Psychology on Ahmed Alghali Blog

Collecting Medals Subconsciously

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

You were taught, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a liability. maybe no one said it out loud. maybe life just kept rewarding you every time you didn’t need anyone, every time you endured alone what others fell apart over, every time you moved on from something that should have broken you and didn’t. the lesson compounded, without you knowing: detachment works. self sufficiency works. you are the proof.

Never the Spotlight

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:24:46 +0300

Looking back at my experiences, I can now see that my pattern was never about avoiding responsibility itself. That was the story I told myself for years. The deeper concern was something else entirely. It was about avoiding the spotlight.

Emotions and States

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:18:20 +0300

I’ve come to realize that not everything we “feel” belongs to the same category. Some emotions are momentary, they rise, peak, and then fade. Others are more persistent. They linger beneath the surface and shape our experience over time. The difference between an emotion and a state has become very clear to me.

Take emptiness, for example. Emptiness is often described as a feeling, but it behaves more like a state. When you feel hollow inside, it isn’t just a passing wave like anger or excitement. It’s a sense that something is missing. You can distract yourself from it, you can silence it temporarily, but it doesn’t fully disappear. It waits. If you’ve ever truly felt emptiness, you know it has continuity. look and investigate inside every time and you will feel it. It’s not a spark, it does not vanish easily.

Small Black Dots

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:21:52 +0300

I have observed many stories. friendships. partnerships. families. I have even lived inside some of them. And I noticed something. Relationships rarely die from one dramatic moment. They die from a hidden cancer.

It grows quietly. invisibly. accumulating over years. no one sees it. no one feels it. until one day, it is strong enough to turn love into resentment, and resentment into distance. I gave this cancer a name in February 2022. I called them small black dots. One black dot is harmless. almost invisible.

On Disappointment

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Among all the emotions I carry, disappointment sits in its own category, the one I least want to experience. I don’t feel it often, and that is not an accident. I don’t place people in positions where they can disappoint me, I don’t expect much from anyone, and I don’t let just anyone close enough to matter, something I’ve written about before in my defensive nature . on top of that, I’ve built a bubble around myself, overly selective about my environment, deliberate about who gets near it. I wrote about this at the opening of not broken but suboptimal . but none of that makes me immune. you cannot fully program your life. mistakes will happen. people you never invited will find their way in, and sometimes you won’t notice until it’s already too late.

Learning to Respect Myself

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 23:27:58 +0300

The image I held about myself was always vague. if I am being honest, I never truly liked myself. I never paused long enough to build a clear internal picture of who I was beyond performance and ambition. this whole psychology conversation about self image and inner narratives felt unnecessary to me. I did not have a defined understanding of self worth. when someone asked me if I believed I was worthy of love, I genuinely did not know how to answer. I did not spend time thinking about those questions. they did not feel practical. they would not buy me the Lamborghini I wanted, so why should they occupy space in my mind. for the longest time, introspection felt like a luxury I don’t want to invest in.

A Map for Understanding How I Navigate Relationships

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:30:36 +0300

It started with a friend (North) asking me a simple question about how I form relationships. something I had never stopped and wondered about. that led to me doing some introspection, and I wrote this at the time: Adding New Friends Systems .

Not Built For Relationships The Way You Think

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:10:00 +0300

This month I have been seeking advice from people I trust about how to handle relationships in my life. there are a few relationships I deeply care about and genuinely want to preserve. but the majority of the tension I face comes from relationships I never consciously chose. they simply happened. I would find someone assuming we were friends, while I had never said so .

No One Is Going To Save You

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:10:00 +0300

We carry this thought in the back of our heads. it is subtle. it is subconscious. it is so invisible that even when you write and write, trying to drag it from the subconscious into the conscious, it refuses to show itself clearly. instead, you only feel the symptoms, the void, the emptiness, the sense of being lost. but beneath all of that, there is something deeply rooted.

