We are huge in numbers, educated, skilled, ambitious and full of passion. We carry degrees, build careers, learn new skills, create businesses, make art, produce content and dream of lives bigger than the circumstances we were born into. We are talented, deeply connected and eager to build lives that mean something. Yet beneath all that potential is a profound restlessness that has come to surround an entire generation.

We are more connected to the world than any generation before us. Revolutions unfold on our screens in real time. We watch young people elsewhere demand their rights, challenge their governments and refuse to inherit futures they did not choose for themselves. We see their courage, their collective strength and sometimes their victories.

But strangely, here at home, that energy meets something very different: frustration, disappointment and helplessness.

In Pakistan, the room to live with dignity, question authority, participate and imagine a stable future is steadily shrinking. Even when an educated and ambitious young person manages to build something of their own, forces far more powerful than their hard work can pull it apart. There is no space to speak freely, disagree safely or believe that young voices can genuinely shape the systems that determine their future.

Across neighbouring countries, young people have taken to the streets to challenge systems that failed them. Their movements have travelled instantly across borders through our phones and social media feeds and their successes naturally prompted a question among Pakistan’s youth:

Why not us? Why can’t we demand change too?

But while young people elsewhere are finding strength in collective action, we are also seeing what happens here when citizens challenge power.

Over the past few years, Pakistani’s have learnt a different lesson. Protests have been met with arrests, intimidation, restrictions and at times, brutal force and deadly violence.  A fear has taken root – that those who step forward, raise their voices or demand their rights may pay for it with their freedom, their future or even their lives.

So here is the question:

Why should a young person walk onto a street simply to become a target for a bullet?

Day after day, we watch young lives being swallowed by circumstances they did not create. Years of education, sacrifice and hard work – often carried not by one person alone but by entire families can be reduced to nothing in a matter of moments. A young person spends years studying, building a career, starting a business and trying to reach somewhere in life, only to become another name in a news report, another photograph shared across social media, another family left asking why.

2026 has already been a particularly painful year for Pakistan’s young people. The tragedies have come one after another, each revealing a different face of the same crisis: young lives lost on perilous migration routes in search of a future abroad, student driven to suicide, enforced disappearances of young people in Balochistan, the acid attack on Dr Mahnoor in Quetta, the killing of 25-year-old businessman Mir Raza Ali in Karachi, the death of young activist and PhD scholar Osama Jamil, who had led protests in Azad Kashmir and the continuing violence and unrest in the region.

Behind every headline is a young person who had dreams, a family that invested years of hope in them, and a future that was never allowed to unfold. We are becoming accustomed to mourning lives that should have been spent building this country. But the story of the oppressed never truly dies; every injustice committed against them keeps returning, demanding to be heard.

The real tragedy is not that Pakistan’s youth has stopped speaking. It is that we have been given fewer and fewer reasons to believe that our voices will be heard and more and more reasons to fear what might happen when they are.

A generation that once asked, “How can we change this country?” is now increasingly asking a far more painful question: “Why should we stay?”

You are not just failing this generation – you are pushing us out of our own home, making us feel that leaving is easier than staying, surviving easier elsewhere than belonging here. How did the country we were born to call home because a place we are being forced to leave?