Is this magazine too cynical? To begin, I should warn you, I have a proclivity for doomsdaying. But I hope you have no future. Maybe I should explain.

I’m not referring to Johnny Rotten’s punk rhetoric of “We’re the future, your future… no future, no future for you,” to which I once flung my 12-year-old self around a posh London hotel room (no, the irony doesn’t escape me, either).

Nor am I referring to that moment of panic all too-soon-to-be grads experience. I am convinced the awareness of massive layoffs that occur during your formative years affects the way you’ll view the job market for the rest of your life. I constantly fight my own ingrained belief that the very idea of job creation constitutes The Big Lie. What kind of jobs? How many more baristas, sweater folders, and greeters? OK, easy targets, all, but the point is, that list is clichéd simply because the economical arguments are nothing new.

I constantly have to remind myself that there are jobs out there for me, and reading the articles for this issue, especially those by Alex Molotkow and Adnan Khan (see “Meet the Drop-up” and “Adult Too Soon?” pages 14 and 18), assures me that this is something every generation grapples with, even if each one does so for different reasons and in different ways.

In 1969, Hannah Arendt published a small book, On Violence —a big, weighty topic— to try to answer a much smaller question: who were they, this generation that seemingly had everything, but were so angry that student protests were shutting down campuses the world over?

Early on, Arendt quotes Stephen Spender: the future is “like a time-bomb buried, but ticking away, in the present,” to which she adds, “To the often-heard question, who are they, this new generation? One is tempted to answer, those who hear the ticking.” Student papers hear ticking for a living. I learned about Arendt in a grad class, and I give my condolences to Stephen Hutchinson (see “Confessions of a Recovering Grad Student,” pg. 27), but when academia, arts or sciences, does what it’s supposed to do, we get those bolts from the blue.

Arendt also says that the future only amounts to present procedures continuing forever: “Only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futurologists’ dream come true.” I wouldn’t wish that on you.

Life after now: it’s big, it’s scary. Let’s keep it that way.

Jade Colbert – Managing Editor