The Observant Life
05-sep-2026
Do yo know that 99 percent people experience life and the 1%* observe life, and the difference compounds. This is the premise of my essay. For most of my life, I believed in experiencing life, which was rewarding. It created a new set of memories etched in my mind. “You want to live” has been the motto. What drove me toward this was equal parts curiosity and the pleasure of being liberated. The same feeling that a two-year-old gets when they are out of their parents’ hands and running with gay abandon, hair bouncing around.
I used to bunk classes when I was in 5th grade, perhaps 10 or 11 years old. When I look back, the trigger was the boundary-pushing thrill of experience. It has many layers to it. On the surface, it was an escape from the teacher. Beneath it, it was an escape from the boundaries of the classroom. When I dig deeper, it was the sheer thrill that the experience offered. I have never felt guilty about doing the same.
This was a phase where experiencing life and the thrill it offered were getting built into my psyche. Movies had a profound effect too. Growing up in the tinsel-crazy world of Hyderabad, this was quite natural, I guess. Movies that inspired me had that exact effect. I loved movies that offered this thrill. The chase for the thrill became my staple. It was seeded in me subconsciously. I started traveling and hiking, and over the last 15 years, I have called myself the Experiential Guy.
However, as I started gaining more experiences, I started to notice a gap, or a bit of restlessness, in what those experiences had to offer. This was not a dramatic, out-of-the-blue, thunderstruck effect. It started gradually, and the thrill was plateauing. I thought it was a natural progression. However, life at the plateau is never exciting**.** I always sought altitude, and for the first time I started missing this thrill. I started asking questions, and in hindsight, those were not really probing enough, mostly existing at the surface level.
My solution was to progress to experiences that are hard, and that would stoke my alpha ego. That is how you beat the plateau. This was the script that I followed for the next phase of my life, and it became a pillar of how I started functioning as a human being. The degree of my experiences improved vastly. My inner circle changed accordingly. My relationship goals were altered to accommodate the new identity. I started to alienate myself from experiences and, most importantly, from people who didn’t have the same spunk to take up hard experiences. I was living my ego’s dream. My ego was writing checks for me. Did you ever experience the same feeling where your ego was driving you around?
~The Journey from Chumphon to Koh Tao that changed it all.~ Nature is a great leveler. It offers ample opportunities to reflect and change course. I had one such engulfing moment that shook me within. I encountered a person whom I judged to be below the standards that I have set. Needless to say, I was super judgmental. I bumped into this gentleman on a trip while I was traveling in South Asia. This gentleman was anything but me: a chance encounter on a ferry, riding up the waves of the Gulf of Thailand. The engine heat. The sun doing its tricks. Sitting on the hot upper deck. I was feeling super thirsty in that scorching heat, and out of nowhere he offered me a bottle of water from his well-travelled flask. If this had happened elsewhere, I would have said thank you and moved on. The very fact that it happened on a ferry, I guess, is divine intervention.
The Observant Soldier. Both of us were seated next to each other, heading out to the exact same island. The purpose was different. For me, it was doing multi-pitch rock climbing and preparing for the grueling Ironman that I had signed up for. For him, it was purely to observe life through a different lens, to appreciate the beauty of the small things, especially after he completed his mandatory enlistment. He had been a soldier for four years. Now he is on his own. He became an observer. The start of our interaction was boring and cold. From my perspective, it was cold, but the soldier was an extremely warm person. I realized this later. As we spent time together, I started observing more of him, and the realization kicked in: the true power is not accumulating experiences, but being a devotee of observation and observing more, observing the finer details and observing everything in between.
He had stoic divinity in him.
What the soldier shared was truly remarkable as our conversation began to flow. He asked me something very pertinent: Ravi, you have accumulated a ton of experiences; how have they changed you and made you a better, more wholesome person? That stayed with me for a long time. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, focused on observation as a tool for self-mastery, urging daily introspection, time management, and the detached viewing of human folly. His observations emphasize that we are not given a short life but that we waste much of it, and that self-examination is crucial for virtue.
