We’re two weeks past Thanksgiving, but I am still puzzling over the dinner conversation. As four 20-something guests talked about hopes and worries, I began to wonder if the pressures they feel reflect a generational terror.
The cast of characters, besides me, was my adorable 23 y/o crypto-nephew and three young women, none of whom I’d met before. You know how it is: crypto-nephew wants to invite his favorite roommate. A couple of days later she asks if we can include one of her friends and then a few days after that, how about another friend at loose ends? Boom! You’ve agreed to feed one person you know and three you don’t.
Despite my apprehensions (who are they? will they throw up on my couch?) they were great. A wonderful time, as the saying goes, had by all—especially by me. Their conversation about ambitions, expectations and fears was as fascinating as it was startling.
They are preparing for, striving towards, in search of nothing less than the perfect job.
Two of the young women, 28 and 29, are graduate students in Social-Industrial Psychology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
The third young woman, 32, holds a PhD in Bio-Mechanical Engineering and works for a pharmaceutical company.
My aforementioned adorable crypto-nephew, also brainy, well-educated and armed with both a degree and the right FIT post-graduate credential, has the entry-level job of his dreams. He landed a spot in the buying office of a high-end national retailer and is blessed with that rare thing, an excellent boss.
Each of the four has been spared the well-publicized 20-something discovery that a degree leads only to the vast nothingness of unemployment and uncertainty. Educational debt, though: that they share with the rest of their generation. Each struck me as ambitious, qualified, smart, interesting, self-aware, attractive, spontaneous, sweet and lucky. By their own reckoning, they are, as the label on their generation has it, entitled. Each worries about finding an equal partner, but I didn’t hear anything about ticking biological clocks.
Debt and love are issues. But they wrestle with a much more urgent, much more disturbing and scary problem: feelings of deep disappointment and self-reproach. They are full of regret about wrong roads, wrong decisions; full of anxiety about what lies ahead. Standard stuff for people in their twenties? Sure. But matters of degree matter. They excoriate jobs (the graduate students have fairly deep work experience) that sound pretty good to me. The jobs I had in my 20s left a lot to be desired too, but I saw them as stepping-stones. On the other hand, when someone told me to stop complaining about a less-than-meets-the-eye job thousands would have killed for, I didn’t stop hating it. So, fair enough. Each of us has our inclinations.
The assembled company sounded reasonably confident that eventually, they will enjoy sufficient money, status, and challenge. This does nothing to assuage their real fear, though, and their real fear is a narcissistic monster. They fear they will fail to realize that indefinable thing, their full potential. A term came into the conversation that has apparently escaped its rightful spot in the Department of Psychology dustbin: self-actualization. My four Thanksgiving guests deeply believe that they must find a career that perfectly uses their capacities, comports with their educations, suits their preferences and furthermore, fits their personalities like a custom-made glove.
Crypto-nephew concedes that he is doing pretty well, but he is angsty and impatient nonetheless. His employer is not the RIGHT high-end retailer. The PhD engineer, who spent a year in Germany on a Fulbright, considers her job a depressing burden. She wants to do pure, disinterested research and does not want to teach. There was no need for me to say honey, there are only so many jobs at (for instance) Dresden’s Max Planck Institute. She knows, she knows, and she knows her job is, by many measures, a good one. But to work in the pharmaceutical industry, she is certain, is to forever fall short of self-actualization.
Parenthetically, she reminds me of two men I know, a bit older, who hold social science PhDs from prestigious institutions. Each is looking for a research-oriented job in academia, and neither wants to teach. I love them both and hope they get what they want, but I wonder, where are their graduate advisors? No one likes to say a discouraging word, but is no one moved to offer a reality check? Or maybe I am not defining the problem correctly. Reality avoidance? Is that what’s going on?
It is perhaps relevant that the Teacher’s College program in which two of the Thanksgiving girls are students says it is training people to “…improve organizational performance by placing the right people in the right jobs…” No misfits and no unhappy employees. A perfect job for everyone. Were the two young women attracted to the program because the sell fits their vision, or has the program ratcheted up their expectations?
It was a stroke of luck that I knew, from an early age, what I wanted to do. Goals have a wonderfully clarifying effect. Goals, however, are not insulation against frustration, set-backs, side tracks and Pyrrhic victories. A job in the general vicinity of your goal may be not just a good, but a great, choice. Things lead to things, things take time, dues must be paid and there is no such thing as a job without a bullshit quotient. A not-terrible ratio of bullshit to satisfaction sounds like a pretty good deal to me but not, apparently, to them.
The Thanksgiving conversation left me feeling that these four, at least, put an insane amount of pressure on themselves. Complete professional fulfillment? The perfect job, and NOW! Is it just those few? Or is it lots of people their age? And if so, where on earth comes this idea of a perfect job? Or am I missing something? Do I just not recognize idealistic youth when I see it?
Image via bedoe.
