It was 6:47 AM on a Tuesday, and I was standing in a packed local train from Kalyan to Mumbai Central, wedged between a man reading Marathi newspapers and someone's overstuffed backpack. My AirPods were dead. My phone battery was at 12%. And for the first time in years, I wasn't scrolling through market updates or refreshing my Groww portfolio.
Instead, I was thinking about Tanjiro from Demon Slayer—specifically, about the moment he decided to become a sword user even though he had no money, no connections, and no guarantee it would work out.
And I realized something. Here I was, a 29-year-old data analyst at Morningstar, someone who's spent the last seven years optimizing every rupee, calculating expected returns, and playing it safe. And a cartoon character was making me rethink my entire relationship with risk, ambition, and what it means to actually live.
This is what nobody tells you about anime: it's not just entertainment. For those of us grinding through Indian corporate life—checking Zerodha at lunch, paying bills via CRED, calculating SIPs like they're our only path to dignity—anime asks uncomfortable questions. The kind that don't have spreadsheets or financial calculators attached to them.
Let me walk you through five anime that fundamentally shifted how I think about this life.
1. Demon Slayer – The Cost of Choosing Your Own Path
Here's the setup: Tanjiro's family is killed by demons. His sister becomes a demon but keeps her humanity. He decides—with no training, no sponsors, no clear ROI—to become a demon slayer to save her.
What gets me about this isn't the action sequences. It's that Tanjiro never once calculates whether this makes sense. He doesn't do a cost-benefit analysis. He doesn't think, "Okay, let me see if I can afford this journey," or "What if I fail and waste three years?" He commits.
And look, I'm not saying throw caution to the wind. I still track every expense in an Excel sheet (yes, really). But watching Tanjiro made me ask myself a question I hadn't in a long time: Am I optimizing for safety so much that I'm not actually optimizing for anything that matters?
The uncomfortable truth
I spent my early twenties making "sensible" choices. Got a stable job. Built an emergency fund. Started investing at 23. On paper, I did everything right. But I also turned down three opportunities—one to work at a startup, one to write full-time, one to take a sabbatical—because they weren't "safe." They didn't have the stability that my 9-to-6 did. And honestly? I'm not sure I even pursued them because I didn't want them. I pursued the safe route because I'd been taught that risk was something to minimize, not something to understand.
Tanjiro doesn't have a Zerodha account. He doesn't think about downside protection. But he has something I was missing: clarity about what he actually wanted. And sometimes, that clarity is worth more than a perfect financial plan.
What changed for me
I started saying yes to smaller risks. I pitched a few articles to publications I respected. I took on a side project that had no guaranteed income. Nothing radical—I didn't quit my job or anything—but I stopped treating every decision like it needed to have the certainty of a fixed deposit. And it's been the most interesting part of my last two years, honestly.
2. Attack on Titan – When Your Plan Becomes Obsolete
For those who haven't watched it: humanity is living behind giant walls, protected from massive creatures called Titans. The entire society is built on the assumption that these walls will keep them safe forever. It's a plan. A good plan. A plan everyone agrees on.
Then the walls break.
And suddenly, none of the preparation matters. The military strategy that made sense last year doesn't work. The safest positions are now the most dangerous ones. The people who thrived under the old system are the first to fail.
I watched this show right after the 2020 pandemic, and it hit different. Here's the thing: I'd spent years building a career around what I thought the world would look like. I'd made choices based on stability, tenure, and seniority. Those things still mattered, but suddenly they didn't matter in the way I'd planned.
And I realized: most of us are living like we're inside those walls. We're making 10-year plans based on the assumption that the structure of work—or money, or life—will stay the same. It won't.
For me, this meant diversifying how I think about income. Not just my day job. Not just trying to max out my SIP. But actively building a portfolio of interests and skills that aren't dependent on one industry staying stable forever.
3. Jujutsu Kaisen – The Privilege of Choosing Your Problems
Yuji Itadori is a normal teenage boy. Then he swallows a cursed finger and becomes the vessel for a powerful demon. Now he's got to learn cursed techniques, fight dangerous enemies, and might die at any moment. Nightmare scenario, right?
But here's what struck me: he does it on purpose. When given a choice between living a normal, powerless life or taking on impossible challenges, he chooses the hard thing. Because to him, choosing your own fight—even a losing one—is better than being helpless.
And I thought about this really hard on my commute one morning (I was listening to a podcast about this, not watching anime, but the connection hit). How much of my life am I spending trying to avoid problems rather than choosing good problems?
A good problem is: Should I take on this challenging project that scares me? A bad problem is: Why does my salary not match my stress level?
A good problem is: How do I balance interesting work with sustainable pace? A bad problem is: Why don't I have passion for my job?
The difference is agency. And in India, especially if you're in the 22-35 bracket like my target audience, we're often told to be grateful for the problems we have, not to choose different ones. But Yuji taught me something: if you have the privilege to choose your problems, you're already ahead. Choose wisely.
