I have a habit.

Whenever I hear a cute anecdote, a heartwarming story, something deeply Indian, I instinctively go, ‘this would make such a good campaign.’

My school of advertising has always been that the idea reveals itself through truth. So, my brain is trained to stay on. To watch. To notice. To pick up behaviours, moments, slices of life.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to switch that off.

It didn’t happen all at once. There’s no dramatic werewolf transformation.

I started listening to people differently. Not just to understand them, but to hear how they’re saying things. What can be lifted, tightened, turned into something that lands harder.

I remember a friend venting to me once. A full monologue on love. Snappy sentences, made-up words, accidental poetry. And even in that moment, a part of me was thinking, this is good. This is really good.

See? I’m looking at life the same way I look at copy. Trying to rewrite it while it’s still happening. I once got into a fight and instead of actually feeling anything, I made a pitch deck.

An actual pitch deck. It contained: Pointers on why I was right. Slides on how the other person could have handled it better.A thank you slide with a cat on it. 

At the time, it felt efficient. Even funny. It wasn’t. You tell yourself it’s harmless. An occupational hazard.

But it’s literally the job. To extract. From people. From moments. From yourself.

I’ve sat in rooms with people I care about and felt myself split in two. One version of me in the conversation, and another slightly outside it, tagging things like I’m building a deck in my head.

That reaction works. That phrasing is strong. That silence means something.

No one asked for that. Nothing about that moment needed to become anything. But my brain doesn’t seem to know how to let something just exist anymore. Even my own head isn’t safe.

I’ve caught myself in the middle of a genuinely bad day thinking, there’s something here. Not concern. Not comfort. Just potential. Maybe it’ll win at the award run. 

Like even my lowest moments are rough cuts waiting to be turned into something sharper. Something that performs better once it’s cleaned up.

And the worst part is, it works.

This version of me is good at my job. Fast. Observant. Able to find the thing inside anything.

That’s the whole point, right?

Advertising rewards people who can see more, feel more, and then use it. So you get better at it.
Better at watching. Better at framing. Better at turning real things into something slightly more effective. Until you realise you’re not really off the clock anymore. You’re just on in different settings.

And no one calls it out, because it looks like passion.

You’re always thinking. You’re switched on. You live and breathe it.

Yeah. That’s kind of the problem. 

Because when everything becomes material, nothing stays yours.

Not your relationships. They start to feel like case studies.

Not your thoughts. They’re always halfway to becoming lines. Not even your worst days. They’re just badly packaged insights.

You stop having private moments. You just have unprocessed content.

Lately, I’ve been trying to catch it in real time. That split second where I’m about to turn something into something else. Clean it up. Shape it. Make it useful.

And sometimes, I don’t. I let it stay awkward. I let it stay unfinished. I let it belong to the moment instead of to my work. It feels unnatural. Almost wasteful.

Like I’m letting something good slip. But I’m starting to think that’s the only way to get any part of it back.

Because when your passion becomes surveillance, you don’t just lose the boundary between work and life. You lose the version of you that wasn’t trying to turn everything into something better.

And I don’t think this industry knows how to give that back.

The author was head - creative and brand communications, Kult. This article first appeared in the April issue of Manifest, which can be purchased here.