The younger generation’s frustration is familiar. The sense that Pakistan has exhausted its promise. That the system has failed, the youth is done, and the only rational move left is to leave.
I’ve heard this before. In 2016, when I received my Australian permanent residency, people told me I was set for life. And when I decided to give it up a few years later and return to Pakistan, they told me something else: there is no future here.
Friends, family, well-wishers, all repeated the same warning. People are leaving. Why are you coming back? Different generation. Same despair. Same conclusions.
But despair has always been louder than reality. When I returned, I didn’t come with grand patriotic slogans or illusions of reforming the system. I gave myself a simple, almost selfish plan: try for six months. If nothing worked, I could always leave again.
I wanted to see, personally, whether opportunity truly no longer existed, or whether we had simply grown tired of looking for it.
I started small. No capital. No connections. No safety net. The idea was simple: build a services business that could sell globally while operating locally. The goal wasn’t to ‘change Pakistan’. It was to create something sustainable, earn in dollars, and employ talent that already existed but was underutilised.
The first month, we landed a project. That one project paid for the next six months. The second month, another came in. That funded the entire year.
It wasn’t easy. Nothing here is. Payments were slow. Systems were broken. Processes tested patience daily. But the market was wide open. Competition was thin. And the hunger to work was real.
That experience taught me something important: people who only talk about Pakistan see dysfunction; people working on the ground see whitespace.
Later, I began working on another startup, a fintech product on the side. At the time, fewer than 32,000 Pakistanis actively invested in the stock market. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because no one had built simple, trustworthy tools or education for them.
That gap wasn’t a reason to leave. It was the reason to stay. Today, thousands of people have started their investment journey because of what we built. Not because the system helped, but because we learned to build parallel to it.
And that’s where I disagree with the conclusion that ‘it’s over’. Hopelessness is not unique to Gen Z. Every generation in Pakistan has believed it was living through the worst version of the country. Our parents heard it. We heard it. Gen Z hears it louder because social media amplifies despair faster than progress.
But the uncomfortable truth is that crises are constant. So are opportunities. Developed markets offer stability, yes, but they also offer saturation. In Pakistan, you are not competing with a hundred well-funded players. You are often building the category itself. Educating users. Creating first habits.
That asymmetry is rare.
My advice remains honest and practical: If you want a stable job, predictable growth and peace of mind, go abroad. If you want to build something meaningful, difficult and disproportionately rewarding, this market still offers upside most people underestimate.
To Gen Z reading this: Being told to ‘adjust’ while opportunities are taxed away feels insulting. But leaving is not the only form of resistance. You have tools previous generations didn’t. Global internet access. Remote markets. Distribution without permission. The very digital space being constrained is still your unfair advantage.
Don’t wait for the system to fix itself or for validation or for permission. Build alongside the chaos. Learn to operate despite it.
The skills you gain here: selling without support, navigating broken systems, building resilience, compound faster than comfort ever will.
They expect you to either fall in line or leave quietly. Do neither.
My controversial belief is this: Gen Z builders who stay and execute will create more real change in the next ten years than decades of brain drain ever did. It’s not over. It’s just no longer comfortable.
The writer is the founder of Sarmaaya Financials.
