I MAY be one of the few who still loves getting non-work related emails which is the closest to writing letters, something I loved doing since childhood. I have a few pen pals I’ve ‘met’ through my columns with whom I exchange emails. One such person is Adeel, not his real name as he does not want me to share his identity. I received a long email from him last Sunday after my piece on the TV show Adolescence, which, to my surprise, seemed to touch a nerve with a lot of readers.

Adeel was writing to me, he said, because he felt I recognised that “our youngsters are not OK”.

In 2023, he sent me a long email about how he raised his children in a joint family system in the late 1970s in a caring mohallah where elders had as much right to reprimand children as he did. “I am not saying I raised saints and I know it was a different, simpler time, but we instilled good values in our children.”

But on Sunday he wrote he has been warning his children that their children are not OK. They are “too much online”. When he tries to engage with his grandchildren, they stop short of telling him to go away. “My children are too busy. We do not really know their friends’ families the way I believe we should. We live in a big house but my grandchildren rarely eat with us. They are always ordering out or eating nuggets which are not food,” he wrote.

We desperately need the sagacity of elders.

I was really sad to read him write: “My wife died last year. I do not feel valued.”

The joint family system, he says, was the backbone of society but it is portrayed on TV as a cesspool of negativity with women fighting each other. Money and power drives everything. Relationships are transactional, including he says, with his grandchildren. “They want brands.”

Adeel feels experiences are irrelevant in this ever morphing moment where everything related to values is changing faster than he can keep up with.

“I don’t know what it means to be a human let alone what kind of society we have become. Experience amounts to nothing. You are irrelevant in five years, forget 20.” He’s been worried about his grandchildren’s (in)ability to make good decisions. At least he knew what music his children were listening to. His grandchildren always have earbuds on. “Do you know if these kids listen to rap, is rap bad?” His grandchildren said he won’t understand their music, shows, or games.

“My children did not want to spend time with my father either but I didn’t give them a choice,” he wrote. “I know my grandchildren love me but I don’t understand how they can be so busy at their age.”

“Let me tell you what our Adolescence should be about,” he wrote, detailing a story that sent chills down my spine. A few children at a reputable school were barely reprimanded for using AI to create nudes of their female classmates. The boys created it and the girls had viewing parties. The girls, whose images were superimposed, were traumatised. When the parents of the victims and perpetrators found out, they went into hyperdrive and turned it into a show of power. No one apologised. No one was penalised. As always, it’s the girls who suffered.

Misogyny has always been rampant but it is becoming more commonplace among young boys, as Adolescence proves. Parents don’t know, schools don’t want to address it, this isn’t ‘our’ problem. Our ‘manfluencer’ Imran Khan normalised misogyny with his vile comments about rape survivors and his supporters condoned it. No one calls misogyny out. The entertainment industry profits from it. Families of murderers slip back into high society without batting an eyelid.

We’re condoning all the wrong things — be it teenagers behaving badly or the horrific manner in which ‘journalists’ we don’t like are being picked up.

Adeel’s email made me realise how desperately we need elders’ wisdom.

In his excellent Ted Talk on wisdom in 2009, Barry Schwarz said a “wise person is like a jazz musician, using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand”. According to him, “rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world”. It was Adeel’s wisdom that foresaw the slow erosion of values.

Good governance, too, must be based on wisdom but here both governance (of which there is only one kind: bad) and wisdom is lacking. I am most worried about the monstrosity coming for us all in the form of Peca. That is if the rising cost of living doesn’t get me first. Something’s got to give and here’s hoping common sense prevails.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2025