# Seerat Awan | Full Content > A quiet corner of the internet where I think out loud. ## About This is the personal website of Seerat Awan, Sr. Software Engineer at [Performance Leader](https://performanceleader.com). It is not a magazine or multi-author blog. One person thinking out loud about reflections, ideas, personal opinions, and whatever he's still working out. Writings include essays, short notes, and photographs. ## Site - [Homepage](https://seeratawan.me) - [Writings](https://seeratawan.me/writings) - [RSS Feed](https://seeratawan.me/rss.xml) - [Sitemap](https://seeratawan.me/sitemap.xml) - [llms.txt](https://seeratawan.me/llms.txt) ## Contact - [GitHub](https://github.com/seeratawan01) - [Twitter](https://twitter.com/seeratawan01) - [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/seerat-awan-01) ## Writings (Full Content) ### [You have to lose in a way that humbles you to your core. That's the entry fee. Most won't pay it.](https://seeratawan.me/writings/you-have-to-lose-in-a-way-that-humbles-you-to-your-core) - Date: 2026-08-16 - Kind: note --- ### [A Little Bit of Thailand](https://seeratawan.me/writings/a-little-bit-of-thailand) - Date: 2026-07-25 - Kind: essay - Excerpt: Ten days between Phuket and Bangkok, mostly in and around water. Seven nights in Phuket, three in Bangkok. The schedule was packed, so there were a lot of 7 AM pickups and a lot of me being the first one down to the lobby. Phi Phi islands, Racha Island, elephants, one water park, gemstones and a cashew nut factory that seem to be mandatory on every Thailand tour package. I came back about three shades darker than I left.The two dives at Racha were the part I keep thinking about. It's very quiet down there.Bangkok was short and mostly spent looking up. The Mahanakhon Skywalk at sunset was the best of it and also a bit of shopping.Not much else to say. The photos do a better job. --- ### [The Friends We Outgrow](https://seeratawan.me/writings/the-friends-we-outgrow) - Date: 2026-07-05 - Kind: essay - Excerpt: On Aristotle, a seven-year expiry date, and why your brain only has room for five people. Imagine there is a table you have sat at for the past ten years. Same people, same jokes, same rhythm. For a long time, being there felt like the most natural thing in the world.Then one evening, you catch yourself sitting at that table as a guest.Nothing happened. Nobody fought, nobody became a worse person. You just start noticing things, small assumptions about life, ways of thinking that no longer fit you. And the uncomfortable part? Those things were probably always there. What changed was the person doing the noticing.I went looking for an explanation and found that philosophy, faith, and science have been quietly building one for two thousand yearsAristotle Saw It ComingAristotle claimed there are only three kinds of friendship, and most of ours are the cheaper two [1].Friendships of usefulness exist because of what we trade: the colleague, the neighbour, the man who knows a man. Perfectly honest friendships. But the warmth belongs to the arrangement, not the person. When the job ends, or the house is sold, the friendship does not break. It simply runs out of reasons.Friendships of pleasure are built on enjoyment: the people we laugh with and lose entire evenings to. These feel like they will last forever, and that is exactly their weakness. They are tied to a version of you. Keep growing, and one day you are surrounded by people you love, feeling strangely alone.Friendships of virtue are the rare third kind: attached to who a person is, not what they provide. Aristotle believed only these survive change, because they were never leaning on circumstance in the first place. Most of us have one or two, if we are lucky.The Fourth KindCenturies later, Muslim thinkers like Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali read Aristotle, nodded along, and added a level he never imagined: friendship for the sake of God, where two people help each other become who they were meant to be. The Quran hints at the same expiry date the philosophers saw: on the Last Day, close friends will turn into enemies, except the righteous (43:67) [2]. Friendships of convenience run out; only the ones anchored in something higher cross over.The Seven-Year Expiry DateScience eventually put numbers on all this. A Dutch sociologist, Gerald Mollenhorst, surveyed about a thousand people, then knocked on their doors again seven years later [3]. Half of their close friends were gone. No betrayals, no dramatic exits, just jobs changed, neighbourhoods changed, and the friendships drifted out with the tide.The strangest finding: the size of everyone's circle stayed exactly the same. New people had quietly taken the old seats at the table. We are not losing friends, it turns out. We are running a slow, polite exchange programme.Your Brain Has a Guest ListWhy does the circle stay the same size? Because the size was never up to us.Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar compared primate brains to their group sizes and found that the human brain maxes out at roughly 150 meaningful relationships [4]. Not 150 followers, 150 people whose story you actually know. And inside that limit, our relationships arrange themselves into layers, each about three times bigger than the last:The 5: your shoulder-to-cry-on people. The ones you call at 2 a.m. from a hospital corridor, or when the news is too big to hold alone. This layer eats most of your emotional energy, and there is genuinely no room for a sixth. When someone new enters, a spouse, usually, someone else quietly slides out.The 15: your sympathy group. The friends whose death would genuinely wreck you for weeks. You see them often, you know their parents' names, their kids' school problems, their quiet fears.The 50: your party layer. The people you would invite to a big dinner or a wedding without hesitating. Real affection, but you could go three months without talking, and nothing would break.The 150: your tribe. Everyone you meaningfully know. Invite them all to your funeral; Dunbar half-jokes that this is the one event where the whole list shows up.Beyond that sit about 500 acquaintances and 1,500 faces you can put a name to. But those are not friendships. That is just memory.Here is what struck me most: the layers are not fixed seats; they are an escalator moving downward. Dunbar found that a close friendship, left unattended, starts sliding to the outer layers within months. Family survives neglect; friendship does not. Nobody has to put the fire out. You just have to stop adding wood.And what holds someone in a layer? Dunbar counts seven pillars: the way you speak, where you grew up, your educational path, your hobbies, your musical taste, your sense of humour, and your worldview (moral, religious, political) [4]. The more pillars you share, the closer the bond. After ten years, you and your friends may still share the language and the jokes. It is the heaviest pillar — worldview — that shifts underneath while nobody is watching.Rebuilding, by the way, is brutally expensive. Researcher Jeffrey Hall calculated it takes about 200 hours of shared time to turn a stranger into a close friend [5]. As adults, we do not have 200 spare hours lying around, which is exactly why we cling to fading friendships long after the pillars have crumbled. The replacement cost is real.Friends of the Road, Friends of the HeartSociologists have a gentler way of putting all this. Some people are friends of the road; they walk one season of life with you, and the season is the friendship. Others are friends of the heart, who cross seasons with you.The mistake is expecting every friend of the road to be a friend of the heart. Then their departure feels like betrayal, when really the road just forked.What RemainsSo I have stopped auditing my old friendships for failure. A friendship that becomes lighter has not died; it has been reclassified. An occasional call instead of a weekly one. Real warmth, smaller dose.The people at that table gave you ten good years. You do not owe them a version of yourself that no longer exists. Neither do they owe you one.Some friendships are meant to be outgrown. That is not the sad part of the story. That is proof there was growth.References & Further Reading[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX (the three kinds of friendship) — full text at MIT Classics[2] The Quran, Surah Az-Zukhruf 43:67 — quran.com/43/67; see also Ibn Miskawayh, Tahdhib al-Akhlaq, and al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din (Book on the Duties of Brotherhood)[3] Gerald Mollenhorst (Utrecht University), study on network turnover over seven years — ScienceDaily summary[4] Robin Dunbar, "The Social Brain Hypothesis," Evolutionary Anthropology (1998), and Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships (2021) — source of Dunbar's number, the friendship layers, and the seven pillars[5] Jeffrey A. Hall, "How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend?" Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2018) — journal article --- ### [The Man in the Car](https://seeratawan.me/writings/the-man-in-the-car) - Date: 2026-07-04 - Kind: essay - Excerpt: On the quiet freedom of realising that the audience we perform for mostly does not exist. For a long time, I made choices with an audience in mind.Not a real audience. An imagined one. A vague crowd of people who might notice what I drove, where I worked, how my life looked from the outside. I adjusted things for them. Small things, mostly. But small things add up to a life.Then one day it occurred to me that no one was actually watching.Not in a sad way. In a freeing way. People are busy being the main character of their own story. When they look at my life, they are mostly thinking about theirs. The way I once looked at a beautiful car and thought only of myself in the driver's seat.Morgan Housel writes about this in The Psychology of Money. He calls it the man in the car paradox. We buy impressive things hoping to earn admiration, but the people who see them do not admire the owner. They picture themselves in his place. The signal we spend so much to send never really lands.When I first read that, I thought it was about money. Now I think it is about attention. The audience I was performing for was mostly me, projected outward.I do not think anyone escapes this completely. We are social creatures. We want to be seen. But there is a difference between being seen and being imagined, and most of what we chase only gets us imagined.So lately I have been asking a simpler question. If no one is watching, what would I actually choose?Sometimes the answer is the same as before. Often it is quieter. A smaller life in some ways, a fuller one in others.Live the life that actually makes sense to you. Not the one that photographs well, or explains well, or impresses a crowd that was never really there.There was a man in the Quran who walked out before his people