The real reason Pakistanis are obsessed with cars

Stop at any traffic signal in a big city and look at the cars around you. One is worth about thirty lakh. Next to it, one worth fifty. Behind that, a car worth a crore, and somewhere in the line a couple worth two or three crore each. So what did all that extra money buy? The man in the three crore car will reach his office no sooner than the man in the thirty lakh one.

And here is the strange part. The man in the thirty lakh car isn't sitting there feeling rich. He is looking at the fifty lakh car beside him. The crore is looking at the two crore, and the man in the two crore car, the one everyone else in that line quietly envies, is looking at someone too. Every single one of them is looking slightly up.

Now, none of this means a car is a waste. This article isn't about that car. It's about what happens after the real needs, transport, comfort, safety, your family, are already reasonably handled, and people keep spending well past that point. Nobody pays ten or twenty times more just to get somewhere. They are paying for something else, and once you see what it is, you can't unsee it, because it isn't only cars.

It's the phone you replace before it breaks. The restaurant you pick. The school you stretch yourself to put your children in, the clothes you wear, the wedding that has to come out a little bigger than the last one. What's really running underneath is a quiet competition over status, and most people are in it without ever having noticed. Once you can see it, you get to decide whether to keep playing.

For centuries you could see class. Then the wall came down.

To understand the fight over cars, you have to go back, before cars, to how one man ever showed he stood above another. The rich wore a cloth, a cut, a design that a lower class man simply could not get his hands on. And that gap gave the people at the top a kind of quiet reassurance: the things we own aren't even reachable by those below us, so we will always look different from them.

Then, over the last twenty or thirty years, that broke. Globalisation, fast fashion, cheap manufacturing, knock-offs, China opening factories one after another. The visual wall that had stood between the classes for centuries became, in a single generation, almost non-existent.

But watch what it does to the ones who were on top. They feel the others catching up, coming up right behind them, and that breeds a specific discomfort, a status anxiety: we need to get a step above these people again, because they've reached us. Hold on to that idea, being caught up with. It comes back the moment we get to cars.

When money stopped separating people, taste took over

So what happens when money stops separating people? We now live in an economy where almost everyone can get their hands on money in some form, their own or borrowed or on cheap credit, and buy the same things the upper class buys. When that happens, the difference between the classes doesn't disappear. It moves to taste.

And taste is a filter money can't pass through. What you cannot buy is the taste a wealthier man built over years, through a certain kind of schooling, a certain circle, travelling to places you haven't, seeing things you haven't. Society will hand two people completely different amounts of izzat for an identical spend.

Take a Pakistani example. If Rastah had sold their hoodies the ordinary way, six thousand rupees each in the local market to anyone who walked in, they could never have built the brand they have now. Instead they put their clothes on the world's biggest artists. A Rastah hoodie on Zayn Malik. On Drake.

The hoodie costs around two hundred and fifty dollars. For that you get a piece of cloth that might be identical to one Outfitters is selling. But the real reason people pay it is to make sure that ninety-nine out of a hundred people can't.

You can watch the same shift on a single person. When Talha Anjum was less known, he wore things anyone could reach, Outfitters and the like. Once the fame and the money arrived, the clothes became labels people couldn't even place. I won't pretend to know what was in his head, but whatever the reason, the signal those clothes send is distance, a quiet gap between him and the people watching.

Clothes can be copied. A car is harder.

A top brand appears, a middle class man sees it and wants it, and within months there's a knock-off out of China or a local factory, the same looking Nike shoes, the same looking shirt, and everyone starts looking the same again. So the distinction drifts, on its own, toward something harder to copy.

Economists call the car the ultimate positional good, meaning a thing whose value comes not from what it does for you but from what it tells other people about you, and one that becomes more valuable precisely when other people don't have it. And the person who sees it gives you izzat, maybe even listens to your opinion, because of the car. For now, set aside whether the car was bought with saved money or borrowed money. Right at this moment, the only thing the car is doing is fixing your place in the line.

