If Pakistan is so poor, why does everyone look rich?

Our average inflation in Pakistan runs at about 11%. What that actually means, in the only terms that matter, is that the money sitting in your pocket buys you less this year than it bought you last year, and you didn't have to do anything wrong for it to happen. We had two relatively calm years on that front.

It's climbing again now, because oil prices are climbing with the war, and oil is the biggest thing we import. One briefing put the severe case at 17%. At the same time, car sales in this country are up 43% year on year. And roughly 45% of Pakistan lives below the poverty line.

Now put the numbers down and walk outside. The weddings are getting bigger and louder every season, not smaller. People are buying cars like there's a deadline on it, and there's a new phone in every second hand you see. So who is paying for all of this?

Let me get one lazy answer out of the way first, because I'm not saying everyone in Pakistan is poor. When wealthy people spend, that's real spending sitting on top of real wealth, and there's nothing to explain.

The mistake is upstream of all that. We talk about Pakistan as though it's a single economy. It isn't. Inside this one troubled economy there are several smaller ones stacked on top of each other. An upper middle class, a middle class, a lower middle class, and everyone below the poverty line. They share a country, but each one lives by completely different rules about what money is and what it's for.

We only ever argue about the economy we can see

Only one of those layers is visible, so that's the only one we ever talk about. Think about what invisible looks like. A man quietly putting money into a portfolio every month. A man keeping his spending deliberately small so that he never has to take a loan. A man driving a fifteen year old car on purpose, because the difference between that car and the one he could afford is going somewhere else. You won't see the decision, you won't see the discipline, and you certainly won't see where the money went.

Now think about what visible looks like. The new car. The new phone. The house. And every one of those things sends a signal into the heads of everyone who sees it, and the signal says: this man has figured it out.

Society never verifies the signal. Nobody stops to ask whether that car was bought with money he had or money he's going to owe for the next seven years.

Because if it was bought on installments, he didn't really buy anything. He handed over five, seven, sometimes fifteen years of his future peace so that people would look at him differently starting today. The money that could have been buying his freedom went into the thing sitting in the driveway instead, where everyone could admire it.

I know exactly how this works, because I did it

I've been in the US trucking industry for nine years, four of those running my own business from here. That business is what actually taught me how money works. How demand moves, how the cycles turn, why one year is good and the next one is brutal. I understood all of it, and I understood it well, long before any of it was visible to a single person around me.

Then I bought an SUV. And overnight, the way people looked at me changed. People started sending their relatives to me, bhai, isko kuch bata do, iski zindagi mein help kar do. Which I like, genuinely, because there was a stretch of my life where I couldn't work out what was happening around me and I badly wanted somebody who could just sit down and explain it.

But sit with what actually happened there for a second. Same nine years, same experience, same advice, because I'd been giving that exact advice before the car existed. The only thing that changed is that one piece of my invisible wealth became visible, and the weight of my words went from nothing to everything.

And yet, being honest, it wasn't all bad. Those doors genuinely opened, and people took the work seriously because something about it finally looked serious. The cost is that people start judging you only on what you showed them. And the things you didn't show them, your savings, your calm, the money quietly keeping you safe, stop counting, because nobody can see them.

Your income doesn't vanish, it converts

Money doesn't disappear. Every rupee that reaches you gets converted into something, and there are only three places it can go. The ratio between those three decides how your life turns out, and almost nobody chooses it deliberately.

The first is attention spending. Your income becomes a signal. The car, the phone, the house, the thing you post. You're spending it to put something in other people's heads, and what it says is: I did the thing, now give me the izzat.

The second is comfort spending, and it's a completely different thing from the first, even though people treat them the same. Your income becomes a better version of you. A mattress that costs four times what a normal mattress costs, because you spend a third of your life on it. A proper chair, because you're sitting in it thirteen hours a day. Decent food. The gym. The tests you keep postponing. Nobody else can see any of this, but you feel it every single day, and it pays you back in energy and a clearer head, which then shows up in your work.

