I have spent 11 years in a bank. For almost seven of those years, I managed to blame the bank for a significant part of my dissatisfaction.
My underlying assumption was simple: I know better. The institution and the people running it are stupid.
State Bank has existed in some form for more than 200 years. I joined it with bubbling energy and opinions about almost everything around me.
Why do we have to write the address again and again on an account opening form?
Why do we need an OTP to withdraw cash or log into internet banking?
Why did the Bank launch this particular product?
Why doesn’t my boss treat me the way I want to be treated?
Why was I posted so far away from my hometown?
The questions kept changing, but one theme remained remarkably consistent:
I was the victim.
I was also extremely emotional about it. At times, I genuinely believed that I had somehow been categorically singled out by the institution.
Then I got a posting in Mumbai, my hometown.
Did everything suddenly become wonderful?
Not really. There were new complaints.
Mumbai became the problem. I hated travelling. My previous postings were better because I lived ten minutes from the branch. Then my boss became the problem. Then somebody not completing work on time became the problem.
The circumstances changed. The complaints survived.
Recently, I was reminded of this while talking to one of my batchmates.
Our conversations often follow a predictable pattern. He tells me about a problem.
I listen.
He explains some more.
Out of habit, I suggest a possible solution.
He says—the solution won’t work. He explains why it won’t work.
I give an alternative suggestion.
He explains why that will not work either.
He explains why nothing can really be done.
I can see that there is no light in his world. No door, no window open to new possibilities. Then I remember.
I know this conversation extremely well because I have spent years having a version of it inside my own head.
It made me wonder how much time I had wasted doing exactly this.
The Only Difference Was
At some point, I became too impatient to keep complaining.
I decided to explore what I could do.
I wanted to build a business.
I wanted to crack UPSC.
I had ambitions beyond my job.
So I tried them. I tried and I failed.
I gave myself one year and seven months to test whether my calculations about my life were correct.
They weren’t.
Many of my decisions were impulsive. There was ambition, but not enough thinking, preparation or sustained execution.
I returned to the Bank.
Strangely, returning did not feel like defeat.
It gave me clarity.
I became aware that I was not really a victim. But I had been behaving like one.
When I joined State Bank, I had chosen to appear for a competitive examination. I had chosen to work for it. I got selected. I chose to join the Bank. I signed documents accepting that I could be posted anywhere in India.
Later, when I became unhappy, I chose to pursue something else.
And when that didn’t work, I chose to return.
Even the half-hearted effort I sometimes put into my own ambitions was mine. I cannot blame an institution for that.
This doesn’t mean institutions are always right, bosses are always fair, or circumstances don’t matter.
But at least in my own life, I discovered something uncomfortable: many things I described as being done to me were situations in which I still had choices.
Sometimes the choices were unpleasant. Sometimes they were expensive. But I always had agency.
My Health Experiment Is Teaching Me the Same Thing
I can say that my office hours are long. Morning workouts are difficult. I am tired. My sleep isn’t perfect. Hunger interferes with my diet. My body doesn’t always cooperate.
All of these things can be true.
But none of them changes the question I now find more useful:
What can I do about it?
So I experiment.
If evening workouts repeatedly fail because office hours extend, I test morning workouts.
If getting ready in the morning creates friction, I prepare beforehand.
If I miss Monday and Tuesday repeatedly, I look at the data instead of constructing a story about my lack of discipline.
If hunger becomes a problem, I experiment with food, meal timing, walking and other interventions.
I am not claiming that I have solved my health. Far from it. The Six Pack Project exists precisely because I haven’t.
But I am trying to approach it without becoming the victim of my circumstances.
This is not a philosophy I am teaching anyone. It is a life experiment I am running on myself.
And I also don’t believe that everybody around me is a victim.
I work inside the same institution as thousands of people who respond to similar constraints very differently.
That itself is useful evidence.
My circumstances are real. Institutional problems are real. Bad bosses, inconvenient postings, long commutes, failures and unfair situations are real.
But for years, I thought the institution was the problem.
Then I left, experimented and returned.
That experiment gave me something more valuable than success would perhaps have given me:
I am not a victim. I am here by choice.
Now, when I think about my colleague, I wonder how long he will continue wasting time before he arrives at the same clarity.