The car you're afraid of isn't the one above you

When you stand somewhere on this ladder, the money decisions you make, the car you reach for, are almost never a reaction to the person above you. If a family two tiers up buys something far better than yours, you don't look at it and think, I'll get that too. He doesn't threaten you, because you never placed yourself in his race to begin with.

The real fear comes from below. Picture a man you were advising three years ago. Your life was settled, his wasn't, and you'd tell him, yaar, if you want to get somewhere in life, do this, fix that. Three years pass. His business finds its feet, or a good job lands, or money arrives some other way, and now he pulls up in the same car you have.

That is the exact moment the panic starts. I need distance again, because if I sit with him tomorrow as an equal, he gets to say, look, you're still where you were three years ago, I had nothing and now look at me. So the status game runs downward, not up.

Then the Chinese cars arrived and shook the whole ladder

The Chinese carmakers arrived. GWM, MG, Changan, Haval, Deepal, one after another. They put features that used to live only inside a two or three crore car, the panoramic roof, the full surround view, the extra airbags and safety systems, into cars that cost a fraction of that. The auto market shook. But the social ladder shook right along with it.

Before this, an SUV in Pakistan meant a Fortuner, and nothing above it was really reachable, the prices saw to that. Once everyone was driving an SUV, the SUV was finished as a marker. The distinction had to move again.

You've seen the ones in Islamabad who find an old, vintage Mercedes, a very particular car, and pour money into modifying it. When that car comes down the road, it bypasses every SUV around it, because the work on it cost as much as half a Chinese car, and a middle class buyer would never think that way. Why put fifty lakh into an old car, he says, when a new one runs longer and gives no trouble. That refusal is what keeps him out, and the distinction reappears in taste, without anyone having planned it.

There's also the opposite move, sometimes called stealth wealth. Someone whose position is already secure drives an ordinary Corolla or an old Elantra on purpose, tells you it's a great car and the new Chinese ones are rubbish, and stays perfectly comfortable, because everyone who matters to him already knows where he stands.

Understanding the game and escaping it are two different things

Seeing the game clearly is not the same as getting out of it, but you can't escape a trap whose shape you don't yet understand, so the seeing had to come first. I made an earlier video, one that reached three lakh views, all about the trap of buying cars on installments, and the full way out is sitting in there. And a car isn't only status. It can genuinely give you access, raise your perceived value in a way that opens doors, gets you into rooms and conversations where you land more business, a better job, a step forward.

So the question was never whether to buy a car. If you had to sell this car tomorrow and downgrade, could you? If your answer is, sure, I'd sell it and put that money to work, I don't really need a car this big, then you're fine. But if the honest answer is, no, I couldn't possibly downgrade, then listen to what that's telling you.

Your fear isn't about the car at all. It's about your position on the ladder, and losing it. That car was never really an asset. It's protecting the image of you that lives in other people's heads, and protecting that image can quietly cost you more than almost anything else you own. Put one crore of two into a car, and the options that crore could have opened for you are simply gone.

I let myself buy the car once the money underneath it is already handled, when the emergency fund is there and something close to the car's worth is already invested somewhere. And Pakistan complicates even that, I won't pretend otherwise. Most people here don't have that kind of money to spare, can't carry heavy payments, aren't earning enough to invest the price of a car alongside buying one. Buy the car that matches where you actually are. Reach past that, for the car that's a step or two above your life, and you walk straight back into the ladder we've spent this whole time taking apart.

The finish line keeps moving because other people keep moving it

There's one last piece of psychology that ties the whole thing together, and it's called the hedonic treadmill. Every time you buy something, a small arc runs its course. First the wanting, which builds and builds before the thing is yours. Then the getting, and a spike of happiness right at the moment it arrives. Days after the new thing comes home, you feel completely normal again, so you reach for a newer one to chase the feeling, and then another, and you're on a belt that keeps moving under your feet while you get nowhere.

Now set that next to the other thing we found, that the threat always comes from below. A goal defined by staying ahead of everyone else can never be reached, because everyone else keeps moving.

When you set a goal and actually arrive at it, don't move the post. If you told yourself you'd buy this one car and then turn your attention to other things, and the day it arrives you catch yourself thinking it already looks a little old, that a better one would be right, then the post has moved and you're back on the belt.