The View from My “I-Worry” Tower

A Tale of Heartbeats, Tap Water & Hindsight

For most of my working life, I lived in what I now fondly call the “I-Worry Tower.”

You’ve heard of the Ivory Tower… where intellectuals and academics sip fine tea while debating the meaning of life in Latin.  

Well, mine was a slightly different version: the I-Worry Tower. 

Same height, less elegance. No tea, only tension.
 

Every floor of this tower came with its own panic button.

• Ground floor? “Am I underpaid?”
• Middle floors? “Am I overworked?”
• Penthouse? “Is this success, or am I just tired in a fancier chair?”

It wasn’t always miserable. I was in love with the adrenaline… the thrill of targets, timelines, and tightrope walking between meetings and minor meltdowns.

Stress was my default setting. I called it “momentum.” Others called it “concerning.”

Meanwhile, I had a few friends.

Chaps who somehow glided through life like they were born on conveyor belts.

They earned more, smiled more, and somehow always knew the best weekend getaways.

While I was still replying to Friday’s emails on Saturday evening, they were in Coorg, sipping filter coffee and hashtagging #WorkLifeBalance.

These were the Relaxed Ones.

They wore linen shirts unironically.

They said things like “I just log off after 6” without blinking.

And they seemed to somehow win at life… while I was trying to win at finding parking near the office.

Naturally, I envied them.

I mean, of course I did… from the penthouse floor of my I-Worry Tower, where the air is thin and the to-do list is thick.

But here’s the thing.

I didn’t hate the hustle either.

There was a certain high to living on the edge of a deadline.

A strange dopamine hit from ticking off tasks and pretending that productivity is the same as peace.

My life was a swirl of coffee, conference calls, and cryptic text messages from bosses at 11:03 PM that just said, “Urgent. Call.”

But all that is past tense now.

Because now I’m retired.

(Which, I admit, still feels like a typing error when I write it. Retired? Me? But I just got here! I only just learned how to say “Let’s circle back on this” without laughing.)

Anyway, rewind to a few months ago.

One morning, I took a walk. Not the dramatic, soul-searching kind. Just your average, knees-creaking, hips-negotiating sort of walk that retired folks are advised to do in between watching OTT shows and forgetting online passwords.

And on a whim, I took a detour.

I don’t know what prompted it. Maybe my feet were tired of the usual path. Maybe my mind was finally free enough to wander.

And that’s when I spotted him… standing near an old public water tap.

It took me a second to recognise him, but that smile hadn’t changed.

It was Suku, my college classmate from what feels like a thousand years and three operating systems ago.

We never studied together, but we shared stories, laughter, and cheap tea at our classmate Razak’s dad’s restaurant, where the parotta and beef curry were deadly… in both taste and price.

Deadly delicious, and dead cheap.

To this day, I’ve never met a parotta that held itself together with such grace under gravy.

We hadn’t met in decades, but conversation flowed instantly… like tea from Razak’s eternally stained kettle.

Suku remembered people. He knew what our classmates were up to — who had kids, who had startups, and who had hair only on their old ID cards.

Me?

I barely knew which day it was.

He looked calm. Not monk-level serene, but settled. Present.

And for someone who once submitted assignments on torn notebook paper, he now seemed impressively tuned into life.

As I stood there, panting like a Labrador and awkwardly wiping sweat off my brow, a thought struck me:

Some people choose the Ivory Tower.

Some are trapped in the I-Worry Tower.

But most of us?

We just keep climbing some tower or the other, hoping the view at the top will explain why we climbed it in the first place.

But now that I’m retired, I’ve finally stepped out.

Not into a sunset or a spa.

But into detours.

Into slow walks, surprise reunions, and the quiet joy of not checking my phone every seven minutes.

The I-Worry Tower is still there, of course. I drive past it in my head sometimes.

But I no longer live in it.

Now I live in a place called Perspective.

Not as tall. Not as shiny. But the view is much, much better.