The missed-call identity: who we are vs what we own

In college in Chennai, I was the boy who gave missed calls.

You let it ring once, maybe twice, then cut it. The other person saw your name, understood the code, and called back on their balance. It wasn’t rudeness. It was a whole grammar — one ring meant I reached, two meant call me, a missed call at a fixed time meant I’m thinking of you and I’m broke. Half of young India ran its relationships on this dialect. I was fluent.

And here’s the part I didn’t notice for years: I wasn’t doing missed calls. I was a missed call. It was woven into who I thought I was — the resourceful small-town kid making it work in a big city, getting by on cleverness because I didn’t have cash. I wore it almost proudly. That was my identity, and I was content with it.

Then I started earning a little. Enough for a motorbike. Enough to upgrade to a Nokia 6601 — a real phone, a camera, a thing I owned outright. And without any ceremony, I stopped giving missed calls. I just… called people. The dialect I’d been fluent in for years dropped out of my mouth.

I had formed a new identity. And I never decided to.

Things don’t just sit in your pocket. They rewrite you.

We tell ourselves a flattering story: I am who I am, and the stuff I buy is just stuff. I’m me, and the phone is a phone, and the bike is a bike.

It isn’t true. The 6601 didn’t just let me make calls — it changed what I expected of myself. Once you can call freely, waiting for a callback starts to feel small. Once you have a bike, the bus stop where you used to stand becomes a place other people stand. The object quietly raised the floor of my self-image, and my old self — the missed-call self, the one I’d been at peace with — got embarrassing in retrospect.

That’s the trick of ownership. It doesn’t announce itself as identity work. It shows up as convenience. But every upgrade is also a small overwrite.

You think you’re buying a better phone. You’re actually buying a slightly different person to be.

I’m not against any of this. I wanted the bike. I earned the phone. The point isn’t that wanting things is shameful — it’s that we rarely notice the swap happening underneath the purchase. We think we’re adding to our life. We’re often replacing a version of ourselves, and we don’t get a vote, because the change arrives disguised as relief.

The effortless upgrade is the dangerous one

Here’s the part I’ve had to sit with. A genuine upgrade — missed call to a phone you own, bus to bike, kirana-haggle to ten-minute delivery — is permanent precisely because it’s effortless. You never go back. You never even need willpower to stay; the new way is simply, irreversibly easier. These are real improvements. I’d never pretend otherwise.

But there’s a line from the book this site grew out of that I keep circling:

What’s effortless to do is just as effortless to neglect.

When an upgrade is effortless, the identity it installs is effortless too — and so is forgetting who you were before it. The missed-call kid had grit. He was inventive with constraints. He could make a relationship survive on zero rupees of balance. The 6601 made all of that unnecessary, and “unnecessary” has a way of becoming “forgotten.” I didn’t just lose a habit. I nearly lost the part of me that knew how to be resourceful when there was nothing in the account.

That’s the scar I want to name. Not the buying. The amnesia that rides along with the buying.

Where this stopped being cute

Years later, I lost a job — a whole division I led was shut down, and I had to let go of people I’d hired with big promises. My elder son Divit was three. And the thing that shook me wasn’t only the money. It was that so much of “who I was” had quietly migrated into the things the job paid for. The title. The salary that bought the lifestyle. The lifestyle that had become the identity.

Strip the job away and you find out how much of your sense of self you’d outsourced to your possessions and your position. It is a brutal audit. For a while I was in denial — it took me a long time to honestly accept the real reasons I was in that situation. And what pulled me back wasn’t a new purchase. It was remembering the missed-call kid. The one who could improvise. The one whose worth had never actually lived inside an object — I’d just let it move there because the move was easy.

My parents, I realised, had a quiet defence against all this. They bought against their past income — what they’d already earned and saved. My generation buys against future income — EMIs, buy-now-pay-later, the salary we assume will keep arriving. When you fund your identity on income you haven’t earned yet, you’re not just risking your finances. You’re renting your sense of self from a lender, and the lender can call it back.

So who are you, with the phone switched off?

I don’t have a clean answer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. I’m still co-learning this one, still catching myself mid-upgrade, still occasionally letting an object decide who I am that month.

But I’ve started running a small test before I buy the next thing. Not can I afford it — that’s the easy question. The harder one: which version of me does this install, and is that a person I actually chose to become? Sometimes the answer is a happy yes. The bike was a yes. Sometimes I realise I’m about to pay money to forget someone worth keeping.

If you want the practical scaffolding for this — the budgeting frames, the buy-against-the-past discipline, the way to keep money serving your identity instead of replacing it — I’ve gathered the tools and trackers over at the resources page, and the longer version of these stories lives in the book. If you just want to know whose scars you’re reading, here’s me.

Your things will keep trying to tell you who you are. That’s their job; it’s how they’re sold. Your job is to remember that the missed-call kid was somebody too — and that nothing you buy is allowed to overwrite him without your permission.