Before founding Kerning Cultures, Hiba Fisher spent every morning of her commute crying (EP 38).
The tears were not triggered by a single event. They were a daily occurrence — a routine expression of the gap between what she was doing and what she wanted to do. She was employed, functional, showing up. She was also miserable in a way that had become structural rather than situational.
This was her quarter-life crisis. It did not manifest as dramatic collapse or public breakdown. It manifested as tears on the way to work, every morning, in a car, alone.
The crying served as a signal she eventually could not ignore. When grief becomes routine — when it is as predictable as traffic — it stops being an emotion and starts being information. The information was: this life is wrong.
Hiba did not describe a single moment of decision. She described an accumulation. The commute tears were the evidence that eventually forced the change — the move toward narrative podcasting, toward Kerning Cultures, toward the career that would make her the founder of the first venture-backed podcast company in the Middle East.
Quarter-life crises are common. What makes Hiba's account useful is its specificity and its refusal to dramatise. She did not frame the period as a heroic origin story. She framed it as misery that eventually became intolerable. The tears were not poetic. They were diagnostic.