This is gonna sound like a 3am thought but hear me out.

The five extra minutes you doomscrolled this morning? That made you miss your train. Which meant you didn't sit next to someone who would've sneezed on you. Which meant you stayed healthy for that thing next week where you'll laugh until your ribs hurt. Or maybe you bumped into a stranger, apologized, and your smile changed their entire day because they were having the worst morning. Maybe you stayed up too late with someone you love, creating a memory that'll hit you randomly fifteen years from now and make everything feel okay for a second.

Every tiny thing matters. We're part of this intricate, chaotic, beautiful web where everything connects to everything else.

And then there's the J-word.

JOB. Too real.

I've been looking for one for a while now. And here's the weird part, I technically have all this free time. More than I'll probably ever have again. But I can't enjoy it. Every spontaneous afternoon feels wrong. Every time I say yes to something fun, there's this voice asking if I should be doing something "productive" instead.

My friend needed someone last week. Just needed me to be present. And I was there, but half my brain was refreshing my email, wondering if that recruiter finally wrote back.

Nobody tells you that you can miss out on life in two ways. You can be too busy with work, or you can be too anxious about not having it. Either way, you're not really living. You're just existing in this weird waiting room while life happens around you.

I want to work. I want the purpose and the structure. But I'm also watching these moments slip through my fingers. Tuesday afternoons that are perfect and empty, chances to be spontaneous, conversations that could turn into core memories and I'm too stressed to grab them.

The clock is ticking. Not just the "find something soon" clock, but the life clock. The one that's counting moments I'll never get back. And once I finally land something? I'll probably look back and think "why didn't I enjoy that time more?" But I can't. Because even the absence of the J-word is consuming. It takes up just as much space as having one would.

I'm still here though. Still creating tiny ripples with every choice I make. I'm just doing it with one eye on my inbox, trying to hold onto the bigness of being alive while the world keeps asking me to be smaller, more hirable, more productive.

I just wish someone had mentioned that the hardest part of looking for a job isn't the rejection or the waiting. It's realizing that you're losing time you'll never get back, time that belongs to the beautiful chaos of being alive, to the thing we don't even have a proper word for.

The thing that's definitely not a J-word.

Sometimes I’ll finish watching a film and realize... I don’t fully know what happened.

Not because it was confusing. Not because I wasn’t paying attention. But because I was completely, helplessly distracted by the cinematography. The way the shadows fall. The framing. The color grading. The way someone blinks and it lines up perfectly with a light flare.

I wish I could say I’m always immersed in the narrative, but let’s be real: I’m often mentally pausing to admire how a scene was lit. I’ll rewind just to see a camera movement again. I’ll watch something entirely for the texture of it, the grain, the palette, the way the environment breathes around the characters.

I think it’s the designer in me. Or maybe the architect. Or both.

I’ve learnt to notice the unseen elements- balance, scale, space, contrast. So when I watch something, I see the choices. The scaffolding behind the emotion. The decisions that make it beautiful, immersive, intentional. To me, that’s storytelling too. It’s just quieter.

Movies are more than plot. They’re mood. They’re emotion. They’re visual language. They’re atmosphere, silence, movement, stillness.

Sometimes the cinematography is the story. Or at least the part that speaks to me the loudest.

Before I open Figma or Notion, I usually open Spotify. Making playlists is something I’ve done for years not just as a background task, but as part of how I think. For me, it’s not that different from designing a product or mapping a user journey. In both cases, I’m curating an experience.

At some point, I realized I approach playlists the same way I approach design:
intentionally, emotionally, and with mad respect for flow.

Every good playlist starts with a question: What’s the vibe? Who’s this for? What moment is it meant to hold?

That’s design 101. Whether it’s a mobile app or a moody driving playlist, it all starts with understanding the user. Are they sprinting toward a deadline? Cooking at 2 a.m.? Mourning a breakup in slow motion? The answer shapes every choice that follows.

Just like in design research, empathy is the foundation.

Every playlist needs contrast slow to fast, loud to soft, heavy to light. Too much of the same thing, and people tune out. The same rule applies in design. You need visual and emotional variation to keep users engaged. Still, it has to feel cohesive.

Good design, like a good playlist, is invisible when it’s working.
You don’t think about it, you just feel it.