Isolation shaped by hallucinatory glass windows

Originally published on Feb 9, 2026 ; published on this blog on July 18, 2026

When I was about 8 years old, I saw titanic, the movie and got obsessed with this scene where Kate Winslet does an en pointe.
I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I had no idea what ballet was and I wanted to do it. Every time I would try, I would visualize the wow in everyone’s faces in the movie and I truly believed if I could just embody Kate Winslet, I could do it. I tried and tried and tried. Every time I failed I just thought I wasn’t embodying myself into her enough.

My aunt saw me do this and snickered “You can’t do it like her all the way, though”. And I just gave up. I wasn’t Kate Winslet, why did I try so hard, I’d never be her or be the receiver of those impressive reactions.

That was one of my earlier memories of seeing something on screen and thinking I could do it. Not knowing that ballet dancers train tirelessly for years building the strength to do something like that. That it was a feat. But, seeing the end result in a completely out of context scene made me think that it was so cool, I should try.

There is a feeling of patheticness and helplessness that comes from watching someone do something well, you know it’s possible because this person did it and you can see them do it. Movies have a unique way of showing reactions to acts of grandeur where you feel like you’re in the room forgetting that it is an illusion of scripted acts and it paints your spirit although it is not real. So you think you can do it too and the reaction would be exactly the way they did in movies.

There is loneliness in the inability to do the act & delusion in how people might react to you doing this act.

I once read a story about how a 59-year-old father suffered from severe paranoia that stopped him from interacting with peers or leaving his house at all. He believed that he was being watched and followed for years and years, tracking his phone, recording him on cameras. His peers and family heard him out for a while trying to help him calm down until one day they just started laughing at him whenever he brought it up. It broke my heart. He probably felt so lonely and refused to accept help or believe otherwise.

People like this have always existed and some of our own parents going through delusions, but there is a new form of this loneliness accelerated by the offerings of modern times.
I recently came in contact with a friend, I hadn’t met her in over ten years and I was excited to know how she’s doing and hear about her life.

She was very enthusiastic to talk to me and hopefully alone. She lived with her parents mostly waiting to get married or convince her parents to send her to study abroad. She told me on the phone how she felt bad for being 29-years-old, not having a job and how her parents will not let her go abroad to study both because of economic concerns and safety. She was also disappointed at all the grooms that had come to see her.

Beneath it all, there was a desperate need to get out of being under her parents’ and other relatives’ constant supervision and their odd remarks. I struggled to convince her to get a job and move out or even train to get a job. She told me how she stood no chance being nearly 30 and her only job experience was 3 years ago. Now, spending her time scrolling on instagram or talking to people when they get the time to respond to her. She was even uncomfortable to come see me in a restaurant, worried that her parents might not like it.
I decided to give her a visit.
After engineering, she couldn’t get a job, when she did, it was non-technical and her lead asked her to come in Saturdays and Sundays to work, she tried to refuse and quit when the overworking continued.
Then a steep and steady decline into phone addiction.
A friend of hers suggested her to see an astrologer in a small town to solve her continued unemployment and dissatisfaction with life. This astrologer told her someone had done black magic on her family due to which she went through all this and why she couldn’t do well in college or get a job. The astrologer then suggested a very expensive procedure to remove the said black magic spell. Her parents now well into their old age & retired cannot afford this but they still paid for it, though skeptical. The procedure conducted at 1am in the morning sitting in between a star, the astrologer then produced a doll out of thin air that was supposedly used to conduct black magic on her family, years prior. She fully believed that this astrologer had then performed live magic in front of her. Her mother refused to believe this was magic at all and said her daughter wasted her time and money doing this. My friend, however felt that this lifted her spirits and she felt so much better.

She then proclaimed how so many miracles have happened to her despite just being at home and doing nothing (like this guy with a million followers on instagram messaged her and asked her if she wanted to be an actress, post which he proceeded to be lewd and creepy towards her when she agreed) as compared to me, who goes out into the world and lives her life despite which no miracles might’ve happened to me. And she explained this by saying that my lack of faith and good deeds have caused me to be in this position. Not perhaps thinking that if you’re alive things happen to you anyway.

After a few months of this and she was starting to feel bad again. She consulted another astrologer nearby who told her that she had another curse that was from ancestors and that her first marriage would not work, she’d have to marry again and her lifespan was very short. It will continue if they don’t do a pooja in gokarna to solve for the same, she had to be married to a tree to solve for her first marriage not working out. She was terrified. Her parents refused to spend any more money and her mother believed this to be a scam she read about in the papers. She also threatened her daughter to not see anymore astrologers. Thinking about all of this has caused her a lot of distress.

She believed a lot of her problems were due to her being unmarried - her neighbour had indecently exposed himself to her, not because he was indecent but because of something lacking in her, which was her being unmarried, her aunt had threatened to hit her and her parents were mostly annoyed with her because she refused to accept a hand in marriage from a guy that wasn’t from the city.

