Last Friday, I finally grasped that nothing I do will cure the undercurrent of stress and anxiety caused by my impending graduation and the future. Browsing through a New York Times blog called The Graduates during a break from the online job postings, I hoped to find a grain of truthful guidance through this agonizing transition. But I only found proof of the ubiquitous, undying nature of this malaise.
The Graduates is a forum where “eight college seniors face the future.” A new rumination is posted each weekday from one of the contributors, who come from universities of varying prestige and geographic location, state and private. Some posts portray their choices as binary: careerism or idealism, soul-selling wealth or impoverished “happiness,” a rock or a hard place. Some express hope, others pessimism.
A writer for the GW Hatchet worried about the increasingly competitive job market, noting that educated foreign professionals are immigrating to take open jobs in the U.S. That added to my stress. A girl at Cornell wrote about finding time for solace during the crunch—sitting on “mismatched couches,” watching “Grey’s Anatomy” and putting “the future off for another hour.” The post made me think of the girls next door, who have the same ritual, but also made me wonder why I was wasting my own time reading her article.
One poster, however, seemed oblivious of his jejune appearance. A 29-year-old senior at San Diego State, he described his transformation from an introverted weirdo into an idiosyncratic aspiring writer, a kind description, by analogizing it to Edward Norton’s 1996 role as a serial killer in Primal Fear. That character first appears to have split personalities, a kind old one and an evil new one, which are in conflict. The “old Aaron” eventually disappears, to put it simply, when the new one is exonerated. Not the sort of thing one would put on a job application.
Whatever the message of each post, readers chime in from around the country. Many of them are older, and attempt to impart wisdom and optimism by summarizing their lives in two paragraphs. Some even try to say what this generation’s “plastics” will be. The Peace Corps seems to be a popular response—lucky for me, since I just turned in my application. But no one word will do.
The post that elicited the most comments came from the opinion editor at the University of Oregon’s “independent” daily, who declared that he intended to become successful “without worrying” about his “future.” He cited The Big Lebowski, A Confederacy of Dunces, and an obscure science fiction writer. No one really needed to remind him he was being asinine. Nevertheless, dozens wrote him basically saying, “find something you love and try to make a living off of it.” But that’s shabby advice for a 21-year-old unsure of the track they want to take. I majored in Regional Studies, a program that certainly gave me invaluable new perspectives on the world, though I know that it did not groom me for a job.
“It is very sad to see the fear and trembling with which young people now face the future, so different from our generation of the ‘60s when we could pick out jobs like fruit off trees,” one reader replied. Thanks. Another expressed surprise that one writer, a Cornell student, did not major in the physical and biosciences: “believe me, you would have a job by now,” he wrote.
Most, however, took a comforting tack: “Don’t let the career-driven folk pressure you. Your early 20’s [sic] are a time to explore, not to settle … it didn’t really matter what I did before I was 30 … Explore the world and enjoy your youth.” Balance, so many of them write, is the key. Still, even those who attempt to blur the distinctions end up reinforcing a bipolar view of the future. All somehow fall into one of two categories: “don’t worry” or “buckle down now.”
The Graduates makes clear that this angst is anything but unique—to us or to our generation. Of course, there is no one solution for this or for any of life’s timeless dilemmas, unless you count miracles and contradictory maxims. Every generation has had its share of philistines, stargazers and revisionists advocating the route they took, long after the fact. No one has your answer; everyone negotiates this quandary to distinctive ends. However trite this truism is, it doesn’t lessen the stress. But it does make it seem unnecessary.
