Self confidence. Who dis?

the subtle art of not being confident

Jul 04, 2026

There is a big industry out there whose sole aim is to tell you that you’re doing good. The situation is bad, you aren’t. It’s not you, it’s them. The world out there is cruel, but you my friend are the king of the jungle. So go out there and conquer the KRAs assigned to you. Crush them. You got this!

These books casually sell a million copies with titles like the Billionaire who sold his Ferrari the moment Ethanol Blending became a norm. Over and over, they tell you the same thing — ‘You got this.’

Really? I don’t think so.

What they don’t tell you, or can’t, is how. Stop overthinking, they say. Don’t feed negative thoughts to your brain. We all know that already. The knowing was never the problem.

So let’s focus on why this problem exists in the first place. Why are we not confident? Where is our mojo? Did we lose it during a Big Bazaar Wednesday sale?

Actually, the problem is much older than we think. And as you all broken minds know from your therapies, it is because of something, or rather a lot of things, that happened in your childhood.

Because here’s the thing nobody puts on the cover of these books. Middle class upbringing isn’t designed to raise kids with confidence. It is designed to make kids survival ready. Like that GMO seed which might not be nutritious, but it will surely survive pests and rain god’s wrath.

When you were born, you and your parents were already being reviewed. Your face, your gender, your skin tone, the length of your index finger against your thumb, your eyelashes, the exact minute you arrived which apparently guaranteed you’d have to marry a plant first before any human would agree to it. The list only grew from there.

You missed a milestone and you were labelled slow. The kid in the next lane, one tooth fewer, was somehow ahead of you. You reached school and the other kid had a better geometry box, one with wheels that actually spun. His subconscious already understood Transformers and Optimus Prime, while you were still working your way through Manoj Comics.

In such an environment, how would a child gain confidence? Encouragement alone was never going to cut it.

Every purchase in my house was a need. Wants were luxury items, and not every need got fulfilled exactly when it needed to. There were budgets. There were emergencies that ate into budgets. Function always won over fun, so thoroughly that buying something just for the joy of it counted as a small sin. New clothes with no wedding to wear them to and no festival on the horizon. What is this reckless behaviour, someone’s mother would ask, in that exact tone only mothers have. And this was never really the parents’ fault. Managing through everything that life kept throwing at them was already a full time job. This was the only version of parenting that survived the conditions.

And if Pavlov’s dog can salivate in a few weeks of conditioning, who are you to break from it when you faced it for years? The human mind’s pursuit to survive is crazier than you think your ex was, and it will go to any length to prove it. It’s the same instinct that kept a man alive for 127 hours with his hand stuck between two rocks in a desert, except no middle class Indian parent would ever let their child anywhere near that desert in the first place. We got the version that fits on a scooter.

I mostly got to skip the new clothes altogether, being the younger one, because my elder brother had already worn everything first. Those clothes were preserved better than any mummy in Egypt. Fewer resources are a wonderful way to erase inequality, because size stopped mattering the moment something had to be passed down.

Fidel Castro and Karl Marx were both elder brothers, incidentally. How else would two men arrive at the idea that everyone deserves the exact same treatment regardless of who they are. Communism was born out of the unspoken hand-me-down agreement between siblings everywhere. The younger one gets the same clothes, irrespective of whether they fit or not. True equality. People romanticise how communism came to be. Naive, all of them.

As a result, I wore a coat two sizes too big for an entire year. Dropped shoulders, sleeves that ate my hands. What did I do about it? I laughed. I made myself the joke before anyone else could get there first. It made the self-deprecation sound like a choice instead of a defence.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. Once, I had to help carry a cooler stand back from a relative’s house, sitting behind my brother on our father’s Bajaj Chetak. He was older, so he got to drive. I, as always, got to be the helper. Now picture this properly. I wasn’t allowed to hold the stand at my side like a sensible person. I was made to sit facing backwards, the stand fitted around me like a cage, so that anyone we passed on the road got a clear view of a boy who appeared to be under arrest, riding pillion. People laughed. I laughed harder. What else was there to do.

Humour, at least mine, some of it genetic and the rest earned the hard way, has always been a survival skill, sharpened across a long list of situations I never chose to be in. Even now, my best writing shows up on my worst days. Nearly everything funny I’ve ever written came out of stress, anxiety, or plain rage. Funny, isn’t it, that the trait I’m proudest of was never confidence to begin with. It is just survival wearing a better outfit.

Which is probably why I spent so long being envious of people who simply had confidence. What drugs were these guys on? Was their life actually perfect? Did they not have their own share of embarrassing situations, twice a day, like a prescription? How much net worth does one need before they stop questioning their own body and mind? Seriously, tell me. Is Boost really the secret of their energy? Because truth be told, Boost, Milo, and Horlicks of the world all failed to make me a tall guy, which I always thought was the real shortcut to confidence. I have never once met a six foot tall underconfident person. So either I got scammed, or their luck simply maxed out somewhere I couldn’t see.

There is no secret. There never was one. There’s just a childhood that trained you to survive first and feel confident later, if ever, and a publishing industry that noticed the gap and figured out how to sell it back to you.

That’s the real trick. The same system that raised you on rationed affection is now selling you a book to fix what it built in the first place. Most self help books don’t do anything new. They just noticed you were hungry and charged you three hundred and ninety nine rupees to say so, in bold font.

You don’t lack confidence because you skipped a self-help book. You lack it because someone once weighed your birth against your cousin’s marks, and your cousin’s marks against the neighbour’s Class 10 result, and nobody ever came back to tell you the comparing was over. It’s still running quietly in the background, like a WhatsApp forward that refuses to die no matter how many times it’s been proven false.

So here is my two rupees, free of cost, no bold font included. You don’t need to conquer your KRAs like the king of some jungle. You need to notice the jungle was rigged well before you got there, laugh at it the way I laughed at my oversized coat, and go live your very average, occasionally joyful, mostly overthinking life anyway.

The self-help guys will keep selling you the same book with a new cover every financial year. I’ll keep telling you, for free, that it was never really your fault to begin with, in exchange for a like and maybe a comment if you’re feeling generous.

You survived a childhood with no confidence-building curriculum, no foreword by a motivational speaker, and a coat two sizes too big. That was never a small thing. It was just badly disguised as one. And if a boy who once rode pillion facing backwards with a cooler stand caged around him can laugh his way to this sentence, you can probably laugh your way to the next one too.

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