in his adornment, and the crowd whispered that they wished they had his fortune (Quran 28:79). Not one of them was admiring him. They were admiring themselves in his place. Then the earth took him and everything he owned (Quran 28:81), and all that survived was the warning.Some paradoxes, it turns out, are very old. --- ### [We tend to judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions](https://seeratawan.me/writings/we-tend-to-judge-other-people-by-their-actions-and-ourselves-by-our-intentions) - Date: 2026-06-20 - Kind: note - Excerpt: We tend to judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions --- ### [When Life Feels Heavy](https://seeratawan.me/writings/when-life-feels-heavy-we-still-look-for-our-parents) - Date: 2026-06-14 - Kind: essay - Excerpt: A quiet reflection on helplessness, fatherhood, and the small moments where grief, prayer, and comfort meet. I was driving back to Islamabad with my uncle.He had to be there because of something difficult he has been carrying for a while. His government job is at stake, and because of injustices in the system, there is not much we can do right now except hope that things work out and that the right people are held accountable.Before leaving the city, he asked me to take him to the graveyard so he could visit his father’s grave - my grandfather.We went there. He prayed for his father for a while, stood quietly by the grave, perhaps trying to speak to him through his heart, and then we continued our journey.That moment stayed with me.It made me realise that a father is someone a person turns to in their deepest moments of helplessness. Whether he is alive or not, when life becomes heavy, you still look for him.If he is alive, there is comfort in knowing that someone has your back.If he is gone, you visit his resting place, pray for him, and somehow leave a little lighter.I do not know if there is a lesson in this.But that moment quietly reminded me how deeply we continue to seek our parents, especially in the moments when we feel most helpless. --- ### [A December-ish Week in London](https://seeratawan.me/writings/a-week-in-london) - Date: 2025-12-07 - Kind: essay - Excerpt: Meeting a team, reconnecting with old friends, and exploring London for the first time. The UK trip was fun and pushed me to the limit of my comfort zone, as I'd never traveled alone outside my country before. It was full of adrenaline, with plenty of culture shock and jet lag along the way.So it all started when Ray (CEO of Performance Leader) and Pat (CTO of Performance Leader), both really nice guys, asked me to join their annual conference in the UK for a week. As honestly as I could, I asked them directly: the only catch is my Pakistani passport, which is great for collecting visa rejection stamps and not much else, so if I got the visa, I'd definitely join. As polite as these guys are, they helped me with all the visa documents, and I got the visa eventually without too much extra effort, though it was a stressful time, for sure.So I packed and told my family a week before the trip. That's just my way of telling things to my family. I wasn't feeling much. I'd only known the Performance Leader team for a few months, but I went with my gut and took the leap. The good thing was that many of my friends live in different parts of the UK. Two of them, Waqar and Tayyab (really old friends), picked me up at Gatwick Airport and drove me toward my hotel in central London, the Sun Street Hotel. It was a long ride, so thanks to them for doing that for me. It was late November, so central London was already wrapped in Christmas. The decorations were up, the air was cold and crisp, and there was a warm, cozy feeling in the streets that's hard to put into words.When I arrived, I checked in. None of the PL team was at the hotel yet, so I got to my room and relaxed a bit. After a while, Pat messaged me and asked if I could come down to meet. I did, and met Pat, Logan, and Paul for the first time. The very first thing we noticed was that the way of greeting is different. On my side, we do a half hug and a handshake, but they went straight for a handshake, professionally, so it got a bit awkward (glad I'm not Arab, or the cheek-to-cheek might have made it even more awkward). But we laughed it off, had a short chat, and then went to bed.The next day, at breakfast, I met some of the UK and AU team, and later the rest. Everyone was really welcoming, and Liz and Logan especially helped me feel at home and settle in.After that, we went to the conference room, then Ray kicked off the meeting and the agenda. It was quite a packed schedule, but fun and really helpful before launching v6 of the PL platform. Along with the meetings, we had some time to chill in the evenings. We had dinners, went bowling, and Pat was also really nice to join me in exploring London on the hop-on-hop-off bus (that was fun), along with a light lunch and a bit of shopping.I also got the chance to do some shopping with Waqar and Tayyab for a whole day. It was a solid get-together, good to reconnect after 4 to 5 years.And then there was the final annual dinner at The Shard. It was an amazing time.I went back home with memories, new experiences, and a fresh perspective on other people's cultures around the world.Here are a few snaps from the trip: --- ### [Sometimes, the bigger the risk, the wider the door to rizq](https://seeratawan.me/writings/sometimes-the-bigger-the-risk-the-wider-the-door-to-rizq) - Date: 2025-03-22 - Kind: note