Dussehra just passed, and Diwali is around the corner. I like the festival season, but it also makes me anxious. I want to be part of people’s celebrations. But what happens when I have to say no? Why do I feel guilty refusing something simply because I’m able to do it?
This letter is a sort of a report on that guilt because for the last month I've been the man saying NO to everyone. Did I disappoint them all? Maybe. But I had my reasons. Saying yes had helped me become useful and trusted. However, being helpful had started to feel like something I had to do to remain a good person.
I had to change that because it was affecting something important. For me the festival season is also a reminder that the year is nearly over. My rule of thumb: If you haven't done 80% of the goals you set for yourself this year, you're unlikely to make it happen now. Sorry to burst your bubble. (I guess I'm not.)
My goal was to write a book. For that, I needed to spam your LinkedIn and Instagram, both of which I did. As they say, a great product not marketed well is just an average product. But more importantly, I had to actually write the book. And it seemed I had time for everything except writing it: a quick catch-up, a dinner plan, making AI agents do cool things.
To make up for the lost time, last month I ran an experiment. I started saying no to the things that came my way. Big requests, small favours, invitations. Even things I could easily have done.
My sister-in-law asked me to buy her something. A Dyson hair-curling thing. I didn’t even open the link. I told her my sister knew more about this stuff than I did. 'No.'
An old friend messaged me asking for an introduction to someone in China with whom I hadn’t spoken in five years. I couldn’t remember our last conversation. 'No.'
Then came a podcast invitation. This one was harder. The host was an old acquaintance, sort of a friend. If a stranger had asked, turning it down would have been easy. Still, 'no.'
I turned down dinner date invitations. My line was, “I can’t miss my morning meditation.”
Someone I hadn’t heard from in ages wanted a casual catch-up call. 'No.'
I was deliberately refusing things I would normally have agreed to, or at least spent twenty minutes finding a polite excuse to avoid. At the end of each day, I sat down and wrote how I felt, and why. Saying no was one part of the experiment. Sitting with how it felt was the other.
Bhali kar, bhali paa
When you think you have the resources to help and you don’t, guilt eats at you. That’s because guilt is one of the most human feelings. It proves we can reflect on our actions. But the difficulty of saying no is not a certificate of kindness. Rather, it's a result of our social conditioning.
I met a woman in a bookstore recently. As we talked, I got the impression that her family relied on her, but she had little room to disagree with them. I didn’t know her whole life, but I wondered how long she had been the one expected to understand, adjust, and never say no. Our conversation made me think about how being a dependable child can become a role you keep carrying as an adult. That role makes people trust you and seek help from you. You become good at noticing what needs to be done. And who questions something everyone praises them for? You learn to be the one who helps. Other people learn to keep asking. Somewhere in that arrangement, having needs of your own can start to feel like breaking a promise.
My mother had a favourite saying: “Bhali kar, bhali paa.” Do good, and good comes back to you.
We all grow up within the boundaries set by this moralising fence. Until you want something different. The freedom to disagree. An evening to yourself. Time for your own work. By doing so, you’re not just turning down a request, but letting down a version of you everyone has come to rely on.
I had begun to wonder where helping ended and ‘owing’ began. A request for your time in the midst of a tight schedule can put you in a dilemma. Being generous or helpful comes at a cost. The guilt of having betrayed yourself. Conversely, owning your life comes at the cost of feeling guilty of not being helpful.
Guilt is a poor indicator
I have no idea what actually happened when I said no to people. Nobody complained to me. I do not know exactly how they felt, and I have no clear evidence that I had hurt them. It turns out that guilt after saying no is a poor indicator of whether one has actually violated a duty. Research says that I may have been imagining more disappointment than I actually caused others. Across five experiments on declining invitations, researchers Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk found that people saying no expected more anger, disappointment, and damage to the relationship than the people receiving the refusal reported. It means we can mistake the reaction we fear for the reaction they will have.
In 1998, psychologists Heidi Fritz and Vicki Helgeson reported four studies that separated caring about others from caring about others while leaving yourself out. The second pattern was linked to neglecting yourself, relying on others to feel worthy, and greater distress. It wasn’t simply a question of how much you cared. It mattered whether that care included you.
I worried about being kind to the person asking. But whose responsibility was it to be kind to me, to understand that I was the one who would have to postpone, cancel, or give up?
I still believe in being ‘kind’. But I don’t think kindness should require one person’s needs to disappear. Especially when that person is always you. At the start of the year, I had promised myself I would write a book. Yet every time someone asked for something, that promise became the easiest one to move. I felt bad about letting them down, not myself.
Maybe you have something like that too. Something you wanted to learn, build, or make time for this year. Before you conclude you lacked the discipline to achieve that, ask how often you sacrificed that discipline because you could not say no to someone.
My self-worth is not tied to the burden of ‘yes’
Running a startup for more than ten years taught me that I couldn’t make everyone happy. I learnt that a decision could disappoint someone and still be the right decision. But I have found it difficult to apply in my personal life - as a friend, a son, or even a lover.
I don’t want to become someone who says no to everything. I like helping people. I like dinners, conversations, and being someone my friends can call. My experiment last month wasn’t to test if I could stop doing those things. It was to notice how often I agreed before considering what I was giving up.
The book project helped me see it. But I shouldn’t need a book, a company, or a deadline to make my own time count. Otherwise, rest will always lose to somebody else’s request.
Before your next automatic yes, take a moment to name what you would have to set aside. You may still choose to help because some people and some responsibilities deserve that from you. But your own needs too deserve a place in the decision.
Caring and reliability are not measured by the number of bags you carry for others, but by whether your ‘yes’ is a choice rather than a fear-driven obligation. Guilt is the alarm you learned to feel when you put one bag down, not proof that you have failed as a person. The more one’s worth is tied to being the person who always says yes, the more impossible it feels to say no - even when your hands are clearly full.
Caring and reliability must be redefined as sustainable, choice-based practices. Carrying everyone’s bags until you can no longer carry your own is not caring. It is a slow form of self-erasure that, over time, undermines both your capacity to help and the quality of your work and relationships.
I feel lighter these days. Saying no is liberating, even with the guilt. It takes me back to the yogashala where my transformation had started. After a gruelling morning practice, everyone would sit around and eat breakfast together. I’d say no. Then they’d go off to mingle, and I’d say no to that too. The ‘no’ was not intended, but spontaneous, born out of my need to be in solitude. Feeling guilty, I asked my teacher, Om sir, “I feel like I’m saying no to everyone. Is it selfish?”
He said, “It’s not selfish. It’s self-care.”