Muniza Zafar
He sat across from me, restless fingers tracing the spine of a notebook he hadn’t written in. He was bright, curious, and full of potential, the kind of young man who had consumed enough advice videos and motivational threads to believe he should already have everything figured out. Yet his days still felt ordinary, predictable, and sometimes painfully small, what T. S. Eliot might have called “a life measured out in coffee spoons,” piecing himself together with borrowed insights, while circling an essential truth: he had no idea of what was wise or unwise.
Recently, he mentioned he had watched a series about a brilliant, unapologetically ambitious protagonist who abandoned tradition for freedom, romance, and self-invention.
“For days,” he said, “I walked around thinking my life should feel like that.”
But instead of clarity, the show left him fragmented. On-screen, possibility was endless; identities could be rewritten, responsibilities paused, roots pulled up without consequence. He admired that freedom, that fluidity, that promise that life could be reinvented by sheer will.
In his own life, however, the script was not so generous. He was expected to be anchored, dependable, responsible, grounded in realities that streaming worlds never ask of their heroes.
“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be,” he whispered. “At home, I am one version. Outside, I try to perform another. I don’t belong fully anywhere.”
In that moment, I didn’t hear confusion; I heard grief, an identity stretched between two narratives, neither fully embraced nor fully rejected. He wasn’t seeking rebellion; he was seeking permission, the freedom to exist honestly, somewhere between what he watched and what he saw; between his roots and the world he had been conditioned to desire, without betraying either.
His struggle is not unique. Every generation believes it is living through the most confusing age in history, but this one might actually be right. For decades, parenting was a collective act. Family, neighbours, teachers, even the shopkeeper who scolded you for “shararat,” all took part in shaping an identity. Boys were taught to protect, girls to preserve. Life was predictable, perhaps unequal, yet comprehensible. Expectations were clear, even when they were restrictive. They offered structure, and structure often brings a sense of certainty.
Now, the scaffolding has fallen away, replaced with borrowed ideals and endless choices. Teenagers learn about love from strangers in Paris, about morality from crime thrillers, and about purpose from people who broadcast their lives as entertainment. The guidance is abundant but inconsistent; the rules shift depending on which page you scroll.
This constant switching creates internal fractures, because while they discuss egalitarianism at a café or Marxism in classrooms, they return to a home built on hierarchy. They quote Rumi on Instagram and Tinder their way through Friday night. They move between languages, wardrobes, values, and social expectations, trying to fit into each space without fully belonging to any of them. It is not hypocrisy; it is adaptation, it is survival in a world that demands flexibility without providing a stable centre.
These tensions express themselves differently for men and women, but the disorientation is shared.
Young men, once told their role was to provide and lead, now face a social landscape where those roles have been questioned and, in some places, dismantled. They are encouraged to be sensitive and egalitarian, which many sincerely want to be, but no one has clearly articulated what responsibility and purpose look like in this new paradigm. We have spent years teaching men what not to be, but we have failed to show them what to become. These men are not cruel; they are lost, unsure of what masculinity even means anymore, and desperate for someone, anyone, to tell them how to be. When society critiques old masculine scripts without offering healthy alternatives, young men drift, confused and searching. Into that uncertainty step hyper-simplified influencers like Andrew Tate, who offer caricatures of strength and clarity, even if what they offer is distorted.
Women today live at the intersection of empowerment and expectation. They are more educated, vocal, and financially independent than any generation before them, yet the world around them hasn’t fully caught up. A daughter is raised to be ambitious, told to study, to work, to be independent; but when the time for marriage arrives, the same parents remind her that the family knows best, that the in-laws must be obeyed, that tradition still rules.
In homes and offices, these women carry both ambition and obligation, often doing twice the work, leading at the office and managing at home. Society applauds their strength but rarely adjusts its expectations. With so much emphasis placed on individual progress and visible achievements, they sometimes question where the reward truly lies: in raising a child, in building a career, or in trying to do both without losing themselves.
Additionally, in this new social landscape, they find themselves conflicted around the meaning of nurturing. It isn’t that motherhood has lost its dignity; it’s that there is little clarity about its worth, especially when the choice to have children carries an unavoidable professional cost, a dip that no amount of ambition can shield against, because our workplaces are still designed around uninterrupted, linear careers with limited support and inadequate maternity policies. The burden of adaptation still falls on women rather than on the systems meant to include them.
They stand between two narratives: one where Betty Friedan described motherhood as “a comfortable concentration camp,” and another shaped by their own biological and emotional longing to nurture. Between the inherited suspicion of motherhood and the instinctive pull toward it, they live in constant negotiation with themselves about what it NOW means to be a woman.
Across gender and culture, what we are witnessing is a narrative confusion, a death of context, with our old guidance systems, storytelling, community wisdom, and shared cultural scripts weakened. Our stories were not perfect, but they offered context. They taught us that love could be noble and inconvenient, that loss could have meaning, that meaning often comes through endurance, and that life didn’t always need a filter.
Now, our myths come with hashtags and background music. They emphasise freedom and reinvention, often without acknowledging the cost of severing roots or the loneliness that can accompany limitless choice. We scroll through borrowed light, perfect lives, and scripted tears, chasing movement instead of meaning. The tragedy isn’t that our stories changed; it’s that we stopped owning them, and a culture that forgets how to tell its own stories forgets how to understand itself.
The answer is not to condemn the modern world or romanticise the old one. It is to build a bridge between them. Rather than silencing screens, we need to interpret them or at least breathe context into them. If technology has become a teacher, then parents, mentors, artists, and communities must once again take up the role of offering context, helping young people understand not just what is possible, but what is meaningful.
We need stories that can hold both faith and freedom without tearing either apart. Because if we don’t tell our own stories, someone else will, and they will not tell them kindly.
And because life isn’t a series finale where everything resolves in the last episode, it unfolds slowly, messily, and often without applause. The task is not to live like the characters we admire on screen, but to craft our own imperfect paths, guided by reflection rather than imitation, by conscience rather than performance, and by a sense of continuity rather than a constant urge to reinvent, honouring where we come from while thoughtfully shaping where we are going.
The writer is a psycho-therapist, visual artist, art therapist, and soft skills trainer. She is also an Assistant Professor and has taught at NUST, NDU, and NCA.
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