My Edit

At some point, we had it figured out, right?

You go to school, get good grades, go to college. You graduate college, you find a job, you save your money. Find a good person, get married, buy a house. Live in said house, have a couple kids, grow old. Retire, reminiscence, rest. 

That’s what we’re taught, isn’t it? What we ought to do. Fifteen steps to a perfectly fulfilled life— what could be easier? 

What happens when you miss one of those steps? Say you get into college, but you don’t graduate. You have to drop out for whatever reason. Your family didn’t have anything to contribute to your finances or your emotional well-being and you slipped through the cracks of a system that’s not designed to care about you. Well, maybe you can find a job but it’s not a great one. Not the one you thought you’d have. “But, hey, that’s your own fault for not finishing school,” so says some disembodied generational voice. And maybe that voice is right. Maybe you think about going back to school all the time and you share that feeling with a friend that has graduated only for them to tell you that college is a waste of time and money.

You see, that friend was able to stick through the hardships and graduated. But as it turns out, the job market is extremely competitive and even the entry-level positions need years upon years of experience. “Degree be damned! Everyone’s got one of those! Where’s your experience, kid?” That same voice again, only they’ve changed their tune this time.

So you and your friend sit cooped up in your shared apartment (neither one of you makes enough to afford your own place) wondering where it all went wrong and, more importantly, where to go from here. You dream of something better and hope it’s hidden behind the barrier of higher education— a barrier that seems to grow more insurmountable as the years pass. Your friend wishes they had pulled a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. Geniuses and entrepreneurs can make it without college. They don’t need work, they create work! Neither of you are really doing anything, though. 

What is there to do really? If both directions lead nowhere, what’s the point of moving at all? 

Life isn’t so bad, really. Sure, you’re not achieving everything your parents had by your age. You’ve got no real assets, but you’ve got your bills paid. You’ve got lights on and food on the table, that’s more than some. You hate your job, but so does everyone else. You sit and scroll on social media and see people living these fantastical lives, but they’re just the lucky ones aren’t they? They’ve got generational wealth or a specific look and time on their hands to curate a perfectly extraordinary glimpse into a world you can only dream of. It’s not real, you tell yourself. You’re real. What you’re feeling, what you’re experiencing is real. You’re not alone, or left out. You’re experiencing what a fine majority of your generation is. Your regrets, your mistakes, your burnout isn’t unique to you. You try to find comfort in that. You try to convince yourself you haven’t failed yet.

“Your generation won’t succeed because you don’t want to do the hard work.”

You’d give anything to ask that voice what the hell the hard work is. What is the secret? How do you turn things around, how do you pick yourself up by the bootstraps and succeed? That voice raised you, brought you here so tell us: What the hell do you do now to fix all the shit that life keeps heaping onto you? 

But that voice is near-silent when you ask for help. The advice they do give, if any, is inapplicable and unsympathetic.

There’s only you and your friend and the millions of other twenty-somethings feeling like they got left behind. They don’t know if they should blame themselves or society or something else. Blame the education system, blame capitalism, blame boomers, blame billionaires, blame yourself. Sit silently and continue blaming everyone and everything and go nowhere because you feel that there’s nowhere to go.

In the end, that’s all you’ve got figured out, right?