They are inseparable. The rage young people feel doesn’t come from a vacuum; it comes from material conditions. A friend of mine had to quit university because her family could no longer afford to keep her in school. She became a full-time activist not because she read theory in class, but because her own situation brought her there. I count my pennies to afford to get to class every day, and with diesel prices rising, transport fares have gone up. That’s a daily reality, not an abstract political question.

When you realise that the officials behind corruption scandals are the same ones driving up fuel prices and cutting education budgets, the economic and the political stop feeling like separate conversations. That’s why farmers, public transport drivers and students all ended up on the same streets. Their specific demands were different, but the source of their frustration was not.

Young activists in the Philippines deeply believe that planning and structure make the resistance stronger. National offices of several organisations coordinate the when and where. Protests tend to coincide with significant dates: the EDSA People Power Revolution anniversary, Independence Day or International Women’s Day. 21 September carried particular symbolic weight, as it marked the anniversary of Marcos Sr’s declaration of martial law. What made 2025 different is that organisers didn’t have to push people onto the streets. The anger was already there. They only gave it a place to go.

After 21 September, there were follow-up protests, including one on 30 November. The numbers were smaller, but people kept showing up. That momentum had a lasting effect. Many people, including friends of mine who had never been involved before, joined civil society organisations during this period. The streets brought them in, and the movement gave them somewhere to stay.

Social media is essential for coordination, getting messages out and shaping how issues are understood. Memes, short videos and TikTok content matter. If you frame something too academically, it doesn’t reach people. During the September protests, young people began publicly exposing ‘nepo babies’, the children of corrupt politicians who display lavish lifestyles online. When a politician’s family flaunts wealth while yours has lost someone because flood control projects never materialised, it makes inequality impossible to ignore.

But the risks are also real. Activists get red-tagged for the way they dress, the events they attend or who they are with, and the consequences can be life-threatening. I experienced this firsthand. After a rally, a security guard stopped me as I was boarding a train because I was carrying a placard about agrarian land reform. He assumed I was a communist. I had to throw it away just to get home. That kind of harassment is common, and it goes further than the street. Police have arrested people without warrants based on their online activity alone.

And the state is not the only threat. Far-right groups also operate social media pages to spread disinformation, and unreliable news outlets frame protesters and their demands in ways that distort what’s actually happening.

Enforced disappearances are also a reality. Activists have been killed. When you wake up and hear that someone you know is gone, the danger becomes very real. That’s partly why young people keep fighting. We can’t keep losing people.

The Gen Z label is not entirely accurate. The issues are intergenerational. It’s not only young people who go hungry or face state repression. Older farmers, public transport drivers and parents were all at the protests too. What’s true is that young people are stepping up to lead and are no longer afraid to take up space.

What happened in the Philippines was part of a wider wave. We were following what was happening in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal. When young people in Nepal succeeded in forcing a change of government, it showed that resistance is possible. For many Filipinos, that was a turning point in how they imagined what protest could achieve.

The One Piece flag appeared at protests across the region as a symbol of shared youth culture, making the political feel accessible to a generation raised on the manga. In the Philippines, though, police associated it with poor urban youth gangs, which pushed many activists to distance themselves from it to avoid being red-tagged. A symbol can mean very different things depending on where you are.

There have been tangible victories. Free tuition in tertiary education came through sustained organising. Diesel price rollbacks helped public transport drivers and commuters. On campuses, students won more inclusive gender policies, including the right to express their gender identity and access to multi-gender restrooms. These may seem small to some, but for us they prove that protest is not for nothing.

The victories I hold closest, though, are the relationships you build inside the movement. You don’t get those from labelling yourself an activist. You get them from organising together, facing repression together and standing in the heat, raising your fist until your voice gives out.

What keeps me going is my family. My father worked as a tricycle driver and handyman. My mother cooks for foreign diplomats. My sister is in her second year at university. There are weeks when I don’t have enough money for lunch. I don’t want my sister to keep living like this. And I know that for many people, it’s far worse. There are families who have lost someone to floods, to extrajudicial killings, to a government that looks the other way. When I think about them, the personal cost of staying active feels smaller. Change doesn’t come all at once; it comes in accumulated milestones. And that’s enough to keep going.