Growing up in Pakistan, you learn early to carry a particular kind of weight, and you learn never to put it down. The situation is much the same across India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is the weight of expectation, and for a long time I believed that carrying it was simply what it meant to be a serious person.
From the very beginning, doing well is not a hope. It is an expectation, applied evenly to every child whether or not it fits them, and a great many of us grow up quietly convinced we fell short of a bar we never agreed to. There is always something to prove. Excel in school. Land the right job. Marry well, and on time. Even in the most private corners of a life, in relationships and family and faith, the pressure to achieve and to conform never quite loosens its grip.
Why the Developed World Keeps Pulling Ahead
There is an uncomfortable version of this story that people tell with numbers. Search for it and you will find tables that assign each country an average IQ. They put Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka somewhere in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, and the United States, Germany, and Japan near and above a hundred. Take the exact digits with caution: they are broad ranges drawn from thin and uneven data, and they may not reflect the true figure for any single country. But set the precision aside, because a real and large gap between this part of the world and the developed one does exist, and pretending it does not helps no one.
What that gap measures, though, is not the worth or the wiring of the people. It measures the system around them. A score like that moves with nutrition in the first years of life, with the quality of a classroom, with how many children ever reach one, and with whether a society invests in developing minds or merely ranking them. Read as a verdict on innate intelligence, those numbers are wrong, and the people who first sold them that way were wrong. Read as a verdict on education systems, they are close to honest.
And the education systems are not close to each other. The countries that pull ahead spend many times more per student and on research, keep nearly every child in school through to a real qualification, treat and pay teachers as professionals, and build universities that feed industry rather than simply issue degrees. The ones that fall behind do the opposite, often not by choice but by history and constraint. Pakistan alone has more than twenty million children out of school, among the highest counts anywhere on earth.
That is not a country short of talent. It is a country whose system never built enough doors for its talent to walk through.
This is a large part of why the developed world keeps compounding its lead. Progress is what a society earns when it develops more of its people's potential, year on year, instead of wasting it. And I know the talent was never the bottleneck, because the global technology industry runs in no small part on engineers and doctors and scientists who were born in exactly these countries and thrived the moment a real system formed around them. I am one of them. So when a child here is handed a low number and told it is simply who they are, two lies get sold at once: that a single score can contain a person, and that the failure of a system is the fault of the student. For most of my life, I believed both.
Self-Worth Was Never Meant to Be Borrowed
The real problem was never the pressure itself. It was the mindset underneath it: the belief that my worth had to be earned, externally, over and over, and could be revoked the moment I stopped performing. Tie your sense of self to outcomes and you sign up for a life of quiet panic, because outcomes are never fully yours to control. What it leaves behind is the thing so many of us carry in silence: burnout, a low hum of frustration, and the strange experience of feeling inadequate in the middle of what looks, from outside, like success. I lived inside that feeling for most of my years in Pakistan, and I always wanted to write about it. I have described its narrower, work-shaped version as the mental load nobody warns you about; this is the wider weight underneath it.
Japan, and Then Germany
Moving to Japan was the first crack of light. Living among that politeness, discipline, honesty, and almost devotional cleanliness, I slowly began measuring myself against something other than other people's expectations. Japan did not lecture me. It simply showed me a different way to hold a life, and I have written separately about what those four years rewired in me and the gratitude it turned into a daily practice.
Germany, later, sharpened it further. It made me more self-aware, more direct, and it gave me something I had never been taught to value at home: clean boundaries, around my emotions, my time, and my privacy. Distance from the culture that raised me was what finally let me see it clearly, to tell which of its weights were load-bearing and which I had simply never thought to question. You rarely get to choose the expectations you are handed as a child. You do, eventually, get to choose which ones you keep.
How I Put the Baggage Down
I did not set the weight down all at once. It came as three slow corrections, and I am still making them. The first was to redefine success on my own terms, to stop holding myself against a yardstick I had been handed rather than chosen, and to ask what fulfilment actually looked like for me instead of what it was supposed to look like. The second was to stop treating life as a race with a single finish line, and to let learning and growing and simply living count for something on their own, not only as fuel for the next milestone. The third, and by far the hardest, was to loosen my grip on external validation. Self-worth borrowed from other people's approval always gets called back at the worst possible moment; the peace you build from the inside does not.
None of this means the expectations vanished. My family still has them. The culture still has them. What changed is that I stopped treating every one of them as a debt I was obliged to pay in full.
That is the moment the weight finally lightens. Not because anyone lifted it off you, but because you stopped agreeing to carry all of it.