At 44, I was a Strategy Leader at a global Big Tech company in Singapore, which meant two things:

1. I earned a lot of money.

2. I believed this made me a fundamentally independent human being.

Neither of these turned out to be reliable.

From the outside, my life looked like a recruitment brochure. A River Valley condo. Two daughters in a top international school. A wife with a respectable job. A LinkedIn profile so polished it practically wore a tie. In our household, there was an unspoken economic truth: my wife’s salary provided stability; mine provided delusion.

Singapore has a special way of teaching you the difference between earning well and being wealthy. You can earn extremely well and still live one missed paycheck away from panic. As a foreigner, my salary didn’t just pay for comfort—it paid the “Foreigner Tax.” Rent alone was about $6,000 a month, which I told myself was reasonable because that’s where all rich expats lived. School fees were six figures a year, which I justified as an “investment in the future,” even though that future seemed increasingly dependent on me never blinking.

And yet, I felt invincible.

I had survived previous layoffs. I had performance ratings. I had internalized the company’s moral branding so deeply that I assumed it extended to me personally. “Don’t be evil” I thought, as if it were a legally binding clause in my contract.

Then came a Friday morning.

No calendar invite. No “quick sync.” Just an email with the subject line: Reorg.

That was it. Twelve years and 11 months of seventy-hour weeks ended by someone pressing “Send to all.” By 10 a.m., my corporate credentials were dead. I was still sitting at my desk, but spiritually, I was already on a return flight to Bangalore—economy, middle seat.

My brain immediately went into full panic mode. Not about savings—we had those. Not about investments—we had those too. My thoughts were far more practical and irrational:

Somewhere in that mental chaos, one thought kept looping louder than the rest: Am I a failure?

Loser.

I had read about layoffs for months. It always sounded abstract. Statistical. Almost theoretical. It hits very differently when the axe has your name on it.

What surprised me most wasn’t the loss of income. It was the loss of identity.

For over twenty years, I hadn’t really been a person. I had been a job title with a passport stamp.

In the Indian diaspora, a Big Tech role is a form of social currency. It’s what your parents casually drop into conversations. It’s what relatives use to benchmark their own children. Being a Strategy Leader wasn’t just my career—it was my family’s group chat headline.

When that disappeared, so did a chunk of my self-worth. A big chunk.

For weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to say I had been fired. I told people I had “left.” This was technically untrue, but emotionally necessary. It gave me a small, fragile sense of control—like rearranging deck chairs while the ship is clearly sinking.

That’s when the realization hit: my life was a psychological Ponzi scheme.

I had been borrowing confidence, security, and social validation from a rainbow colored company logo. Promotions were early payouts. Bonuses were proof the system worked. And like all Ponzi schemes, it felt stable right until the moment it collapsed.

I wasn’t a leader. I was a well-paid tenant in my own identity.

___

The layoff wasn’t just about money. It was about face. About pride. About imagining my parents quietly recalibrating how they talked about me. That part hurt more than I expected.

But something else happened too.

When the title vanished, I was forced to meet a version of myself I hadn’t spent time with in years—the one without slides, approvals, or status updates. He was awkward. Under-rehearsed. Slightly scared. But he was real.

Losing my job didn’t break me. It broke the illusion that the job was holding me together. And once that illusion was gone, I finally had space to ask a dangerous, liberating question:

If I’m no longer impressive—what do I actually want?

That question, it turns out, was the beginning of everything.`