The Performance of Living

By Khawaja Abdul Wase

Go to any posh area of Pakistan on a Friday evening. Just go.You’ll observe that people are gaining dopamine from an entirely different set of activities than what used to be a norm a few years back. Eating food, having discussions and enjoying family time are not the only things people focus on today. Rather taking a snap of the meal, parking the car where it catches the most attention and laughing louder than the joke deserves because they want to impress someone sitting close to them are more important activities.There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people perform happiness they are clearly not feeling, and Pakistani urban culture has become absolutely saturated with it.And we are the one responsible for this.

Social media does have a role to play in it but blaming it alone is not sufficient. The hunger for visibility and the desire to be seen as successful rather than simply be successful, has existed since ever. It was in the wedding that bankrupted a family because the guest list demanded it. It was in the car bought on bank installments to park outside a rented apartment. What social media has done is maybe amplified the reach and made the performance mandatory.

The bigger problem is the way we have accepted these terms. Arrogance? We call it confidence now. A man is known to be resourceful  as someone who knows how to navigate through the world, who bypasses the process by using the right contact number. Similarly, a person standing in the queue waiting for their turn is known as the fool in this story. We have quietly, collectively, decided that the rules are for people who have no other option, and we call it pragmatism. Sorry it is idiocentrism.

The security guard sitting outside a restaurant who barely looked up suddenly snaps to attention when the right car pulls in. The restaurant staff treats you differently depending on what you are wearing or how flashy or glamorous you look. Roads are blocked for some random wedding convoy while hundreds of ordinary commuters stand and wait because there is nothing to be done about it. Where on one end these moments feel minor, add them up across years of daily life and what you get is a population that has deeply internalised that visibility is the only currency that counts.

The issue broadens when the majority of Pakistan is absent from this very picture. The food delivery rider who spends twelve hours in this scorching heat just to make ends meet. The old father calculates bills multiple times, not because he is slow but because has responsibilities. The fresh graduate is rechecking his job portal again and again in an economy that is honestly running out of space for him. These people are not in minority rather they are Pakistan. They just do not trend well on social media, algorithms do not support them and as a result the cultural conversation largely proceeds without them.

Their lives are real. Their dignity exists. It is just quieter than we are willing to pay attention to.

Pakistan scored 28 out of 100 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2025. People cite that number and then talk about institutions, about governance, about structural reform. Fair enough. But that number also reflects something more intimate, a society that has normalised selective ethics at the personal level for so long that it barely registers anymore. You cannot spend twenty years teaching people that rules bend for the right person and then act surprised when the institutions those same people run turn out to be crooked. Character, as Aristotle observed, is built through repeated habits. We have been practising the wrong ones for a very long time.

The real problem, the one nobody wants to sit with, is that ordinary life has been stripped of its dignity in our cultural imagination. A stable job. A modest home. Raising children without drama, without excess, without a public audience confirming that it all looks impressive enough. These things used to mean something. They do not carry the same weight anymore. The pressure now is not to live a good life. It is to be seen as a living one, and the distinction has become enormous.

Once fulfilment moves outside the person and into the audience, you are finished. You are permanently dependent on a response that is always slightly out of reach, always requiring a bigger house or a louder wedding or a more expensive car to sustain. It is not a way to live. It is a way to perform living while the actual thing quietly slips away.

And in a society that has confused the two, inequality does not stay economic. It gets inside people. It changes how they see themselves when nobody is watching.That is the part we should be talking about.