The Bias In My Advice

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:44:00 +0300

I remember that over the years a kind of resistance began to form between me and giving advice to others. at first I thought it was because they were too lost to see . sometimes I thought they were not ready to heal . but the truth is simpler and harder to admit. the resistance existed because I was different.

I have learned something recently that I can finally say without arrogance. when you are naturally good at enduring something, you underestimate how heavy it feels for others. there is a friction that happens when your strength becomes someone else’s weakness. and instead of recognizing that difference, I was projecting my own structure onto them.

Sick of Yourself

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0300

There is a catalyst behind every better decision you have ever made., it is the urge for change.

What Wren Carried — 06: Starting to Get Excited

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

It is a month later now. Wren has been going through something that feels painfully familiar to me, something close to the days I once lived without understanding . today he texted me, excited, talking about learning psychology and trying to understand the human mind and anxiety. I felt briefly happy for him. he sounded genuinely alive, like someone who had finally found a door he wanted to open.

Wren is not usually the type to dive into these themes. he is into anything but interoception, so when he spoke with that kind of curiosity, it caught my attention. then he said something that touched me. he said there were no days he hated himself more than those days. the moment I read that, I felt tightened inside.

I Have Nothing To Say About This

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:21:00 +0300

I don’t really find myself like everyone else. most times, I have no opinion on almost everything. I have no favorites. I don’t have a stance on almost anything that happens. I get asked, what’s your take on this? what’s your stance? and when I try to investigate myself within, I find none. there is no clear answer.

Life Rewards and Penalizes

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I’m not an expert in this, but I have a saying, when I surround myself with a certain kind of people, people who have very pure hearts, who don’t fear feeling, who aren’t guarded, who explore and live fully, they often end up being the ones who suffer the most in every situation. the one who love the most in every relationship. they carry the weight of every room they enter. and what makes this harder is that they rarely know how rare they are.

What Wren Carried — 04: Learning to Acknowledge

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I discovered that wren was lost. he was living in his head. he carried fears and doubts that no one knew about. one of these fears was that he did not know how to look at god. not out of lack of faith, but because the way we learned religion did not include space for what a man can endure from the inside. the emphasis on this is either completely absent or very shallow. because of that, he struggled to understand what he was going through. is it good. is it punishment. the men of religion did not emphasize this enough.

What Wren Carried — 03: The Weight Is Now Visible

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0300

I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.

He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.

Worrying About It Later

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:57:56 +0300

I do not remember exactly whereIfirst learned the sentence “worry about it later”. but over time, it revealed itself as something deeper than advice. it describes a mental mechanism that works almost automatically in my mind. a form of being selectively ignorant about certain things, not because they do not matter, but because they do not matter now.

The Tail of the Monster

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

In the five unplanned hours I’ve spent on calls with Awab, he mentioned once that he had started a course kind of on self discovery, presented by the author of The Surrender Experiment. as I remember they were nine chapters, online. Awab said he moved through the first few quickly, impatiently, because the material was already familiar to him. and then he reached the end of chapter six, where the instructor said: in the next lecture, we’ll be talking about x. and Awab paused. he told me he knew, instinctively, that what came next was something he wasn’t ready to hear. so he stopped. and he stayed stopped.

Learning To Be Bothered

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:00:00 +0300

Either at work or in daily life, car horns for no reason. someone dragging their feet without lifting them. cutting a public service queue. leaving clothes in the gym changing room instead of the locker. a bank agent typing five words per minute. an uber driver talking on the phone. someone playing a video on the metro without headphones.

What Wren Carried — 01: Faith

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Wren’s heart is deeply faithful. when we lived in the same building, I never once saw him miss a prayer at the mosque. not even Fajr. no matter the hour, he was always there.

I met him when I was around eighteen, and we remained friends from that point on. he has one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard in Quran recitation. our conversations were light. he was gentle, considerate, quiet. a pure soul. he did not have many people around him, at least that is how it felt to me.

