Your dreams might be invaluable, but they’re going to cost you.
Today I was served with unsettling news that came in the unfortunate wake of even worse news: I’m not getting a paycheck for over two weeks and I have $9 in my bank account. I live in New York City. I’m in college. My future is relatively bleak.
Summertime for me used to mean full-time lifeguarding, lounging on my parents’ sofa and eating meals they paid for. I was led to believe that I understood the difficulties of entering adulthood, but had the right to enjoy adolescence as my final meal before execution.
I realize now that looking at my parents, convincing myself that I would never be under similar financial duress and conjuring half-ass plans for my future—most of which ending in, “ …then I’ll write a best-seller and pay off all of my student loans and be rich!”—does not equate to understanding and preparing for cold, hard, brutal adulthood.
This mentality, that I like to refer to as living defensively, is what columnist David Brooks says is a real problem with today’s graduates.
He says that, “Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.” This system of extreme supervision, Brooks feels, does not cohere well with the new landscape of the job market—vast openness.
“Worst of all,” he continues, “they are sent off into this world with the whole ‘baby boomer’ theology ringing in their ears.” It’s this theology of “follow your dreams,” that I consider living defensively. It’s as if to say the world and its oppressiveness—some call this capitalism—keeps us from ourselves and our happiness, but to search for our passions is to defend our identities. People who believe this read Thoreau.
But is this search just a distraction that inevitably leaves us broke, desperate and entirely susceptible to the rat race from which we’ve fled for years thinking, or rather being told, that our innermost desires would keep us immune to? David Brooks and myself think so.
Worse news yet came again today—the unemployment rate has risen to 9.1%. It seems our country of dreamers have woken up and realized they need to work. Local governments have quietly cut jobs, private companies are hiring less and more people have entered the workforce.
What’s a girl, not yet calloused from reality and hardly detached from her childhood dreams, supposed to do?
“Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life,” says Brooks. “They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.” This is what I call living offensively, and it’s a lifestyle I’ve never been taught to lead.
To conform to anything that doesn’t feel like a direct extension of self is to fail. I’ve held onto this personal ideology for a long time, and not until last night, when I saw $9.28 flash onto the small ATM screen, did I realize I’ve gotten it all wrong.
My interior notions of self-righteous life planning first began cracking, however, after I read the David Brooks’s article and listened to a friend exclaim that she “just has a feeling that she’ll get a job.” I put two and two together and understood why so many college graduates move back home, suffer for years in destitution, refusing to belittle themselves with jobs like waitressing before finally settling for some terrible office job at a local bank doing something they’ll never understand.
Today is the culmination of my “oh shit” moment, but unlike Thoreau and my best friend, I am not going to tell myself that life starts today and I better go live it. Life started 21 years ago and has led to this moment of facing college graduation, drowning in a pool of debt with less than $10 to my name and a small chance that I’ll be able to get a job.
I’m not going to tell myself that I’m not fucked—because I am—royally. I’m not going to think I can get whatever I want simply because I want it. I’m going to start living and working like tomorrow isn’t a new day, and because of this, I might not die homeless in a year.
June 03, 2011 at 11:06 pm, Alan Stowe said:
This needs to be on bill boards, walls, read aloud on TV throughout the day and hidden in itunes downloads of hit singles. I’m 29 now and managed to circumvent long term schooling (I did 2 years of JC) and still get to a very nicely titled design position and the entire time I’ve fought and clawed my way to it, knowing damn well I had to compete with the kids with that piece of paper that means so much for some reason (I say for some reason because from what I’ve seen of college kids, I don’t see a whole lot of perks to that path). But I fought really effin hard for a long time and I did not wait for hand outs or my luck dragon Falkor to come flying out of the clouds and carry me off to my epic destiny I was meant to fulfill (not that I didn’t constantly hope that would happen). And the whole time I clawed my way up I watched from the outside as friends and co-workers and plenty of others just drifted around in school wasting time and constantly spouting ideologies that just do NOT function in the real world. Looking for their destiny, scoffing the “grown up” 9 to 5 life (which, little do they know, no longer exists in the cliche Darren Stevens image they seem to cling to as this villainous world trying to steal their souls). You summed it up PERFECTLY!!!