4. Steins;Gate – The Compounding Cost of Control
Okabe invents a time machine (okay, it's more complicated than that, but work with me). He can change the past. Fix mistakes. Optimize decisions. And so he does. Over and over. He tries to create the perfect timeline.
But every time he changes something, the world shifts in unexpected ways. The cost of perfect control is that you can never actually move forward.
This one hit me like a physics problem I couldn't solve.
I realized I was doing the same thing with my life, just without the time machine. I was constantly trying to optimize. Spreadsheets for everything. Tracking every expense. Running financial projections. Trying to control every variable so that nothing bad would happen. And in doing so, I'd made my life very small and very predictable.
There's a cost to that level of control, and it's not measured in rupees. It's measured in experiences you don't have, conversations you don't start, and paths you don't explore because you can't guarantee the outcome.
I'm still a data guy. I still believe in tracking and understanding your finances. But Steins;Gate made me realize that some of the best parts of life come from the variables you can't control. The friendships that surprise you. The opportunities you didn't plan for. The conversations on a random commute that change how you think about everything.
5. Natsume's Book of Friends – What We Owe and What We Carry
This one's quieter than the others. Natsume can see yokai (spirits) that others can't. His book contains their names, which means he has power over them. But instead of using that power, he spends the show trying to return their names to them, breaking the contract.
He's literally giving up power to free other people. And he keeps doing it, over and over, even though it makes his life harder.
I watched this after a particularly frustrating quarter at work where I'd spent a lot of time helping junior analysts figure things out, mentoring, answering questions—time that didn't directly contribute to my own deliverables or bonuses. And I caught myself thinking, "This is inefficient. I should focus on my own work."
Natsume made me rethink that. Here's the thing: we live in a society that measures everything by individual output. Your salary. Your promotion. Your net worth. Your SIP returns. And within that framework, helping others looks like waste. It's time you could've spent on yourself.
But Natsume suggests something different. That what we build—bonds, trust, reputation, the willingness of others to trust us—might matter more than what we extract.
And I don't even mean this in a "nice person" way. Practically speaking, the people I've helped have helped me. The junior analyst I mentored flagged a critical issue in my analysis once. The colleague I covered for when she was sick returned the favor when I had a health issue. The person I shared my research with invited me to a project that changed my career trajectory.
But even if they hadn't, I think Natsume is saying something true: some things are worth doing even if you can't quantify the return.
| Anime | Core Lesson | How It Changed My Life |
|---|---|---|
| Demon Slayer | Choose your path with conviction, not just caution | Started saying yes to smaller risks and side projects |
| Attack on Titan | Your plans become obsolete; build flexibility instead | Diversifying skills and income streams, not just optimizing one path |
| Jujutsu Kaisen | Choose good problems, not just avoid bad ones | Being more intentional about which challenges to take on |
| Steins;Gate | The cost of perfect control is missing life | Holding plans loosely, embracing unexpected opportunities |
| Natsume's Book | Some things matter beyond what you can quantify | Investing more in relationships and community, not just metrics |
My Perspective
Honestly, writing this feels vulnerable because I'm a data guy. I'm supposed to believe in spreadsheets and optimization and measurable outcomes. And I do. But somewhere between my apartment in Kalyan and my desk in Mumbai, listening to podcasts about market returns and scrolling through financial news, I started noticing something: the parts of my life that actually felt rich weren't the ones that optimized best.
The commute itself has become this thinking space. An hour-twenty every morning where I'm not working, not refreshing markets, just observing—people, conversations, the monsoon on the tracks. And it's made me realize that all my tools (Groww, CRED, Zerodha, the spreadsheets, the projections) are just tools. They're useful. But they're not the point.
Anime helped me see that because anime isn't trying to optimize anything. It's just asking: what do you actually want? And what are you willing to risk for it? Those aren't spreadsheet questions. But they're the questions that matter.
Final Thoughts
Look, I'm not saying quit your job and become a demon slayer. I'm still here, analyzing data, maxing my SIPs, trying to be financially responsible. That's real life. But I'm also saying: don't let the tools of financial optimization become the entire goal.
You're in your 20s or 30s. You've probably got a decent job. You're probably thinking about your career, your money, your future. Good. Keep doing that. But also watch something that makes you think differently. Read something. Talk to someone who makes completely different choices than you. Let your certainties get a little shaken.
Because the truth is, we're not living inside walls or running from Titans or trying to perfect timelines. We're just living. And life gets better—not when everything is optimized, but when you know what you actually want and you're brave enough to pursue it.
Start with an anime. See where it takes you.
Dattatray Dagale
Data Analyst • Blogger • Mumbai
I'm a data analyst from Kalyan, Maharashtra, working at Morningstar. I write about personal finance, career growth, and everyday life for Indian millennials — the stuff I wish someone had told me earlier.
Written by Dattatray Dagale • 17 August 2026
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