I was 17 when I first stayed up for 12 hours straight on a ranked FPS match. I was 21 when I stopped, mostly. There's a year in the middle I don't remember too clearly. Cranky, fatigued, low B12, sleeping when the sun came up. Two clean breaks in those four years. Two relapses. My mom locked me in the house for a year and taught me gardening, cooking, cleaning, reading. Actual skills. Boring ones. The kind that don't give you a dopamine hit in 90 seconds.
I still crave it. Not just the gaming. The Instagram presence. The flaunting. Rich restaurants, trips, a loving girlfriend, a business, a love life running in parallel, all of it. The craving doesn't go away. I just exit ranked lobbies faster now. One thought of something I wanted to build and I'm out.
I'm writing this because yesterday I got on a call with two first-year students I was supposed to mentor for a hackathon. And I felt something I didn't expect to feel: pity.
They'd sent me a proposal. AI accident prediction system. Real-time sensors, CCTV feeds, three to five years of historical data, a mobile app that would alert drivers before accidents happened. Two first-years. One B.Tech Electrical, one B.A. Economics. Zero demonstrated code. The deck had a section called "Advantages and Disadvantages for Students," which is how you know it came from a college project template.
The idea isn't bad. The execution was a PowerPoint.
I got on the phone with both of them. Ten minutes. I didn't even open with the technical stuff. I said, "My background's in software, not electronics, can you walk me through your project?"
Silence.
I tried again. "If English is slowing you down, switch to Marathi or Hindi, I'm comfortable in both."
Silence.
Then, eventually: "Sir, you tell us what to do."
I rapid-fired a few questions after that, which I regret. How will the driver actually be alerted, a biker doing 60 isn't checking his phone. Where do the sensors go, who pays for them, the government? What stops people from stealing them, what about the dust, the monsoon, the sun. Five questions in thirty seconds. They should've caught one. They caught none.
I closed the call with "okay, I'll think and let you know." Drafted a WhatsApp message that evening. Laid out the gaps. Offered one test: pick a Kaggle dataset, load it in a notebook, write five observations about it. If you can do that, we'll build something. If not, park the hackathon and come back when you have bandwidth.
Thumbs-up reaction. Nothing else.
Here's where the post turns on me.
My first instinct after that call was to write her off. Another kid stuck in the race. College, assignments, friends, boyfriend-girlfriend, hookups, Instagram, the whole thing. Validation loops from relatives and society. The kind of person who'll end up as a thought in their own head for a decade, wanting a fat paycheck or a husband with a bungalow, but never quite leaving the scroll long enough to build toward any of it.
I still think that's probably where she's headed. Statistically. Eighty-five percent of people that age are in that loop. Fifteen percent aren't. I don't know which one she is yet.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to.
At 17, I was in the loop too. Different loop. Same mechanism. A screen, a ranked ladder, a dopamine schedule, and a vague sense that the real world could wait one more match. The loop doesn't care what the content is. Gaming, Instagram, hookups, assignments, it's all the same machine running the same job: keep you busy enough that you never have to ask whether any of this is yours.
What pulled me out wasn't drive. I didn't wake up one morning with fire in my chest. What pulled me out was watching my mom and dad get older. Small details. The way a conversation they had with someone didn't land because they'd missed a beat, and I could see it and they couldn't, and I wanted to be the person who filled that gap. That's it. That's the whole origin story. Not ambition. Not vision. Just the slow arithmetic of realising my parents were finite and I was spending my hours on strangers in Discord.
And even then, I didn't do it alone. My mom locked me in the house. My dad's company gave me somewhere to go. Being pulled out of school young, which my parents still tell me was a mistake when they're scolding me, turned out to be the scaffolding that kept me from fully fusing with the loop. I didn't escape by willpower. I escaped because the people around me built walls I couldn't scroll past.
She doesn't have that. Most kids don't. College is a frictionless cage. Assignments fill the hours, Instagram fills the gaps, the degree promises a payoff at the end, and nobody in the structure is incentivised to ask whether any of it is producing a person who can build something.
So when she said "sir, you tell us what to do," I don't actually think she was being lazy. I think she was being honest in a way she didn't know she was being honest. Nobody has ever asked her to produce something without a rubric. She's 18. She's done what was asked. The hackathon was the first thing in her life that wasn't a rubric, and she tried to turn it into one by handing me the pen.
I'm not going to pick up the pen. That part I'm clear on.
But I also can't pretend I was different at her age. I was worse. I had more privilege, a gaming PC, a car at 18, a job to walk into, and I still spent four years in a chair losing B12 and being cranky with my parents. The only thing I had that she might not is a mother who was willing to lock me in the house and teach me how to grow a plant.
Here's the uncomfortable part I have to sit with.
I watched those motivational reels. The ones about kids from villages with no electricity topping exams, the ones with no privilege out-building every kid with a laptop. I know the mindset line. "It's just a matter of mindset." Maybe. But I've lived enough of my own loop to know that mindset doesn't appear out of thin air. Something has to crack you open first. A parent getting older. A humiliation. A health scare. A specific, concrete thing that makes the loop feel smaller than the world outside it.
She hasn't had that crack yet. Or maybe she has and I missed it. I was on a ten-minute phone call. I'm not her biographer.
What I know is this: I'm not going to mentor her into that crack. You can't mentor someone into wanting to build. You can only be around when they decide to, and hand them a dataset when they ask for one. I sent the message. She sent the thumbs up. That's the whole transaction. She might come back in three years having built something I couldn't have imagined. She might not. Only time will tell, and time isn't mine to spend on her schedule.
If there's a thing I want to remember from this, it's that the gap between me and her isn't drive. It's not intelligence. It's not privilege either, I had more. It's that somewhere between 17 and 21 I had people who refused to let me disappear into a screen, and a specific moment of noticing my parents were finite, and those two things added up to a direction.
Drive is the output. Not the input.
I don't know what the input is for her. I don't think she does either. And that's okay. That's actually the honest place to end this.
I still crave the loop. I just exit the lobby faster now. That's the whole difference, and some days it's not even much of one.