I didn’t panic when I lost my job. That came later—while sitting in a massage chair I had bought to “reduce stress.”

This chair cost more than my first motorcycle. It kneaded my back gently while my brain spiraled violently. That’s when I realized something deeply ironic:

I wasn’t afraid of being poor. I was afraid of downgrading.

Loss aversion is a simple idea with a brutal effect: losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good.

Which explains why humans will cling desperately to a bad deal—as long as it’s familiar.

Especially if it vibrates.

Before the layoff, the “platinum lifestyle” barely registered emotionally. Good insurance. Good school. Comfortable home. Smooth logistics. These were background features—like oxygen or Wi-Fi.

You don’t wake up grateful for oxygen. You only panic when you think it might disappear.

Suddenly, I was mentally rehearsing conversations that hadn’t happened yet.

“What if we have to change schools?”

“What if the insurance changes?”

“What if the dentist is no longer ‘in-network’?”

I was catastrophizing dental plans while literally being massaged. This is loss aversion at work: your brain treats removal as an emergency—even when the original thing wasn’t delivering daily joy. No one wakes up thrilled about their premium dental coverage. But the idea of losing it feels like societal collapse.

Psychologists call this the endowment effect: once something is “yours,” your brain inflates its value. Objectively, nothing had changed yet. Subjectively, everything felt under threat.

The lifestyle hadn’t improved my happiness. But it had become defensive terrain. I noticed how irrational it was when I caught myself justifying things I didn’t even like.

“I mean, we need the massage chair.”

(We did not.)

“We can’t lose this neighborhood.”

(I barely talked to anyone.)

“We can’t give up this convenience.”

(The convenience was mostly avoiding small discomforts.)

Loss aversion doesn’t ask, “Is this good for you?”

It asks, “Can you survive without it?”

And it asks loudly.

The most revealing moment came when I realized the fear wasn’t about money. It was about identity continuity.

If we lost these things, what would that say about us?

Downgrading felt like regression. Like admitting failure. Like explaining something at a dinner table you no longer wanted to attend.

So my brain did what loss-averse brains do best: it clung. It created a fake urgency to protect things that were never central to my joy—only to my sense of normalcy. That’s why loss feels sharper than gain. Gains are optional. Losses feel existential.

Here’s the punchline: when we actually started letting go—slowly, selectively—the pain was mostly imagined.

The massage chair left. Nothing bad happened.

Some subscriptions vanished. Life continued.

We didn’t lose happiness. We lost the noise.

Loss aversion had convinced me that comfort equaled safety. In reality, comfort had just raised the emotional cost of change.

___

The platinum life didn’t make me calmer. But the thought of losing it made me anxious.

Once I saw that clearly, the fear lost its grip. Not all at once—but enough to breathe again.

In the next article, I’ll talk about the real tax that kept this lifestyle alive—not money, but other people’s expectations.

Because nothing fuels loss aversion quite like the question:

“Log kya kahenge?”`