Essay: Safety Nets and Stars

Subramaniam Cheemalapati shares a personal essay on observing life closely and noticing how others view it.

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I have noticed over the years that there are at least two kinds of carefree people. From a distance, they can look alike.

The first kind believes, quietly and without much drama, that things will work out. Money will come if you stay positive and do good. Health will hold if you live decently. The universe is not hostile. It may not be actively friendly, either, though it certainly isn’t keeping score against you. This reflects my grandfather’s carefree nature. He left a royal court to become a farmer and never seemed troubled by either choice. For people like him, even thinking about a safety net is almost beside the point. They are not reckless. The net is not separate from them; it is woven from the same fabric as their faith. They are already inside it.

The second kind of carefree person is different. I have come to recognize them more as I have gotten older. These are individuals who do whatever they want, whenever they want, largely without considering how it lands on those around them. They are usually not malicious. They are simply unbothered. They remain untroubled by consequences because those consequences never seem to be theirs to bear. Someone else absorbs them. Someone else adjusts.

“Adjust” is exactly the word. I have watched this play out across families, workplaces, and friend groups. Someone acts, and the rest of us are not expected to react. We are expected to adjust. Quietly. Without complaint. It is as though their carefree attitude is a kind of weather, and the rest of us simply need better umbrellas.

For a long time, I found this confusing because both types of people seem carefree. Neither worries visibly, nor does either plan obsessively for disaster. From the outside, the man who trusts the universe and the man who simply ignores everyone else can seem like the same person for a fleeting moment.

They are not. One has a safety net because he has made peace with something larger than himself. The other has a safety net because others serve as that net, often without even realizing the arrangement.

I must admit something here to keep this essay honest. The presence of the second kind of person has often made me work harder. This reaction does not stem from admiration. It comes from something closer to refusal. I become more careful, more attentive, and more hyperactive in direct proportion to how carelessly someone near me behaves. I act as if I am trying to close the gap they left open. I refuse to let their carelessness take up more space in our attention, outcomes, or success.

I am not sure this is a virtue. It might just be a reflex. Yet it has still shaped much of my life, appearing as a quiet, ongoing refusal to let someone else’s attitude dominate the narrative.

The first kind of person is carefree. They are not idle. They are deeply engaged. Their engagement comes from a settled place rather than an anxious one. They do not seek to escape effort. Their fuel never seems to run out because it relies on more than willpower.

For the second kind of person, their carelessness never runs dry. Their fuel, however, is borrowed. It runs on other people’s adjustments, other people’s quiet absorptions, and other people saying, “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

Here is the conclusion I have reached, even if I have not quite resolved it. The stars my grandfather pointed to, the eyes in the sky watching everything, were never meant to serve solely as a deterrent to other people’s behavior. Growing up, I assumed the stars were mostly relevant to the careless. Surely, they were the ones being watched, judged, and eventually checked.

The stars, if they are watching at all, are watching everyone. They watch the person standing there, working a little too hard and staying a little too alert. They watch the person refusing to give an inch to someone else’s carelessness, calling it diligence, responsibility, or simply refusing to be like them.

Maybe the real safety net, the one my grandfather had while sitting in his field, laughing his soft laugh, was not the belief that things would work out for him. It was something quieter. It was no longer needing to keep score. He did not keep score against careless people, the universe, or even himself.

I am not there yet. I still notice. I still tally, somewhere in the back of my mind, who is adjusting and who is simply being adjusted.

I notice that I notice. Perhaps that is its own kind of beginning.

Author’s Bio

Subramaniam Cheemalapati is a writer based in Mysore, India. His work explores memory, family, faith, caregiving, and place. His personal essay, “What the Stars Kept Secret,” will appear in Borderless Journal (July 2026). He is currently working on a literary novel, a memoir, and a collection of personal essays.