Graduates: postpone reality for as long as possible

This originally appeared in the 2009 edition of The Idler.

If you believe everything that has been written about me in the last few months, I should be easy to spot. The horrific scars of recession cover my body. I stumble from job centre to pub, weeping over my catastrophic debts and futile attempts to secure that coveted shelf-stacking job. I am a “victim”, a “casualty” and will be “a constant in the dole queue”.

Less hysterically, I am simply graduating from University in June. Born in 1988, I am a child of the insatiable greed of the 30 year capitalist party that Thatcher started, but now that I’m old enough to join in, the lights have been switched off and everyone has gone home. It’s all the worse because I did everything right, getting proper qualifications and doing internships. I have even been subjected to ghastly “transferable skills” seminars in order to shape my CV into the perfect package of employability. So do I feel downcast and wretched, cursing society for its faceless betrayal of what I was assured would be a bright future? Not especially. It doesn’t surprise me that my friends and peers in the class of 2009 got chewed up and spat out by our economy, but now that the inevitable has happened, I want to explain what the world of the imminent graduate looks like, and to explore what will it mean to have so many overqualified and unemployed young people hanging around.

Dazed and Confused – Third Year Blues

“If we are all gonna die anyway shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.” The words of Cynthia in the seminal 90s film about the 70s, Dazed and Confused.

It seems very much like everyone is talking about either Law School, not being able to afford Law School, or how they were going to be an investment banker but now, actually, they’re thinking about Law School. It’s barely November and people are forgetting about their degrees, friends, and actual functioning lives in order to work themselves into a frenzy of money worries and status anxiety.

Amidst all this general narcissistic soul searching, why can’t we just stop for one moment and reflect on the fact that we are mostly 20 and 21 years old and that we will never have it this good ever again? We have health and free(ish) government money, and we’ve settled into our student lives very comfortably. We can get up late, miss lectures, eat some scrambled eggs, fall asleep with said eggs on our faces, and no one will mind. In fact, they will more than likely congratulate us on a productive day.

All this talk about jobs detracts from the fact that if we don’t get that coveted placement or onto that trainee scheme, nothing happens. We ride out that overdraft, pick ourselves up and apply somewhere else. We take a TEFL course, temp for a while, and see a foreign country. We go back home and spend some quality time with our grandparents. We do an MA in Cultural Studies. Any of these options ensure a year of time to expand our minds (maybe not with that MA) and get a sense of perspective.

Why rush into a job that you’ll spend your entire working life hating? Hang back and get another take on the world for a year, or even for longer. Mindlessly pushing forward into the future all the time means that one day we’ll have to stop, turn around, look back and say: Well THAT wasn’t worth it. Why didn’t I bum around in a loft in Brooklyn, or teach English to kids in Cairo, or make scrambled eggs for my grandparents?

Then we’ll really be dazed and confused.