"Never Stop Trying": Advice from the Last Lost Generation

My generation also faced a tough recession. I don't know how, but we managed to survive. As hard as things are now, today's millennials have to believe they will too.

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.

* * *

Dear Millennial,

Right now is a hard time to be someone coming out of school without a job.  I'm sympathetic, because I graduated from college in 1993, during the hard years of the early 1990s recession.  It wasn't fun to say the least.  In many parts of the country, there was no entry-level work; even volunteer positions were hard to come by.  My husband and I moved to D.C. in 1994, and I was fortunate to find a position as a library assistant in a law firm, mostly because I had worked in a library all through college to earn extra money.  My co-workers had degrees from Georgetown and George Washington.  My husband, who had an M.A. from Yale, worked an unpaid internship at a think tank and evenings as a clerk in a bookstore.  His manager had an M.A. from Columbia.  The woman who was the manager at Borders, down the street, had a J.D. from Texas.  To say we had no money was a massive understatement.  Most people I knew went without healthcare because even with an employer sponsored plan (assuming you could get a job) it wasn't affordable.  You simply hoped you never broke a leg, were in an accident, or that your birth control failed.  You had roommates and ate a lot of spaghetti, fried potatoes and Hamburger Helper because they were cheap and filling.  We might have had to worry about weight gain, except most of us didn't have a car and so we walked everywhere.  Even the Metro can be pricey if you must take it every day.

We spent hours every week looking through want ads and dialing into OPM's job bank.  (Oh, for the internet as we know it today!)  We smarted over reading "experienced required" -- how were we to get experience?  People gave up oh-so helpful advice -- if only we had majored in engineering, or computers, we would be set for life.  Never mind that some of us had those degrees and were as wobbly as the Jell-O salad we sometimes made for dessert.  The two people I knew who were employed with benefits were me (philosophy/English literature) and my co-worker (political science).  Mostly, we shelved books and processed magazines and congressional bills, but at least we could talk about Burke and Nietzsche while we did so!  We networked constantly, setting up informational interviews with anyone who would give us one.  We put cardboard in our shoes when they wore out, and topped off the frayed cuffs of our suits with blank ink so you couldn't see the worn spots.  We drank cheap wine and laughed a lot, especially at ourselves for thinking we were ever going to get anywhere.  The Washington Post did a series of articles on "slackers" and "the new lost generation."  But there were only two options -- keep trying or quit.  We knew what quitting looked like -- it looked a lot like failure.  We kept trying.

The early years of Friends were pretty funny, although their apartments were a lot nice than ours.  The movie Reality Bites really had a bite to it, especially those scenes at the The Gap.  (A retail job meant a discount on clothes!)  We read Generation-X by Douglas Coupland and listened with only a little eye rolling to Alanis Morissette’s misuse of the word "irony".  We were poor, ambitious, and in our 20's.  We cooked more spaghetti.

Little by little, we started to find work.  My husband's unpaid internship turned into a paying one, albeit minimum wage with no benefits.  An informational interview he'd done in 1994 became a job in 1995.  (With benefits!)  Some went back to school, and some, with their foot in the door, started moving up the D.C./corporate ladder.  I started my first novel.  We'd been told that we would make less than our parents had.  We'd been told our earnings would be forever destroyed.  Here we were -- in our late 20's with no 401Ks, renting (but perhaps without a roommate!) and massive credit card debt and student loans.

Where are we today?  We are all very well employed in careers of our design.  Maybe not the careers we thought we wanted when we were 25, but positions of respect and challenges.  We are now the ones writing the job descriptions that say "experience required" and occasionally, in a misguided moment, sign and talk about "young people today."  But we managed, and so will the millennial generation.   There are only two options -- keep trying or quit, and quitting looks a lot like failure.

Meanwhile, spaghetti still tastes pretty good, even after all these years!

Gretchen Moran Laskas is the author of two novels, The Midwife’s Tale and The Miner’s Daughter. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia. She can be contacted at her website or by email at GretchenMLaskas@aol.com.

Tweet