Amit Das
I make things with my hands. Sketches, paintings on the walls at home, a garden, some music when I get around to it. Whatever lets me build something that isn't on a screen.
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The little walk we get to do on a given week to the sabziwala or the walk from the metro, or a post-dinner routine in the nearest park doesn't happen in silence. There's the noise from traffic, cars honking, sometimes people talking, and a lot more from the distant chatter at a chai stall.
So we gave in to podcasts, calling a friend
Most of us, in 2026, no longer know how to walk somewhere without something in our ears. The walk to the sabziwala. The walk from the metro. The silence has become unbearable.
This week, before next Sunday, walk somewhere without your headphones in. Twenty minutes. Once.
The walk is not for thinking. The walk is for nothing. If you come back with nothing, the walk worked.
You will hate the first ten minutes. You will reach for the phone twice without realizing your hand is reaching. You will start composing a tweet about how strange it is to walk without headphones. Your mind, denied a podcast, will offer to be one.
Don't be a podcast.
Around minute eleven, something will shift. You will notice the horn of the auto. The bird. The woman selling jasmine outside the temple. The headphones were not just adding sound. They were subtracting the world.
A few of you will, on minute fourteen, have a thought you have been avoiding for months. I should leave the job. I do not love him anymore. It has been waiting for the headphones to come off. Don't reach for the phone. Let it sit next to you for the rest of the walk. The shape is the work.
By 2032, the people who walk without headphones will be obvious to each other. They will know the name of the man who sells the tomatoes.
Be one of them.
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The most taboo thing a person can do in 2026 is have an experience and not tell anyone about it. Simple. This means that one would live an hour, a slow Sunday afternoon, have great coffee at home, take pictures with visiting parents, get on a long call with your dadi, and not let it become content. These lived moments do not need to become something except the actual thing it was. The lived moment doesn't need to be 'repurposed.'
I know a lot of people around me who already do this. And then a some who don't do this. Become the kind of person who can have something happen and not tell anyone.
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Somewhere over Rajasthan, I opened the Kindle app on my iPad mini and started reading a book I'd just bought. This is my second time leaving paper. I own over 800 physical books now. The shelves at home are full. Unfortunately, the floor stacks have become their own piece of furniture. It has its own beauty but it's borderline messy.
The arc of my reading journey, if you're interested is as follows. In February 2017, I gave up on paper and bought a Kindle Oasis. It was my first Kindle device and I got the Oasis instead of the Paperwhite because I wanted the light one with longer battery. I immediately fell hard for it. I also made a sensible rule — physical for illustrated or graphic books, digital for everything else. You know if you travel with a couple of books, they cross 3kg easily, which is the sort of fact you learn when you're the one carrying them and find yourself moving to the cabin bag at the check-in counter.
Five years in, 2022, I drifted back to pens, highlighters because… there's a specific satisfaction of dog-earing a page. I sold the Oasis and went full paper again. Bought more books than any single human should own in a country where we pay rent by the square foot.
During my last trip packing, I pulled four books off a shelf for a two-week trip, weighed the bag, put three back. I packed the thinnest one and finished it on day two.
Which is how I ended up here, at 35,000 feet, opening the Kindle app again.
No Kindle device this time. This time it's my favourite iPad mini with the pencil for notes. Goodnotes in split view occasionally. On the iPad with a matte screen guard, it feels like writing. Will apply the same rule as before — illustrated books stay physical, everything else goes digital. This time it's just a different device.
I hope this sticks.
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A few weeks ago, at the airport lobby, I picked up the Fortune magazine (India edition) from the bookstore. The cover story was compelling - The star designer who's reimagining Samsung. Followed by another - The world's most admired companies.
This was around the time when I was reading and putting together my South Korea & Samsung blog post.
Samsung electronics has hired Mauro Porcini as Chief Design Officer who's previously led design at 3M and PepsiCo and started his career as a product designer at Philips. He recalls moments from 3M where he was pissed at the fact that his designs were beautiful and functional but the packaging and overall retail and digital experiences were ugly. He pushed them to be done in the proper way which naturally pissed a lot of people there especially because doing this bit wasn't part of his job description.
