On my Exposure to the Reality of Life in America
No matter what you do in capitalism, you will lose. There are very few jobs in America right now for young people that allow them to win. These are the jobs that seem available: doctor, lawyer, nurse, dentist, firefighter, police-person, teacher, accountant, and ‘business person.’ IF you are smart enough to enjoy math when you are sixteen, know that you would like computer science, and maybe start to learn coding, THEN you can have a stable and well paid job in data science, computer science, finance, or engineering. You must know all of that four years after you are twelve years old, and five years before you actually start making money. You must know that while you don’t know how to drive, have never paid taxes, and don’t know how to go to the grocery store by yourself. You don’t have a credit card, and you probably don’t have a bank account, but you have to know you want to go to school for math.
I picked ‘business person.’ My father was a Business Person, so I thought it would be a good fit. My mother is an emergency room nurse, so she wanted me to go into something medical, but I wasn’t good enough at science, and didn’t have any AP credits.
Notice that there are certain occupations that are just off the table — why consider? Why pause on them? They would include astronaut, artist, pet groomer, historian, sociologist, politician, marine biologist, journalist, writer. They fall into approximately three categories: 1) low wage workers and starving artists (pet groomers, retail workers, painters, writers), 2) small amount of hiring opportunities (marine biologist, astronaut, politician, journalist, historian), and 3) disagreeable to my conservative parents (sociologist, social worker, politician). In my household growing up, they were almost considered ‘unmentionables.’ My mother told me, ‘If you work in the medical field, there will always be a job for you.’ There was little faith in anything unknown.
The first category of unmentionables is my favorite. The minute you take into account survival, low wage workers and starving artist jobs are no longer in play. America treats them like a nuisance who we deign to feed crumbs, rather than members of society. When I was younger, I wondered, “Who could survive without a salary when the average cost of a wedding is $33,000, and the estimated cost per child is $250,000? Don’t you want to own a house?” Just this week, my father told me, ‘you really are very artistic and you could have been an art major at school, but then you wouldn’t have been able to get a job,’ but the ironic thing is, I was a business major and I’m already out of work. And obviously, he knows that, and I know that.
When choosing an occupation, it seems like there are these limited number of choices that, when you really look at them, aren’t what they’re cracked up to be no matter what you do. In the simplest terms, it is as follows:
The worst case scenario seems to be that you will be a slave to your job and you will make starvation wages. This applies to retail workers and managers, teachers, post office workers, and potentially artists. You work for a larger system (like the government, or the school system, or a corporation) that has no interest in your well being.
The middle case scenario seems to be that you will have a good work life balance but be financially dependent on another person OR never be able to own your own home. This applies to childcare providers, independent artists, some retail workers, and other ‘lower class’ jobs. If you’re lucky, you work with individualized clients, but if not, you work for a larger system that has no interest in your well being, or even your personhood.
The best case average scenario seems to be that you will be a slave to your job and you will make enough money but have no time to spend it. It will all seemingly disappear in housing costs. You will have no life outside your job. This applies to medical jobs, computer science jobs, finance jobs, and being a lawyer. You probably work for a larger system that pretends they have an interest in your well being.
The last scenario is the ideal scenario: one in which you have work life balance, and enough money to lead a ‘reasonable’ life, in which you can afford a house, and children, and your medical bills. You also support something you believe in — yourself, your dreams. This seems to mostly come from successful social media creators, authors, small business owners, and potentially, dare I say it, real estate agents?! (It’s just a hunch on the last one. Let me know if I’m wrong.) This is the ‘sweet spot’ that has millennials flocking to create their own businesses and leave corporate life.
Like many young millennials, I am currently living with my parents as I mull all of this over, and I have no real job prospects. I am as close to Jane Austen’s Charlotte Lucas as you can get, in terms of economic opportunities. I graduated with a four year degree in 2019, took a job that I hated but stayed in, and was eventually furloughed and then laid off from that job, six months ago. The world chewed me up and spit me out, and I ended up back here (a la ‘the thirty-something gang’ from the Gilmore Girls revival). I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back, wondering where I went wrong. How could this all have been avoided?
As far as I can tell, the wrong decision happened when I was sixteen years old, and chose what I wanted to study at college. It could even be earlier than that, when I decided math just wasn’t my strong suit, and I should focus on the other subjects instead. When I was done grieving over that, and how un-fixable these choices seem to be, I’ve been thinking and thinking, what is the next step? The companies I have interest in don’t have interest in me. I don’t see eye-to-eye with most of the people in my industry because I refuse to ignore ethical issues. Potential next steps range from applying to outdoor occupations to gaining income from a handful of different side businesses, like an Etsy store. These I try to do, and I wait. And I try, as much as I can, when I’m belittled at work or turned down, to be optimistic.
To do only those things though, would be to miss the point of this article. I’ve been mired at this point for months, trying to gather a conclusion with thousands of other young people. Right now, it seems like the conclusion is that millennials in general, except for those very few who somehow knew exactly what they were doing, are screwed. The only way out seems to be to fight as hard as we can to survive and to tax the rich and exercise our right as employees to choose the conditions we will comply with. This means refusing to work for people who won’t and don’t respect work life balance. It means refusing to work for people who treat their staff ill used. For now, you’re a slave to your job, with 20% less income with inflation adjusted than your parents made, and make a fraction of what you are worth. You will spend 80,000 hours working. And for what? You may never retire because global warming may kill us all anyway. From my point of view, our political actions may be the only thing that really make a difference in our collective well-being.
Most days I’m exhausted, trying to pick from those choices. Trying to pick what I think society says I should be. Society does not say I should be happy now. Society says I will be happy later, when I have money and a house, even if I’m not there most of the time because I’m at my thankless job as a worker bee for a corporation. What happens if I don’t make it to later? Doesn’t matter, according to society. Look at all those homeless people you see living under bridges and wheeling around shopping carts. Those people are no different from you and me; they just didn’t have the advantages you do, and they happened to guess wrong when they were making their choice. Then they didn’t have anyone to bail them out. No trust fund, like Donald Trump, who has lost millions of dollars in bad business deals. I feel like I’m finally turning the tide on my understanding, but it’s not without feeling sympathy for those our society abandoned.
All I can do is move forward with faith in myself, and faith in my fellow Americans’ capacity for empathy and humanity. I know as sure as I’m standing here that millennials have been screwed over too many times to allow this abuse to continue, and we will continue to fight for a better life. The path to ‘success’ is never a smooth one, and I can only hope that we as young Americans will carve our own paths, fearlessly.
