u/kichusan

I'm 23, based in Mumbai, and I've never been in a relationship.

I graduated in 2024 and have been working remotely since then. While remote work has been great in many ways, it has also made it difficult to meet new people. Unlike college, there isn't a natural environment where I'm regularly interacting with women around my age.

I genuinely want to experience dating and relationships, not just for the sake of having a girlfriend, but because I want to build a meaningful connection with someone. It feels like a big part of life that I've never really had the chance to explore.

Before anyone suggests hobbies, I've tried putting myself out there. I've joined hobby classes, gone to the gym, started swimming, attended concerts solo, and made a few acquaintances along the way. The problem is that most connections stay surface-level and rarely turn into close friendships or opportunities to meet more people.

Dating apps haven't worked particularly well for me either, and they often feel very transactional.

A bit more context. I lost my dad when I was 12, so a lot of my teens and early 20s were spent focusing on studies, work, and building a stable life rather than dating. Looking back, I think that's part of why I feel behind when it comes to relationships.

For people who were in a similar position after college, how did you eventually meet your partner? Was it through friends, work, hobbies, cold approaches, social events, or something else? I'd appreciate honest advice.

I'm 23, living in Mumbai, and I've never dated anyone. I graduated in 2024 and have been working a remote job ever since.

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The biggest challenge is that remote work doesn't really create opportunities to meet new people. Most of my friends are busy with their own lives now, and unlike college, there isn't a natural environment where I regularly meet women my age.

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I genuinely want to experience dating, relationships, and hopefully fall in love someday. It feels like everyone talks about enjoying their 20s, but I'm not even sure where people are meeting potential partners anymore.

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Before anyone suggests hobbies, I've tried putting myself out there. I've been to gyms, started swimming, and even attended a few concerts solo. Those experiences were great, but they never really led to meeting new people. Dating apps haven't worked for me either, and I don't think they're the best fit for what I'm looking for.

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So I wanted to ask the women here: if you met a decent guy in this situation, what would you suggest he do? How would you want someone to approach dating and meeting people in a way that feels natural and respectful?

Edit: Some context that might be relevant. I lost my dad when I was 12, so dating and relationships were never really a priority growing up. I spent most of that time focusing on studies and building a stable future. I'm 5'7" with a dusky complexion, and while I don't think those things define me, they do make me wonder whether I'm missing something when it comes to dating.

So on paper, I am doing well. I have a good job, I'm trying new hobbies, and life is generally moving in the right direction.

But during my diploma years and engineering, I never really met people with whom I could build long-lasting friendships. I also never found a group that would just go on random trips, hang out, and create memories together.

I was very introverted back then, which is one of the reasons I don't have many friends today. I have improved myself a lot in the last 1 year and feel that I am more of an ambivert now.

Growing up was also hard for me. For a long time, I was focused on survival and saving as much money as possible. Because of that, I often held myself back from socializing with people who seemed carefree, outgoing, and able to enjoy life like normal teenagers.

I know a lot of the fault lies with me. Looking back, there were many opportunities where I could have put myself out there more.

But now that I am finally free from most of the survival challenges in life, and can actually see a future beyond just getting through the next month, I feel like I missed out on so much.

I want to make my life better. I want to enjoy the rest of my 20s. I'm 23 right now and will turn 24 soon, but I don't have many core memories that make me feel like I truly lived my youth.

I live in Mumbai, and I haven't even been to Lonavala, which feels like a rite of passage for every friend group at some point. I can solo travel, and I already have done a bit of that and plan to continue. But let's be honest, some experiences are simply better when shared with people who matter to you.

The frustrating part is that I still don't have those people. The problem is made even worse by the fact that I work from home. Unlike people who go to an office and naturally meet coworkers, my social circle doesn't really grow on its own. Most days, it's just me working from my room.

I know everyone says, "Get hobbies and meet people through them," but honestly, making friends as an adult is hard. At this stage, I don't just want random acquaintances. I want genuine friendships. The kind where you can call someone when life gets difficult. The kind that lasts years. The kind of friends you invite to your wedding someday.

And sadly, I don't have that.

Does anyone else feel this way?

TL;DR: Humans act as the accountants of reality, we obsessively label and record everything to make it "exist" (building a collective ledger). But our biological memory is full. AI isn't here to replace human thought; it’s an external hard drive taking over this ledger. By offloading the micro-management of reality to AI, humanity is finally free to "look up," perceive higher dimensions, and climb the Kardashev scale.

Pls read, it won't take more than 2 minutes:)

I’ve been sitting on this thought for a few years. It isn’t a grand theory. It’s just this recurring pattern that keeps showing up in physics, in how we build systems, and in theology. I finally had to get it out of my head.

Let me start where this always starts for me: with a name.

Your name. Mine. The street you grew up on. The river that splits your city. Every single one of these things exists to us because a human stopped, pointed at it, and gave it a label.

