On Slow Days!

My old school friend runs a dairy. His father built it. His grandfather before that.

We were sitting outside couple of weeks back, coffee in hand, talking about nothing in particular. At some point, we started talking about business. How our fathers did it. How the people we watched build things when we were growing up actually went about it.

They didn’t have a five-year plan. They had a product, a reputation, and a quiet belief that if you showed up every day and didn’t cut corners, the thing would eventually hold its own weight.

My friend’s father knew every customer by name. Not as a strategy. Just because that was how you ran a business when the business was also your life.

We didn’t say what we were both thinking. That we couldn’t name many founders our age building that way.

I spent a day last month refreshing my Shopify dashboard every twenty minutes. Nothing was wrong. I was just checking. Morning numbers, afternoon numbers, end-of-day numbers. The compulsive kind of checking that happens when you have let a number become the measure of whether the day was real. At some point, I caught myself and felt embarrassed.

I once read Byung Chul Han writing about something he called the achievement society. The idea stayed with me. He says we have replaced the external voice telling us what we cannot do with an internal one that keeps saying there is no limit to what we can do.

At first, that sounds like freedom. His argument is that it is a more sophisticated trap. Nobody is pushing you. You are doing it to yourself. Constantly. Quietly. Without ever stopping to ask where exactly you are trying to get.

The burnout is not a side effect. It is the design.

Every founder conversation seems to arrive at the same place now. The target. The timeline. The next version of the business that will finally feel like enough. There is a particular look people get when they talk about the number. Slightly desperate underneath the confidence. As if the target is not a destination, but a line that keeps moving. Ten crore will feel like fifty crore feels now. The goalpost is not fixed. That is the point. Our fathers didn’t talk this way.

I don’t think it is only happening in business. It is happening in the way we relate to almost everything. Work. Love. Friendship. Attention. Even boredom. People leave faster now. Replace faster. Stay with less patience.

The friction of continuing with something, of being known by someone across years, of finding a reason to remain after the novelty has gone quiet - that friction has started to feel optional.

Greed is not only financial anymore. It has become a way of relating to life. More options. Faster results. Lower tolerance for anything that takes time.

A business that takes seven years to find its footing feels too slow. A relationship that needs real work before it becomes easy starts to look like a warning sign.

We have not only lost patience. We have started distrusting anything that requires it.

The thought I keep returning to is that the answer may not simply be rest. Rest can become another task. Another thing to optimise. Another way to become a better version of yourself by Monday morning.

Maybe the harder thing is to be with something without immediately converting it into use. To build something slowly because the slowness is not a weakness, but part of what makes it worth building. My friend’s dairy is not a ten-crore business. He is not sure he wants it to be. The version that gets there may be a different business, with different problems, run by someone who no longer has time to sit outside with tea and talk about nothing. He seemed settled about this. I found that hard to locate in myself.

House of Kanzan will probably not be a ten-crore brand in the way people mean when they say that. The version that gets there quickly is not this. It is something else wearing the same name.

And maybe that is worth admitting. My friend’s grandfather built a dairy. He did not build a brand. I think about that difference more than I probably should.