I want to juxtapose two articles that represent a recent trend in reporting on the economic plight of my generation.
The first is the post entitled "Playing The Blame Game: Or; How Should Graduate Schools Respond To The Bad Job Market?" by the blogger Tenured Radical(sic). In it, Tenured Radical(sic) argues that current graduate students should blame themselves for discovering that graduate school in the humanities is a great way to be exploited labor for a university & that there's no hope for a tenured track job for most of us. To be far, she also says that we should look forward to a future of non-academic work in exchange for our six years as exploited labor.
The second post is entitled "Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis" by Kate Caraway for the blog Got Milk. In it, Ms. Caraway documents the increasing ennui of 20-somethings (again, my generation) and how, in an oh-so-hilarious fashion, we are going through a quarterlife crisis b/c we don't have direction in our lives, as though none of this despair resulted from the worst economy in the history of the United States.
What I want to highlight from both of these posts is the culture of blame that seems to be building around my generation as it is represented by older generations.
This is from Tenured Radical(sic)'s blog:
In fact, I don't know a single form of professional education that guarantees its graduates a job, whether the market is good or bad, and why Ph.D. granting programs have a special moral responsibility to do this is unclear. But on the job wikis and the blogs there is an emerging consensus that the jobless should have received a waiver of liability with the letter of admission (which Brown University actually used to send its graduate students in English back in the sad old 1980s, and most of us who knew someone who received one were horrified by the practice.) Resentful job seekers , in other words, speak in the language of fraud rather than regret. This I find astonishing, given that an hour of research prior to applying, or accepting an offer of admission, could tell any prospective graduate student what their academic job prospects might look like six to seven years hence.
As a number of the non-tenured commentators have pointed out, how would we have known that? @ShawnaRoss mentioned in the comments that she had three meetings with undergraduate faculty who told her that hard work would lead to a job, even in a bad economy. I had similar conversations. Moreover, the graduate program at PSU said to our recruiting class, during recruitment, that one of the best reasons to attend here was our 100% placement rate. While that, obviously, isn't a guarantee of a job, it makes the prospect of tenure-track employment seem like a serious possibility.
But, Tenured Radical(sic) says that we shouldn't have been so naive as to actually trust any of these people & that our resentment towards the tenured is clearly misplaced resentment at our own poor decisions. What? Moreover, fuck that.
While it's becoming increasingly obvious that I made a rather poor decision in coming to graduate school, this decision was based on information from supposedly reliable authority figures, figures like Tenured Radical(sic) (I'd really like to know what Tenured Radical(sic) says to her students when they want to make the jump to graduate school; "Although I have no former undergraduates making the leap into a Ph.D. program this year, the bigger picture is quite different," she writes before abandoning any topic that might make her look culpable). That's why graduate students are so angry about this thing: people we trusted told us it would be okay if we worked hard enough & that just isn't the case at all.
But the culture of blame around our generation suggests that it was our fault for trusting people in positions of authority.
From Ms. Caraway's post:
When a contemporary 25-year-old’s parents were 25, they weren’t concerned with keeping their options open: they were purposefully buying houses, making babies and making partner. Now, who we are and what we do is up to us, unbound to existing communities, families and class structures that offer leisure and self-determination to just a few. Boomer and post-boom parents with more money and autonomy than their predecessors has resulted in benignly self-indulgent children who were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to, and an increasingly entrepreneurial, self-driven creation myth based on personal branding, social networking and untethered lifestyle spending is now responsible for our identities.
Also:
Among the implicit promises made to this generation of twentysomethings was that they would have work that was engaging and creatively fulfilling. A 27-year-old freelance graphic designer with a graduate degree who is struggling to find work, Prescott says “You could always say the whole premise of education is that if you study, get good grades, acquire skills, you will have more options in a ‘career and life’ point of view. If you get a degree, you don’t have to work in a factory or have to work in a farm. That’s proving to be a huge lie, because you have people coming out of school and there are just no jobs, especially in ‘middle-class’ fields.” The dissonance between a twentysomething’s pre-career expectations and the dissatisfaction they feel as part of the working world can be hugely defeating.
Here's the money-shot, though:
Kimmel says, of men in particular, “Part of the Quarterlife Crisis is a kind of malaise that the end of your youth is really the end of fun. And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.” So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like.
See, the reason we're not getting on with our lives is because we are lazy! Great, fantastic, wonderful! Also, go fuck yourself with a hot metal poker.
What I find in Ms. Caraway's article, as much as in the Tenured Radical(sic) post is this culture of blame I keep discussing. Essentially, the argument being implicitly made in both pieces is this: "how dumb are young people to have trusted those of us in authority?" In both cases, especially in the quarterlife crisis piece, it's documented that young people were told that if they worked hard at interesting and creative pursuits, they would have jobs in the glorious high-concept economy to come. Now that my generation has bought into this (and how could we not? as Ms. Caraway documents, every authority figure our whole lives has fed us the same line), though, it's somehow our fault that we are unhappy with working at Starbuck's instead of in the gleaming towers of the Right Brained Future Economy (I feel bad for dumping on Daniel Pink, here. A Whole New Mind is really a great book).
Posters like Historiann & Tenured Radical(sic) in the comments on the blog, say that we, as disaffected graduate students, have to own our own bad decisions and retrain. Ms. Caraway suggests that to skip the quarterlife crisis, we have to get up off the couch and work harder at retraining. Isn't hard work & listening to the old what got us into this mess in the first place?
Moreover, by way of a conclusion: how were we supposed to have made better decisions if everyone was lying to us (or, at least projecting their own desires for a better world on us)? These authors both seem to be suggesting that it's perfectly reasonable for smart, well-adjusted, middle class, white teenagers (and younger) to say "fuck you mom & dad, I want to repair air conditioners!" (or whatever). I say "fuck that." Part of the bitterness felt towards the old by my generation is a result of owning our decisions. We can look back over the processes that went into our life choices and can see that everyone in positions of authority--who suggested that a better, more fulfilling world was possible through hard work--essentially lied to us.
The thing that is most shocking about both of these pieces has to be the degree of anger the old feels towards my generation. That's what's so shocking. There have been a number of pieces that can be lumped in with the Tenured Radical(sic) piece in which tenured faculty suggest that we are so dumb for having chosen to follow them & that, essentially, we deserve miserable and unfulfilling lives for having believed them. Largely, this anger is a result of the fact that our current hopeless situation suggests that the "I got what I have through hard work and talent" narrative the tenured see themselves as taking part in is, in fact, a lie as well. As Tenured Radical(sic) points out: "what I now consider in retrospect to have been wildly good luck on a really bad job market" led to her job. That may help explain this weird anger that permeates so many of these discussions (I think this anger is also the undertone for Ms. Caraway's piece). Our situation can't be the result of bad luck unless our elders' positions (that they tell us were won through drive and talent) were also the result of good luck. In essence, hard work gets you nothing, but if you do get nothing, it's because you didn't work hard enough.
In any case, I point out this anger in order to highlight the importance of our generation sticking together & supporting one another through this period, because it is increasingly apparent that the liars who got us into this mess are not interested in helping us out of it. We have to work to project a different image of ourselves, unless we want this label of "lazy" and "ungrateful" to stick.