This New Year, instead of promising myself a better routine, I’ve chosen a quieter resolution to stop forcing imported ideas of discipline onto a life lived in Lahore. No 5am alarms and no colour-coded calendars. I tried that version of discipline and failed miserably at it. It first brought me guilt but then came something unexpected: relief.

That relief felt suspicious, almost indulgent, which is how you know discipline has become more than a tool. It has become a moral language.

The modern gospel of productivity arrives with a specific accent. It assumes uninterrupted time, private space and predictable work; bodies that obey alarms rather than climate or care. These assumptions are not neutral. Historically, discipline entered this region through colonial administration: office hours, factory time, railway schedules and bureaucratic punctuality. It was an attempt to make our lives legible and in turn, governable.

But here’s the thing: Lahore, then and now, has never been fully governable. The city still runs on interruptions. A work meeting scheduled for noon drifts to two because the electricity went out and the internet followed. In the gap, an elderly relative needs a ride to the clinic and someone else asks if you can “just listen for five minutes.” By the time the meeting finally happens, it’s messier, later and less efficient… But three other lives have been quietly held together in the meantime. Progress in this city is rarely linear; it typically takes numerous detours. What looks like inefficiency from the outside is often a form of accommodation and a way to keep many of our roles moving at once.

Take the bookstall ustad I know in Anarkali Bazaar. He opens when he pleases, sometimes well into the afternoon. By any productivity metric, he is undisciplined. But he shows up, again and again, and when he does, he has stories — oral histories of Lahore, censored books, vanished lanes and old publishing feuds. People don’t come to him for speed or convenience; they come for continuity and for memory. His success is relational, not optimised.

This kind of slowness is not failure. It is a different logic of doing well.

The first time I visited the West, I noticed the urgency in every movement. People ran to bus stops, to cars, with coffee mugs in hand, faces set like deadlines. I kept wondering why they were running. What was so important every single day that it demanded leaving the house without a proper anda, paratha and chai (my all-time favourite breakfast)? Even rocket scientists must have slow days. The rhythm there felt rigid and exhausting. This was a stark contrast to Lahore, where healthy slowness allows the day to bend without breaking.

Even our newer obsessions betray the mismatch. Therapy culture, for instance, often arrives packaged as another discipline: weekly sessions, tracked emotions, measurable breakthroughs.

There is value in that, undoubtedly. But interestingly science has quietly been telling us something less marketable for years: strong social connection offers comparable mental-health benefits. Studies in psychology and public health consistently show that regular, emotionally supportive conversations, especially with trusted friends, reduce stress hormones, buffer against depression and improve overall well-being.

A long phone call with your best friend or group meet-ups dissecting the week are not lesser substitutes for healing; they are culturally embedded forms of regulation and care. They are also more affordable, more accessible and less alienating for regular awaam than clinical language imported wholesale from elsewhere.

To the world, these might be new revelations. But to us Lahoris, it’s just another Tuesday evening.

Discipline tells us healing must be scheduled and monetised, but Lahore reminds us it often already exists informally, imperfectly, collectively.

This is where class and gender matter. Discipline is easiest for those who can outsource chaos (for lack of a better word) like childcare or domestic labour. Women, especially, are disciplined by time long before they are allowed to master it. Care work doesn’t fit into Pomodoro cycles and emotional labour doesn’t clock out. For many of us, particularly working-class individuals, survival already demands constant adjustment. To then demand aesthetic discipline with perfect routines and constant self-improvement is to misunderstand how energy is actually spent here.

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History offers a clue. Before industrial time, learning in this region happened through apprenticeship or the usual guru-shishya/ murshid-mureed relationship. Knowledge was transmitted slowly through presence. Mastery came from showing up over years, not from compressing growth into quarters. Even today, Lahore rewards this ethic in small, quiet ways.

Like the moment my daughter asks, just before I leave for work, “Mama, can I show you what I made today with paper?” And the city, through traffic delays, flexible mornings, unspoken permission, allows me to say yes. That extra minute will never appear on a productivity chart. But it will stay somewhere else, longer.

Philosophically, discipline promises self-mastery, but rests on a fragile idea of the self as solitary and uninterrupted. Lahore exposes that fantasy daily. Selves here are plural. They belong to families, neighbours, and dare I say, moods. You are never just managing yourself; you are constantly adjusting to others. The Fort of Loh doesn’t reward perfect routines; it rewards stamina, humour and the ability to return.

This isn’t an argument against ambition, nor a romantic defence of difficulty. Slowness here is not always chosen; often, it is imposed by inequality. But there is a difference between necessary adaptation and imported self-surveillance masquerading as growth. Not every pause is procrastination and not every delay is a flaw.

So, my New Year’s resolution is modest and unfashionable: to stop treating discipline as the only moral vocabulary for a good life and to stop forcing myself into imported ideas of discipline and perfection. Lahore has never been a city of strict schedules or tidy plans. Its heat bends the day; its stories interrupt the streets; and a single phone call can reset every priority. You don’t change Lahore; Lahore changes you. It taught me to slow down; to notice the pauses; to embrace the detours; and to live fully in the imperfect, beautiful rhythm of life. My resolution is simply to follow what the city has written for me.

Kiva Malick is an academic and writer who focuses on education, philosophy, music and culture