When seventeen-year-old Amin gets home from class each weekday afternoon, his prime concern is finding a sanctuary where he can be alone with his thoughts. After spending six hours under the watchful eye of zealous disciplinarians and teachers fond of memorization drills, he feels drained of energy, in need of a quiet moment to decompress the feeling of dread that lumps in his gut as soon as the first bell rings. Amin feels he’s different from the others. He listens to American grunge rock (he hums Nirvana during the interview) and wears his hair shaved close at the sides and slightly longer on top, so as to follow the modern style without riling the high school principal. The only visible feature that differentiates him from his peers are his eyes, glazed over and ringed with dark circles that seem out of place in his otherwise youthful face.

“The world just doesn’t have the attraction it’s supposed to have. Sometimes, I feel like I’m 50,” he says. “It’s not like something bad or extraordinary ever happened to me. It’s just the system, and I am just in it.... I never had that privacy, that quiet dark room which I could come back to.”

The absence of an independent space evokes similar feelings in Payam, who lives with his parents and older sister on the outskirts of west Tehran. At 23, he is unemployed and did not attend university, save a for a short stint to exempt him from mandatory military service. His parents, worried that he’s fallen in with the drug crowd, prohibit him from staying out past ten or spending the weekends at an older friend’s flat, which for Payam represents a sole escape from his family’s crowded apartment. Feeling trapped, Payam channels the frustrations into his appearance, which he alters based on the tastes and expectations of whatever group of friends he momentarily associates with: the video gamers, the stoners, the theatre kids. Aside from acting, a hobby his parent’s approve of, Payam’s most recent obsession is plastic surgery. After recovering from a procedure that transformed his long, straight nose into an effeminate snow peak, he is planning a second operation. This time, the plan involves surgical implants to enhance the contour of his chin.

In different ways, Payam and Amin both struggle to cope with simultaneous feelings of social isolation and claustrophobia, predominant among the current generation of Iranian youth. Unlike the country’s thirty-somethings, old enough to have experienced the cultural thaw of the Mohammad Khatami era, these young men have spent their formative years during the 2005-13 presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which reclaimed the regime’s stronghold on public space. While members of the Khatami generation recall lively intellectual talks in cafes, free concerts on art school campuses, and citizen gatherings on city squares, the Ahmadinejad youth grew up at a time this open atmosphere was systematically stomped out. Violence against demonstrators, dress code policing, and the highly publicized arrests of anyone attempting to have fun in ways that violated prescribed Islamic norms gradually drove youth culture into constrained private spheres.

Spending hours a day in front of their computers or satellite TV, the Ahmadinejad generation’s cultural tastes have moved far outside the confines of the Islamic republic. By the time they reach high-school age, many teenagers spend hours a day on Instagram and Facebook. They share videos, edit photos, and satisfy sexual curiosities. But even the virtual sphere is not immune to very real repercussions from the authorities. The recent arrests of the young men and women behind the YouTube Happy video, which depicted a group of kids dancing to the popular Pharrell Williams song, shows the system’s rigid approach to the perceived ‘Westoxification’ of its youth. Such attitudes, pervasive in the education sphere, largely ignore the cultural reality young people experience online, in the streets, and in their interpersonal relationships. As a result, young men like Pedram and Amin are forced to live schizophrenic lives, balancing the stylistic tastes of their generation against the traditional expectations of the system.

The absence of public space and the wide availability of digital media means that there is no middle ground between these two worlds. Both at home and at school, young people feel isolated in their virtual microcosms and trapped in their contrasting physical reality. Their parents, usually oblivious to the purposes of sites like Instagram, worry about what their children do outside the home. But in a closed society like Iran’s, the virtual world can be just as psychologically damaging as hard drugs.

“The Internet is not a cure. It’s an addiction, a place to channel your complexes without having to deal with the repercussions,” says Ali, 18. An aspiring filmmaker, Ali says he feels acutely aware of his generation’s problematic perception of life. He is particularly concerned with the way his peers form sexual relationships, many of which begin with graphic images transmitted through Instagram and online video chats. “Ten years ago, when kids were dating, the first physical contact happened somewhere outside,” Ali says. “Now, it all happens through virtual sex. It’s very dirty and unhealthy.” When these virtual flings lead to the rare physical encounter, young people of both genders find themselves pressured to go as far as they would online. Girls become sexually promiscuous at age 14, and many have illegal abortions. Among Ali’s social group, 90% of kids have had at least one sexual relationship, he says.

Yet even as their private habits incline toward the pornographic, the school system expects them to follow narrowly defined traditional values. While most of Ali’s peers have learned to wear a facade of chastity when they enter the classroom, even studious pupils have trouble following the direction of teachers who expect them to blindly obey orders and memorize lessons that seem out of touch with the outside world.

Photograph: Kamyar Adl/flickr Photograph: Photograph: Kamyar Adl/flickr

“School is a waste of time. There’s no intellectual engagement,” says Shahin, 17, who comes from a bazaari family and plans to study engineering in college in hopes of securing a lucrative job. “Before, there was at least some effort to match education to the job market, but now when you get out of university, you are like a newborn.”

When school does offer the odd life lesson, it usually comes in the form of a cynical comment reflecting the country’s socioeconomic problems. “I don’t like my teacher, but today, he said something very true,” says Amirhossein, 17. “In this country, you have to think only of yourself, because no one else will.”

With the official youth unemployment rate at 27%, Iran’s economic environment has a profound impact on teenagers’ future aspirations. The rampant inflation and general uncertainty of recent years has created a sense of panic in young people, teaching them to value financial security above all else. At the same time, corruption and nepotism in the business sphere and the unaccountability of ruling elites has led many youths to believe that a get-rich-quick scheme is a surer path to success than a good job.

“You cannot think deeply when you are struggling economically,” says Ali. “As kids see more of the real world, they no longer consider a straight, normal career path. People used to want to become pilots, artists, robotics engineers - now, they want to be bazaaris. The future is all materialistic - how to secure a car, a home, or how not to die of hunger.”

While western culture as experienced online and on television is a powerful influence on young minds, the specter of poverty and material want is no less real. Many young people feel that achieving their financial goals requires at least some conformation to the Islamic system. Others, like Shahin, the sons of religious bazaaris and veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, try to follow the rules because they remain committed to the revisionist ideology of post-revolutionary Iran. On the whole, Iranian youths are trapped somewhere between western and Islamic values, unable to develop deeper ties to either culture.

“Even if they drink litres of alcohol on the weekends, a lot of my friends say they believe in God,” Parsa says, “but I don’t think any off them actually mean it. They’re just afraid of going to hell, in case there is one.”

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau. This article was originally published without a byline