The greatest crisis facing Pakistan may not be inflation, terrorism, or failing public services. It is that we no longer seem surprised by any of them. Psychologists call this habituation, the gradual weakening of human response to repeated hardship. What begins as shock eventually becomes routine. What becomes routine soon turns invisible. And a society cannot fix what it has stopped seeing.
Electricity bills tell the story. Prices more than doubled within a few years, sparking protests and public fury. But as nothing changed, outrage slowly gave way to acceptance. The higher bill became the new normal, not because people approved of it, but because hope is difficult to sustain when institutions refuse to respond. What remained was not acceptance born of consent, but resignation born of exhaustion.
Terrorism tells the same story. Pakistan has crossed grim milestones in militant violence, yet each attack disappears more quickly from public consciousness than the one before it. What should provoke national reckoning is reduced to official statements, condolences, and another headline. The problem is not a lack of compassion. It is the slow erosion of hope. When people no longer believe that outrage can produce change, grief becomes routine, and routine is where accountability goes to die.
The economy reflects the same pattern of normalised crisis. Since 1958, Pakistan has entered twenty-four IMF programmes, each presented as the difficult but final prescription that would restore lasting stability. Yet every programme has ended with the same structural weaknesses unresolved and the next crisis already taking shape. Inflation reached a record 37.97 percent in May 2023, fell dramatically to 0.3 percent in April 2025, only to climb back to 11.7 percent by May 2026. The numbers changed, but the story did not. Every cycle brought the same assurances of reform, the same promises of recovery, and the same appeals for patience. Analysts repeated familiar diagnoses, ministers recycled familiar commitments, and ordinary citizens once again calculated how to absorb the next wave of rising prices. The script has been rehearsed so often that everyone already knows their lines. What was once described as an economic emergency has gradually become an accepted rhythm of national life. Perhaps the most troubling reality is not that Pakistan repeatedly falls into crisis, but that it has learned to live with crisis as though it were normal.
American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described this condition as psychic numbing, the gradual erosion of emotional and moral response when catastrophe ceases to be exceptional and becomes a permanent feature of everyday life. Studying survivors of Hiroshima and communities living through prolonged violence and environmental disasters, Lifton observed that people do not stop feeling pain. Rather, they adapt because the human mind cannot remain in a constant state of alarm. Pakistan is not Hiroshima, but the psychological mechanism is strikingly familiar. A power outage that would once have provoked public anger is now built into daily routines. A terrorist attack that once dominated national debate disappears within a single news cycle. Inflation levels that might have toppled governments elsewhere are now presented as signs of economic stabilisation. The crises have not disappeared. Our capacity to be shocked by them has.
The danger of normalising crisis extends far beyond psychology. It corrodes the foundations of democratic governance. Democracies survive because public outrage translates into political pressure, and political pressure compels institutions to respond. But when outrage gives way to resignation, that chain of accountability begins to break. Governments become less responsive, institutions less accountable, and failure increasingly self-perpetuating. The greatest risk is not that dysfunction continues. It is that it no longer faces enough resistance to ever be corrected.
History shows that societies can break the cycle of normalised dysfunction. Often, it takes a defining moment that a nation refuses to accept as just another tragedy. South Korea’s 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, which claimed 304 lives, exposed deep regulatory failures and triggered months of sustained public outrage. That collective refusal to move on helped drive sweeping institutional reforms and ultimately contributed to the impeachment of a president. The tragedy itself was not unique. The response to it was. Pakistan, too, has endured its Sewol moments, the APS massacre in Peshawar, the deadly Karachi heatwave, and the thousands of lives lost on the country’s roads every year. Each shocked the nation, but only briefly. Grief was expressed, promises were made, and before long, tragedy was absorbed into the familiar rhythm of national life rather than transformed into lasting reform.
The greatest threat to Pakistan is not that it faces too many crises. It is that those crises no longer surprise us. Nations decline not only when institutions fail, but when citizens begin to treat failure as inevitable. The first step towards recovery is therefore not economic or political. It is psychological. It is the recovery of the civic imagination that insists things do not have to remain this way. Pakistan has endured enough to understand despair. It has survived enough to reject it. The day we stop mistaking survival for success and begin demanding a higher standard of national life will be the day genuine recovery begins.
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