The Unproductivity Pandemic

Amal Mega Project

Maryam Noor

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6 min read

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Apr 9, 2021

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I believe that everyone knows what a pandemic is by now. We all have faced the full brunt of it. Still, just for clarification, let me explain what a pandemic means. It means something of widespread nature, something that crosses international boundaries and usually affects a large number of people. The word is generally associate with the spread of disease. But in this blog, I want to touch upon something that is not necessarily a disease, more so behavior or an attitude. Being unproductive in my opinion is a widespread problem faced by many. In the current times where the reliance on cell phones and the internet has transcended beyond casual use, many people find themselves spiraling down the path of unproductivity.

However, the group of people most affected by this issue is our young generation. Being cooped up inside homes, no school and with nothing to do, the only obvious option left is the use of phones, internet, TV, and games to pass the time. After watching the Ted Talk by Bill Roche, in which he talked about developing an entrepreneurial mindset especially in young children, I was struck with inspiration. Why do we not promote such activities for children in Pakistan? Why do children have to go to school, come home and go to a madrasah then go to an academy and come home dead tired to sleep?

I believe that in Pakistan, the main focus is always on studies, children are not pushed towards learning other skills and when they do have free time the only thing that is left for them to do is to use the internet. This feeds into a chain of unproductivity with children wasting the golden years of their lives without learning any other skills except cramming and scoring high on exams. In developed countries, pushing children towards extracurricular activities is a trend. Children attend classes for music, dance, sports, art, writing and so much more. To apply for high-end universities, extracurricular achievements and activities are equally important. Ivy league schools of the US only take applicants who have a strong record of both curricular and extracurricular activities. Compared to Pakistan, can you even imagine King Edwards university turning a 90%+scoring student away just because they have no extracurricular accolades? The idea itself seems laughable. So with all this in mind, I concluded that in Pakistan, little to no attention is given to learning skills that are not related to academics, and as a result when provided with free time most people express feelings of boredom.

To confirm this theory, I chatted with a few children and teenagers I know. Since I could not go to meet with them in person because of the pandemic, I talked to them on the phone. The first one was my sister who is 13 years old. I asked her if she wanted to learn something other than her what was in her books and I was presented with a long list of very ambitious goals. “ I want to learn how to skateboard, I want to learn how to play basketball, I love doing origami. I want to read more novels why don’t you buy me more?” were a few of her remarks. Next, I talked to her friend who is 14. She was interested in writing novels but did not know how to start. I also talked to another one of my sister’s friends and her remarks were what made me believe that I was right in identifying the problem. This girl was in 8th grade doing O levels and I asked her what she wanted to do but she could not think of a single thing that she liked. All she talked about was studies and in her free time, she read novels but mostly used her mother’s cell phone. I also asked these kids that if given the opportunity would they like to pursue their interests and all of them were affirmative.

After conducting these interviews, I concluded that children are not provided with enough opportunities to expand their skill sets and freely practice creativity. And most of them are too obsessed with technology to utilize the opportunities or free time they have to be more productive and find new hobbies. If this continues our next generation will be nothing but a bunch of mindless robots, functioning because they have to and not because they want to. Without passion, creativity and curiosity we can not expect our youth to lead our country to success.

This problem is a vast one and has many causes but upon critical evaluation, I narrowed down a few important ones. They range from lack of opportunities, lack of knowledge about places that provide such skills, financial constraints, and most importantly the lack of attentiveness of parents towards the creative freedom of their children. I came up with a few ways to address these issues. Firstly, we can compile information about organizations or individual start-ups that provide training or courses related to multiple skills. These can include art classes, book clubs, sports academies, competitive sports, cooking/baking classes, sewing classes, horse riding, archery and swimming classes, calligraphy or writing classes, language learning, and many more. We can compile full information about these resources and then circulate this information on various social media platforms. We can also try to find courses that are available online because of the pandemic and those which are more affordable. Next, we can conduct a webinar targeted towards parents and young adults in collaboration with any child educator/psychologist and a motivational speaker to assert the importance of productive hobbies for children and how learning new skills is important for their mental growth.

From this experience, I learned that there are so many problems in our everyday life that are neglected to the point where they are not even considered problems anymore. Secondly, I learned that every problem has a solution and it is always the flip side of the problem. When researching this topic and talking to the children I learned a lot about their thought process. Their ambition was there but it was dialed down to the point of absence. Once given the chance they got so excited to talk about their favorite things and gave me a lot of insight. The one girl who could not figure out what her favorite thing to do was may not have given me an answer but having this conversation with me forced her to think about this. All in all, this was a good learning experience and I got to practice a lot of things that I learned from Amal. Looking forward to how far I can take this topic and how much I can do to solve it.