A deeply personal reflection on money anxiety, career instability, and how financial gaps quietly shape identity and self-worth—especially for men in India. This story explores how employment breaks, social comparison, and missed connections can intensify depression without visible drama. It’s about unlearning the belief that income equals value, and rebuilding dignity beyond salary numbers.
Disclaimer: I write from lived experience, not professional authority. This space is for connection and reflection, not diagnosis or treatment. If you need support, please speak to a trained mental health professional.
Money has never been a temporary problem in my life.
It has been a background condition.
I moved from one job to another often—not because I lacked ability, but because stress piled up faster than I could carry it. The real damage, though, wasn’t switching jobs. It was leaving one before securing the next. Those gaps followed me like scars I couldn’t hide.
In a world that quietly teaches men to be providers first and humans later, my worth began to feel numerical. Not metaphorically—literally.
When I joined a new workplace, the first question people asked after my name or my role was my salary. That number decided whether I would be addressed as aap, tum, or tu. Respect was calibrated, not earned.
Whereas for some others, the amount didn’t matter as much as continuity. Was I earning right now? If not, the gap itself became a verdict. Employment breaks were treated like moral failures—evidence of weakness, instability, even madness. Those labels eventually found their way into my marriage, contributing to its collapse.
Strangely, none of that hurt as much as something far smaller. Something quieter. Something that happened years earlier, in Jaipur, in 2006.
During college, I lived in a hostel and had many friends, but one stood apart. We spent hours together writing code in C and C++, practicing not because we had to, but because we loved it. After watching The Matrix in a theatre, we were shaken. The ideas were too big to digest at once. We argued endlessly about reality, consciousness, and machines.
Eventually, we started writing our own science fiction. An AI that became self-aware, transferred its consciousness into a fighter jet, connected itself to the internet, CCTV cameras, everything electronic. We even imagined it coating itself with an optical-fiber–based layer to become invisible. Our story became so clever that we couldn’t figure out how to defeat our own creation. We laughed and abandoned it.
Those were some of the lightest days of my life.
By the final semester, many classmates were placed in prestigious companies. My friend landed a software job with an unimaginable package and was posted to the US. I didn’t get placed. I also lagged a year behind my original batch.
After graduation, I chose to prepare for government and public sector jobs. To survive, I took up a part-time lecturer position in a private engineering college, far from home. Around me, friends were joining global firms, moving abroad, building lives that looked complete from the outside.
No one openly mocked me.
The situation did that quietly.
At the time, the fastest and cheapest way to stay connected was email and chat rooms. I stayed in touch—occasionally—with my science fiction friend. Our conversations were rare but warm. We always returned to those unfinished stories, those earlier versions of ourselves.
One day, through a common friend, I heard he was back in India to get married.
I was genuinely happy for him. He deserved everything he had achieved. But the news came to me indirectly. Days later, I sat beside a colleague after lunch when his phone rang. It was my friend. I heard the entire conversation. He shared the news of his engagement and explained he had only fifteen days of leave, so he was inviting people personally over the phone.
The call ended.
I waited.
Days passed. People I barely spoke to asked me if I knew about his wedding. I said yes—I had heard. But something heavy settled in my chest. Not anger. Not jealousy. Just the quiet question: Did I not matter enough to be remembered?
Months later, I emailed him to congratulate him. He replied kindly, explaining how rushed everything had been, how he didn’t even know where I was or have my phone number. That line broke something in me.
I asked him why he hadn’t emailed me—why that option hadn’t occurred to him. He apologized repeatedly, saying that no one really used email anymore, that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind.
I asked him the question I had been carrying like a wound:
Had I become insignificant because I hadn’t achieved anything yet?
He refused that idea immediately. He was sincere. I believe him even now. I wasn’t angry with him then, and I’m not angry with him today.
But I was exhausted—exhausted by a life that kept proving, again and again, that I was forgettable. That moment didn’t create my depression, but it marked the beginning of its deepest phase.
After that, I withdrew. From people. From conversations. From hope. Not dramatically—just quietly enough that no one noticed.
Even today, years later, the guilt and shame of not being “worth remembering” still surface when money becomes tight, when work stress deepens, when the future feels like a narrowing corridor.
Money anxiety never really leaves.
It just changes clothes—sometimes a missed invitation, sometimes an empty bank account, sometimes the silence of people who once knew you well.
I’m learning now that these moments were never proof of my worth. They were mirrors held up by a system that confuses income with identity. I’m still unlearning that lesson—slowly, imperfectly, but consciously.
A gentle question to sit with:
When money becomes uncertain, does your mind question your survival—or does it quietly question your worth?
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