Being brown in the West means living with surveillance, torn allegiances, and mistrust — the exact texture of a spy thriller. That feeling is the emotional engine behind Bait, and why James Bond served as the perfect genre vehicle to explore it.
Where this was said
At 4:25 · chapter starts 2:53
Mendoza sets up Bait as a show about an actor of colour trying to break out of stereotype, with Bond as the vehicle. Ahmed immediately complicates the premise: James Bond came late in the writing process, he says, and the show is fundamentally about self-love and how all of us perform a public version of ourselves — on social media, on stage, anywhere we're being watched. He gestures at his own borrowed clothes and jokes that he's reading from an autocue, embodying the very gap the show explores. Then comes the pivot that reframes everything: Ahmed invokes Jordan Peele's observation that being Black in America feels like a horror movie. For Ahmed, being brown in the West feels like being stuck in a spy thriller you never signed up for — surveilled, suspected, caught between allegiances. Bond, then, does double duty: symbol of aspiration and nod to a genre Ahmed desperately wanted to inhabit. [1] — Riz Ahmed "Being brown in the West feels like you're stuck in a spy thriller that you did not ask to be in." 04:42
Bait is a six-episode Amazon Prime series in which Ahmed plays Shah Latif, an actor who auditions to be the next James Bond, exploring themes of self-love, identity, and authenticity.
James Bond came late to the Bait writers' room, but he arrived as the perfect symbol. The show is really about self-love and how people chase validation in all the wrong places — and what better emblem of decisive, desirable, alpha-male aspiration than 007?
Riz Ahmed says being brown in the West feels like being stuck in a spy thriller you didn't ask for — surveillance, torn allegiances, mistrust — which became the emotional core of Bait.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
Every person lives in constant tension between infinite possible selves and the finite, limited self they actually are. Tipping too far toward infinite possibility produces a loss of identity; too much confinement in the finite produces stagnation. Kierkegaard argued that this tension is never solved — only managed.
Standing outside a cold pool imagining reasons not to jump is the exact experience of pre-commitment anxiety. Once you jump, the shock passes and you wonder why you ever hesitated. The same mechanism governs every significant commitment in life — the dread is always on the outside, the relief on the inside.
Traditional societies had rites of passage that closed off childhood and opened adulthood. Modern society kept the in-between liminal phase but eliminated the ritual that resolved it. The result is 'emerging adulthood' — a decade or more stuck in the transition — engineered by rising education requirements, women entering the workforce, and delayed marriage.
When Mark Manson proposed to his wife, software he didn't know was running — the low-level assessment of sexual market value and other options — suddenly shut down. Commitment doesn't take freedom away. It trades optionality (freedom to do many things) for focus (freedom from distraction). John Dewey called these positive and negative freedom, and the latter is more powerful.
Mark Manson spent years as a location-independent digital nomad — always a new country, a new woman, a new venture. Then the diminishing returns kicked in: countries started feeling the same, dates felt identical, businesses all frustrated him. The cure wasn't more novelty. It was narrowing: one place, one person, one career.
Every meaningful commitment has a dip — an initial peak of excitement, a brutal trough of difficulty, and a second higher peak for those who push through. Institutions once kept people in the dip long enough to reach the other side. With infinite optionality and no institutions, everyone bails at the bottom and restarts the cycle of shallow first peaks.
Stage one — the aesthetic — is the default: chasing sensation, novelty, and keeping every door open. Stage two — the ethical — is learning to choose with eyes wide open, accepting the trade-offs. Stage three — the religious — is when a commitment becomes so total that it no longer feels like a choice. It just feels like who you are.
The ethical stage is rational commitment — you can explain your choices. The religious stage is when your commitment exceeds rational justification. You can't explain why. It just feels like it chose you. Kierkegaard called this the 'virtue of the absurd' — and it's represented not just in faith but in the entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes who can't imagine doing anything else.
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