03
Mar 10The luckiest.
The impetus for this post (and the last one) were Ta-Nehisi Coates’ closing words in a post about feeling unqualified to give life and career advice:
[Writing] is about rolling the dice, and it’s paramount that you give yourself as many chances as possible to toss those bones. It was easy for me, I was either going to write or drive a cab–probably both. I wasn’t really capable of doing much else. So whenever I’m faced with a smart group of kids who could be doing something else, and making more money than me doing it, and they’re asking for advice it’s always weird. I feel like so much of my life is in spite of formal education.
I’d say this is true, as far as it goes, but it misses another important point, made by Dwayne Betts:
[F]rom reading this blog, and from hearing TNC talk about all the books he still reads – I think it’s pretty apparent that the actual education one puts into a job is always going to go beyond the walls of the university. … And that’s what I’ve found kids don’t always get.
This is a good time to point out that my career path owes as much to making Command and Conquer fansites as my B.A. in English. After the jump, Betts’ comment also gets at a second point I wanted to highlight from “The Recession’s Long Shadow“:
Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle1. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told [article author Don Peck].
[...]
As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.”2 She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.” … Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.
First, I’d like to reiterate: I am really lucky to have a job that is more or less tailored to my interests while appeasing the material girl in me. The fact that I more or less fell into a job3 that rewards my love of web design, statistics and the written word is still kind of amazing.
Second, I don’t think there’s anything I hate more than the “everyone’s a winner” mentality4, and I’m glad to see evidence that it’s bad for kids. Those “My child is a terrific kid at Fuckface Elementary” bumper stickers I see around Baltimore drive me insane.
- I’d also add that it seems more kids want jobs they can believe in, make the world better, and generally not evil and/or corporate. ↩
- This is backed up by Teach for America’s data about teacher outcomes. ↩
- Well, after waiting tables for six months and another year in an office that would be generously described as “hellacious.” ↩
- This is hyperbole. I hate a lot of things. ↩
March 4th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
re [1]: I’m not sure if this is just a byproduct of where we were educated, but i see the same thing. In this case i wonder if the survey results–our gen wants jobs “tailored to their interests” along with hella money–actually record two separate populations. It’s not like people start working at a nonprofit with the expectation that they’ll be paid anything more than servants’ wages. The big money’s corporate, and often evil, and everyone knows this.
The Atlantic article is all around fantastic, but i couldn’t help but cringe at the tone of that section. It’s really easy to say “i don’t understand why that generation can’t enjoy their jobs” when you’re a tenured professor of psychology, or a writer at the Atlantic. Most of us grew up in households where our parents generally hated their jobs, and most of us don’t want to wind up just as miserable as they turned out to be.
There’s this generational disconnect where older folks think that it’s psychotic that we don’t embark on the path of greatest dollars, and use up quite a bit of their complaint capital in making up excuses for why we don’t think exactly like them. That particular section seems to conclude that we could get out of the recession of only those durn kids had a better work ethic, after first telling us the myriad ways in which we’re fucked sideways by the recession. The choice of example people (that first guy–wth?) seems to reflect the article’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of recession. In the magic land of long form journalism, unemployment isn’t due to hiring freezes, but lack of applicants. The reason that yesterday’s employed graduate couldn’t find a job today isn’t because he wasn’t socialized to be sufficiently humble. Like you said, it’s luck–or lack thereof.
This isn’t what the article meant, but we’ve been trained to “disconnect performance from reward” because we’ve seen that bad things (layoffs) happen to good people for no good reason whatsoever. We’re ‘fatalistic’ because we don’t accept the lie that if we’re humble hard workers who do well in school, we’re guaranteed a magic job at the end. That’s the boomer myth and this article perpetuates it.
aaand re [2]: The first thing i was told in grad school was that my success had nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with how willing i was to bust my balls and get work done. Geo employers don’t really care about the topic of your MS thesis–the fact that you got it generally indicates that you’ll be a busy little bee in some godforsaken Texas oilfield.