Startup life in Bangalore lead to divorce

I worked at an AI stealth startup in Bangalore, the kind where everything is “confidential” and hustle is treated like religion. For a while it felt like I had finally cracked the code. Late nights turned into wins, wins turned into praise, praise turned into identity. I became the person people depended on. The “reliable one.” The “always on” one. We did the office trip too. Coorg, bonfire, forced team bonding, everyone laughing like we were building something historic. I remember standing there thinking this is it, this is the life everyone wants. I did not realize I was celebrating the version of me that was slowly disappearing from my own home.

The grind was not even glamorous. It was just repetitive and consuming. Days blurred into nights, nights blurred into more Slack pings. And every Friday, like clockwork, we went to Bob’s. Not to celebrate. Not even to have fun. Just to forget. We would sit there with drinks we did not really want, laughing louder than we felt, telling ourselves this is what “building” looks like. It became our weekly ritual to numb the pain of working that hard. The irony is we thought we were blowing off steam, but we were really just learning how to not feel anything.

The divorce did not arrive like an explosion. It arrived like decay. It was a hundred tiny disappointments that looked harmless in my head. One more sprint, one more call, one more “I’ll join in 10 minutes,” one more missed dinner, one more weekend swallowed by “just finishing this.” Slowly, the house stopped feeling warm. Conversations became logistics. Her face stopped asking and started accepting. She did not leave in anger. She left in exhaustion. The sentence that ended it was not dramatic either. It was quiet, almost polite. “I feel alone even when you’re here.” Something in me went cold because I knew she was not exaggerating. I was present in the room, but absent in every way that mattered.

After it happened, I thought I would bounce back because that is what I was trained to do. Ship, move on, handle it. But it did not work like that. The divorce broke me in a way my brain could not “optimize” out of. I would wake up and feel this heavy emptiness before I even opened my eyes, like my body remembered before my mind did. I would go to office and pretend to be normal, and then come back to a home that felt like a rented apartment in my own life. Quiet, sterile, no noise, no fights, no warmth. Just the hum of the fan and the weight of everything I had postponed until it became permanent.

The worst part is work still rewarded me. I still got shoutouts. People still clapped. And every time they did, it felt like someone was applauding a lie. I had built a version of “success” that could not sit next to me at night, could not look at me with softness, could not forgive me, could not tell me it is okay. If you are deep in the Bangalore startup grind right now, please do not romanticize what I did. You can win every sprint and still lose your life. And when the person you love finally stops waiting for you to come back, no promotion in the world will feel like anything.

^^ Full Disclosure: I have used AI to frame sentences better, I am not in mental state to talk about this