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. Same road. Same jam. Everyone crawling forward at exactly the same speed, toward the same places. So what did all that extra money buy? Nothing about the journey. 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 fifty lakh owner is looking at the crore. 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. Nobody in the line has arrived. Every single one of them is looking slightly up.

Now, none of this means a car is a waste. In a country where public transport barely works, a car is genuinely useful. It moves your family around safely, it saves you hours, it makes ordinary life easier, and up to a point every rupee you put into it buys you something real. 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.

Because past that point, a car stops being transport. 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. The car you love today will start to look old to you in three or four years, not because anything changed in the car, and the same quiet mechanism sits underneath almost every financial decision you make.

Most people explain all of this with one lazy word. Ego. Or vanity, or greed, or keeping up with the neighbours. That explanation is comfortable because it lets you off the hook: those people are shallow, and I'm not. But it explains nothing, and it won't help you step out of it. 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. For most of history it was simple, and it was visible. The rich wore a cloth, a cut, a design that a lower class man simply could not get his hands on. The gap was wide because the things themselves weren't available further down. 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. Suddenly the thing a rich man wears, or eats, or the phone he carries, can be had by a lower class man too, through one route or another. The visual wall that had stood between the classes for centuries became, in a single generation, almost non-existent.

For the first time, the people at the bottom of the ladder could look like the people at the top. Which sounds like good news, and in some ways it genuinely is. But watch what it does to the ones who were on top. The thing that used to reassure them is gone. 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 quietly moves to somewhere money can't reach. It moves to taste.

Nobody sits down and decides this. There's no meeting where the rich agree on new rules. It just happens, the way water settles into the lower ground, because once everyone can own the same object, the only distinction left is in the things money alone can't buy.

And taste is a filter money can't pass through. You can walk into any shop today and buy the same object a wealthier man owns. What you cannot buy is the taste he built over years, through a certain kind of schooling, a certain circle, travelling to places you haven't, seeing things you haven't. It can't be picked up overnight.

So taste became a kind of secret code. Two people can spend the exact same amount, and yet by how they look, how they speak, how they carry it, you can still tell which one is elite and which one isn't. Society will hand the two of them completely different amounts of izzat for an identical spend.

Take a Pakistani example. Rastah makes clothes, genuinely good ones, good t-shirts, good hoodies. If they had sold those 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 took a different road. They put their clothes on the world's biggest artists. A Rastah hoodie on Zayn Malik. On Drake. Worn on stage, in front of millions, with the Rastah name sitting on it. And a signal travelled into everyone's head: this is a brand worn by people at the very top.

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.

But clothes have a weakness as a marker. They can be copied. 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. This is where cars come in.

Economists have a name for this kind of object. They 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.

That is the whole trick. The car in front of you isn't taking anyone from one place to another. It is announcing a position on the ladder, marking where its owner stands. And the person who sees it judges on that perceived value. He gives you izzat, maybe even listens to your opinion, because of the car. Sit low on the same ladder in a car nobody respects, and that same person won't give your words a second's attention.

For now, set aside whether the car was bought with saved money or borrowed money. That matters enormously, but it's a separate question. 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

Here is the part I had wrong for years, and only understood recently, when I felt it in myself rather than just thought about it. 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. You can't, and somewhere in your head you've already accepted that.

He's a different world. Everything about him is different, not just the car. 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. Back then you drove a certain car and he watched you drive it.

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.

The man who used to take advice from me is driving what I drive. How can that be? I need to get above him. 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. You're not straining to catch the people above you. You're straining to keep the people below from drawing level. Once you notice it working in yourself, you start seeing it everywhere.

Then the Chinese cars arrived and shook the whole ladder

Something happened in the Pakistani market that shows this machine working in real time. The Chinese carmakers arrived. GWM, MG, Changan, Haval, Deepal, one after another. And they did something disruptive. 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.

The anxiety ran in every direction, but the sharpest cut landed at the top. Before this, an SUV in Pakistan meant a Fortuner, and nothing above it was really reachable, the prices saw to that. Then the Chinese SUVs came, people booked them in a rush, and suddenly SUVs were everywhere, in every big city and even in my own small one. Once everyone was driving an SUV, the SUV was finished as a marker. The distinction had to move again.

And here the taste factor does its work. The obvious response is to bring in something others simply can't, a BMW or a Mercedes imported from abroad, expensive in duty and effort. But the sharper response is taste. 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. Exactly. 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 often doesn't need a car to prove it. He 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. He has nothing to prove, so the plain car costs him nothing. But that option mostly belongs to people whose status is already settled. For everyone still climbing, the car is still doing the talking.

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. What I want to add here is something I only understood later, as my own life kept changing.

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. I won't pretend that signal is worthless, because it isn't. So the question was never whether to buy a car. It's the one you put to yourself, honestly, before the next one, or about the one already in your driveway.

If you had to sell this car tomorrow and downgrade, could you? Not because an emergency forced your hand, that's a different thing, in a real emergency your mind will happily agree to sell and promise to buy again later. I mean by choice. If downgrading made plain financial sense, if it freed up money you could invest, could you actually go through with it?

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. You bought a car and nothing more. 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. Real wealth was never in the car. It's the money in your accounts, the amount invested, the emergency fund actually built, all of it quietly buying you options that a car can't. Put one crore of two into a car, and the options that crore could have opened for you are simply gone.

Here's the test I use on myself, and I offer it only as that, not as a law for everyone. 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. That way the car sits on top of solid ground instead of hollowing it out. It's a personal rule, not a commandment, but it's kept me honest.

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. So the honest version isn't a rich country's rule. 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. And then, quickly, the happiness drains off and you're back to feeling exactly as you did before you bought it.

You've felt this yourself. 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. The reason the treadmill has no end is not only that your own happiness resets each time. It's that the finish line was never yours to set. It belongs to the people around you, and the ones behind you keep closing the distance, so the line keeps sliding forward however fast you run. A goal you defined for yourself, you can reach and then stop at. A goal defined by staying ahead of everyone else can never be reached, because everyone else keeps moving.

So the discipline is small, and it's difficult. 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. You'll go there, and then there, and then there, and the place you were originally headed for, the one standing quietly on the other side, you'll never actually reach.