Pakistani youth: the future is optimistic and angry

At a café with a friend, I noticed a group of half a dozen or so modernly attired urban teenage boys and girls pulling up chairs to the table beside us. My friend glanced over his shoulder with a rather patronizing scan and just shook his head slowly. “I bet you, none of these lost souls even know Quaid-i-Azam’s real name” remarked my friend with a smirk on his face. I joked that we are sounding like two grumpy senior citizens, but I also suddenly realized we were casually and dismissively discussing two-thirds of Pakistan’s population, its most important stakeholder, its youth. Perhaps the paternal instinct kicked in and it got me thinking. What makes us so sure of ourselves? Do we really understand our young men and women and the realities of their world? Are they “lost” or is it our lazy grown-up ego allowing a one-track critic to overpower the best of us? If we don’t understand their issues, how can we help them navigate the global technological, cultural and economic transitions well underway? The contrarian in me decided to take matters into my own unscientific hands as I soon got an opportunity to test these hypotheses first hand.

A few days later it was my first day of teaching entrepreneurship at the university to a class of around fifty. After I finished my introduction, I asked all students to spend five minutes writing down on a piece of paper their biggest strength and weakness described in a single word, respectively. Twenty minutes later I had the strength and weakness of every single student on the whiteboard. I had now taken the first step to connect with our Pakistani youth and piece meal the puzzle that is our future.

It has been three years since then and regardless of the role I am in, a visiting faculty member, workshop trainer, speaker at youth seminars or youth mentor, I try to run this basic self-awareness test with nearly all who I come across, with the intent to learn and gather relevant context. Here are what thousands of interactions and observations have revealed to me about our Pakistani millennials: nearly two-thirds of young men and women report optimism as their main strength while almost three-fourths of young men and women report anger as their main weaknesses. So, what do we have here? Are we to extrapolate, with a couple of grains of salt, that the Pakistani youth is mired with angry optimism? What do we make of this in our effort to relate to them?

Let’s get a bit granular here starting with the strength. Why the audacity of optimism? Why the naivete of hope? Are millennials oblivious to high unemployment rates, rising costs, political volatility, red-tapism, feudal mindsets, general societal intolerance, corruption, lack of meritocracy, sensationalism and breaking-news culture, etc.? Aren’t these the typical conversation footnotes everywhere around us? So, what is so positive about this “khichri” of doom and despair we call a system?

Unsurprisingly, and with broad consensus, it seems digital technology is the real beacon of hope and game changer for our youth. It’s a multidimensional enabler offering much more than simply cat-videos catharsis. The excitement of being a global digital citizen with the ability to instantly absorb the world with a Google search, self-educate at will on YouTube, connect with others on Facebook, consume bespoke content on Netflix, curate inspirational ideas on Pinterest, read hilarious internet memes on Instagram and initiate unbanked commerce via bitcoin, even though it is presently not supported by State Bank of Pakistan, is a reasonably attractive proposition to a 20-year-old. Their optimism centres around the innovative, liberating and disruptive possibilities afforded to them via the internet and digital economy. With these building blocks of possibilities, they can create their own micro ecosystems and rule their own virtual worlds that may be more interesting, financially rewarding and personally nurturing than our traditionally inflexible and inefficient socioeconomic structures. Sponsor of empowerment of the mind and pocket, one may argue.

When I ask college-going students, how much time per week they spend digesting traditional informational channels like TV, radio and newspaper, their answers are quite predictable. None! How much time per week they spend on computer desktop or laptop? Maybe between 1 and 2 hours if there is an assignment requiring word processing or making a presentation. How much time per week they spend on their smartphones? Many answered; how much is 12 times 7?

This is just a tiny glimpse of the new reality underway and for many, it may feel egregiously past the speed limit, if you will. The younger generation is nowadays taking virtually all cues from the digital world with certain sequences of 1s and 0s deconstructing and reconstructing their identities and choices. They are experimenting with new hyper-democratised social structures and addressing literally every issue in a unique way and it appears beautiful to some and chaotic to others. At any given day, a trending topic on Twitter may allow millions of users to go on-the-record, voice their opinion and engage in everything from a healthy discourse to hate speech, the latter just as reflective of our society as the former. The noise and friction created by clash of technologies, cultures, age groups and information flow are creating a global narrative that is more hopeful, collaborative and transparent and it is now here in Pakistan. These young and “naive wanderers” are testing new frontiers and are forcing us to re-examine everything from how we conduct our personal lives to how we run our businesses. How can optimism and excitement not prevail in such a backdrop? How can we not be at least cautiously optimistic if not outright euphoric about the collective change awaiting us?

