After weeks of heightened anticipation, I've decided to give an explanation for the rather unorthodox name for my blog. It's easy to say that a certain group of people are unemployable -- but an entire generation? It's true, my generation has to survive this plague of joblessness -- or being stagnant.
This is the age of Facebook, Twitter and speaking your mind -- at a volume and font that gets noticed. We want to stand up and be counted, separate from our parents. For our entire lives, we've been defined by what our parents did or who they are -- and our biggest fear is falling into those same footsteps.
Ways we get away from our parents -- 4 years of abuse to our livers (and brains) in college, we major in art and political science (instead of business and medicine), and we travel the world. We see a limitation and laugh, because our potential has no bounds.
However, that's as far as we get. Potential. With the economy in it's current state, we're lucky to get a job at Starbucks, let alone one that will let us change the world. Speaking from experience, surviving the job hunt is more daunting than the job we seek. We go on hundreds of interviews just to get chewed up and spat back out. We don't get the job (or promotion) because they're "looking for someone with a little bit more experience."
What do we do next? Go back to school. Law school, graduate school -- financial aid is our best friend. Who knew you'd get more if your parents weren't the ones filing? While this seems logical, it has the potential to ruin us. We're doubling up on our student loan debt (which has recently surpassed credit card debt as the nation's largest pool of debt), which if we don't get a VERY high paying job when we finish that second (or third) degree, we don't get the luxury of being able to declare bankruptcy.
So now what? You're 25, almost $100k in student loan debt, and are praying that the restaurant down the street from your parent's house calls you back to bar-tend, because that car loan isn't going to pay itself.
You survive. That's what we're built for. We take daily beatings with rejection email after rejection email, so badly that you've become numb to the idea that you'll be living in the same bedroom you had when you were 8 for quite a while.
The baby boomer generation may be hogging the ENTIRE job market, but we have something they don't -- future. We are going to overcome obstacles they could never even dream of. We're going to become so resilient that we're going to breeze over hurdles. The drawback? It's going to take us a little longer to get there.
We were taught long ago that there's no such thing as a free lunch, a lesson our parents probably don't understand. Thankfully, when they retire, we'll be able to teach them. We'll tell them the stories of our struggle, but it won't be those stories that they'll awe at -- it'll be the success we achieve.
The world is ours, unemployable generation. This pause is just allowing us to collect our thoughts in preparation for our slingshot to success.
Bobby Kennedy once said, "without great risk there can be no great reward." So risk takers, what's next?
Two comments:
ReplyDeleteBaby boomers, by definition, are those born from 1946-1964. Whatever portion of the job market we're "hogging," it's not 100 percent. And many of those 1965 and after people are in fact the parents of your generation.
If all of us who are boomers retired tomorrow, who's supporting us? Any of us born in/after 1951 are not yet eligible for any type of Social Security. Any of us born in/after 1953 can't tap retirement savings. Any of us born in/after 1947 can't get Medicare -- so where do we find affordable health insurance? (Yeah, I know. The Republicans tell me it's out there. I have yet to see any proof of that. And I, like many boomers, can't go without health insurance.)
I know boomers who would dearly love to retire -- but they can't solve those two problems. We'll leave for another time the saga of boomers like your humble commenter, who happens to love her job and intends to "hog" it awhile longer.