanuts. Everyone your age is moving forward. I saw Mr Rao’s son yesterday on Facebook; he’s in Seattle waiting for his seed money, maybe he’s into agriculture there”
“Of course you did.”
“They bought a house. A house! And what about you? I can’t sleep at night thinking about you. Do you know how many people less talented than you are earning well?”
The sentence landed heavily. Less talented than you. He knew she meant well. He also knew what it sounded like.
“I’m trying, Ma,” he said. “Succeeding in writing takes time.”
“How much time? Till you’re forty? Fifty? Are you saving anything? Planning anything? We’re not asking you to be famous. Just stable. Why are you being so stubborn?”
Because I don’t know who I am without this; the idea of quitting scares me more than failing, he thought.
Instead, he said, “I’m trying. I really am.”
She sighed. The tired sigh of someone who had been hopeful for too long.
“Okay. Do what you want. I am done trying to make you understand our concern,” she said.
The call ended. The guilt didn’t. His phone lit up again almost immediately. This time, it was his girlfriend.
The preview read:
I’m sorry, but…
His stomach tightened. He opened the message.
I don’t think this is working anymore. I love you, but I can’t keep waiting for your “someday”. You keep saying things will change, but nothing is moving. I don’t want to resent you. So I think this is goodbye.
For a moment, the room felt smaller.
His mind flickered through memories. A noisy cafe on their first date. Her laughing too loudly at his jokes. Her saying, “I love how you see the world.”
Then the latter flashes. Her asking about savings. About plans. About where they would be in five years. Her saying, carefully, “I think you love the idea of being a writer more than the work it takes.”
He couldn’t type anything. He put the phone face down and walked to the balcony.
The city was in its usual element. Dogs barking at nothing. Scooters rattling past potholes. Neighbours hanging clothes that dried faster than his career. Somewhere, a pressure cooker whistled. Somewhere, someone laughed.
He leaned on the railing, carrying every voice with him. His mother’s fear. His girlfriend’s exhaustion. His own quiet panic.
He didn’t want to jump. He knew that. But for one calm, unsettling second, he thought that if someone said he slipped, he might not argue.
He stayed there until the sun shifted and his tea went cold.
The breakup settled into him slowly. More like slow internet. The kind of humiliation you can’t complain about because nothing technically went wrong.
For a few days, he decided this was it. The sign. The turning point. He would fix everything. The plan was vague, but gym-shaped.
He started running in the mornings, lifting weights in the evenings, and drinking on weekends, as if physical exertion and alcohol might rearrange his life internally. He downloaded a habit tracker. He made a list on his whiteboard.
RUN. READ. LIFT. APPLY FOR JOBS. SLEEP EARLY.
His calendar looked busy. His Instagram stories looked disciplined. For a brief period, it felt like progress. Then one weekend, at a casual football game, he misjudged a tackle and twisted something he didn’t know could twist. He came home limping, collapsed on the bed, and stared at the ceiling fan spinning with more purpose than he had.
The pain faded into the background. The real ache stayed. Nothing had changed. Same bank balance. Same unfinished documents. Same anxiety. The people who once believed in him had silently exited the group chat.
Is this growth, he wondered, or just a distraction with better shoes?
Lying there, he remembered something he usually avoided.
Years ago, when he first started writing seriously, he posted an opinion piece about failure, age, and the shame of not arriving on time. It was small but honest. It got shared. For two days, he felt seen. Then the comments came.
“Who is this guy?”
“Another mediocre writer with opinions.”
“This is self-pity dressed up as insight.”
He told himself it didn’t matter. But every time he tried to write honestly after that, his fingers froze.
What if they were right? What if his thoughts were shallow? What if his dream was just a well-decorated delusion?
That was when he retreated into safe work. Lists. Guides. Keywords. He told himself the real writing would come later, once he had money, time, and validation. He stayed invisible and told himself that invisibility was temporary.
After the breakup and the injury, something cracked.
He opened his old blog. The last post was three years old. It made him wince; it wasn’t bad as such, but because it was sincere. On impulse, he started writing again.
He posted about starting over in your thirties. About feeling left behind. About telling everyone you are figuring it out while secretly having no idea what that means.
One of the pieces took off. Messages poured in. Strangers saying they felt seen. For three days, he floated. He refreshed stats compulsively. He told his mother, cautiously. He almost texted his ex.
Maybe this is it, he thought. Maybe this is the beginning. Then came the backlash. Mocking comments. Threads dissecting his privilege. One comment stopped him cold.
“Another soft boy with a WiFi connection and no real problems.”
He shut his laptop and lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling crack. Even when you do good work, people still hate it. And if they hate it loudly enough, you stop altogether, he thought.
The next morning, he couldn’t write. Virality suddenly felt like a trap. So he made a deal with himself to write every day, not publish, and not check the stats. He created a folder called For Me.
The sentences came slowly. Warmly. Just honest. Something loosened.
He started running again. Just to get out of his head for an hour. Every afternoon, around two, he passed the same bench in the park. A man sat there with paint-stained fingers and a small sketchbook, mostly staring at trees. Eventually, they spoke and exchanged pleasantries.
The man was a painter named Hari. “I come here to avoid what I’m supposed to be painting,” Hari said.
Arjun understood immediately.
“I’m a writer…,” he said, then corrected himself. “Mostly, a content writer.”
“Sacred art?” Hari asked, smiling.
“Sacred when it doesn’t pay. Commercial, when it does,” Arjun said.
They laughed.
After a few days, Arjun wrote Hari a short thank-you note and handed it to him awkwardly. He felt the daily conversations about art, discipline and life helped him clear the clutter in his head.
The next day, Hari returned the gesture with a painting.
The moment Arjun saw it, he knew it was terrible. Truly awful. Colours fighting each other. Shapes refusing meaning, and overall, a mind-jarring piece.
And Hari handed it over with absolute confidence. “This is for you.”
Arjun laughed on the way home, holding the painting carefully. This man had created something badly and offered it freely without hesitation or explanation.
Meanwhile, he had spent years protecting his work from judgment by never letting it breathe.
Maybe the problem was not talent. Maybe it was courage.
On the way home, he passed his favourite bookstore. The sign outside was faded, the glass slightly dusty, but the bell over the door still rang with the same old-school charm. He hesitated, then stepped in.
The air smelled of paper and the passage of time. He walked past the fiction shelves, past the self-help section with all the “Unlock Your Potential in 7 Steps” books he secretly read and abandoned. He stopped in front of the stationery corner. There, among pens and journals, was a simple, no-brand notebook. Brown cover. Plain. Thick pages. He picked it up.
In his room, he cleared a small space on the wall above his desk and pinned the painting there. It looked even worse against the peeling paint of his own walls.
“Congratulations,” he told it. “You’re my supervisor and probably my saviour.”
He opened the notebook and wrote:
Day One.
I don’t know if I’m good. I don’t know if I’ll make money. I don’t know if people will care. But I’m done waiting to be chosen.
He opened his laptop. The cursor blinked. He typed a title:
The Man Who Refused to Decide.
He looked up at the painting. It looked back, fearless and ridiculous.
He smiled. And began.
Arjun was thirty-something…
Credits
This story was written by Rajiv R Nair, reviewed by Nikhila Kotni, edited by Sreekar Ayyagari, photographer by R. S. Chintalapati, and actor Kireeti Chandavolu.
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