#107 - New York Made Me Confront My Shadows (feat. Rohan Routroy)
This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/15gGLyolKyEchygdbyJnOk], and Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unreasonable-art-of-living/id1692006683] for audio only.
I want to tell you about my friend Rohan, because he said something on this episode that I haven’t been able to put down since.
Rohan Routroy [https://substack.com/profile/9674928-rohan-routroy] is the founder of Studio38 [https://weare38.com/], built around a problem he’s been circling his whole life: working on things for which the language doesn’t exist yet, which traces back to his own decades-long attempt to bridge the language gap between himself and his parents. Before that he spent eight years leading Brand Strategy at Twitter, starting with a small team in Singapore, then China, then eventually running a full creative vertical out of New York once the company relocated him there in 2019, work that took him across thirteen countries and clients like Apple, Chase, and LVMH, and closed out with him leading the push to legalize cannabis advertising on the platform, a project that reshaped how the whole industry approached it. Back in Singapore, in his own words, he was the glue of every social circle he touched, the guy who organized things, the guy people called when they wanted a reason to go out, the guy whose farewell party pulled a hundred people. If that sounds like a compliment, it is one. It’s also, as he found out, a kind of hiding.
Here’s what we talked about:
The city that doesn’t let you hide: New York didn’t let Rohan keep doing what worked in Singapore. He landed, and within months the city closed down for COVID, and he went, in his own description, from level one of learning how to be alone straight to level ten, no ramp, no practice runs. No office community, no going out, no five familiar bars where he knew he’d run into someone. Just him, an apartment, and his first winter of actual snow.
The sentence that stopped me cold: What he found in that apartment wasn’t dramatic, he was careful to say that, not some cinematic breakdown. Just a persistent discomfort with his own company, dressed up for years as a love of people. And then this: I was seeking, needing, the validation of other people to justify my presence. And in doing so, I was completely invalidating my identity. Sit with that one for a second. The very thing he thought was his gift, his social ease, his need for people, turned out to be built partly on a fear of finding out who he was without an audience.
The other half of shadow work: This is the part I think most people miss when they talk about confronting their shadow; naming it is only half the exercise. The other half is asking what that same wound is the reason for a strong positive driver in you, without you noticing. Because the same instinct that made Rohan need to be needed also made him, for fifteen years, the person who introduced strangers at a bar because a mutual friend once mentioned his name, the person who took two friends by the hand at his own birthday party and told them to go for a walk together, the friends who have been now married for 12 years and have 2 kids. The wound didn’t just cost him something; it built one of the more generous instincts I’ve ever seen in a person. He didn’t want anyone else to feel the specific loneliness he’d felt, so without ever framing it this way, he spent a decade making sure fewer people had to. Flip your shadow over, and it’s often the exact shape of the good you’ve already been doing in the world, just without a name on it yet.
Why the rats stopped doing cocaine: Rohan brought up an old experiment on rats and cocaine, the kind of thing that sounds like a party fact until you hear the finding. Isolated rats, given free access to cocaine, used it until it killed them. The same rats, given a real environment, other rats, space, things to do, mostly didn’t. The conclusion researchers drew wasn’t about willpower. It was that the antidote to addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. If you go looking, this particular study has had its share of critics and mixed replications over the years, so treat it as a provocative frame rather than settled science; the point still lands either way.
None of us get to sit this one out: Rohan’s point wasn’t about drugs, though. It was about the rest of us, scrolling, swiping, refreshing, all of it running on the exact same wiring. He referenced a chart from the writer Ted Gioia [https://substack.com/profile/4937458-ted-gioia] mapping out how nearly everything we do has a fast, cheap, dopamine-shaped substitute now, dating apps standing in for love, headlines standing in for books, an AI summary standing in for the headline. He wasn’t lecturing about it either; he included himself in it without blinking, which is exactly why I believed him.
Catching himself mid-sentence: What got me most happened in the last few minutes, almost by accident. We were talking about honesty, about what it costs to say the honest thing instead of the safe thing, and mid-sentence Rohan just stopped and named it in real time: “every time in this conversation I tried to pull back, bring in other cities, add a disclaimer, it’s because I was afraid people listening wouldn’t like me. Which meant I was less honest.” He caught himself performing honesty about honesty, live, and said so out loud instead of editing it out. That’s rarer than people think.
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There’s a lot more in the full conversation: New York as a city built entirely out of collisions, creative conflict as the actual engine behind culture, why the loneliest city in America might also be the most honest one. But if you only take one thing from this episode, take Rohan’s small reframe: whatever you’re still ashamed of in yourself is probably already the root of something good you’ve built without noticing. Look down before you look away.
Thank you, Rohan, for the honesty. All of it.
Where to find more of him: Rohan Routroy [https://substack.com/profile/9674928-rohan-routroy] writes about movies, myths, and meaning over at Nothing in a Nutshell, and builds Studio38 [https://weare38.com/] around that same core question: how do you find language for the things that don’t have any yet?
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