Akkiblogpost

Two hours into a movie you've hated since the opening scene, you're still sitting there. Not because the second half might redeem it. You already suspect it won't. You're sitting there because you paid for the ticket, and leaving now would feel like admitting that money was wasted. Never mind that the money is already gone either way, whether you sit through the ending or walk out right now. This same broken logic, dressed up in far more serious clothing, is what keeps people in careers they've outgrown, relationships that stopped working years ago, and courses of study they lost interest in halfway through. It has a name, and once you learn to spot it, it becomes genuinely hard to unsee. The Experiment That Named This Pattern In 1985, psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer published a paper called "The Psychology of Sunk Cost" that gave this behaviour its formal name and its first rigorous experimental proof. In one of their classic scen...

You know the guy. Every family WhatsApp group has one. He watched a fifteen-minute YouTube video about the stock market last Tuesday and now he's explaining to your finance-professional cousin why Nifty is definitely going to crash next month. He's not necessarily lying. He's not even being deliberately arrogant. He genuinely, fully believes he understands this topic better than someone who's spent years studying it professionally. Meanwhile, that finance-professional cousin sits quietly in the same conversation, hedging every sentence with "well, it depends" and "I could be wrong, but." The person who actually knows the subject sounds less certain than the person who barely does. We've all seen some version of this. It happens in family conversations, workplaces, social media debates, investing discussions, health conversations, and increasingly, in the endless stream of information that arrives on our phones every day. But this isn't...

There was a colleague you genuinely couldn't stand during your first week at a new job. Loud laugh, sat a little too close during meetings, had an opinion about everything. Six months later, somehow, that same person is who you grab chai with every evening. Nothing about them actually changed. You didn't have some big heart-to-heart that resolved your annoyance. You just... saw them. Every day. Enough times that your brain quietly stopped registering them as irritating and started registering them as familiar and somewhere along the way, familiar turned into liked. This isn't a coincidence, and it isn't really about that particular colleague growing on you in any meaningful sense. There's a well-documented psychological pattern behind exactly this experience, and once you understand it, you'll start noticing it running quietly underneath a huge amount of what you assume are your own genuine, considered preferences. 📌 Key Takeaways ✅ Psycholo...

She got into IIT. Then a good job. Then a promotion nobody expected her to get so early. On paper, Meera's career looks like exactly what every Indian parent prays for at every temple visit. And yet, most mornings before a big meeting, the thought that actually runs through her head isn't confidence. It's a quiet, persistent dread: "what if today's the day they figure out I don't actually know what I'm doing." She has never said this out loud to anyone at work. Why would she? She's the one everyone else looks to as proof that hard work pays off. Admitting she feels like a fraud would feel, to her, like confirming it. If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, you're far from alone and the research on this exact feeling, particularly among Indian professionals, is more extensive and more revealing than most people realise. 📌 Key Takeaways ✅ 63% of Indian professionals reported suffering from impostor syndrome in a post-pandem...