The Soldier was wearing the Hat of Seneca.. Perhaps as children, we all had it in us. We had the energy and curiosity to observe and not be a passerby. Look at any child. They observe, and that astonishes you. How did we lose that magic? Observing life as a child, observing the mundane, observing the extreme vagaries of life, and observing human nature. This philosophy had a deep impact on me. My experience-seeking life was a linear life. It wasn’t transformational. The observant life that I embraced made me human. It made my arrogance vanish and created a different internal wiring. I became a person who is more aware of not just myself, but also of the small things that add up to the beauty of life. The most profound thing of it all is that by being an observer, a diligent observer, many things tend to compound, and that is when the magic kicks in. Perhaps this is the magic that I have been missing. Life became nonlinear. We’ve all been to family dinners. The moment there is a minute of awkwardness or stillness, we grab our phones. Chasing the new has become the norm.
I felt that many times this route made me an attendance subject rather than being present for the occasion.
Let us look at how we consume sports. We keep watching these live sporting events for the exhilarating experience they provide. The highlights and the reels give us the rush. Rarely are we truly bothered to understand and observe the story behind these games: the sport, the coaches, and the players. We miss the nuance. That is a big story. When we mindlessly consume events and content as an experience, we miss the finer details. The struggle of the team. The boxing legend, GOAT, Md Ali. He was the epitome of observation. When we sit with his interviews and behind-the-scenes work, his observation of not just the opponent, but how he reads the room, was his winning edge.
“A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life” - Md Ali. Re Read this quote and something definitely will shift internally.
Let me also share the impact on my personal life. I started observing more. I started to appreciate things. At his parent-teacher meeting, I was more observant. Once, his teacher went on to explain the finer details of my son’s curiosity, and how he loves to flip pebbles. These were the things I was missing. I could see life through the other person’s observational aptitude. This eventually led me to become intentional about being observant. If you have read this far, consider this your nudge to reclaim your agency. From someone rushing from one episode of experience to another, I was almost binging on experiences. I started slowing things down and journaling about my observations, the finer details. This led me to make decisions that I was in control of. You expand the surface area of living more, which will open more opportunities and doors. Just like I got to know more about my son and his finer interests***. It made my fatherhood complete.*** That is a big win, and the cascading effect was massive.
Being an Observant Father. The greatest joys of life...
As rhetorical as this may sound, if we dig deeper and embrace being observant as a practice, we become better fathers, better mothers, better partners, better coaches—you name it. Let us look at why we struggle to place observation into practice? The fundamental trouble is conformity. It requires confrontation with the truth. Observation brings us closer to the truth, and that is uncomfortable. High-order thinking: Observation pushes us into high-order thinking, which we safely ignore because it disturbs the status quo. Going back to the fourth day of my trip, after the realization, I started questioning the rationale behind the experience that I was seeking. I was clearly missing the depth. I was bound to conformity. Without the deliberate nudge from the soldier, I would have gone back to my past persona. These two aspects require a think-fast, think-slow approach. It is easy to slip into the experience persona rather than the observant persona.
Make observation your greatest leverage. Fill the Lack. I will have to bring the soldier back into the frame. Remember, we are sailing on the ferry. I want you to pause and reflect on a soldier in your life who changed your thinking around observation. The question beneath the question is: what will my world look like when I become a diligent observer? Where has our observant knife become blunt? If you started using AI as an all-purpose tool, like one hammer to fix everything, your surface area of being an observer drastically dulls. I felt it. Before you jump to answers from AI, which at its best is the average of the inputs given to it, become a seeker of patterns. Be obsessed with it. The greatest observers of all time, particularly in astronomy, include figures like Hipparchus, who cataloged the stars, and Galileo Galilei, the “father of observational astronomy,” who first used a telescope to study the cosmos. These individuals fundamentally changed humanity’s understanding of the universe through meticulous, sustained, and revolutionary observation.
Your Telescope! So what is your telescope? I have been using this as a metaphor to encourage being a diligent observer. One point to note: Great leaders and visionaries are unanimously recognized as great observers, not experience accumulators.
The soldier never knew he handed me anything. He was simply a man on a ferry, watching the water move, feeling the engine heat, present to all of it without needing it to be more than it was.
That is the quiet truth about observation. The teacher is rarely aware they are teaching. The moment rarely announces itself as the moment. You don’t find the telescope. You become still enough that someone places it in your hands. What will your world look like when you become a diligent observer?