The third is freedom spending. Your income becomes your future self. That future self is just you, ten or fifteen years from now. His costs are higher, his responsibilities are heavier, and the part that matters most, his energy is lower than yours is right now. As your energy drops, your money has to rise to cover the gap, so that you're not still trying to earn your way out of trouble at an age when you no longer have the strength for it.

Money you send to him compounds on the way. And that man will make dua for you. Send him nothing and he'll curse you instead.

So why does everyone keep picking wrong?

If the three are that clear, why doesn't everyone just fix the ratio? Because of timing. Each one pays you back at a completely different speed. Attention spending pays tomorrow. You buy the car and the congratulations start the next morning. People ask what you're doing now, bhai, aap tou baray cool hain. And half of it you generate yourself, inside your own head. Comfort spending pays daily. You sleep better tonight.

Freedom spending pays in five, ten, fifteen years. And your brain genuinely cannot picture fifteen years from now. It simply cannot do it, unless you have trained it to. So an untrained brain handed a decision about where money goes will put it in the first two almost every time, and mostly in the first one, because that's where the reward lands fastest.

That's not a character flaw and I want to be careful here, because this is where most people writing about money start insulting their reader. That's an untrained brain doing precisely what brains evolved to do, which is take the reward it can actually see. It's just that the ratio it produces will quietly cost you your life.

So the fix is to invert the list and put freedom at the top. Not to kill attention spending, I'm not saying that, I'm saying shrink it. Every rupee you pull out of attention is a rupee that can go to freedom, and that's the only trade in the whole system that pays you back.

Change what you're keeping score of

Your life has a scoreboard whether you picked one or not. Most people are scoring how much they've managed to show other people. Put a different number on it. How many months could you survive with no salary?

If the answer is zero, you can't last two weeks, and you're not stable, you're just currently employed. Two months and you're finding your feet. Six to twelve, or past twelve, and you're actually free. You have options, and options are the entire point.

I wear a fitness band. It shows me data, the data tells me where my health is quietly failing, and I act on the data. That's a health feedback loop, and it works because the number is in front of my face. Money has a feedback loop too, and almost nobody looks at theirs.

The first number I started tracking was my IMR, my intentional money rate. Out of everything that came in this month, how much of it went somewhere on purpose? Investments. Debt I'm actively paying down. Sadqa. Zakat. Everything else just went out somewhere without me deciding it.

I was certain my IMR was 50%, that half of everything I earned was going where I'd chosen. Then I actually tracked it, and it was 27%. Which meant the other 73% was drifting away every month, and I couldn't have told you where. Now I decide it before the money arrives, and I keep it at 50% or better.

And here's the part I find genuinely funny about myself. When my IMR drops under 50%, I feel real anxiety about it. Which is the same anxiety another man feels when he sees his neighbour's new car and decides he needs a better one. It's the same machinery underneath, the same status anxiety and comparison and need to push a number higher. I just pointed it at a different number, one nobody else can see. You probably can't out-discipline your own brain. But you can give it something better to chase.

The second thing I do is give my money pots, or what we'd call galle in Urdu. An emergency fund is a galla. Your daughter's education is a galla. Your income fills those first, before anything else in the month is allowed to move. Because here's what happens if you don't. Money that hasn't been given a destination builds its own, and the destination it builds is almost always attention spending.

The difference

Do all of this and none of it will be visible to anyone. It's visible to you. Turn it into a game you're playing against your own number, make filling those galle the thing you can't rest until it's done, and one day you'll notice you no longer need other people to tell you how you're doing. Start now, because the man you're saving for is walking into a harder world than this one. That preparation either starts today or it doesn't happen.

So, back to the question we started with. The man who wants to look rich converts his money into attention. The man who wants to be wealthy converts his money into freedom. And those two men end up worlds apart.