At some point, between the third funding round and the fourth sleepless night of the week, a founder begins to wonder whether the company is succeeding at the expense of the person who built it. The company’s financial numbers are healthy. The team is growing. Investors and shareholders are optimistic. LinkedIn stats suggest everything is perfect too. And yet, something’s off.
Sleep is now a luxury. Meals are now mere biological mandates. Friendships are now perpetually rescheduled events instead of meaningful relationships. The phone vibrates at midnight and sends shockwaves through the heart as though it has detected a seismic event of dramatic scale. Even on vacation, leisure is a threat. The mind remains at work, rehearsing tomorrow’s problems in an endless loop of imaginary board meetings. The ‘successful’ founders feel like they are perpetually failing. That is precisely the problem. They are succeeding in accordance with every market metric while quietly becoming strangers to themselves. In short, they’re burning out. And somewhere along the way, an unexpected destination begins to make sense: Kashi.We shall explore this contrast in this article.
The startup founder is India’s Newest Mythical Hero; but that comes at a cost.
The 21st Century Indian Founder is the protagonist of a particularly seductive modern desi mythology: the person who notices what others cannot, works hard when others sleep, takes great risks and goes to great lengths to eventually change the world. But that mythology has a dark, dangerous secret.
Do we ever stop to ask what happens when the qualities that make someone a compelling founder begin to consume them from the inside?
A founder may employ a thousand people and still feel profound loneliness.
Employees have the liberty to resign and customers are free to switch providers. Even Investors can withdraw at any moment. A founder, however, may experience every setback as an indictment of their own worth as an individual- after all, their business is nothing less than a child to them. That is what leads to the well known term that is ‘Burnout’.
Burnout is not mere exhaustion, it’s a much graver ordeal. It can involve emotional depletion along with growing cynicism and a diminishing self esteem. A person can continue to perform impressively while gradually detaching themselves mentally from the work that defines their life. That is what makes entrepreneurial burnout extremely difficult to diagnose and thus cure. The founder is still replying to emails like a machine that they are. Still making impactful decisions. Still delivering presentations with great enthusiasm. The machinery is perfectly operational, yet no one checks if the person inside is alright.
Enter Kashi: A City That Couldn’t Be More Unfit For A Founder (Or Is It?)
Kashi; Banaras; Varanasi. Three names for the same ancient land of holiness. Take a moment and contrast it against the world the entrepreneur lives in. It is noisy, crowded, disorganised. At the same time, it’s a heavenly peaceful space that is forever resistant to the aesthetic of frictionless efficiency that the startup founder lives by. The ghats are never accommodative of your plan. You’re coerced into forgetting all that reminds you of your life of hustle. It is a cruel affair, an evening at the Manikarnika ghat- it’s almost like being force-fed peace and spiritual belongingness regardless of whether you want it or not.
The ghats are a space where cremation takes place as part of the city’s continuing encounter with mortality. The Ganga washes away all painful crumbs that remain of death and grief. The peace, however, isn’t comforting at all. It is something far more unsettling: a confrontation with the fact that everything that is born will indeed die; and that we shall return with nothing that we have earned in our lives.
Why Your Next Vacation As A Founder Must Be Banaras
You must wonder how a place that offers maximum contrast to a founder’s lifestyle could ever be a useful spot for a productivity retreat, but it’s actually perfect!
In Banaras, you learn to be responsible for your actions without being in control of the outcome.
Spirituality has forever offered a refuge from the relentless demands of worldly life. Science already knows the benefits of spiritually all too well: research links meditation and spiritual mindfulness to reduced stress and improved psychological well-being. For India’s exhausted founders, Kashi offers an opportunity to finally reclaim their healthy relationship with ambition. It’s truly therapeutic in more ways than one. A conventional vacation often fails to offer such a brilliant mix of intellectual provocation as well as mental clarity served to you on a platter.
The holy land creates a sharp distinction between the individual and the identity they have built around their work. It allows conversations to happen without an obvious agenda, reflection without an immediate need for action, and silence without the obligation to fill it.
What does success look like if it comes at the expense of your health? Which responsibilities genuinely require your attention, and which have become habits of control? Can you build an organisation that depends on your judgement without making your entire existence dependent on the organisation?
These are not questions that a weekend in a different city will automatically answer. However, stepping outside familiar surroundings and engaging with different perspectives that offer a dramatically different perspective to life can provide a starting point for examining patterns that have become almost invisible.
This is where Kashi becomes extremely relevant. Rather than treating the city as an exotic backdrop for another networking event, the more meaningful approach is to engage with it as a place for reflection, conversation and a temporary departure from the relentless demands of building a company. The emphasis should not be on escaping work indefinitely. It should be on returning to it with a clearer understanding of what deserves your energy.
Building businesses without losing ourselves
Spending evenings next to the Ganga may not automatically replace adequate sleep, supportive workplaces or professional treatment for serious mental health difficulties. But it can at least change the outlook one has towards each of these elements. So, if you’re a founder, perhaps your next vacation should be Kashi.
Grab a bunch of your founder friends, book a flight, show up! You’ll return a changed human being for sure.
While businesses require discipline and sustained effort, it also requires the mental strength needed to be unaffected by the negative circumstances attached to the profession. That could create the perfect business-person: One is who is immune to burning out. And if one Indian city offers that without any prejudice- it’s Kashi.
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