He also put a simplistic approach to split responsibilities cleanly where designers come with human-centric approach, marketing with business, and R&D with technology on the table.
The article also covers the transformative story of Samsung all the way up to how they treat design today. For instance, Samsung executives assumed customers cared only about video and audio quality in televisions while the designers argued how TVs look is equally important since the TV spends more time off than on making it more like furniture than source of entertainment. Samsung's Frame TV was born as a result of that argument.
Porcini will now focus on making consumer devices from the ground-up given the ruling age of AI. He'll build towards devices that no longer need to adhere to the known form - the phone doesn't need to look like a smartphone at all. Today, it's important to bring more human into the equation since AI and robots will eventually become a commodity.
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Earlier this month, for a long 10-hour+ journey, I printed a 4,000-word essay (from Substack) to read on the flight. I just didn't want to read it on the screen (phone or tablet).
I've been doing this more lately. Now, I read physical books and trying to switch to ebooks between 2016-2019 on a Kindle didn't help. Something about the screen has started making me feel like I've read something but keeping a slow pace to absorb properly becomes ridiculously difficult. It makes me just want to keep scrolling. I don't have a clean explanation for it but I notice the difference.
I still write on the blog. That part isn't changing. It's where I figure out what I think before I know what I think. But I've started wondering whether a 2000-word post is the right delivery for ideas that are better shown than described. The person I want to reach in India in 2026 is probably more likely to watch than to read. I've been thinking of using AI more often to convert these into polished short YT reels so the blogs get more reach. Then the time required to polish them to achieve visuals as I want becomes a task. Maybe someday. I haven't started that and will probably figure out as the year progresses.
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A few weeks ago, I split my social accounts into three spaces (for now). A private Instagram album. A public Instagram workshop, and something on LinkedIn that doesn't make me cringe. Honestly, I don't know how to use that platform beyond the occasional hiring posts.
I've had @one.more.colour on Instagram for years. I'd use it haphazardly by sharing (uploading) things when I remembered to while scrolling through the phone gallery. Nandini, my wife, keeps poking me, "your relationship with social media is complicated." Here's my new thing. It was obvious that phone cameras replaced the physical album so we kept on capturing everything and revisiting nothing. My phone is a graveyard of thousands of photos I don't look at. I want to undo some of that. I am turning it into something closer to what families used to do with physical albums before camera phones existed. They would print a selected set of photos, walk through different phases of life, revisit a beach vacation or a school year or a house move. The album was for themselves and a small circle.
I removed 2,200 followers from this account because I want it private. I kept only the people I am genuinely comfortable sharing my life with. My ideal future version of this is what I half-jokingly call a 'zero gallery.'
@godgeez is the public Instagram account. I share my work at Native here along with the stuff I find inspiring and some other things I keep creating. Like the private account, I've not treated it with attention. I hope to turn this account into a loosely linked set of set of themes across hardware, systems, design judgment, and building in the real world. The build journey of Native products and the trade-offs we make. A lot of "this failed, here is why" moments that I find myself thinking about for weeks afterward. I hope to make this is a better working log to share the journey with other builders.
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I wrote my first blog on Blogspot. I think I was in standard 10th, 2004. Then Orkut through college, then Facebook, then the rest of it as the years went by.
Looking back, that early era felt like something. Everyone I knew (school friends, college friends, mutual friends, crushes) were in one place with their life updates, photos, and I was looking forward to opening the tab just to see what had happened. It was like a shared living room where you could drop in anytime and somebody would be there.
Two decades later, that feeling is completely gone.
I can't quite articulate what changed but I can feel it every time I open the apps now. It's tiring before I've even seen anything. Something shifted at some point and I missed it happening. And now I'm standing in what used to be the living room and it's turned into a casino.
I'm not going to throw my phone into a lake. I'm also not writing one of those posts about deleting all my accounts. What I'm doing is more boring: figuring out what I actually want from these platforms, and redesigning my presence around that instead of around whatever the algorithm prefers or what trend bandwagon the world has moved on to. I intend to redesign how I use these platforms from the inside, with some actual intention behind the decisions.
I split my online presence into three spaces. A private Instagram album. A public Instagram workshop. A hardware journal on LinkedIn. Each with a specific job and goal.