Why Upgrading Your Life Is Harder Than Earning the Money
One month after coming home: money habits, sudden layoffs, and customer support taught me life lessons.
Last month, I wrote about how Amazon US and Amazon India felt like different companies.
One month later, I’m still adjusting coming back to India — but this time the surprises weren’t about meetings or lunch breaks. They were about money, customer support, and a reminder that even carefully chosen career moves can suddenly feel uncertain.
The hardest upgrade isn’t the lifestyle. It’s the mindset.
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed since moving back is this:
Many people don’t enjoy an upgraded lifestyle — even when they can afford it.
Not because they don’t want better things, but because spending still feels wrong.
I see it most clearly in my parents. They spent their lives optimizing every dollar (rupee). My mother will go out of her way to buy the same vegetables for a few cents less. Leftovers never go to waste — they go to someone who needs them, or at the very least to animals. Every hour, she turns off every extra bulb (or fan), even when the house still needs light. My father keeps old slippers for years. Buying new ones feels like disrespecting what still works.
I inherited some of this too. I still check three online stores before buying anything — not because those few dollars would make me rich, but because if I paid X and later found the same item for less, it felt like someone had tricked me. Or worse, like I had been careless.
I’ve intentionally improved a lot in this area. My parents still struggle. They don’t get happier by upgrading their lifestyle, and that surprised me more than I expected.
Why don’t people enjoy spending — even when the money is there?
This isn’t just my family. I see it in my friends too. One of them makes more than half a million dollars a year, and he will still spend an hour to save $10. Anyone looking from the outside would say that trade-off doesn’t make sense. But he isn’t doing it consciously. His mind learned that path years ago — and it never fully left.
Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
Money habits are no different. Financial psychologist Brad Klontz has a useful idea for this: our money behavior is driven by unconscious “money scripts” formed in childhood.
One of them is money vigilance. It looks healthy — save carefully, avoid debt, stay careful. Taken too far, it becomes anxiety and an inability to enjoy financial success.
Another is money avoidance. It links wealth with guilt, and that can lead to under-spending even on reasonable purchases.
When a carefully made decision suddenly feels fragile
Recently, Amazon announced another round of layoffs — this time specifically in its AGI organization, the same org I recently moved into.
You know that feeling when you make a decision carefully, and then the ground shifts underneath it? That was me. I moved from another team into an AGI team just one month ago, and then the layoffs arrived. Luckily, I wasn’t impacted. But I’m with everyone who was.
Layoff news is rarely gentle. It arrives suddenly, and it can change a life overnight. I saw that up close with a roommate who was laid off in Amazon’s first wave, just when it started across companies.
It’s scary — not only for the people who lose their roles, but for everyone around them who suddenly wonders what “secure” even means.
And yet, over five years — or twenty — that same disruption can become useful in ways you can’t see at the time.
A friend of mine is in London today because a layoff pushed his career onto a different path. At the time, it felt like an ending. Looking back, it was a beginning.
Steve Jobs put it better than I can:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”
There is not one path in life, my friend. Sometimes the path you didn’t choose is the one that opens next.
The other shock: customer support
The second big realization this month has been simpler — and more frustrating. Customer support here is often poor, and even international companies don’t feel the same.
Amazon US customer support is not Amazon India customer support. You can’t return many items easily, even when the quality is wrong, or the product arrives different or damaged.
That gap became very real when I recently bought term insurance. I wanted to protect my family from the unexpected.
The agent filled out the entire application for me — without asking, without sending it for review, and without even sharing a copy.
Then Indian law did something useful. An automated email landed in my inbox with the filled details, and many of them were inaccurate. I asked them to correct it. Over the phone, the agent casually said they had.
That “yes” didn’t give me comfort, so I sent a formal email to their official address and asked for a written response.
Then I went ahead with multi-step, multi-day, multi-week process of getting term insurance. Eventually the policy became active. Then I received the final documents — and the application still hadn’t been updated.
I reached out to customer service. The responses were unclear. Sometimes they closed the case without a proper explanation. I finally said something simple: if I don’t get a clear answer, terminate the policy and refund the money.
That got their attention. They filed a complaint, and I finally received a short written response that gave me just enough comfort to keep the policy:
“We have carefully re-evaluated the application and the information shared by you. We would like to inform you that, as per our underwriting guidelines, there is no impact on the aforementioned policy with respect to the declaration made by you regarding your health status.”
Not a long explanation or specific details. Just a few generic lines.
I’m staying with what I have — not because the experience was great, but because I already spent weeks getting here.
Maybe the next company’s support would be worse. I don’t know.
What I do know is this: I need to change my expectations around customer support in India. Not lower my standards completely — but stop assuming every system will behave like the ones I got used to abroad.
What this month taught me
Coming back after years away doesn’t just reset your calendar. It resurfaces old habits, and it exposes new gaps.
Some of those gaps are personal — like the money scripts we carry from childhood.
Some are structural — like how customer support works from country to country.
And some are professional — like realizing that even a thoughtful move into the “right” organization can still leave you standing next to sudden uncertainty.
Same person. Same country I grew up in. Different expectations.
As Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”
Coming home has felt a lot like that. The place looked familiar. The current does not.
And that difference is still teaching me.
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