The thing that struck me the most interesting about this was how she didn’t think the man being indecent could also be her husband, he is indeed somebody’s husband, somebody’s father. That no matter what you do men that want to be creepy towards you because they want to.Her dad was 78 years old and she is terrified of losing him before she’s married. Her frustration and disappointment towards her parents to not help her figure out her life felt very daunting to hear about. More than anything, it terrified me that she was on her phone all day watching the rich kids doing rich kid things and also having alt right media tell her that ambani was rich, modi was prime minister and ronaldo was the best in his field, only because of their good deeds in the past and that there were angels protecting them constantly. The only reason that she wasn’t in their position was because she just didn’t do enough good deeds. The only way to get out of this is to do good to others and get that curse removed, which apparently costs upwards of 30k + travel and stay. As much as the good deeds train of thought is great, every time something goes bad - instead of critically thinking & retrospecting, it puts one in a precarious loop of “maybe I did something bad and I deserve this”. The chaotic aspect of being alive and things like gender discrimination, systemic oppression, mental health disorders and generational trauma aren’t concepts you can explore and break. But are bound to repeat.

This makes me immensely sad that once a bright, curious girl is now at the mercy of her parents, her fate and some astrologer’s words that you can’t change your fate unless you spend an exorbitant amount of money. I cannot imagine not being able to exercise your own agency as a person in this world. There’s lots of things to blame but the environment at home for young girls discouraging them from socialising leaves them severely disabled to take care of themselves by just asking around, figuring out and become autonomous. It sets them up for a life of dependency on others.

The fact that this person is an engineering graduate and waiting for life to happen has to be the saddest thing to hear of all. And her social media reflects nonsensical ideas like - be faithful, be a virgin, be clean, have good thoughts and you will find success. Which is such a load of bullshit, the brain rot perpetuating voodoo and severely nipping the little critical thinking we have has got to be the worst thing that we’ve managed to propel into humanity through social media.

Even though this might seem like an edge case, it is a lot of people that are subjected to these ideas, further exacerbated by being stuck at home and scrolling all the time that further sends them down this hole, getting harder and harder to find a smidge of reality that might snap them out of it. Just like me seeing Kate Winslet do an en pointe and wanting to do it, thinking that I could without ever knowing what it takes to get there. Everything she sees online, she knows she can have it because all these other people have it not knowing what it takes to have this life. These ideas don’t make her the greatest company to keep and she has been slowly ostracized by her peers.

Her delusions are similar to the man thinking that he is being followed and being ridiculed for it. But it’s even more dangerous that she relies on her ever changing-glass window producing fake realities to self-soothe, to tell herself that what she feels is real and relying on astrologers’ advice to solve problems, lowering her resources getting said advice whilst nothing changes in real life to make it better.
However, there is hope.
The violin is one of my favourite instruments, it’s hard to learn and it requires dedication & mentoring. I can’t even imagine learning something like the violin by myself. I see people playing it (Paganini Caprice no. 24 is my favourite musical composition on violin). And it feels so far off for me to ever play it.
I spoke to a friend about it and he told me he plays the violin, my eyes lit up in the hopes that he’d let me hold it or better, teach me. I asked him if he has a teacher and he said that he’s self taught, plays folk music and not the sophisticated arrangements. People have been teaching themselves music available to them for generations, all over the world adapting it to the local scene and he finds that it makes the instrument more approachable. I was beyond thrilled to hear this. Hearing from a real human being that something is possible and them helping you by making it less mysterious opened my eyes.

I never learnt the violin, but I do sing and play the guitar and even doing it badly gave me a community, playing with others or going to concerts or karaokes brought me closer to the people I didn’t know. The arts bring us closer to our people. But now there’s a glass separating us from the art that people make, making it unapproachable and some straight up are hallucinatory furthering us from our community, because we don’t engage in creating the arts or experiencing in the art others create, leaving a longing for both - to experience the arts and being the ones making the art. The generous people you meet around you make everything seem doable whilst the infinite scroll glass window makes extraordinary things seem doable but just out of reach for you. When you try, you slowly realise how far you are from having what they have or doing what they do.

And you spiral into a sort of loneliness and shame that can only be experienced by watching everyone living a life that you always wanted to live but its just out of reach for you in this life.

“That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?” said his son

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?” said Peter
“No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.”
“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”
“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”
-The Veldt, Ray Bradbury 1950
tie your own shoes, brush your own teeth, comb your own hair, give yourself a bath, acknowledge you exist and paint of your existence. Do it, do it badly.

This loneliness & shame of not having what the people through the glass window have is unfounded and the world is your oyster. You might not be able to replicate the exact same thing as the person you see on your glass window, but there is doable version of it out there. You will start at a few 100 levels behind the person you saw but once you stop envisioning yourself as Kate Winslet and meet yourself where you are, in the experiences capable to you, being Kate Winslet won’t matter to you anymore.

On a side note, my friend’s story is many unemployed people’s story in India. Those that are stuck at home and no way to leave. Their isolation warps their reality so far from what real life really is and stops them from ever trying anything. It is extremely concerning. This persons views were so far from mine that I couldn’t help her out. I hope one day maybe things are different, we can talk again and I hope she finds the hope to try with her own life.