Last spring, after realizing that I had spent the two years since my high school graduation working in retail, I started to get some premature worries. With a humanities BA forthcoming, would I be spending the rest of my life exactly where I was? I began to resent the yuppies who patronized the record store where I worked, whereas before I had merely disliked them. These people have good jobs, I thought, and they didn’t get them by studying English and philosophy.
My fears were assuaged in the summer, when I had the privilege of working in the office of a non-profit organization. It was rewarding work and the pay was better, but when it was all over I had a newfound respect for the thirty- and fortysomething retail warriors whom I had dreaded becoming. Many of these people, I realized, worked just as hard as the nine-to-fivers, logging as many hours on their own projects as I or my NGO co-workers did behind the desk. A friend of mine quit his record store job in his late 30’s and took up a new career in the trades without incident. Had he squandered his youth, or had he done what satisfied him until it was time to leave?
In January, the Globe & Mail published a feature about “the Underachievers”-twentysomethings who take an inordinate amount of time to finish their degrees, remain at home after graduation, or simply sponge off their parents longer than much of society deems acceptable.
“The job market is hot, and yet many well-off, educated kids are adrift, moving back in with their parents, often smoking pot, and delaying careers in what can seem like a willful ‘failure to launch,'” reads the story’s lead paragraph. Writer Alexandra Shimo goes on to imply that these “educated kids” lack the ambition that their parents had. Tell that to the thirty-year-old art college graduate who, having searched endlessly for anything but precarious contract or freelance work, resigned herself to working in a field that seemed stable by comparison-the service industry.
It’s hard to find well-paying, full-time work these days, especially when one’s interests or skill set lies outside of the norm. It’s been said, and not without reason, that a bachelor’s degree is barely worth the paper it’s written on, since a mere post-secondary degree doesn’t get you where it once would have. Yet not everyone has the money to pursue a post-graduate degree, or the desire to be saddled with staggering student loan payments until they get their bearings in the dubious job market.
If our generation isn’t following the paths blazed by our parents, it might be because those paths have largely grown over. With tuition fees mounting, expensive post-graduate credentials taking on increasing importance, and stable full-time jobs divided into more cost-effective contract work and unpaid internships, our own graduations find us in a very different “real world” than that of our parents. At the same time, the average age of marriage is rising and birth rates are falling.
While Shimo interprets the loss of the “traditional dream of success and domesticity” as a symptom of the younger generation’s lack of work ethic and ultimate resignation to mediocrity, it seems fairly obvious that today’s educated youth are simply weighing their options and waiting before committing themselves to a life they never wished for in the first place. More and more, people pursue a number of careers over the course of a lifetime, or simply take the time to map out their plans instead of jumping into the first available employment opportunity. Pragmatism regarding one’s future happiness is commonly-and unfairly-misconstrued as irresponsibility.
It’s childish to disregard the possibility of working a “normal job” on the basis of one’s own delicate, artistic spirit, just as it’s shortsighted to write off those who choose “low-level employment” based on what they supposedly should be doing with their lives. There is a middle ground between cynical realism and idealistic navel-gazing. As most of us know (or will know), gaining entry into the workforce when you’ve been trained in a creative discipline is difficult at best-particularly if your parents aren’t in a position to pull strings for you.
For those who work tirelessly as designers or freelance writers and those who struggle to get a creative project off its feet, a stable (if unrewarding) wage job with flexible hours is often preferable to menial data-entry duties that will only suck their time and energy.
Some of our culture’s most revered minds were, by conventional standards, slackers. Take Henry Miller, who lived the life of a starving artist until publishing Tropic of Cancer in his 40’s, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived with his mother after college while he researched and wrote. While certainly not every erudite youth is a Miller or a Hawthorne, plenty of us have good ideas and talents that can be brought to fruition given time and steadfast devotion. Take Alan Zweig, the Toronto filmmaker and self-admitted “failure” who produced Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon to cult acclaim, or the legions of Toronto indie rock musicians who work in retail because it’s the only job that will allow them the freedom to tour.
It’s not for everybody to make films or write novels between bartending shifts, nor should it be. Certainly in some cases, as Shimo asserts, doing so might be a childish tactic to avoid adulthood. Of course, many are deterred from this lifestyle because of negative opinions like those found in Shimo’s article. And if this fear factor succeeds in producing enough doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats to keep our society together, it can’t be all bad.
But just as tangible as the fear of “failing at life” is the fear of living a life in which one’s passions are unrepresented. University is a time of great panic for most, myself included-but it helps to realize that even the so-called worst career options aren’t really so bad if they’re a means to pursue what makes you happy. As trite as the notion may sound, there are plenty of living testaments to its sincerity-don’t let the boomers tell you otherwise.
