Debt equals prison

Forget the good-debt-bad-debt framework. That's a story written by people who sell debt for a living. The truth is simpler. Almost all debt is bad for you.

The moment you owe money to someone, your spine bends. You stop saying no the way you used to. You stop taking the stand you'd take if the balance in the account were actually yours and not the lender's. Every meeting, every negotiation, every fork in the road — there's a quiet voice doing the math on the EMI. That voice is your jailer.

People forget what debt used to mean. For most of human history, when you couldn't repay a creditor, they took everything. Land. Tools. Wife. Children. You and your bloodline became the collateral. Debt slavery was a literal institution — Babylon, Rome, India, all of them. The legal framework has softened. The psychology has not.

When you owe someone money, you are not a free person. You are a tenant in your own life, paying rent to whoever holds the paper. The bank. The credit card. The VC who marked you up. The supplier extending you credit. You wake up working for them before you work for yourself.

This is most dangerous for entrepreneurs.

The early years of a business are the years you need maximum spine. You'll be told no a thousand times. You'll need to walk away from bad customers, bad partners, bad terms. You'll need to bet on yourself when nobody else will. None of that is possible when you owe somebody money you can't comfortably repay.

Debt in the early years doesn't fund your dream. It funds the lender's leverage over your decisions. They don't even need to call you. The fear of the call shapes every move you make. You start optimising for survival of the loan instead of survival of the business — and those are very different things.

I've watched founders take a working capital loan at 14% and spend the next two years making decisions designed to service that loan instead of build the company. The debt didn't accelerate them. It tied a rope to their ankles and told them to run faster.

If you're starting up, my advice is unfashionable and absolute: no loans. Not for inventory. Not for ads. Not for hiring. Not for the office. Build slower. Stay smaller. Earn the next rupee before you spend it. Bootstrapped and broke beats funded and obligated. Every single time.

The freest people I know are not the richest. They are the ones who owe nobody anything. They walk into rooms without a calculator running in the back of their head. They say no without flinching. They sleep without doing arithmetic.

That's the asset class nobody talks about.

The absence of obligation.