Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer

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Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer

After months of upheaval, many are attempting to get on with their lives while quietly grappling with grief, economic stress and a loss of hope.

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An emotional goodbye on Iran’s border with Turkey before an Iranian family headed to Australia for work, not knowing when they would reunite with loved ones at home.

Credit...

Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

By

Yeganeh Torbati

April 30, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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On the surface, Iranian society appears to be functioning normally, at least for a country that weeks ago was under heavy bombardment.

Hip young people gather outside street cafes in Tehran, smoking and chatting with friends. Tickets to a high-profile rock concert in the city sold out in minutes. And people still travel outside Iran for leisure and for work.

That is all a veneer, many Iranians say, masking the painful and precarious conditions that they are living with. Four months of traumatic, world-shaking events — a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests followed by a devastating war — have dashed hopes for the future, and left large parts of society in grief, feeling powerless.

“People are living their lives,” said Sara, an Iranian woman in her 40s living in Turkey, who had traveled to Tehran in the winter and returned to Turkey in late April. But, she said, the apparent calm was misleading: “Everyone’s morale is terrible.”

Like most of the two dozen or so Iranians interviewed for this article, Sara declined to be fully named, fearing reprisals from the government. Others declined to be identified at all.

Sara was in Iran for some of the worst weeks of the war, and said that Iranians outside the country were more anxious about what was happening inside than those actually living there, who may be more resigned. “Everyone is hopeless, or some have hopes in something that is illusory,” she said.

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