Worst Feeling Ever

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:52:38 +0300

If you were to ask me what the worst feeling is, I would not choose one single emotion. it is not anger alone. not grief alone. not sadness or longing by themselves. the worst feeling is when they all gather at once. tension born from emotional suppression. confusion layered over alienation. longing mixed with hopelessness. pressure sitting beside grief. anger tangled with sadness. it is not one storm. it is many storms colliding in the same sky.

Never Losing Control Between Good and Bad

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:51:17 +0300

The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power,

It Grows Teeth

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0300

“What you can’t say owns you. what you hide controls you.” — something my brother Mustafa kept as a bio, somewhere around 2016

Not Broken, Just SubOptimal

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:45:29 +0300

I do not complain about the life I am living.
I do not point fingers at the surroundings anymore.
I used to do that, a lot, but I stopped. now I look inward and stay there. and sometimes a quiet question rises.
what if I never stopped blaming the world and allowed it to carry my pain for me.
what if naming the environment was easier than naming myself.

On Comparing Pain Without Erasing It

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:36:08 +0300

I’ve recently been thinking about comparative suffering . for me, the idea that there is a greater problem out there often helps me feel relief. It allows me to dismiss my own problems.

Disproves - the Battle Between Belief and Evidence

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:54:34 +0300

And then I’m surprised because… I guess I’m surprised because people care, cause I think, when I was young growing up, I felt like nobody cared, and you put up all these things inside of you because nobody cares, and then you happen upon a small moment where somebody really cares, and it just disproves everything you ever knew about the world, and that is surprising. Theo von

Comparative Suffering : A Habit of Looking down

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:11:01 +0300

I used to lament having no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.

When I was a kid, my elder brother Mohammed used to work in many charity organizations . I used to be part of many of the events these charities were about. I saw the suffering of kids who were at the same age as me, many of whom had no father, no mother, no home to return to.

Forgetful

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Growing up isn’t the problem, Forgetting is.

The Little Princess

Uncertainty

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:55:00 +0300

There was a time in my life when I allowed myself to be uncertain. uncertainty was my mindset. it did not affect the technical side of my questions, nor did it damage my daily decision making on the surface. but internally, I sometimes drowned in it. the paradox of choices embedded itself into my behavior, and perfectionism became a side effect of refusing to pick what felt suboptimal. I lived inside my head more than I realized. this state was invisible to the external world. it was entirely internal. I was doubting my own internals.

Walking Contradictions – I Could Read You But Not Feel You

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:20:00 +0300

No matter how open, peaceful or loving you are, others can only connect with you at the depth they have reached within themselves.

This realization came to me at twenty one, and it was not gentle. it hurt to admit. I come from a spectrum of people who were never fully able to see others clearly , but I was not one of them. I was always good at analyzing people. I understood patterns, motives, insecurities. I even played the therapist role many times in my life, something I wrote about briefly here . understanding people was not magic. it is a basic human feature if you pay enough attention. the contradiction that confused me for years was this: I could understand almost everyone, yet I struggled to truly connect with them.

A User Manual for Being Close to Me

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:53:08 +0300

I basically ruined all the friendships I had since I was a kid, and it is me who is the problem, not the people, although I kept myself busy to the point where I don’t feel it most of the time, alongside guilt and fear of making new friendships.

Losing Control Over My Thoughts

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:14:28 +0300

This is a part I have always wanted to document and share but I never found the right words for it. it is the scariest feeling I have ever experienced, and it is mainly composed of fear. but it is also confusing in a way that, unless untangled slowly and honestly, it will remain confusing forever.

The story goes back to 2023 when I was a student at the University of Khartoum. I wrote about that period before in a draft called days that I still do not understand . during that time, I was packed with fear. I was shaking for no obvious reason, living inside something I could not explain. I kept saying it was my sympathetic nervous system reacting because I was grinding too hard, as if my body had decided to pull the emergency brake for me. but that explanation slowly started to feel shallow. what triggered my nervous system in the first place? why was I already tense before the collapse? why was I restless long before everything fell apart?

Who I Am : on the Person I Failed to Define

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:40:54 +0300

This question is by far the hardest for me to answer. I’ve tried for years, and every attempt was prone to failure. A big part of the struggle wasn’t just about identity itself, but about how strange my relationships were, unstable, confusing, always shifting. It’s hard to know who you are when the people around you don’t stay long enough , for you to see your reflection in them.

I Forget Too Much

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:14:36 +0300

You’re just forgetful.

There is one attribute that almost all the people around me seem to know about, because I keep talking about it a lot: I find it difficult to remember both people and places, I forget things very easily.

I Learned Meaning Before I Learn Pleasure

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:32:58 +0300

There is a famous Viktor Frankl quote:
“When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.”

Lessons That Healed Me Then - Thought and Condition

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:19:51 +0300

There were parts of my childhood and teenage years when I found myself visiting what I now think of as the cave of disparity. I was fortunate enough to find my way out. much of the credit goes to one essential shift that guided me toward stability if I my say: I stopped over-complaining about my condition and began paying attention to how my thoughts were shaping my state of being.

The Limits of the Regret Minimization Framework

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:30:00 +0300

When making decisions in life, especially when we are faced with selecting between two events, we find ourselves comparing how important they are in order to determine which event we should choose. Some people study the implications of each decision and measure how rewarding or penalizing the outcomes might be. Picking the least penalty is a tactic for choosing a decision under this scenario.

Action Influences Thoughts

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Action Influences Thought and Not The Other Way Around.

Most self help books sell you the same idea in different packaging: fix your mind first, then your life will follow. cultivate the right thoughts. visualize the outcome. build the belief before you build anything else.

Indeed there is truth in that, thoughts do shape action, I agree. but there is a half of the equation that nobody talks about, the feedback running in the other direction. action shapes thought. and it does, faster, and more permanently, than thinking ever could.

I Can't Accept Compliments

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:56:42 +0300

I remember once posting on Facebook about how I dislike people who compliment me , and I wrote something along the lines of: if you want to be a good friend of mine, do not give me compliments.

The Reproducibility Problem in Machine Learning

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Reproducibility is the corner stone of science

Somewhere between building a model and publishing the results, something gets lost. not the results themselves, those make it into the paper. what gets lost is everything that would allow someone else to arrive at the same place.

This is the reproducibility problem in machine learning, and it is more widespread than most people admit.

In 2016, the journal Nature reported that around 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another researcher’s results , and 50% had failed to reproduce their own. machine learning is no exception. a study that analyzed 400 papers from top AI conferences found that only 6% shared code, roughly 33% shared test data, and 54% shared nothing more than a pseudocode summary of their algorithm. not the environment. not the hyperparameters. not the exact version of the library that made it work. just a rough sketch of the idea.

Flow State and Sleep

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:52:21 +0300

Lately, I lost my ability to focus and maintain a flow state. I don’t sleep late, I eat relatively healthy food, and I’m not dopamine addicted. The problem comes down to practices that would align your efforts with what you want to achieve.

Walking Contradictions: Head in the Clouds. Hands in The Ground

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

The art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

I’ve spent a lot of time confused about my own wiring. not in a debilitating way, more like an ongoing low grade puzzle that I kept returning to. the confusion had a specific shape: I knew I was deeply analytical, the kind of person who could sit with an idea for hours without needing it to go anywhere, who would trace a concept back to its roots just for the satisfaction of understanding it fully. but I also noticed I was restless whenever nothing was being made. not bored exactly. more like something in me would protest, ask what all this thinking was actually for.

Learning Faliure Modes - Branching

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0300

This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.

Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.

Learning Faliure Modes - Floating Information

ahmed@offsechq.com (A.Alghali) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:50:51 +0400

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.