My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.
A friend recently shared the 2025 India country report from Deloitte’s annual survey of young workers across 44 countries. A couple of data points stopped me. According to the report, 55% of Indian Gen Zs and 62% of Indian millennials say they live paycheque to paycheque. Both figures are higher than the global average of around 52%. And if that wasn’t sobering enough, 20% of Indian Gen Zs say they struggle to pay all their living expenses each month.
Now what makes these numbers puzzling is that these are not unemployed people, or those living in poverty. These are earning young Indians—people with salaries, maybe SIP accounts, and often carrying iPhones—and yet nearly half of them go to bed every month unsure if they are going to be okay.
What exactly is going on here?
I have been writing about investing and money for fifteen years, and this question of “why does money feel so stressful even when you’re earning” is the one I get asked most often. And the reason it keeps coming up is that nobody gives it a straight answer.
Most personal finance advice skips right past the feeling and jumps to the framework. “Make a budget.” “Build an emergency fund.” “Start a SIP.” These are all good advice. But they do not address why the anxiety is there in the first place, which means the anxiety doesn’t actually go away even after you follow the advice.
So let me try to answer the real question in today’s post.
One of my biggest lessons around money over the years has been that money stress is almost never really about money. It is about uncertainty. And the human brain handles uncertainty very badly.
Psychologists call a part of this ‘loss aversion’, which is the finding that a potential loss feels roughly twice as painful as an equivalent gain feels good. This is hardwired into us. Our ancestors who were more sensitive to threats survived longer than those who were relaxed about them. The problem is that the same wiring that kept early humans alive now makes modern humans miserable every time they check their bank balance.
But there is something beyond loss aversion that I think is even more important, and it gets almost no attention. Most people have never clearly decided what money is actually for in their own life.
Just think about that carefully. You spend years earning it, worrying about it, saving it, and spending it, and yet the question “what is money supposed to do for my life, specifically?” remains unanswered in most people’s heads.
And I am not talking about a vague “financial freedom” sense, but specifically. Like, what does enough look like for you? What concrete things do you want money to enable? When would you be able to say, without anxiety, that you have enough?
Without a clear answer to that question, money becomes an end in itself. And chasing an end in itself is exhausting because there is no finish line.
You earn more, the goalpost moves.
You save more, the anxiety doesn’t reduce.
You invest more, but you’re not sure what you’re investing toward.
The unease is not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It is a sign that you haven’t yet decided what doing it right would even look like.
Then there is the comparison problem, which has gotten dramatically worse over the last decade.
We humans have always measured ourselves against others. It is one of the most basic social instincts we have. But for most of human history, your comparison set was limited to the people physically around you, which included your colleagues, neighbours, or the relatives you met at weddings. That group was manageable as it was small. And your information about their finances was partial, because people didn’t walk around announcing their net worth, SIP, or EMI amounts.
Today, the comparison set is infinite. And it is systematically skewed toward the most visible and most financially well-off versions of other people’s lives. What you see on LinkedIn and Instagram is the edited highlight reel, and your brain, which cannot easily tell the difference between a curated performance and reality, uses it as the baseline for what “normal” looks like.
The result is a modern form of suffering. People feel financially inadequate while being, by any objective measure, comfortable. Not because they are actually behind but because they are measuring themselves against a comparison set that has been specifically curated to make them feel behind.
So what actually helps? Three things, in my view.
First, get genuinely clear about what you want money to do. And like I wrote above, be specific and write it down somewhere. Like, “I want to be able to take a three-week family trip every year without it being a source of stress.” Or “I want the option to leave a job I hate within three months of deciding to leave it.” When you have specific intentions like these, two things change. One, you can calculate whether you are actually on track, which converts vague anxiety into a concrete problem with a concrete solution. And two, money stops feeling like a monster and starts feeling like a tool with a specific job.
Second, reduce your comparison inputs, deliberately and without guilt. I’m not asking you to pretend that the world doesn’t exist. Instead, it’s about recognising that the information you are consuming is making you feel worse without making you any wiser. Nobody’s social media post has ever helped you make a better financial decision. Unfollow whatever makes you feel behind (just do it!). Stop having conversations about what other people earn or what their apartment cost unless those conversations actually teach you something useful. Remember that your financial life is not a race but a private construction project. And it’s you, and only you, who gets to define what you are building.
Third, learn to tell the difference between ‘useful worry’ and ‘useless worry’. Useful worry is a result of something real, like a real risk or something you can act on. For example, if you notice that you have no emergency fund and your job feels shaky, that worry is telling you something true and actionable. Pay attention to it. Useless worry, on the contrary, is the background hum of unease that doesn’t point anywhere specific and doesn’t generate any useful action. It remains there, quietly consuming energy. Most of the financial stress that we carry around is this second kind. And the antidote to ambient anxiety is not more money. It is more clarity.
The Stoics had a practice worth borrowing here. They called it “negative visualisation”. It involved deliberately imagining the loss of things you depend on, not to make yourself miserable, but to test your assumptions about what you actually need.
Try it with money. Ask yourself honestly: “If my income fell by 30% tomorrow, what would I do?”
Most people, when they think it through carefully, find that they would adjust, they would survive, and they might even discover that the simpler version of their life is more liveable than the current one. Now, that realisation doesn’t solve anything on a spreadsheet but it takes the existential edge off the anxiety, which is worth more than most people expect.
None of this is to say that financial stress is always irrational. Sometimes the numbers genuinely don’t add up. Sometimes the job situation is uncertain, or the expenses have actually outrun the income. In such cases, what you need is not a mindset shift but a practical plan. We will get to all of that in the articles that follow.
But in my experience, many people who feel chronically anxious about money are not in that situation. They are earning, saving, and managing… but doing it without a clear internal compass, in an environment that is constantly signalling that they are behind.
No amount of extra salary or extra SIP units solves that problem, because the problem is not the number. It is the absence of a clear intention behind the number.
Money is a tool, and this is worth saying plainly. And like any tool, it is only as useful as the clarity with which you deploy it. A hammer in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re building just makes noise. The same is true of a salary, a portfolio, or a savings account.
The stress, in the end, is not about the money. It is about not knowing what you are building, or whether what you’re building is the right thing for you.
Try to get clear on that and the anxiety changes character. It stops feeling like a fog you’re stumbling through and starts feeling like a compass pointing you somewhere. And a compass, however uncomfortable to hold, is always more useful than a fog.
This is the first in a series of articles on the money questions that young people are genuinely wrestling with today.
My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.
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