"Believe in Your Worth": Advice from the Last Lost Generation
It's hard to accept the uncertainty of the Great Recession, but never stop believing in the worth of your life and work no matter how much others may insult it.
With the release of new employment numbers on Friday March 4th, we at FrumForum decided that it was time to listen to the voices of the young as they face the challenges of this economic crisis. Over the next days, in an exclusive series, we will be featuring a number of their first-person stories in this space. If their experience is yours, we welcome you to join the conversation at Editor@FrumForum.com.
Click here for David Frum’s introduction to this series.
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For the past week, FrumForum has been running a series of columns from young people starting out in this wretched economy, in response to the even more abysmal leadership that both sides of our political system have shown on their issues. If you're one of them, may I say (in the best impersonation of a big brother that an only child like myself can give) that I really do "feel your pain." I was in college during the end of the post-aerospace recession in California. And then, when the Internet 1.0 really launched, and everyone else started enjoying the "recession-proof" decade where "deficits didn't matter", I watched what had become my line of work (book publishing and film/TV criticism) go through one relentlessly violent meltdown after another (Borders' death being just the latest casualty). In one of my less compassionate moments, after the September 2008 meltdown, I thought to myself, "Well, finally the rest of the world has caught up!"
On that note, a while ago, when I was between agents, I shared a limo ride from a trade show with a lovely and good-humored older lady (think Sylvia Miles or Joan Rivers) who ran a boutique literary agency. She and one of her (younger) associates had shown an interest in my work, but I had already submitted to another one who seemed on the brink. Wanting to keep my options as wide as possible, I suggested I send my material over to her, and then, if the first agent turned me down, I could sign with her. "No dahling," she said, patting me on the side with just the right amount of semi-affection. "I don't audition. My clients are lucky to have me!" Years earlier, when I was in high school, I watched one of those PBS "telecourses" on child development and psychology. An old buffer of a psychiatrist said that one knows when one has arrived at 'adulthood' when "you're no longer challenged at every turn. When the bartender no longer says, 'Show me your ID', when people over 35 or 40 treat you like something approaching an equal."
By that definition, it seems like we're all in a state of suspended adolescence these days. Most of my colleagues I know are constantly "auditioning", constantly being "challenged" and forced to re-prove themselves at every turn, no matter how many books, agents, degrees, coursework, and reams of magazine articles they have to their credit.
Everyone's favorite password for the Great Recession seems to be the word "uncertainty", but if my own experiences and those of my friends are on target, the most worrisome uncertainty isn't just the immediate worry of whether one will be fired or foreclosed tomorrow. It's that one's fate in the Economy 9.0 seems completely and irrevocably divorced from cause-and-effect. In the past, if you went to work for a "sound as the dollar" company like GM or GE (let alone got a teaching, police, or municipal job) and did your job well, the rest would take care of itself. If you did a good job and "played by the rules", you would go far. If you didn't become a public alcoholic or drug addict, didn't have unwanted pregnancies, didn't make serious mistakes that you brought on yourself -- how could life go wrong for you? This was the good ole US of A, after all!
Today, the CEO who ordered your manufacturing plant's outsourcing, or the bankruptcy-court judge whose remedy was downsizing the Borders or Blockbuster Video store you work at, doesn't give a bloody darn whether you were Dudley Do-Right or a pot-smoking slacker who watched YouTube videos and did online shopping all day. Either way, you'll suffer the same fate. Both of you will be "punished" equally. So what's the market incentive for working hard, playing by the rules, doing the right thing?
It is the total illogic, or as we younger folk say, the irrational "random"-ness to it all, that seems to be what's animating everything from the protests in Wisconsin to Michael Moore's latest blockbusters to the Tea Party itself. Almost to a person, these people signed up for a "Big Daddy" social contract, where the big company or factory, the city hall or corner bank, the library or school district, would always "take care of them", so long as they did their Ward and June Cleaver duties and "played by the rules". Like a character in a love song, they bet, even mortgaged, their entire futures on things working out the way they always used to, the way they were taught by their Greatest Generation parents that things are "supposed to". And when the New Economy wheel came up red instead of black, they didn't know what to do.
But, Class of 2011, you can know what to do -- or at least, you can learn from their mistakes and know what not to do. I've seen and dealt with many folk my age and younger, who were graduated with degrees in creative writing and journalism, and learned all the skills they'd need to succeed -- in 1979. The curriculum and the teachers hadn't caught up, or they simply didn't want to deal with the inconvenient truths of what the new media had morphed into, compared to what they remembered so much more fondly. The aging professors and teachers didn't help them. Nor could many of their shell-shocked parents. And worst of all, it seems the politicians are unwilling (or unable) to help them.
But you can help yourselves. And in our socially-networked world, you have your most important survival weapon. You have each other. I don't mean this in a cheap, wannabe "motivational speaker" sense of phony promises and empty rainbows. I mean it in that the young authors and journalists I've seen who are (and will) succeeding in the post-bookstore, post-print society are the ones who have given up on "looking for Mr. Goodbar," on finding a "Big Daddy" to take care of them, as uncomfortable and disillusioning as that is.
Like their hero Mark Zuckerberg, they are taking the initiative to learn the brand-new rules and angles themselves, on their own, and then network and compare notes with each other. They don't wait for opportunities to present themselves; they go out and pound the pavement each day to try to make them, preparing for and taking the beatings that come along the way. They hope to improve their situations, but they don't allow themselves the false comfort of a future security blanket, where everything will work out as if on auto-pilot or cruise control. And they are a part of you.
Will it be pleasant? No way. Will getting your foot in the door be an easy task? Ha! Will it be the way our parents or grandparents had it? Not a chance. But it can be done. Believe in the worth of your life and work no matter how much others may insult or denigrate it, and above all, just keep going. Think of this as our generation's civil-rights challenge (which it is), and our hope for the future in and of itself. And if anyone can do it, kiddo, it's you.
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