For the past few months, I’ve been giving rides on the Pakistani equivalent of Uber. If I was coming back from school and could pick someone up along the way and drop them off on my route home, I would do just that. My time wouldn’t go to waste, and I’d make up for the gas money. Win-win, really. But people’s reactions have been bothering me lately. Whenever someone gets in and realizes how young I am, they assume something must have gone wrong. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you in school?” Almost all of them ask.

When I reply, “I do go to school. I’m just doing this on the side,” they can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that school and work can coexist.

All these interactions have taught me a lot about the stigma surrounding young people working part-time jobs in Pakistan.

If a young person starts to work in a restaurant as a part-time worker, people will eye him with pity. Why? For many Pakistanis, social status is often times more important than financial and social well-being. That young person might be working to scrounge up enough money for his university tuition. He might be working there to support his family in a time of difficulty. Instead of admiring his efforts, Pakistanis tend to demean him.

In Western countries, it is nothing out of the ordinary; it’s like you just saw someone walking their dog. You wouldn’t pity him for having to take out the time to walk that dog. It’s their responsibility. Nothing to pity. If anything, it’s something to admire. Pakistanis don’t understand that working part-time jobs gives character.

Everybody hopes to work high-paying, high-status jobs. However, there are an extremely finite number of these jobs and a seemingly infinite number of candidates. Someone would have to work these minimum wage retail or restaurant jobs. It’s inevitable in this highly capitalistic society.

What we can do is to show such people the respect they deserve. Because sometimes they are the people who got the shorter end of the stick due to having been dealt a bad hand early in life, like a lack of resources for proper education or family responsibilities.

It’s easy to judge someone’s situation when you’ve never had to balance a shift with a study schedule. From the backseat of my car, I see how some people look down on the very person helping them get home. But when you actually do the work, you realize the tenacity it takes. If more of us spent time behind the wheel or behind a counter, we’d replace that misplaced pity with actual respect for their hard work.

If there were such a tradition where it was normalized for the young people to work part-time, as is the case in Western countries, maybe then the young people in Pakistan could work without being unnecessarily criticized. And most of all, perhaps then the workers who deserve the most respect in a capitalistic society would actually get it.