Hina Agarwal | Everyday People 116

Everyday People

Welcome to Everyday People, a show featuring the admirable people all around us. Here are your timestamps:

* 00:00 What’s new with you, TxU?

* 03:18 Everyday People w. Hina Agarwal

* 01:09:50 Mailbag

* 01:12:20 Letters to Myself

Hi! This is the last episode of the year.

Thorough and Unkempt is a reader-supported publication. Thanks for becoming a free or paid subscriber!

What’s new with you, TxU?

This week’s blog:

Everyday People — Hina Agarwal

Hina is a manager in a SaaS startup in Bangalore, managing the customer success team and operations in India. She is also my colleague. We sat down for this conversation after 6 months of me chasing her and finally “putting her in a chokehold” by taking her laptop and blocking her calendar.

We recorded this in a cafe, so apologies for the background noise.

Quotes from the conversation:

On maintaining friendships as an adult:

Fortunately I have a lot of people who are very close to me. I have friends from school, which I finished in 2004! One of my best friends [is someone] I met in 2002. We do a lot of trips together. We are stupid together, although we think we’re very intelligent. I have a lot of friends who go back 15-20 years.

Obviously not everybody lives close by, but we’re well-connected, and you can feel that connection. Any person that you can laugh with, without being judged, is a friend that lasts.

On gardening as a hobby:

I grew up in a small town (Meerat in UP). When you’re not from a Tier 1 city, then you end up living in big houses. I had a garden, which I did not do anything to maintain. It was my parents doing it, and we had a gardener. But we had hundreds of plants.

I am very close to nature. That’s possibly why I can spend time on my own. I just moved into my own home last year, and before that I was on rent. But I always had a huge collection of plants. It makes you happy to look at greenery around you.

Something that surprises me is that they need such little care. A little bit of sunlight, some water, and they’re good. They’re flourishing. As people, you need a hundred things every day to get by. The simplicity of [plants] is refreshing.

On her work-life balance now in her mid-thirties:

I don't think of a work-life balance and things like that. Now when I'm working, it’s only a part of my life.

But it is a pretty major part of my life because I'm spending most of my time working. That's something which I keep in mind, not to cause me stress, but because I am responsible for some things.

Also I have pretty good people to work with. My manager is amazing and is a friend. When you're working and you can talk about things apart from work, then it's obviously good. If you can't have friends at work, it's not going to last.

So now [work] flows well. I know what I’m good at, and what I need help with. In the initial bits of my career, it was very difficult for me to ask for help, because I wanted to figure everything out on my own. Because that's what makes a strong, independent woman. Now that feels overrated, you become that over time. It's not something that you need to be super serious about.

Now I just want to just to make sure that I'm also able to provide the help I received. Sometimes [people] just want to talk it out, and maybe family or friends are not the right people because they don’t understand the space. So then you need friends at work. That’s something which Singular has also given me where I can express myself.

On her relationship with money:

Like with everything else, I think I've become more comfortable with it. I have always been responsible with money. I am not a spendthrift, but I have also not been somebody who has run out of money by the end of the month, even in my student days. And I'm also somebody like who will spend on others.

I'm not somebody who is very hung up on always going to fancy places or spending on brands. So that helps save money. *laughs*

My father used to work in a bank and he was the only one working and raising the entire family, and taking care of everything. Even though he was working in a bank, I think the only time he took a loan was possibly for when he was building his home. And I think a small one for his car.

We were just surviving on one person salary, right? So there was always this notion that you have to use it very, very wisely. And because of that, he did not even let us take an education loan. So everything which I did, it was sponsored by my father, which is great. Like even my MBA was done. Otherwise I would have [struggled with a] loan with an extremely huge rate.

That's what he taught us. You have to be good enough with what you are doing, what you are making. There’s a saying in Hindi, “jitni chaadar utne pair” (Your legs should only be as long as your blanket). So you have to be wise with what you're doing.

(This is all from the first 20 minutes of the conversation! Listen to the podcast for more like this.)

Hina’s recs:

A travel channel Hina enjoys is Ronnie and Barty. She strongly recommends it as something you can just watch again and again.

Mailbag

Send your letters for the show by commenting below, or by emailing [e-mail].

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

This question used to be the cliche interview question, but nobody asks it anymore. Planning 5 years ahead is no longer feasible, not in your professional life nor your personal life.

If you do want to plan ahead, I suggest trying a year long deadline at most. Also, try creating a vision board - a collection of images that inspire the goals you want to set. That gives you a visual tool to help you plan better.

Thorough and Unkempt is a reader-supported publication. Thanks for becoming a free or paid subscriber!

Letters to Myself

Hello Vaibhav,

I’m ending the year happy, but burnt out. It’s such a strange experience.

Happiness feels so fragile. It’s hard not to treat happiness as the absence of discomfort. The moment something goes wrong, I’m no longer “happy”.

This has been an incredible year for me. I turned thirty. I took my first-ever solo trip. I planned, though could not execute, international travel. I restarted Everyday People as a podcast. I became leaner, healthier, and more stable. I learned, I taught, I made people laugh. Loneliness started to mean less, and being social became easier.

And yet as I approach the finish line, I find myself flagging again, not enjoying the things I loved, not wanting to do anything, not wanting to chase more.

Happiness feels so fragile, but when I loosen my grip on it, it doesn’t break as easily. I’m not happy, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be happy. Just be.

We do things because we want to do them, and this year, that has never been more true. We do things because nothing matters, so we might as well pass the time and smile along the way. Who said happiness has to be the goal? We will continue to chase newness, because then happiness comes right back, kowtowing us to take it along for the ride.

Let happiness chase us. We’re done running behind anybody.

Not a chaser,Vaibhav.

Get full access to Thorough and Unkempt at vaibhavguptawho.substack.com/subscribe