A man sits in his car outside his daughter's school. He cannot afford the tuition increase. The letter came last week. His salary has remained unchanged for three years. The school needs more resources. He understands. But understanding does not pay bills. He sits there for ten minutes before driving home to tell his wife.
This is not a crisis you see in headlines. There are no protests, no riots, no dramatic collapse. There is only the quiet dissolution of a life that once seemed secure. Pakistan's middle class is vanishing not in a single catastrophic moment but in the slow erosion of daily economics and daily hope.
The numbers are brutal and straightforward. A family earning Rs150,000 per month, which was once solidly middle class, now struggles to cover basic expenses. Rent consumes 40 per cent of income. It consumed 25 per cent five years ago. Electricity bills have tripled. School fees have doubled. A visit to the doctor now requires deliberation. Medicine costs matter. Groceries are calculated, not chosen.
Inflation in Pakistan has reached 25 per cent in recent years, though official figures vary. Wages have not kept pace. A salaried worker earning the same amount as three years ago has effectively lost 40 per cent of purchasing power. This is meat becoming a weekend luxury. This is choosing between petrol and medicine. This is a mathematics of survival that leaves no room for life.
The middle class once meant something specific in Pakistan. It meant a house, eventually. A car. Children are educated in good schools. Savings. Security. A trajectory where your children might live better than you did. This was the bargain, the purpose of work, the reason to endure long commutes and office politics and difficult clients.
That bargain is broken. Homeownership has become a fantasy. A modest house in Karachi or Lahore now costs around Rs20 million to Rs30 million. A middle-class family cannot accumulate this amount in a lifetime of saving. Car ownership is still possible but represents a sacrifice that crowds out other necessities. Quality education means private schools, which now charge fees that families cannot sustain. Savings have become impossible. Most middle-class households live paycheck to paycheck, one emergency away from collapse.
The traditional markers of arrival have become markers of departure. You are not climbing anymore. You are holding on.
There is a particular pain in this trap. A university-educated accountant or engineer or teacher cannot rise. Their education promised opportunity. It delivered a stable but slowly sinking platform. They cannot fall either. They have jobs, credentials and family obligations. They cannot simply walk away and rebuild. They are trapped in a compression that denies both ascent and the freedom of descent.
They remember when things were different. This memory is crucial. This is not generational poverty that accepts its condition. This is a generation that experienced relative mobility, that believed in progress, that worked with the faith that effort would be rewarded. That faith has been systematically extinguished.
The psychological weight of this is immense. Anxiety has become the default state. A responsible parent lies awake calculating: Can we afford next semester? Can we absorb a medical emergency? What happens if I lose my job? What happens if my spouse loses theirs? The mathematics never works out. There is always a shortfall. There is always something that cannot be covered.
This produces a specific kind of stress – the stress of managing decline in slow motion. You cannot point to a single breaking point. You can only point to the accumulation. The skipped medical appointment. The child who needs tutoring but cannot receive it. The family event you cannot attend because of the bus fare. The conversation with your spouse about cutting back, again, on something that was already minimal.
Depression follows anxiety. Hopelessness follows depression. When a person works full-time, meets every obligation, does everything right and still cannot provide basic security, the mind concludes that effort is pointless. This is not laziness. This is rational despair. If work does not produce results, why work?
But they do work. They continue. This continuation despite the pointlessness is its own form of tragedy.
The consequences extend far beyond individual households. They fracture institutions. When teachers cannot afford to live on their salaries, education suffers. When doctors cannot make a middle-class living, medicine becomes a field abandoned by talent. When engineers and architects, and other skilled professionals see no future, they leave the country. Pakistan haemorrhages talent because the middle class can no longer sustain itself.
Social cohesion depends on a broad middle class. A stable society needs people who have something to lose and believe the system works. Pakistan's middle class is losing faith in the system. They see wealth concentrated at the top. They see the poor surviving through the informal economy and family networks. They see themselves alone in the middle, squeezed from above and below, belonging nowhere.
This creates vulnerability to extremism, authoritarianism, and social fracture. When people feel unheard and abandoned, they seek leaders who claim to understand their pain. They become vulnerable to simple solutions and dangerous promises. A middle class in crisis is unstable ground for democracy.
What dies with the middle class is not merely economic. It is a vision of the future. A middle-class person believes in tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better, or at least manageable. Children will have options. Life will progress. These beliefs structure meaning and motivation.
When these beliefs die, something essential dies in a nation. Not the people – they continue, they persist, they endure. But the narrative that sustained them vanishes. Pakistan's middle class is not disappearing because people are lazy or incompetent. It is disappearing because the economic system that sustained it has fractured. And no one has yet committed to fixing it.
The man outside the school will drive home. He will tell his wife that they cannot afford the new tuition. His daughter will transfer to a public school. She will receive a poorer education. Both of them know this. Nothing changes except that the family's circumstances grow slightly more precarious. The trajectory continues downward.
This is how a middle class vanishes. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But in ten thousand scenes of quiet calculation and painful compromise. In the slow erosion of dignity. In the death of hope. In a generation that worked hard and played by the rules, only to discover the rules were rigged.
The writer is a journalist specialising in socio-political analysis and historical perspectives.
