Kashmir’s unemployment problem is often framed as a shortage of vacancies. It is measured in exam notifications, application numbers, recruitment delays, and government posts per capita. But reducing the crisis to vacancy counts obscures a more unsettling truth. The Valley is not facing unemployment alone. It is facing a crisis of how work itself is understood, valued, and pursued.

Over time, we have constructed a narrow definition of what constitutes a “real job.” At the top of this hierarchy stand government positions – permanent, titled, secure. Beneath them lies a limited band of white-collar professions. Below that, stretching far wider than we admit, are small businesses, skilled trades, manual labour, and family enterprises. These forms of work sustain the local economy daily, yet socially they occupy a lower symbolic rank.

This hierarchy is rarely announced openly; It operates quietly – in casual remarks, in parental expectations, in marriage negotiations, in the language of social media, in the way we congratulate one achievement and merely tolerate another. “Get a real job,” is something we keep telling young people ,but What defines a real job?

The labourer who earns through physical effort, the baker who wakes before dawn to feed a neighbourhood, the fruit seller who builds trust, customer by customer – are these not real jobs? Are these not economic actors in the most fundamental sense?

They generate value. They circulate money. They sustain households. Yet in collective imagination, dignity remains disproportionately tied to titles,credentials ,and white collar status rather than to productive contribution. This distortion is not accidental. It has been historically reinforced by structural realities. For decades, the government functioned as the most stable employer in a region marked by political uncertainty and limited private investment. Public employment offered security where markets fluctuated. Stability became aspiration, aspiration hardened into prestige. Prestige evolved into dependency.

As a result, a significant portion of educated youth now orient their entire economic identity around a small cluster of government examinations. Preparation becomes a full-time occupation. Years pass within coaching centres and study rooms. Recruitment cycles often stretch unpredictably , with three, four, sometimes more years passing between advertisement and appointment. During this time, productive capacity lies dormant. waiting becomes normalized.

It must be said clearly: there is nothing inherently misguided about aspiring for competitive examinations or public office. Ambition is not the problem. The desire for stability, influence, and upward mobility is legitimate in any society. The difficulty arises when aspiration narrows into exclusivity, when a single examination becomes the only acceptable gateway to dignity. An economy cannot function if an entire generation suspends participation while awaiting one outcome.

To prepare is reasonable. To prepare indefinitely, at the cost of productive engagement is costly -economically and psychologically. When young people detach themselves from available avenues of value creation and internalize the belief that only one form of employment validates their education -they risk weakening both confidence and capability.

This is particularly paradoxical in a region where family enterprises, traditional trades, and small businesses already exist as economic foundations. A shawl shop is not merely a shop; it is a supply chain, a product line, a potential brand. A bakery is not simply inherited labour; it is distribution, customer loyalty, scalability. When educated young people enter such a spaces, they do not regress. They possess the tools to digitise operations, expand market access, , introduce branding, and connect to global platforms.

History repeatedly demonstrates a quiet truth: respect follows excellence, not designation. Many of the most respected contributors to society began with work that was considered ordinary, yet through discipline, vision, and uncompromising standards, they elevated it into something that created value, employment, and identity. Their work did not change in category – it changed in ambition and execution. The lesson is not that everyone must pursue the same paths, but that whatever path one chooses must be pursued with mastery. Nor is the argument that aspiration for administrative ranks or white- collar professions should be abandoned , only that it must not be treated as the sole legitimate measure of success.

As a society, we must confront an uncomfortable bias: we often celebrate titles more than competence. We equate designation with success and undervalue those who build quietly but effectively. If dignity continues to be allocated primarily through administrative rank and formal designation then even well-intentioned reforms will falter. The cumulative effect is a generation trained primarily to aspire rather than to participate. Capability exists, education levels have risen, exposure has increased. Yet confidence in alternative economic identities remains fragile.

The social consequences are visible but misdiagnosed. Frustration is attributed to moral decline, substance abuse to personal weakness, delayed milestones to individual inadequacy. Yet beneath these symptoms lies a deeper condition: a society that has attached dignity to a narrow occupational corridor while quietly diminishing the legitimacy of all others.

Such a value structure is economically unsustainable. No region can indefinitely rely on the state to absorb its entire educated population . A resilient economy requires distributed ambition – individuals willing not only to seek positions but to create value within existing and emerging sectors. Reforms, therefore, must operate in alignment across both policy and preparation. Governance can no longer remain the default employer of aspiration; it must become the enabler of opportunity predictable in its recruitment processes and deliberate in cultivating sectors that generate stable, year-round, and scalable employment. But opportunity creation alone is insufficient if education continues to prepare young people only for selection rather than participation. Educational institutions must therefore recalibrate their purpose. A degree cannot remain a theoretical credential detached from economic reality . Every programme must embed at least one applied, market-facing skill that equips students not merely to qualify for a post, but to contribute meaningfully within an economy that is already evolving beyond it.

Yet even this alignment will remain incomplete unless society itself revises the language through which it defines success. Dignity must return to competence, integrity, and the creation of real value, rather than remain confined to titles alone. When a young person grows a local enterprise, builds a reliable service, or revitalises a traditional craft, that achievement must command the same instinctive respect we reserve for formal designations. Because the message young people absorb is rarely taught in classrooms it is communicated through everyday reactions. What a society chooses to value, it multiplies , what it learns to dismiss, it quietly diminishes.

Finally the responsibility returns to the youth and its not a comfortable one

No policy can substitute for self-definition. No reform can rescue a generation that has quietly accepted that a narrow hierarchy of white-collar titles and government posts alone confers dignity. At some point, we must confront a harder question: when did we allow our definition of success to become so constrained?

We live in an age of unprecedented access to knowledge, to technology, to markets, to networks. The distance between idea and execution has never been smaller. And yet, ambition has contracted rather than expanded. The tools to build and to scale are within reach, yet we continue to measure our worth by the scarcity of official positions rather than by the magnitude of what we are capable of creating. This, then, is the real choice before us: whether to confine oneself to a path handed down by convention, or to define our value by the worlds we have the competence to build. The answer will determine whether the next generation becomes a generation of participants or remains a generation of aspirants.

Anieqa Farraz, first-semester Public Administration student at Amar Singh College.

© Greater Kashmir