Part 1 — The Education Money Couldn't Buy

I grew up in a small city in a developing country in Southeast Asia.

Middle class — which in a developing country means something specific: enough to eat, enough to go to school, but never enough to stop worrying. My father worked outside the city to keep us afloat. I saw him on Saturdays and Sundays. My mother worked too. Both of them, every day, pouring themselves out so that four children could have a chance at something better.

I have one older brother, one older sister, one younger sister. We were not rich in money. But I was — I see this clearly now — extraordinarily lucky in the things money cannot buy. Two parents who gave everything without complaint. Siblings who still call, still show up, still mean it. A home that was warm even when it was small.

I did not understand then how rare that was.

I left that small city and enrolled in one of the most prestigious engineering universities in my country. This was the first time I truly stepped outside my world.

And the world I stepped into was not what I expected.

I met a friend who survived on a single pack of instant noodles a day — not by choice, but because his scholarship payment was delayed and pride kept him from asking for help. I met another who tutored elementary school children every evening, not for extra spending money, but to save enough to buy a pair of glasses he needed to read his own textbooks. I met a young woman who worked as a domestic helper on weekends to pay her tuition — then sat in the same lecture hall as the rest of us on Monday morning, exhausted but present.

These were not stories of failure. They were stories of extraordinary will.

But they unsettled me deeply. Because behind every one of them was the same quiet antagonist: money. Not greed for it — just the brutal, daily reality of not having enough of it. The way its absence could derail a brilliant mind, steal years from a young life, force impossible choices on people who deserved none of it.

I graduated with an engineering degree and a question I couldn't shake loose: why does this keep happening?

I joined one of the largest EPC contractors in my country. Steam power plants. Gas engine facilities. Crude oil production. The work was real, the projects were large, and the salary was good — better than anything my father had earned at my age.

I saved. Consistently, carefully, the way I was taught.

And yet.

Year after year, I noticed something that no one around me seemed to talk about. My savings number grew — but what it could actually buy quietly shrank. The same amount of money bought less groceries, less security, less future than it had the year before. I was running, but the ground beneath me was moving backward.

So I started reading. Financial history. Monetary economics. The mechanics of inflation, fiat currency, interest rates, stock markets. I read the way engineers read — looking for the system underneath, the logic that explained the behavior.

And the more I read, the more uncomfortable I became.

Because the picture that emerged was not reassuring. It was clarifying — and clarity, when it arrives, has a way of making the old maps feel suddenly, obviously, wrong.

I had been saving in an instrument that was designed — structurally, by its very nature — to lose value over time. The money in my account was not a store of wealth. It was a participation token in a system that required my continued participation to function. The moment I stopped, the system penalized me through inflation. The moment I saved too cautiously, the same.

The question was no longer am I saving enough?

The question became: am I saving in the right thing?

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