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A crowd with my name

I deactivated my Instagram for no real reason. I just wanted to see what changes when the scrolling stops, and who I am without it.

The next morning I did something a little ironic. I searched my own name, Gaurav Kunwar. Six or seven accounts came up, some with a lot of followers, guys from Nepal, maybe India, I don’t know where. Then I searched Gaurav Jung Kunwar, the middle name I almost never use. Another six or seven. Some were influencers, some were making videos, some were taller and better looking than me.

I have always been quietly proud of who I became. Not in an ego way, but in a “look how far you came” way. And in one search bar, that pride met a crowd of strangers wearing my name.

What the strange feeling is

My first reaction was: I am nothing. Even my name is not mine. Then something stranger came after it, a kind of total blankness, an infinity of nothing that I could feel but could not put into words.

It was not dark. I was not afraid or confused. It was more like the universe suddenly stopped being background and became enormous, and I felt my actual size inside it. Very small. Very here.

People have been trying to name this for centuries. Pascal wrote about being terrified by the silence of infinite spaces. Psychologists who study awe describe a “small self,” the moment your worries and comparisons shrink because something vastly bigger has entered the frame. Buddhists would say you just glimpsed that the solid self you were guarding was never that solid. Most people meet this feeling under a night sky or at the edge of a mountain. I met it in a search bar.

Why it will not fit into words

The strangest part was that I could not say it. I could feel the shape of it in my head, but the moment I tried to speak, the words came out smaller than the thing itself.

I used to think that meant I was not thinking clearly. Now I think it is the nature of the feeling. The Tao Te Ching opens by saying the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Wittgenstein ended his first book by saying that what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. Some experiences are bigger than language because language was built for the small things: names, objects, plans. It was never built for the whole.

Heidegger wrote about a mood where the ground under everyday life slips away and the world suddenly feels unfamiliar, almost not at home. He was careful to say it is not fear. Fear is always fear of something. This mood has no object. It just shows you that everything you lean on, your name, your role, your reputation, is held up by nothing in particular. That was exactly it for me. Not scared. Just strange, like seeing my own house from the outside for the first time.

A thousand mirrors with my name

When I saw all those faces under my name, my first thought was that it erased me. But there is an older way to read that moment.

The Upanishads carry a line: tat tvam asi, you are that. The idea is that the self looking out of my eyes is not separate from the self looking out of anyone else’s. Buddhist teachers describe something similar with the image of Indra’s net, an endless web where every jewel reflects every other jewel.

Seen that way, a dozen other Gaurav Kunwars are not competitors stealing my uniqueness. They are other jewels in the same net, each one living out a version of being human, each one reflecting a little of me back. That does not make me less. It just makes me less alone.

At the end of the day, it is just you

We think about a hundred things a day: who is ahead, who is watching, what people will say. But under all of it there is one plain fact. Nobody else can live my life from the inside. Nobody can feel this strange feeling for me, and I am not even telling anyone about it. It is just me, noticing.

The people who truly care about me are maybe ten, twenty, thirty. My parents, my sister, a few friends. And they are busy with their own lives too, which is how it should be. My parents are not even on social media.

At first that sounded lonely. Now I think it is just honest. That has always been the real size of a human life. Social media only made it look like the number should be bigger.

The theologian Paul Tillich drew a line I keep thinking about. He said loneliness is the pain of being alone, and solitude is the glory of being alone. Same situation, two completely different experiences. What I felt that morning was not loneliness. Nobody had left me. It was solitude, the rare moment of being fully with myself with no audience, no feed, no one to perform for.

Maybe that is why the feeling came right after I switched Instagram off. For years there had always been someone watching, even when no one was. Remove the watchers and you meet the one person who was there the whole time.

What the feeling actually does

Part of me wanted to ask whether any of this is useful. But I think that question misses what feelings are. Grief has no use. Neither does love, or the quiet that comes over you watching snow settle on the hills. We do not measure them because they are not tools. They are what it is like to be alive.

What this feeling did was loosen something. The moment the universe got big, the urge to beat every other Gaurav Kunwar went quiet. Why compete with them? They are doing their thing, I am doing mine. I had not realized how much of my pride was quietly built on being ahead of someone, even strangers I had never met.

When that grip loosened, there was a softness underneath. Not sadness. More like relief, the way your shoulders drop when you did not know you were holding them up. A person who does not need to be the best is freer to simply be, and to see other people as people instead of rivals.

Most people never think about this, and they are fine

This is the honest objection. Plenty of people never sit with questions like these, and they are doing great. They work, they love their families, they laugh, they sleep well. Maybe they had the thought once, shrugged, and moved on.

I do not think that makes them shallow, and I do not think it makes me deep. Some people live the answer without ever asking the question. A farmer in Darchula who wakes up, works the land, and feeds his family may understand his place in the universe better than any philosopher, without once putting it into words.

So maybe the feeling is not required for a good life. But when it shows up, I do not want to run from it either. It came to me uninvited. The least I can do is listen.

Chaos or advantage?

Thinking this much can turn into chaos. You start with “how big is the universe” and end with “what is the point of anything,” and suddenly you are stuck on the couch at 2 AM, building questions with no floor. That is the version that hurts.

But the same feeling can also be an advantage. The difference, as far as I can tell, is what you do after. Chaos is when the feeling becomes a loop you keep spinning. Advantage is when you let it pass through you and leave something behind: a little more quiet, a little less need to prove, a clearer sense of what actually matters.

The feeling itself is neutral. It is like weather. You cannot choose whether it comes, but you can choose whether you build a house in the storm or just stand in the rain for a minute and walk home.

What I am leaving with

My uniqueness was never in my name. A name is a label thousands of people share. What nobody else has is the road my life has actually taken: from the mountains of Darchula, down to the plains of Kanchanpur, and across the world to New York. No one else with my name walked that exact road, saw what I saw, or carries what I carry. My life is simply different, and it does not need to be better than anyone else’s to be mine.

Does this strange feeling matter? I still do not fully know. It does not arrive with a lesson attached or a use for it. But for one morning it took away the need to be better than everyone else with my name, and left me with something simpler: I am here, I am small, and that is enough to start from.

Maybe that is all it is. Not an answer, just a moment where the noise stops long enough to notice you exist. I am going to keep the account off a little longer and see what else I notice.