any old thing will do

This seemed to articulate what I’ve been feeling this past year, and why so many of my friends seem to feel the same way.

Basically: “I feel like our parents (or at least our parents’ parents) had different ideas about jobs and life goals and stuff, but in my generation I feel like instead of having a stable office job being the dream, our stable office jobs are almost embarrassing.[1] (But not as embarrassing as being the guy who’s in his late 20s and still waiting for his band to take off.) It’s either have a kind of lame boring job (because let’s face it, most of us aren’t on the executive track since our parents are still taking all the jobs at the top) or admit that you want something better and failing at it. And I say this as someone who’s had the best case scenarios of boring office jobs since I finished grad school. I’m now on my second decent-but-not-amazing-paying public sector administration job, where I actually do reasonably interesting stuff and don’t feel like I’ve sold my soul to the devil, because my job is as an office grunt that helps people do stuff that is good for society. But there’s sort of a sense of…aimlessness, stuckness. Like… you should be doing more, that real people are out having fun or something, that your experiences aren’t the real authentic experiences that other people are having.

[1. This is the caveat where I note that lots of people don’t have the good fortune to actually have stable office jobs]”

We know we can do “anything we want to do,” but that mantra parents and teachers have instilled in us puts an awful lot of pressure on us, doesn’t it? Why be an accountant when you can be… ANYTHING! Yes, we may seem like an entitled generation, but we were raised to think that we are. We’re constantly worried someone else is having a more fun, productive, or exciting life, and wondering, why is it so hard for me just to survive?!

We definitely have irrationally high expectations in life as middle-class Americans, but when people brush off your panic with an unsympathetic, “Yeah, life’s tough” kind of reassurance, it doesn’t really make us feel better about anything. It’s that aimless, stuck feeling that really gets you, and I guess there’s really no cure for it, but man, is it hard to deal with.