Why I Am Not "Locking In" This September
The Life of a Creator Entrepreneur: Living and Building Trendie.
“Lock in” has become the anthem of September. You can’t miss it. It’s in captions, on TikTok, whispered like a mantra for discipline. It’s the new badge of seriousness: close the door, cut the noise, focus until you make it.
Every September arrives with a script. New notebooks. Fresh gym memberships. That quiet seriousness that hangs in the air as summer fades. This year, the script has a headline: “lock in”.
And I get it. It’s catchy. The wellness industry eats it up. A phrase that feels decisive and marketable. Lock in your goals, lock in your life.
The Culture of Control
I can’t help asking: what exactly are we locking into? And what are we locking out?
Because the whole idea comes from a culture obsessed with control. A culture that tells us progress only counts if it’s born in isolation. That achievement is a direct product of grinding, compressing, sacrificing. It’s hustle culture in a different font, packaged like discipline, sold like self-respect. And we reach for it, because it promises certainty in a world that feels endlessly uncertain.
The irony is, “lock in” doesn’t make us more present. It makes us smaller. Narrower. We end up shutting out the very things that give life its texture. The dinner tables where conversations go sideways, the spontaneous moments where ideas sneak in uninvited, the unplanned detours that change everything. Locking in doesn’t create evolution. If you’re always locked in, you’re not actually gaining more to build from. You’re just narrowing the very palette you’ll need later.
Reminder: Nobody’s immune
And I feel the pull, of course I do. I’m human. I feel the guilt creep in when I’m out late on a Tuesday. When I choose a good night sleep instead of squeezing one more task out of myself. When I let life feel bigger than my to-do list. Sometimes I can literally hear the whispers in my head: “You won’t achieve anything if you don’t just work harder. Stop enjoying yourself. Get serious.” For a second, I almost believe them.
But here’s what I keep circling back to: if I lock in completely, I cut myself off from the very thing I’m building from.
We’ve been taught that freedom and ambition are opposites. That you can’t have both at the same time. Either you chase your goals with tunnel vision, or you step back to “enjoy life” and risk falling behind.
But that binary doesn’t quite hold up in real life.
I’ll work hard, yes. I’ll show up, move things forward, keep building. But not if the cost is missing out on life itself. Ambition should open your world, not shrink it.
Trendy < Trendie
Here’s the truth: you can’t package nuance the way you can package binaries. Nuance isn’t trendy, it’s Trendie. It’s a feeling, not a phase. It doesn’t spread as quickly. It’s harder to stamp on a caption, harder to market, harder to sell to everyone and anyone. Which is exactly why it matters. Because nuance asks for patience. It asks you to resist the script. It asks you to keep tuning in, especially when everyone around you is handing you the binary: lock in or fall behind. Hustle or soft life. Discipline or delusion.
And of course, once a phrase like lock in gains traction, brands jump on it. Suddenly it’s everywhere, in captions, ads, podcasts, even product launches. What starts as a trend quickly hardens into a script. And when something is repeated enough times, it stops sounding like an option and starts to feel like the only way.
Some people will shrug and say, “it’s not that deep.” But it is. Language matters. Culture matters. When a phrase like lock in becomes the anthem of a season, it shapes how we think about ambition, how we measure freedom, even how we treat ourselves when we fall short. To dismiss it as shallow is to miss how quietly these scripts run our lives.
The Third Way
Because life has never been binary. It’s layered. Messy. Alive. And that’s where the third way lives. Not in rejecting structure, not in surrendering to escape, but in the daily act of choosing rhythm over rigidity, nuance over certainty, presence over performance.
For me, freedom without sacrificing ambition looks like this: building with intention while still leaving space for joy, presence, and spontaneity. It’s ambition that expands your life, not ambition that shrinks it.
And this is why I still love September. I love the reset, the rhythm, the sense of a fresh page. But I refuse to reset at the expense of enjoyment. To me, structure isn’t about sacrifice, it’s about rhythm. The pulse that holds freedom together, not the prison that cuts it off. And that rhythm is subjective.
Locking in might work for some people, and I respect that. Discipline looks different for everyone. But for me, shutting out the world means shutting out my source material.
For me, tuning in looks like reminding myself that this is all part of it:
Spending time with friends is also part of building.
Leaving room for spontaneity.
Resting without guilt.
Bringing a little joy into the everyday.
Creating more than I consume (and lighting the candle while I do it).
Taking the long way home while the evenings are still light.
Remembering I can live and build at the same time.
Let work feel inspiring, not overwhelming.
Always celebrate the small wins.
Maybe “tune in” doesn’t sound as decisive as “lock in.” Maybe it won’t go viral in the same way. But it feels human. It feels Trendie. And more than that, it feels sustainable.
I don’t want to spend September to December locked in a tunnel. I’ll work hard, yes. But I’ll also leave space for the spontaneous, the unplanned, the life that spills over the edges. Because that’s where the best ideas, and the best stories, always comes.
Because the point isn’t to prove you’re serious. The point is to keep building without forgetting to live.
Keep building but don’t forget to live.
Stay Trendie ;)
India x