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“We’re just trying to make enough to eat, just to keep ourselves going,” Fadzel, an online taxi driver in Jakarta, told me. “Then suddenly you can become a victim simply because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s terrifying.”
He was talking about Affan Kurniawan.
I learned of Affan’s name on the night I came home.
On Aug. 28, 2025, I landed in Jakarta after spending several years studying and living in the United Kingdom. My father and my childhood friend were waiting at the airport. For a few minutes, exhaustion gave way to the relief of familiar faces.
Then we got into the car.
Jakarta was caught in traffic, as usual, although the city felt unusually tense. Everyone seemed to know something I did not.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
My father reached for his phone. Videos, forwarded WhatsApp messages and fragments of breaking news filled the screen. Affan, a 21-year-old Gojek driver, had been run over by a Brimob tactical vehicle during demonstrations in Central Jakarta. Reports said he had been completing a food-delivery order when he was caught in the unrest.
I had spent years abroad learning how to put Indonesian politics down whenever it hurt too much to carry. Within hours of coming home, I learned I could no longer look away.
A year later, I wanted to know what had become of that anger I arrived home to.
The Anger Changes Shape
The streets did not stay quiet.
In June, hundreds of university students returned to central Jakarta under the banner #MenujuIndonesiaBangkrut, roughly “Heading Toward a Bankrupt Indonesia.” Initiated by the University of Indonesia Student Executive Board (BEM UI) and joined by students from other universities, the protest carried demands around fuel and staple-food prices, government spending and the mounting economic pressures of everyday life.
That same month, former education minister and Gojek cofounder Nadiem Makarim was controversially sentenced to 10 years in prison in the Chromebook procurement corruption case. Makarim denied wrongdoing and appealed.
The case surfaced repeatedly in my conversations with Gojek drivers. Several asked not to be named because they were afraid about speaking publicly regarding the government. To them, Makarim remains closely associated with Gojek’s beginnings and with a period when the platform opened new possibilities for making a living. Several still regard him as a capable figure who once gave them reason to feel hopeful about what could be built in Indonesia. His conviction has only deepened their sense that even the people they place hope in can be pulled into a political system they already distrust.
The anger was still easy to find. Reading it had become more complicated.
Fadzel does not think it looks exactly as it did last August. He remembers a more spontaneous fury then: people pouring into the streets and reacting almost immediately to what they had witnessed.
Now he notices something quieter.
“People have become quieter, but they’re holding on to the resentment,” he said. “It feels like a time bomb.”
Rafa, a University of Indonesia alumnus who has been involved in the university’s chapters of Indonesian Young Entrepreneurs Association (HIPMI), and Islamic Students Association (HMI), sees exhaustion settling in as well. He remembers the anger before Affan’s death being heavily focused on the legislature and the economy. Affan’s death, he said, widened the grievance, bringing questions around police accountability much closer to the center of public anger.
A year later, Rafa still believes the anger exists. He worries about what repeated disappointment is teaching people to accept.
“What’s the point of going back to the streets if the outcome is going to be the same?” He said, describing a sentiment he increasingly sees around him.
In his reading, people are slowly learning to live around dysfunction. Corruption, economic instability and institutional failure start feeling permanent enough to plan a life around. In his interview, Rafa repeatedly returned to the idea of melumrahkan: the slow normalization of things people once found unacceptable.
Survival Mode
From Fadzel’s point of view, the exhaustion looks more immediate.
He described Jakarta as a city that remains relentlessly busy: malls full, roads packed, people constantly moving. Among drivers, small traders and lower-income workers, he sees anxiety beneath all that movement. The calculations are smaller and more urgent: what everything costs now, whether work will still be there, whether this month’s earnings can carry a family into the next.
“You’re in survival mode,” he said. “What matters is being able to eat tomorrow, come home safely, see your family and meet the needs of your household.”
Affan’s death made that calculation more frightening for him. Drivers already spend their working days exposed to the streets. The possibility that somebody simply trying to earn enough to eat could become a casualty because he happened to pass through the wrong place stayed with him.
Another driver I interviewed, who asked not to be named because he feared repercussions for speaking publicly about the government, had lived through the unrest of 1998. The atmosphere today reminded him of that period, he told me. What frightened him was the absence of anyone he believed might eventually pull the country back from the edge. In 1998, he remembered still being able to imagine one.
This time, he could not.
Alesha, another University of Indonesia alumnus who has been involved in strategic studies and student politics, has been watching the same political frustration from another corner.
She called the past year an “awakening.”
“I think people are more satu suara now,” she said.
Alesha sees political awareness widening as disappointment reaches people who once felt more confident about the direction of the government. The problems themselves are familiar to her. She described police brutality and institutional failures as structural issues that have survived different political periods. What has changed, in her view, is how many people are now willing to recognise them.
That is why she still believes in demonstrations.
“I think student protests have to keep going,” she said.
Student movements remain important to her because she believes political institutions rarely correct entrenched problems without pressure from outside them.
Rafa and Alesha had described two things I had assumed would cancel each other out: growing political awareness and growing exhaustion. Yet both seemed to be happening at once.
Fadzel had already given me an image for what could sit between them: a time bomb.
What Anger Becomes
Shanna, who studied law and now works in the NGO sector, knows something about wanting distance from politics.
For much of her younger life, she saw it as murky and unpleasant. Studying law complicated that instinct. Working in the NGO sector eventually brought her close to communities whose lives could be changed by policies decided far away from them. Politics became harder to treat as something abstract.
Her anger stayed with her, though she gradually learned to use it. Through advocacy work, what had once burned chaotically became fuel to get by.
She also rejects the idea that hoping Indonesia can improve is naive. Shanna describes hope as an intervention: enough belief in the possibility of movement to make action worth attempting in the first place. Her version of participation starts close to home, with leaving our bubbles and learning to care about lives that rarely resemble ours.
I had spent weeks hearing anger described through protests, exhaustion, survival and work. But in conversations that wandered further from organized politics, the feeling became harder to name. It surfaced in smaller questions: whether speaking up still mattered, whether the future felt worth planning for, or whether anything an ordinary person did could meaningfully reach the people making decisions above them.
“People are confused about where to channel their anger now,” says Adli, who has been involved with the Information Systems Student Association (HIMSI) at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta.
Ahmad Hanif, who has participated in forestry movements, spoke instead about the widening distance between people’s lives in Jakarta. “I still don’t see a clear way out of any of this,” he said.
For Mahmud Asrul, who has been active in student organizations at the University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Computer Science and in the international youth organization AIESEC, that distance has become personal.
Indonesia can sometimes feel like “tempat numpang”, a country he lives in without feeling much power over what happens inside it.
He still hopes it can become better. He sees good people around him who may one day have enough influence to change something. For now, though, he told me, “It feels like there’s nothing I can do except protect myself, my family and my friends”.
A year ago, I came home asking what had happened while I was gone.
I think I understand now why the answer has been so difficult to hold. The anger did not go anywhere. It settled differently in different people.
I still do not know whether hope is the right word for what remains.
A year after Affan’s death, I only know that remembering him should make it harder for us to let what happened to him become something we simply learn to live with.
