here is a particular quietness that settles over a house when the money runs out. It’s not the loud, dramatic poverty of the films - the sudden eviction, the shouting landlord. It’s a slow, creeping silence. The geyser stays off, even in January’s cold. The children’s visits from abroad grow shorter, or stop entirely to be replaced by a slightly-too-small remittance that does not cover the new blood pressure medicine. The pension, once a badge of life-long honest work, slips from sufficient to supplementary to insulting over the span of a decade. This is the old-age poverty that comes for the working- and middle-classes. I have come to believe that it is not an accident. It is a structural betrayal, designed into the very economies we trusted to protect us.

Is this a uniquely Pakistani story? Hardly. But the way it unfolds here is a particularly bitter brew of global trends and local betrayals. When I look at the data from the OECD, I see a mirror, albeit a distorted one. Across the developed world, the old-age poverty rate for people who were once stably middle-class is creeping up, from the United States to South Korea. The reason is a quiet revolution in risk. Where a company once said, “You work for us for thirty years and we will pay you a defined percentage of your final salary until you die,” they now say, “Here is a small pot of money, invest it wisely, and good luck surviving to ninety.” The risk of inflation, market crashes and simply living too long has been forklifted from the broad shoulders of the institution onto the narrow, trembling shoulders of the individual.

In Pakistan, we haven’t even had that hollowed-out pot of money for most. We are a nation of the ‘informal.’ More than 70 percent of our workers have never has a formal pension scheme. For the sliver covered by the Employees’ Old-Age Benefits Institution, the monthly payments are often a cruel joke, a figure so low it cannot cover a week’s groceries, let alone rent. So, the Pakistani middle class invented its own three-legged stool, with different legs: one was the hope of a government pension; the second was the ownership of real estate (a plot, a flat, a shop to rent out); and the third, most important, was children. Sons, in particular. You invest everything in them; they become your social security.

That third leg is now wobbling under an unbearable weight. The sons are in Dubai, in London, in Riyadh, sending riyals and dirhams. Or they are here, but crushed by their own inflation, their own children’s school fees, their own dreams of a better car, leaving the old parents with a monthly ‘pocket money’ that buys less dignity each year. The filial contract, the bedrock of South Asian old-age security, is unravelling not because children have become evil, but because the economic basis to honour it has dissolved. You can no longer support two households without completely depleting your salary in a city like Karachi or Lahore.

What of that other leg, the property? For decades, the mantra was simple: buy land, it only goes up. For a certain generation, this was true. A man who bought a 200-yard plot in Gulshan-i-Iqbal in the 1980s on a bank manager’s salary could sell it today and fund a retirement. But for the next tier down, the private-school teacher, the mid-level corporate clerk, the retired sepoy, what could they buy? A small flat in a distant housing scheme, which becomes a trap. You are asset-rich and income-poor, living in a structure you own but cannot afford to heat, cool or repair. This is the gilded cage of the Pakistani retired middle class: a house worth millions of rupees and no money to pay the electricity bill.

More than 70 percent of the workforce has never had a formal pension scheme. For the sliver covered by the Employees’ Old-Age Benefits Institution, the monthly payments are often a cruel joke.

Then there is the real killer: healthcare. In a country without a meaningful universal health safety net, a single cardiac event is a financial atom bomb. I have seen many. A retired professor, a man of immense dignity and a shelf of published books, drained his entire Provident Fund, a lump sum he received at retirement meant to last 20 years, on a single bypass surgery for his wife. It disappeared in a fortnight. The state is nowhere to hold your hand in the crisis. There is no “means-tested” benefit to fall upon, because the Pakistani state’s social protection, the Benazir Income Support Programme, is designed purely for the destitute - the absolute bottom of the pyramid.

The government’s recent obsession with slashing the pension bill for its own employees is proceeding without creating any alternative. We are hearing talk of “defined contribution” plans for new civil servants, a copy-paste from a Western model without the Western regulatory safeguards or financial literacy levels.

Who pays the deepest price? As always, women. The Pakistani middle-class woman who spent her life as a housewife, a noble and yet utterly unpaid profession, arrives at her husband’s death to find she is a financial ghost. The pension, if there was one, either dies with the husband or is halved. Her name might not even be on the property papers. Her children, if she is lucky, will provide. If she is not, she becomes one of the silent statistics of invisible female poverty.

What we are witnessing is not a failure of individual planning. It is the planned obsolescence of the middle-class life cycle. We are told to be financially literate, to invest, to plan, as if the economy were a stable, rational machine. You cannot diversify sources of income when you have no surplus either in cash or kind.

So, what is to be done? The answer cannot be simply “teach people to save better.” We need a new social contract for aging, one suited to this century. For Pakistan, this means a multi-pronged, deeply unglamorous push: a universal, non-contributory, basic social pension for every citizen over a certain age, funded not as charity but as deferred wages for a lifetime of contribution to society, be it in a factory, a field or a home.

Until then, the silence in those houses will grow. It will be the sound of a generation that played by every rule it was given and discovered only at the finish line that the game was rigged, the prize had been stolen and the only thing left to do was to turn off the geyser, smile tightly at the visiting grandchildren and pretend that this quiet, slow disappearance into poverty is somehow their own fault. It isn’t.

The writer is a sociologist, with extensive work in social policy and development. He’s accessible at [email protected]