rowing up, most of us are told some version of the same story: you work hard, be decent, respect your elders and think of others before yourself. You don’t break rules, you don’t break hearts and you definitely don’t break the family.

For many urban South Asians, especially those raised in middle-class homes, that story becomes a life plan.

The daughter studies hard. She comes home on time. She doesn’t date and stays within the invisible boundaries drawn around her. The son gets a job and contributes to the household. He helps educate younger siblings. He postpones his desires because there is always something more urgent like a sister’s wedding or a parent’s medical bill. They do everything right, so why do so many of them end up lonely?

Not lonely in the dramatic sense, but something quieter. The loneliness of being useful to everyone and known to no one.

I have been noticing this particular kind of loneliness more and more in our cities. It sits behind professional success, family respectability and carefully maintained lives. It belongs to people who are functioning perfectly well; people who pay their bills, answer family calls, remember birthdays and show up when needed. But ask them a simple question about what they want and many struggle to answer.

Somewhere along the way, wanting became a luxury.

South Asian cultures have long been built around duty. Historically, this made sense. Families survived through collective effort. Individual desires often had to make room for larger needs. Love was never just emotional; it was practical. Who would earn a living? Who would care for ageing parents? Who would sacrifice today so someone else may have a better tomorrow?

The problem is that while our economies and cities changed, many of these expectations stayed exactly where they were. We inherited the language of sacrifice without always inheriting the communities that once made sacrifice meaningful.

Today, the obedient daughter may have a degree, a career and nominal financial independence. Yet, she may still carry a deep discomfort around prioritising herself. She spent years learning how to be agreeable, accommodating and available. Nobody taught her how to identify her own desires without feeling guilty about them.

The same thing happens to men, though we talk less about it. The good son often becomes the family’s emotional and financial infrastructure. He learns early that his value comes from what he provides. His reliability becomes his identity. He is praised for carrying burdens quietly. He is admired for not complaining.

But carrying is not the same thing as living.

Many of these men become emotionally hyper-independent. They solve problems alone and process pain alone. They become so accustomed to being needed that they sometimes forget what it feels like to need someone else.

This is not an argument against duty. Families matter. Responsibility matters. The problem begins when sacrifice becomes permanent. 

Psychologists describe this as a form of self-protective adaptation. If your environment rewards self-sufficiency and discourages vulnerability, eventually vulnerability begins to feel dangerous, or just embarrassing.

The result is a strange paradox because people who desperately want connection often become experts at surviving without it. Our culture applauds them for it. The woman who never asks for help is called strong. The man who never talks about his struggles is called mature. The person who endlessly sacrifices is called noble. Rarely do we stop to ask whether they are happy.

Then comes the financial dimension.

I think of the people who spent their twenties funding households rather than building lives: the women who postponed dreams because family obligations came first; the men who delayed marriage because younger siblings needed support; the countless urban professionals who became responsible before they had the chance to become themselves. Many eventually wake up in their thirties or forties with stable careers and respectable lives, only to discover an unsettling absence that they never really got around to living for themselves.

Of course, this is not an argument against duty. Families matter. Responsibility matters. The problem begins when sacrifice becomes permanent; when self-denial stops being an act of love and becomes a lifelong identity.

Human beings cannot survive on usefulness alone.

We need to be seen beyond our roles. Beyond “good daughter,” “good son,” “dependable employee,” “responsible sibling.” We need spaces where we are valued not for what we provide but for who we are when we stop providing.

Perhaps that is the hidden cost of being good in a desi world. Many of us were taught how to be needed before we were taught how to be known. Being needed can fill your calendar, your wallet, perhaps even your sense of purpose. But being known fills something much harder to reach. Maybe that is why so many seemingly successful, respectable, well-adjusted people still carry an ache they struggle to name: they spent years becoming indispensable to everyone around them, only to discover that indispensability is not intimacy.

The daughter inside the four walls and the son slouched over the work laptop arrive at the same destination from opposite directions. A quiet question awaits them at the end of it: after taking care of everyone else, who will take care of me?

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer