GOOD magazine: The woe-is-me trend continues

Image credit: XKCD "Tapping" by Randall Munroe.

In July I blogged about an unfortunate media trend: woe-is-me articles about twenty-somethings who can't find jobs that never once mention entrepreneurial inventiveness as a viable alternative to the frustration, boredom and fear of not being immediately employed after college.

Now GOOD magazine has become the latest publication to jump on the bandwagon with a new woe-is-me article by education editor Amanda Fairbanks, "Young, Educated and Unemployed: A New Generation of Kids Search for Work in their 20's."

The recession has had a crippling effect on the job market, but it has also led to a rise in entrepreneurial ventures which have far more power to transform the lives of young workers and the world at large. This never gets mentioned even glancingly in articles that follow this trend. My comments are in bold following the original text excerpts:

"Since January, for 35 hours a week, at a rate of $10 an hour, Luke Stacks has been working for a home-electronics chain. He answers the phone and attempts to coax callers into buying more stuff. This is not how he imagined he would be spending his late 20s."

"Like a lot of us," Fairbanks writes, "Stacks was given a fairly straightforward version of how his life would unfold: He would go to college and study something he found interesting, graduate, and get a decent job. For a while, things went pretty much according to plan. Stacks, who now is 27, went to the University of Virginia, not far from where he grew up, majoring in American Studies. He later enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa, with the eventual goal of becoming a professor."

The fact that Stacks' life is not unfolding according to the cookie-cutter vision planted in his head is a personal problem. And apparently the author can relate, therefore granting her permission to extrapolate that this impression was created for "a lot of us." We are therefore entitled, she infers, to achieve what we have been given the impression that we deserve.

Stacks, as an educated individual, should be learning to look around and realize that this vision does not correspond with reality rather than hoping that reality will conform to his vision. It won't. The transformation of the global economy has a crippling impact on prospects. The solution is not to wait for that to change, but to try and be the change you want to see. This can best be accomplished through entrepreneurialism and creative collaboration, both of which are never mentioned as viable solutions. In fact, no solutions are ever mentioned at all.

"Flash forward to the fall of 2008, when the stock market crashed. There were never enough jobs for newly minted Ph.D.s to begin with, and now the likelihood of landing a tenure-track teaching position in the humanities was slim. Academia stopped looking like such a sure bet and Stacks grew disenchanted with his program. Even if he were to finish his doctorate, he reasoned, a job was in no way guaranteed to follow. He wondered, “How bad could it really be out there?” Turns out, it’s pretty bad."

This is why my brother, who will earn his PhD in December, recently told me that he plans to become a licensed electrician so he can feed his family in case his academic plans end up failing to correspond with reality. I admire this attitude and I will respect him more for being an electrician with a PhD than an unemployed, bitter academic with an unshakeable sense of entitlement. The world has changed past the point of whether this is "fair" or not. We are in the collective process of creating entirely new systems, and those who lose hope because their visions don't match what the world might offer won't succeed, period. I don't think my brother will ever have to use any such certificate unless he chooses to, however, because he is already employed as a professor. I think his work ethic is the reason why. He didn't expect academia to roll out the red carpet. He has maximized every opportunity that has come his way, amplifying the extrinsic effects of situations that aren't necessarily intrinsically glamorous but can open doors to expand his experience.

"So, in May of 2009, equipped with a master’s degree and a decent amount of courage, Stacks changed course. Shortly after graduation, he moved back in with his mother, who lives in Chantilly, Virginia. And from a desk in his bedroom, still littered with childhood toys and posters, Stacks started over.

"What confronted him was not exactly pleasant. What once thrilled him—curating museum exhibits, making comic books, being a curious person—now seemed to make little financial sense. “I’m not confident that schooling has a direct connection with employment anymore,” he says. “But if I hadn’t received the kind of education I did, I would be less of an active citizen and less engaged in the world in ways I would not have discovered on my own.” And while passion and intellectual curiosity can’t be measured in dollars and cents, he expected they might at least secure a paycheck."

What does Stacks do that engages him in the world from his mother's basement? Maybe he's highly engaged, but the article paints him out as a victim barely past boyhood, still sitting among his childhood toys, and never mentions exactly what form this engagement takes from his mother's basement.

As time passed, Stacks’s confidence flagged. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to write another cover letter about your great accomplishments if you question every day the greatness of your accomplishments,” he says.

Again, the article fails to address whether any of Stacks' accomplishments are truly great. There's a certain amount of hubris required to perceive oneself as great, even if one truly is great, which can be off-putting to potential employers.

"Still, for Stacks and many others of his generation, the old “go to school, get a job” mantra sounds hollow."

It is hollow. But what are they going to do about it?

"Fifty years ago, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had attained traditional markers of maturity by their thirtieth birthday: They had left home, finished school, gotten a job, married, and started a family. By 2005, those numbers had almost halved. Now, a new crop of 20-somethings is experiencing what it’s like to be young and ambitious and unable to find work, or work that in any way aligns with what they’re passionate about. As a recent New York Times Magazine story made clear, early adulthood has become one long pause, affecting not only short-term, conventional milestones of coming of age, but longer-term stuff, too—things like the hopes and dreams and basic constitution of a person."

It was already evident that the recent NYT article influenced the tone of this one, but they're both off for the same reasons. Entitlement and ambition are not the same thing, and this problem is not a new one for passionate people. Sure, a tiny sliver of the population is fortunate enough to find work that matches exactly with their passions, and what a wonderful blessing that is for them. But most people settle for work they can't stand because it pays the bills, and it is this category of work that has been most severely impacted by the economic transformation.

The remedy in many cases to create a company (or align with an existing effort by adding value) that serves a need you perceive that aligns with your passions. If there's no need for what you're offering, it likely won't work. Even a job that seems like it will be perfect can often end up getting mired in glacial bureaucracy and what my mother sagely calls "insect authority." Young people can't understand this because they have no work experience. Maturity, further, cannot simply be measured by the blind adherence to expectation in the form of milestones, especially if we're talking about a person who is waiting amidst his childhood toys for the offer of his dreams.

"Few people right out of college expect that their first job will be the ideal one. Neither did Stacks. But he also didn’t expect that he would be the only person in his entire company to crack open a book during their 30-minute lunch break."

This last sentence reveals a first-world, elitist bias that is more subtly woven throughout the article elsewhere. Are Stacks' co-workers required to prove themselves during thirty minute lunch breaks in order to demonstrate that he's in good company?

"For Stacks in particular, the most severe toll hasn’t been a loss of income, but feelings of estrangement and isolation. It’s fair to say that Stacks doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with his coworkers. Many are still in high school. Most of the older ones haven’t gone to college. In general, Stacks veers away from conversations about his education or the number of degrees he has acquired, worried that they’ll think less of him because of it—or worse, think that he thinks he’s better than they are."

Many recent grads have felt isolated since the concept of college was invented, mainly because their social bubbles get pricked by a new reality as they enter a world that isn't conveniently set up for them to learn in controlled environments and socialize with same-age peers. I understand the feeling he describes, but the remedy for it is to embrace the fullness of the human condition and allow it to erode the illusions that have created the sense of entitlement to begin with.

So if college doesn’t guarantee a path toward upward mobility, is it even necessary?

Increasingly, it seems that the answer is no. Education is necessary, but more people are realizing more ways they can achieve this. I've tried an experiment since becoming an entrepreneur. I don't discuss my education, how many degrees I do or don't have. One of my parents has an Ivy League education with advanced degrees and the other never took a college class. I've watched with interest as these decisions affect--or don't--the paths of their respective lives. Very often, it's not about what you learned but rather the feeling the listener is supposed to get, the impressions of you as a person with a certain future, because of where you studied, even if not much studying took place. On the other hand, education is critical, for those who undertake it earnestly.

Beyond that, some people are so smart that it doesn't matter how they learned what they learned. Take William Kamkwamba, for example. My level of education is not a badge that entitles me to a career. Experience builds on itself. I consider this a great adventure and the reason why I'm taking the time to respond to this article point by point is to illustrate why this lame trend in covering the work and education crisis must stop. Not a single client in four years--including Fortune 100 companies, think tanks, and top universities--has ever asked about my education.

Some recent graduates aren’t yet ready to settle for a version of life that is less than what they had imagined. When looking for work, the line that Kristen Vockel draws is this: Could she have done it before graduating from college, like the jobs she worked during summers while she was in school—at a call center, a movie theater, a dollar store?

“It was nice to have a break at first, but at this point I’m bored,” says Vockel, who goes to bed late and wakes up even later. “The glamour of being able to do whatever you want wears off pretty quickly.”

Again I will call on my mother's wisdom for this one: "Only boring people get bored." If Vockel is bored in such an amazing and dynamic world, why should anyone hire her? If she can't even keep herself occupied, why is it an employer's obligation to keep her busy? It's a very competitive climate into which young people are graduating, and anyone who admits boredom isn't employable. This is a major problem.

"If it weren’t for the 15 hours a week of work she currently has, "she imagines she would resort to making jewelry and selling it on Etsy."

Why not make jewelry and sell it on Etsy? She might meet someone interesting who can point her in the direction of more satisfying, lucrative, long term employment. This article, and the others that came before it that influenced it, seem to believe in a direct cause and effect relationship between college and career, as if individuals play no role in creating the lives they imagine through taking chances and choosing unexpected routes to the eventual goal of sustainable employment. This is partly because young people feel that their parents have expectations, but letting go of how others perceive you is a necessity if the world in which you exist is completely different in so many ways from the one once inhabited by parents before they hit their "maturity markers" in a timely fashion.

"Most days, Stacks leaves work and comes home to the upper-class neighborhood where he lives, feeling beaten down. While not all parts of his underemployment have been bad—Stacks has had time to read contemporary novels again, wade his way through the entire Criterion Collection of films, and has grown closer to his mother since moving back home—it isn’t easy for him to shake the sense that life as he’s living it won’t last forever. With his personal life on hold, not wanting to start a new relationship while living in his mother’s house, he tweaks his resume, writes cover letters with astonishing speed, and waits."

Stacks is still living in an upper class neighborhood and reading novels. I understand that frustration is relative and not just reserved for people who can't feed their families because their entire city has collapsed and they literally have no hope for the future. Stacks has what he needs to get himself back on track. Billions of people don't.

It is the end of the article, however, that makes it read like a piece from the Onion and proves why this trend toward bandwagon reporting isn't helping to undermine the root cause of the problem at all.

Despite all of the stories that Stacks reads that say he is hardly alone in his battle for meaningful employment, nearly all of his friends have jobs. Some are really successful. “It makes talking about it and hanging out with them, marveling at the size of their televisions and spacious kitchens, really difficult,” he says.

Last fall, a friend invited Stacks to a Halloween party where there would be a lot of people he didn’t know. After wavering on what sort of costume he should wear, he ended up not going. “I honestly had no idea to how to explain to people who I was and what I did,” says Stacks. “And maybe I still don’t.”

If his costume had been clever enough, maybe no one would have asked.