Over dinners, and over long walks, my friends and I talk about the purposelessness of (most of) our pursuits these days. Even in a space like the academia where we’re told that our work should always strive to be socially (and morally) relevant, the day-to-day can seem empty. The long haul feels even more pointless. The moment we attempt to make our work relevant outside our fragile and distant bubbles, we realize that the real world needs something else than what we came to offer.

In this short story, I talk about my personal prison – a capitalist and individualistic system that has turned curiosity, creativity, and working for a purpose into a far-fetched reality. In this moment of my life, my prison is the academic space, where we’ve turned ourselves in and as we try to understand the world around us, we forget to ask – whose understanding is this? What and for whom is this for? We’ve created a sense of self-importance without having been stripped naked of our privileges that we are a group of people who “can know,” and by knowing, we think we are inherently important.

I’m on my last six months of the PhD, and I thought it was necessary to revisit that one interrogation room. Here’s an invitation to The Jail.