"Can we go out for dinner tonight?"
"Sure."
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Okay, check the menu first."
And there it is. The most middle-class sentence in the English language: check the menu first. Not because I am picky. Because "anywhere" needs to be quietly cross-examined before it's allowed to happen.
So I open Zomato. Scroll. Open District to see if there's an offer. Scroll some more. Cost for two, roughly ₹1,200–1,500 before the inevitable "should we get a drink" tax gets added on top. Fine, doable, sounds nice.
Except my thumb has already opened the banking app on its own, like it doesn't trust the rest of me. Balance: ₹4,860. Dinner: ₹1,200. What's left: ₹3,660. And suddenly I'm not thinking about paneer, I'm thinking about movie tickets next weekend, the metro recharge, that one thing I've been "meaning to buy" for two weeks, and the fact that there are still eleven days left in the month.
I didn't just decide I wanted dinner. I ran a small, unpaid audit on whether future-me can survive present-me's decision. Nobody taught me to do this. It just... happens. Every single time.
What does "Middle Class" even mean anymore?
Here's a fun one to sit with: if you own a car, live in a decent flat, and eat out occasionally - are you middle class?
I used to think yes, obviously. Then I made a list of things I actually have - a decent phone, a reasonably good school growing up, a car, the occasional trip and put it next to a list of things I actually worry about; fees, medical bills, EMIs, "are we saving enough," what happens if something breaks.
Both lists were true at the same time. That's the part nobody warns you about.
Turns out middle class was never really about what sits in your house. It's about how much room you have to breathe after everything in your house is paid for. You can have all the stuff and still feel like you're one bad month away from trouble. That's not a contradiction. Apparently that's just the definition.
The ₹500 Question
Somewhere along the way, ₹500 stopped feeling like money. It's not a purchase anymore, it's a rounding error. It disappears into one food delivery order, two coffees, an auto ride home, a "quick" supermarket run that was supposed to be milk and became a basket.
"It's only ₹400," I tell myself.
"Yeah," says the part of my brain that actually checks the bank balance, "you said that three times this week."
Nothing about this is one massive, dramatic overspend. There's no villain moment. It's just a hundred small yeses that quietly became the new normal, and somehow the normal keeps getting more expensive without ever announcing itself.
"We can afford it" ≠ "We can afford it Comfortably"
This is the sentence that changed how I think about all of it.
Technically, sure we could afford the better school, the newer car, the holiday, eating out twice a week, the slightly nicer version of everything. Nothing on that list is impossible. But nothing on that list exists alone either.
"We can buy it."
"Then?"
"Then we'll have to cut back somewhere."
Then we'll have to cut back somewhere might be the most middle-class sentence after "check the menu first." Every expense is quietly borrowing from another one. Income can look completely comfortable from the outside while most of it is already spoken for before it even lands in the account. You're not broke. You're just... booked.
The Internet made "Normal" expensive
Somewhere between skincare, gym memberships, weekend cafés, gadgets, concerts, and vacations, "normal life" got a serious upgrade -and nobody sent a memo, it just showed up on Instagram looking casual about it.
"Everyone's going to Goa this weekend."
"Who's everyone?"
"...I don't know. Instagram."
That's the trick, isn't it. Social media was never just selling products. It was selling a standard of living and letting us think it was the baseline. You end up comparing your actual, ordinary Tuesday to someone else's carefully edited highlight reel, and somehow your Tuesday loses.
We never spent this much!
There's a conversation I think every household has had in some form.
"We never spent this much when I was your age."
"You also didn't have ₹799 subscriptions, six food delivery apps, and online classes all asking for money at the same time."
It's tempting to make this about discipline that people today are just worse at saving. But that's not really it. It's that the list of "normal expenses" got longer. Things that simply didn't exist as line items before are now monthly, recurring, and automatic. You're not managing money worse. You're managing more categories of it.
Are we actually getting Poorer?
I want to be careful here, because it's easy to reach for something dramatic like "the middle class is disappearing." I don't think that's quite it.
The more honest question is: are incomes actually failing to keep up, or has our idea of "enough" simply gotten more expensive? Rent, education, healthcare, EMIs - all real, all rising. But so is the quiet expectation that a normal life now includes things a normal life didn't used to require.
Maybe the middle class isn't shrinking so much as the price of feeling comfortable keeps climbing just out of reach -like a staircase where "comfortable" takes one step back every time you take one step up.
Back to Dinner 😃
We ended up going, by the way. Nothing dramatic, no big lesson, just dinner. But I noticed something on the walk back.
Maybe being middle class today was never about having too little. It's about having enough -but never quite enough to stop calculating.
Enough for dinner out, but not every night. Enough for a holiday, but not without a plan. Enough for the new phone, but not without someone saying, "the old one still works fine." Enough to live comfortably, but never quite enough to forget what things cost.
You spend your whole life trying to reach "comfortable," only to find out that comfortable got expensive while you were on your way there.
If anyone has their budget fixed out, do share with me the same, thanks in advance!