THERE is a particular quality to the anger visible in Pakistan today that distinguishes it from ordinary frustration or political disagreement. It is not the anger of a specific grievance that might be resolved through negotiation or reform. It is something more pervasive and more alarming, a generalized fury that appears at traffic signals and erupts on social media timelines, that colours political discourse and corrodes family conversations, that makes strangers hostile and neighbours distant. It is the anger of a generation that has been promised a future and suspects, with growing certainty, that the promise will not be kept.

Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and one of its youngest, with roughly 64% of its population under thirty years of age. That demographic reality, so frequently celebrated in official speeches as a dividend waiting to be collected, contains within it an enormous social pressure that the state has never adequately reckoned with. Youth unemployment stands at 9.6% by official ILO estimates, a figure that substantially undercounts the far larger population of young Pakistanis who are technically employed but trapped in informal, low-wage work that offers neither security nor a meaningful pathway forward. Approximately 51% of university students in Pakistan show symptoms of depression according to a systematic review and meta-analysis published in 2025, while UNICEF’s own........

© Pakistan Observer