This is an older post – Sept. 17 2013
A response to this blog:
Hi. I’m Lucy.
Recently, my 20 something compatriots and I have been reduced to a Facebook-addicted, entitled, delusional, self absorbed Gen Y Protagonist and Special Yuppie stick figure who is “kind of unhappy.”
I’m here to tell you it’s all true. I check Facebook once every 15 minutes on my iPhone, and I feel deeply unworthy as I absorb the baleful effects of Facebook Image Crafting. Secretly, I think I’m Harry Potter and that once the world discovers that I’m a wizard, everything will be all flowers and unicorns and Dumbledore. I selfishly want to be fulfilled AND secure, at the same time.
There’s only one thing you got wrong about me: I am not “kind of” unhappy. I am extremely unhappy.
(Lucy SMASH!)
Let me break it down for you:
Extreme Unhappiness = (Crippling Student Debt + Unaffordable Healthcare + Unlivable Wages + Being Called “Whiney” All The Damn Time) – iPhone
I am wildly ambitious. I am in my 20’s. I’m supposed to be like this. This is the time in my life for taking risks and thinking about really huge possibilities because I am unfettered by spouse, family and mortgage. Thinking about whether I want to be the President or the author of the next Great American Novel is what will put me on the path to being a lawyer or an Associate Project Manager who managed to publish a book in her spare time.
The problem isn’t that our dreams aren’t measuring up to our realities, the problem is that we aren’t even given the chance to try to make it happen.
The fact is, I’m not unfettered. I’m deep in student loan debt, decent healthcare costs me half my paycheck and affordable healthcare will leave me bankrupt me if I spend a night in the hospital. I can’t afford to take the risks I need to take to go after my dreams. I need whatever job or two or three I can take just to survive, which is kind of a slap in the face after hearing stories my hippie parents tell about hitchhiking to Mexico and building chairs out of driftwood while affording a – granted, small – NYC apartment at my age.
But I get it. Jobs are a fact of life. Or at least, they would be if anyone would hire us. It’s one thing to start at the bottom and slowly work your way up. But when even the lowest rungs of the ladder are inaccessible to you and all you’re getting hired to do is babysit and make coffee, that’s another thing entirely. Those of us who managed to find “secure” and even “fulfilling” careers (I’m an Associate Project Manager at a publishing company) are usually paid less than a living wage. I can’t just “dive in somewhere” – there’s not enough water.
For those of you Boomers out there who survived on $10,000 per year in the 70’s, and are perplexed that we can’t seem break our new gadget addictions long enough to try it, look at it this way: Inflation has increased by a factor of about 4, so if you were working that same entry level job you had in the 70’s nowadays, you would be making close to 40k. Conversely, if my salary is converted into 70’s value dollars, I am making 4K a year. With student loans. And much, much pricier healthcare that most people my age opt out of, if we even can.
So sure. The average baby boomer career path, using horticultural graphs and metaphors, looks like this:
The way we see it, our career path is shaping up to look like this:
Which, admittedly, makes our parents’ career paths look like this:
To make things worse, we all read the news and bloggers more intelligent than we are, we all know that we are much more productive than our ancestors, and we also know that most of our very hard work ends up as cash not in our pockets, but in the pockets of the 1%. And that stings.
It feels like this:
Of course I want flowers on my lawn. I want a big apartment overlooking a fantastic city full of craft beers and cute friends, I want a love life nothing short of cinematic, I want Hogwarts for grown-ups.
Everyone wants that. You want that.
A safe place to live, a loving partnership with a person of my preferred gender, a semi-decent job that pays my bills and gets me the care I need when I’m sick – these are not flowers. And I am told I’m an entitled, whiny stick figure who thinks she’s special every time I complain about not having them.
Michael Chwe made a very insightful comment in his book, Jane Austen, Game Theorist:
“Austen shows how social norms, far from protecting sociality against the corrosive forces of individualism, can be the first in line of oppression. For Austen, duty and decorum are often nothing but pretenses used to prevent a person from making her own choices, over whom to marry or even whether to take a walk. To control someone, call them selfish. ”
Calling someone whiny, deluded or selfish is a way to take away their social capital, thus making them easier to dismiss.
Therefore I, Lucy, the narcissistic 20 something, see it as my responsibility to complain, whine, blog and tweet my outrage because I am living in a society that is in need of deep and sustained reform. This is my responsibility because I am the hero of the story, because I have something special that nobody else has, and because I just can’t take criticism very well. Or maybe it’s because everybody else is content to ignore the rapidly increasing wealth disparity and gradual erosion of human rights, and I’m the one who is going to have to raise, clothe, educate and take care of children in this mess. My silence is only convenient to those who benefit from an economy that’s rigged against the majority of the population.
One last thing: It’s the Boomers and Greatests who keep bringing up the fact that we’re defective and that they have it all figured out.
Why are we the arrogant ones?