I am writing this in the middle of a chaotic, overwhelming 2026 — with a cup of chai going cold beside me, because that is what happens when you start thinking too hard about slow living and forget to sip.
Outside, March 2026 is doing its absolute most.
There are wars rewriting borders. Geopolitical tension that no longer feels like news — it feels like background radiation, always present, always humming beneath everything. The Year of the Wood Horse arrived and true to form, it has been untameable — wild, fast, gloriously indifferent to our carefully made plans. And the planets? Repositioning, apparently. Both astronomically and metaphorically. Honestly, at this point, who can tell the difference.
And then there’s the tech circus — which truly deserves its own paragraph, possibly its own therapy session.
Every week, a new model drops. Anthropic, Claude, Google, Meta — all in full gladiator mode, each announcement louder than the last. There is a name for what many of us are quietly feeling about all of this — over using,or what some are now calling AI overwhelm. It is far more widespread than anyone is admitting. A robot went viral last month for dancing in a restaurant. An AI is — hiring humans now?? The race has become so breathless, so relentlessly competitive, that the headlines blur into one long glittering stream: we are building the future faster than we have decided whether we want it.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, we are expected to scroll it, react to it, form a nuanced opinion on it, and ideally post about it — preferably before breakfast.
But Here’s the Crisis Nobody’s Reporting
I want to be clear: I am not an expert in slow living. I have not been quietly practising this for decades in some sunlit ashram while the world figured itself out. I am, at best, someone who woke up a little — slightly more than before, still in progress, still figuring it out alongside everyone else.
But here’s what I do know, from years of working as an architect and interior designer — thinking about how spaces hold people: there is a profound difference between a room that lets you breathe and one that doesn’t.
The same is true of a life.
What I am watching right now is a strange, collective suffocation — not dramatic, not visible, just a quiet interior crowding. This is the real digital overwhelm — not the kind that crashes your browser, but the kind that quietly crowds your inner life until you can no longer hear yourself think. We have more access to everything than any generation that has ever lived, and somehow, we are bit disoriented, more saturated, more achingly going achingly lonely. The more we connect online, the more we seem to lose the thread of our own company. The more choices we have, the harder it becomes to choose what actually matters.
This is not an anti-technology rant. I use it abundantly, gratefully, and sometimes a little sheepishly. This is simply an observation I keep making, and cannot stop: somewhere between the noise and the notifications, we have quietly misplaced the art of being present to our own lives.
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.” — Anne Lamott
What Does It Mean to Live Slowly in 2026?
This thought — this particular itch I could not stop scratching — is what led me to begin building Dhritsthal Collective.
Not as a polished idea I had fully figured out. More like a question I needed to live inside for a while.
What if there was a space — a publication, a slow ongoing conversation, a gathering of genuinely curious people — that wasn’t trying to help us keep up, but was instead asking something different: what does intentional living actually look like when the world is this loud? What does mindful living feel like for a modern person with ambitions, devices, responsibilities, and opinions? How do we find seasonal rhythm when life doesn’t pause for seasons? How do we design our days — the way we would design a room — with intention and a little beauty and actual breathing room?
I don’t have clean answers. I am very much learning along the way — and honestly, the learning itself has become the most astonishing part. Every conversation, every experiment, every slow Sunday that I actually protect teaches me something I could not have read in a book. And sharing it with others who are asking similar questions only deepens the experience. It turns out that the act of noticing, together, is its own kind of joy.
“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” — Caroline Myss
The Intangible Is the Whole Point
Here is the thing about inner peace — and this is the part that both thrills and frustrates me: we cannot measure it. We cannot put a number on the particular quality of a morning that belongs entirely to us, unhurried and unwitnessed. We cannot quantify what it means to sit in genuine stillness, to feel at home in our own company, to have a conversation that doesn’t need to go anywhere. There is no metric for any of this.
And yet — we know, instinctively, completely, in our bones — that this is what matters. That this is what we are protecting when we protect anything.
The intangible has no ticker symbol. But it might be the most precious thing we have.
Choosing Otherwise
The world outside our window in March 2026 is loud, restless, and genuinely a lot. The Wood Horse is galloping. The models keep launching. The feeds are full. The robots are being hired and occasionally falling over.
And I am here, with my lukewarm chai, choosing — deliberately, joyfully, a little rebelliously — otherwise.
If any of this resonates — if you too have felt the particular exhaustion of existing in this moment and the deep hunger for something quieter and more real — I would genuinely love to hear from you.
What does the world outside your window feel like right now? And what are you doing — however imperfectly — to find your way back to yourself?
Mrinalini Rajendra Architect · Interior Stylist · Founder, MriraDesigns Theheraav Dhritsthal Collective