This presentation explores the ambivalences that trouble the project of pious self-discipline of a young woman whom I met during my fieldwork in Cairo, between 2006 and 2009. Daughter of two return-migrants from the Gulf, Lamya - just as many other young women, coming from Egyptian petit-bourgeois families, who gain access to ‘modern’ educational and labour contexts – was caught up by competing religious, educational and market oriented discourses, promising respectively moral, personal and social improvements. If on the level of individual engagement the young women managed to live up to the manifold and, at times, incongruous expectations these different discourses engendered, on the other hand she experienced the forms of sociality they entailed as totally irreconcilable. When required to conform to the specific social bonds elicited by the pious life she had enthusiastically committed to, soon Lamya became frustrated because of the tensions arising from her different social allegiances, thus started to question her path of virtuous self-discipline. By complementing the analysis of the subjectivation processes inherent to the diverse projects of moral and personal progress, with the description of the forms of sociality these same projects give rise to, this presentation suggests that an ethnography attentive to the relational and social dimensions of grand schemes in daily life is crucial in order to grasp the complexities and the conditions under which their promises are lived.