The Ledger

I keep returning to this strange thought. Human beings don't just live inside reality. We constantly index it.

A kid is born and before they can even speak, we assign them a name, a surname, a timestamp, and a nationality. We map mountains. We classify clouds. We give hurricanes human names, probably because chaos feels less scary when it has an identity.

Somewhere right now, a scientist is documenting a microscopic bacteria under the ice in Antarctica and logging it into a database. Somewhere else, an astronomer is writing down the coordinates of a dead star.

The strange part to me is this. The moment we observe something and write it down, it becomes part of our working reality.

Before we mapped germs, sickness felt supernatural. Before we mapped tectonic plates, the ground felt permanent.

Sometimes I wonder if civilization itself is just this massive process of observing and recording reality faster and faster. We aren't just building tools. It feels like we are acting as the accountants of existence. We’re running a collective ledger of what’s real.

And this creates a weird tension when you look at modern physics. What actually happens to things before we log them in the ledger?

Quantum mechanics has a deeply uncomfortable answer for this. At the quantum level, particles aren’t just tiny rocks waiting to be found. Before you measure them, they exist as a wave of probabilities. It’s only when you interact with them that this wave collapses into a measurable state.

It’s called the observer effect. Not because our brains magically create matter, but because the act of measuring changes the thing you're measuring.

That idea has haunted me for a while. Because humanity itself seems built entirely around observation. We observe. We label. We store. We transmit.

Sometimes it feels like our entire experience of reality depends on us continuously observing and updating this ledger.

The Problem With Two Eyes

Look at particle physics. It’s basically our ledger obsession taken to the extreme. We smash protons together at the speed of light and dig through the debris, hoping to find a new piece to label.

It works, but it feels like brute-force trial and error. We’re trying to understand an infinite system using our two eyes. It’s computationally heavy.

But what if there's a more elegant way the universe operates? What if you didn't have to observe things one by one to make them real?

The Higher Dimension

Imagine you’re a 2D drawing on a piece of paper. A circle drawn next to you is just a wall. You can't see inside it. But me, as a 3D person looking down at the paper, I see the whole circle, the inside, the outside, all at once.

Some physicists talk about the "block universe" theory. It’s the idea that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, and our consciousness just moves through it slice by slice.

If a creator exists in a higher dimension, maybe they don't experience time frame by frame like a movie. Maybe time is just a solid landscape to them. The whole ledger we spend centuries writing, they’d just see it in a single glance.

If I were trying to design a system to manage trillions of galaxies, I wouldn't build it so it requires constant, manual observation. I'd build it from a higher dimension where the whole map is visible at once.

The Handover

Right now, the ledger has simply gotten too big.

We have generated more knowledge, more labels, and more measurements than any biological brain can hold. There was a time when a single person could comprehend almost all the major sciences of their era. Today, the sheer volume of what we have indexed is incomprehensible. You can spend an entire lifetime studying one specific sub-field of physics or biology and still not scratch the surface of what is known.

Our biological memory is basically full.

Human civilization has always scaled through externalized memory. First speech. Then writing. Then libraries. Then the internet.

AI feels like the next inevitable layer of that process. I think that's why AI is here. Not to replace human thinking, but to take over the ledger.

It’s external memory. It stores the micro-data so we don't have to anymore. And if we can finally offload the granular work of tracking every little change, our attention is freed up. Where does it go?

I think it goes up.

The Ladder

As AI continues to climb up to the human intelligence scale, humanity has to figure out what to do next.

Think about the creator of this universe. The ultimate engineer and physicist. They don't sit around noticing every single microscopic change happening across the cosmos. They don't keep a manual ledger of good and bad karma. Their systems are infinitely more efficient than ours. They operate from a higher dimension. They operate entirely from the macro.

Now that AI is taking over our ledger, future humans won't have to focus on repetitive, minor changes either. We finally get to focus on the macros.

Simply put, as AI handles the ground floor, we are being pushed to climb the ladder that the creator of this universe is sitting on.

We talk about the Kardashev Scale, Type I, II, and III civilizations. We usually measure them by energy consumption. But you can't harness a galaxy if you're still trying to count it one star at a time. The leap to becoming a multi-galactic species isn't just about building better rockets. It's a fundamental shift in perception.

I don’t know this for sure. I’m just writing this as someone who has sat with this question until it started to feel less like a theory and more like a direction.

The universe seems to have a grain to it. And the grain says: climb.

We’ve spent millennia looking down, filling out our ledger.

It might be time to start looking up...

These are just rough thoughts. The question is still open.

Are you still studying or graduated already? What are your ambitions in life, your expectations from this life, are you happy or under stress at this point in life ?

I believe we all are going through a lot and hope this comment section allows you to write down your thoughts because I find it interesting to know what my generation is going through