A lot of people have been talking about this so called "quarter-life crisis" lately and i just want to talk about one section of it that is pissing me off. Yes, we're all in transitions with our lives, jobs, relationships, responsibilities and everything else, but i really fear that it's becoming an excuse for a lot of people my age. I got caught up in for a little while and it's no good. This is life, it doesn't matter how old you are. You create your own circumstances and you teach people how to treat you, don't hide behind this excuse. I'm working on following my own advice and it's a struggle but when you start to think of it as an out, then you never escape it.
The thing that pissed me off the most about this "transition" is something that was/is out of our control for the most part. All through high school, teachers said, "You have to do A, B and C to get in to a good college. If you don't do this, you won't get into a good school." So those of us that wanted to go to school and get what they told us was a good education, listened. We did what we were told. We became "yes" men at a very young age. Join this club, do that charity work, take that AP test 20 times and we all sold our souls just a little bit each time.
Then we get to college and we do it all over again. "Join a fraternity/sorority," the said. "Take this class, study this hard, get these grades, take some business courses, keep up the charity work, do this many internships for no pay, no respect and no actual on-the-job experience because if you don't, there won't be a place in the real world that will hire you." That's what they tell us. And then we get to read the news and hear on the TV and the radio how horrible the job market is, how our generation is immature, anti-social, unprepared and generally retarded. So after 4, 5, 7 years of that, some of us are completely convinced that an undergrad education still won't do it and we spend another 2, 3, 4 years at grad school because we still don't think we're sufficient enough.
Eventually we all go out into the job market and take the very first thing offered to us for as little money as they'll offer us. And we thank them. We thank them and we're fucking grateful for the opportunity. And it doesn't stop there...we get to hear how we need to stay there for X amount of years to get enough valuable experience so that we can quit and get a slightly better job at a slightly better place where we can still be working as hard as possible to make money for somebody else. And for what? So you can wake up when you're 65 and barely have enough money to live comfortably for the last 10-15 years of your life? That doesn't seem appealing to me at all. Maybe i'm alone, but i doubt it.
And I know how it happened too, I saw it happen and I can look back and trace every advisor and every teacher, but for some reason we all sat there and let it happen. We let these "authority figures" sit there and devalue us and tell us that no matter what we did to prepare and mature and educate ourselves that we still weren't prepared enough to be trained circus apes in a cube/cage. And i'm not saying they did it on purpose, they were just doing their best, just doing what they were trained to do, but it's really all wrong. Who were they to say what quality is, who made the rule that you were supposed to tell young people that they weren't worth a shit? Is that the point? That the worse we feel about ourselves, the more work we'll do at a lower cost?
Maybe it's just because i'm a writer and we're notoriously paid like shit, but I have a feeling that i'm not the only one in this boat. Maybe the engineers don't know what the hell i'm talking about and they can go fuck themselves. That's all for now. Maybe i'll deal with the other shit later.