Shifting to the weakness, an overwhelming majority believes anger as one of the main reasons holding them back in life and the greatest source of emotional and mental pain. I may be wrong, but I infer it’s not anger but mainly lack of confidence among other fundamental issues that leads to this anger. Neither home, work nor school environments allow the broader youth to express feelings or ideas with freedom, leaving purpose discovery, self-awareness and other crucial personal identity-related matters to only social media as a de facto outlet and that is not always the best of options. Natural creativity is frowned upon largely because we have not yet created a space in society to maturely address tough questions in a respectable setting. Questioning is often times equated to disrespect and I would argue there is not a fine but a bold line between the two. The perpetual fear of inviting scorn from family members, friends, bosses, teachers, etc., leads to perpetual repression of emotions leaving silence as the only non-turbulent state of existence.

Anger also stems from heightened state of defensiveness, signaling proximity to the edge of the intellectual and emotional cliff. One more question, and he fears he will fall down like humpty dumpty! Adding fuel to the fire is the volatile ingredient of machoism, where male intellectual and emotional weakness is instantaneously covered in a blanket of irrational threats and rising decibels — the common symptoms of the angry-young man syndrome. A mirror reflecting a bitter reality must be shattered immediately before despair sets in — anger to the rescue!

We, as a society, seem to be fixated on one’s accumulation of external reference points and IQ (intelligence quotient) through acquisition of tangible assets and qualifications, respectively and are blatantly overlooking the desperate need to develop EQ (emotional quotient), a prerequisite of which is self-awareness. Our youth is simply not equipped to single-handedly process record volume of unfiltered information flow in their lives and in due time. The “information processing centres” of society namely parents, teachers, mentors, etc., are not up and running either. Most parents are not spending enough quality time with their kids conducting pulse checks and reflecting on the future, many teachers exhibit indifference to the student beyond assignments and exams, at times supervisors at work engage in counterproductive authoritarian behaviour, again limiting the opportunities for individual’s emotional growth, etc. Then why wonder at the vexed youngster?

Compare the lives lived by our fathers to the ones our children are living. In two generations, the world has radically transformed with more exponential change on its way, where the lives of our grandfathers may be incomprehensible by our grandchildren. We risk massive loss of unique culture, unique identity and unique values. At the risk of coming across as a youth apologist, instead of criticizing the lackadaisical attitudes of young men and women nowadays, the overindulgence in vanity, the lack of respect shown to elders, the addiction to social media and resulting attention deficit problems, etc., we need to communicate with purpose to preserve and evolve together as one. There is no we versus them. It’s an interconnected and interdependent continuum of society to which we all belong.

We need effective means to transfer knowledge and actively communicate across all generations. We should have forums at universities and schools fostering more hands-on engagement, i.e. workshops between students, parents, teachers, public office bearers, business community members and other stakeholders via direct dialog and joint activities in addition to speech-oriented formats including perhaps a version of TED Talks. Digital content producers and social media influencers should develop content tailor-made to explore the integration of the past, present and future so our youth at least begin to associate with a genuinely aware, confident, humble and vibrantly modern identity. We need to create community-level information highways and bridges to extract the wisdom of the older generation and merge it with the energy and nomadic instincts of the younger generation. We need to integrate the power of culture back into our national narrative to reinforce identity and profound pride in our heritage and finally we need to leverage technology for maximum scale and effect of all of the above.

The most alarming statistic I came across in last three years is that almost all surveyed, said they were never asked about their strengths or weakness at any point in their lives, no one really bothered, including themselves and they were not aware of the importance of self-awareness. They didn’t know the critical value of establishing a personal baseline, a jump-off point, and the visualization and planning of a jump-to point. This is ground zero for our youth. If we fail here, there is not much to build upon for the future. Let us not waste words and energy on non-productive criticism and instead help deliver a future worthy of earned and not angry optimism.