There is a peculiar brand of exhaustion that modern life mistakes for choice. We feel free – rather, we are told so – because we can choose between eerily identical prisons. In that, I am often reminded of something Noam Chomsky wrote in his 1998 book, The Common Good, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
The modern subject is told that he is responsible because the system, in its democratic elegance, has transformed guilt into a shared commodity. None can be exempt from the blame; therefore, none is free. When this fatigue mutates into despair, bureaucracy takes over, and it is then catalogued, discussed, and neutralised, but, crucially, never addressed and rooted out.
It is within that framework that the suicide of a student and an attempted suicide by another are treated as events that can be explained through attendance records, financial anxieties, or romantic failures. Amidst the pronounced and well-marketed management of these events, the deeper catastrophe goes unnoticed: that the modern subject has been stripped of his right to meaning and then expected to be grateful for the right to choose among its substitutes.
If blame must exist, let it fall not on the young who fall from buildings, but on the architecture that made the fall inevitable. They are not the interlocutors of despair, only its most visible communication, that is, if anybody should listen. Their anguish is computed in outcomes, data, and bureaucracy, but no heed is paid to their wounded souls. Theirs is the agony of a generation born into the matrix driven by calculation, instruction, and expectation, which collapses under the weight of coherence itself, while the hollowness of existence tramples their feet.
Recently, the university at the centre of these tragedies shut down in-person classes for a few weeks. Nets were installed across every floor, and a new “mental wellness centre” was unveiled: state-of-the-art, armed with psychologists, calm lighting, and comfort rooms. In its inauguration video, there were bouquets exchanged, applause shared, and influential voices declaring it the first of its kind in Pakistan.
The speed of its completion was remarkable; it seemed a triumph of responsiveness. Yet, in private, several faculty members — those who actually meet the students in classrooms — quietly advised them not to go. Not because they doubted the need for support, but because they feared that what students revealed in those sessions could follow them like a shadow. That their confessions might adorn their files, find their way into academic records, or silently shape the perception of future employers and institutions.
The first act of defiance is not revolution, but careful cultivation of the inner life – tending hearts as much as minds
The very space meant for healing thus becomes an emblem of distrust; a place where even the act of vulnerability risked surveillance. What could have been an oasis of care turned, almost inevitably, into another arm of bureaucracy. This notion is not without its basis, as what would a wellness centre achieve, or repair, that an existing robust educational bureaucracy could not; one that had to be jolted into action only after a second student fell within a month or so. Modernity’s cruelty lies precisely in this: it transforms even our cries for help into data points. The wound is tended only so long as it becomes unavoidable, but remains measurable.
It would be uncharitable to question the intention, as the people behind such initiatives are often sincere. But sincerity cannot redeem a structure whose logic is predicated on control. The modern system’s genius is its ability to convert wounds into administrative functions. It manages pain but never questions its source. It soothes symptoms while sanctifying the disease.
Mental health centres, awareness drives, and institutional empathy cannot heal what the structure itself is designed to fracture. Because the modern university – just like the state that authorises it – operates on the logic of performance and quantification. It demands coherence as well as a polished outcome. The result is an education system that teaches compliance while pretending to teach thought.
In our part of the world, there’s a slang-turned-saying: teachers teach as they were taught. This single line captures a generations-deep tragedy. The only way to reproduce authority that the modern state thrives on is to commit to inherited pedagogy. The same fear-driven logic that once governed the teacher’s own formation is passed to the student, unexamined. The result is not education, but replication: a well-organised continuity of confusion and obedience.
Democracy perfects this illusion. It proclaims that the structure is collective, that the suffering is ours to bear because we consented to it. “You could have chosen better,” it says, and in that sentence lies the genius of the modern order: consent borne out of systemic coercion morphs despair into a private fault line. The citizen, crushed under the weight of shared and weaponised guilt, internalises its subjugation and calls it freedom.
Modernity is tyrannical, sure, but its cruelty lies in its efficiency. It has replaced morality with administrative rigour, spirituality with self-help, and love with algorithmic compatibility. It has hollowed the language of virtue until all that remains is the constant, exhausting performance of freedom. The need to calculate, compare, and optimise annihilates the soul and renders the heart irrelevant.
And yet, there is resistance.
The first act of defiance is to feel, for yourself and for others. To wrest meaning from within, not from applause, not from outcomes, not from the hollow ecstasies of modern success. The mind, stripped of ehsās, will calculate despair with perfect precision. It will tell you this is the end; that the only choice left is to jump. But the heart, when it remembers, knows otherwise. It knows that to feel is still to resist – to hold on, to endure, to quietly revolt.
The second act is communion: non-institutional, small circles of care, and persistent, non-material gestures of recognition. Communities that fear no authority because they are rooted in the human, free from the constraints that institutionalisation of just about everything entails. The modern state fears nothing more than an unadulterated, non-transactional solidarity of souls. When care spreads, its logic dissolves. It cannot command a heart, cannot quantify tenderness, and cannot legislate presence.
Perhaps, ehsās was always meant to guard more than just feeling: the moral memory of what it is to be human. Perhaps, the first act of defiance is not revolution, but careful cultivation of the inner life – tending hearts as much as minds. Minds can only obey modernity. It is only hearts that can defy it.
In tending the heart, in building circles of care, we begin to loosen the grip of a civilisation designed to alienate, exhaust, and commodify. Perhaps then, freedom will amount to more than just a ledger of outcomes: a constellation of attentiveness and of moral presence. Perhaps then, we will stop mistaking the floor for the ground.