Marwan, a former banker living in Keserwan north of Beirut with his wife and two children, once believed that he and his wife’s combined income would be enough to guarantee a life for his family in Lebanon.

“We were living a normal life,” Marwan, who asked that only his first name be used, told Al-Monitor. “We had two jobs, we had stability. We considered that this stability supported our lives and supported our future. But now for the first time I feel that I'm mentally tired, my family is tired, and there is no future.”

Marwan left his job in the banking sector in 2016 because he felt his salary was not enough to sustain his family, and after his business venture was stymied by Lebanon’s financial crisis, his family has been left to rely primarily on his wife’s income as a schoolteacher. But now half her salary has been cut over the last several months, and Marwan said he is afraid she might lose her job altogether.

For people like Marwan who are part of Lebanon’s fragile and already strained middle class, the country’s compounding economic and monetary crises, exacerbated by the pandemic, have caused dramatic changes in their standards of living and financial stability, pushing many middle-income earners toward poverty. Skyrocketing prices, salary cuts and the looming risk of job losses have necessitated a fundamental readjustment in the lifestyles and spending habits of middle-class Lebanese, who have in some cases felt the relative impact of the recent crisis more acutely than even Lebanon’s poor, according to some analysts.