Everyone who posts on social media has already accepted a deal they refuse to accept anywhere else.

The deal sounds like this: do your best work. Show up consistently. Understand your audience. Tailor the message. Refine the craft.

And after all of that, the discipline, the study, the daily commitment, there is no guarantee.

None.

The algorithm does not promise virality.

It does not promise reach.

It does not promise that the thing you spent eleven hours on will outperform the thing you made in twenty minutes.

What it does promise is this: if you stop, nothing happens.

Guaranteed.

No guarantee of upside. Certain inevitability of downside if you disappear.

And somehow, across every course, every expert, every content strategist... everyone nods.

Agrees. Accepts. Posts anyway.

Nobody sends an invoice to the algorithm.

Now apply that same logic to a life decision.

Leave a stable career.

Start something from nothing.

End a relationship that looks fine from the outside but has been quietly hollowing you out for years.

Suddenly, the same people who accepted three years of algorithmic uncertainty want results by month two.

I left one of the most secured job from a public sector bank.

The kind of career path that carries its own gravitational pull... guaranteed pension, post-retirement income, a social respect that doesn't require explanation.

I left to start a cloud kitchen.

First-generation founder. No lineage in business. No direct experience in the industry. No template.

I'm not writing this to argue that the choice was correct or incorrect.

That isn't the point.

The point is what arrived next.

Not the disagreement about leaving the job, that was expected.

What followed was something more specific.

A sustained evaluation that dressed itself as curiosity but functioned as an audit.

An old colleague, a few months in: "You must be getting bags of cash every day by now."

Family, around the same time: "Are you making some money? Are you getting your break-even?"

Not technical language. Simple words.

But the calculation underneath them was precise.

Input vs output, cost vs benefit, pounds placed vs pounds returned.

As if beginning something from scratch should resemble placing £100 on a table and watching £1000 appear by morning.

The questions started from month two.

They didn't stop.

Different people, different months, same underlying mathematics.

Here is the part I didn't see at the time.

The evaluation didn't stay with them.

I started noticing it when I realised I wasn't mentally free anymore... not around business conversations, not around anyone who had ever asked.

I began avoiding colleagues.

Not just the ones who questioned the choice, even the ones who might.

I stopped talking about business in family settings.

Redirected conversations before they could arrive at the question I already knew was coming.

And then something quieter happened.

I started asking myself the same questions.

Not because I believed them.

But because when enough people examine your journey through a particular lens... consistently, over months, that lens begins to feel like your own.

This is what an infiltrated evaluation looks like.

It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive as someone else's opinion you're choosing to adopt.

It arrives as your own thinking... already installed, already operating, already colouring how you assess what you've built and what you haven't.

The criteria were never mine.

But by the time I noticed, they were running the assessment.

And here is where the inconsistency becomes impossible to ignore.

The algorithm, the one we're all so patient with, is actually governed by companies.

It has rules, even if those rules shift.

There are patterns that can be studied, behaviours that can be reverse-engineered, probabilities that can be partially mapped.

The algorithm has, if not certainty, at least a structure of intelligibility.

Life has none of that.

No company governs it. No pattern guarantees returns. No consistency of input produces a calculable output.

Life is not 2 + 2 = 4. There is no mathematics of life.

And yet.

We grant the algorithm, the more structured, the more decipherable, the more rule-bound system → years of patience.

We grant life, the wilder, the more unknowable, the fundamentally unpredictable → months.

The thing with clearer rules gets infinite tolerance.

The thing with no rules at all gets audited like a quarterly earnings report.

This isn't a failure of logic. It's a failure of permission.

We've given ourselves permission to exist inside uncertainty when the identity cost is low.

A post that doesn't land costs nothing socially. A reel that underperforms doesn't invite dinner-table scrutiny.

The algorithm domain feels safe, not because it's predictable, but because nobody evaluates your life through it.

But when the stakes involve how you're perceived, your career, your stability, the story others tell about your choices... the permission disappears.

Uncertainty becomes evidence of error.

The absence of proportionate results becomes proof that the decision was wrong.

Not proof that the decision hasn't finished unfolding.

Proof that it was wrong.

I'll be honest about something.

The infiltration still happens. Even now.

Someone asks a question with a particular tone, and for a moment, the old lens activates, the one that evaluates through imported criteria, the one that measures against mathematics that don't exist.

But the realignment happens faster now. Months become days. Sometimes quicker still.

Not because the external evaluation stopped.

It didn't.

But because the direction became visible, the direction from which the criteria arrived, and the fact that they were never generated internally.

That doesn't resolve anything.

It just makes the pattern recognisable in real time.

The Mathematics Lie isn't that we expect too much from life.

It is that we pretend life has mathematics at all, and feel betrayed when existence doesn't honour equations it never agreed to.

We are more patient with an algorithm than with our own existence.

And the strangest part isn't that we do this.

It's that we've never stopped to notice.

Where in your life are you applying mathematics that don't exist?

Until next week,

love,

aayush

hustle peacefully!