Death of the Flower Child

 

Fight your impulse to make out with the man

So I have a confession to make: I hang out with a lot of squares.  Perhaps it’s because of my first day back at work after a blissful six week break, but I suddenly feel the urge to comment on the strange trend I find in my day-to-day friends and acquaintances.  As the specter of unemployment haunts our city streets, it seems that the young twenty-something year old is suddenly convinced that at any moment they could be exiled from their computer console in their corporate jobs and thrust into the no-man’s-land of…well…retail, I suppose.  

  Not only does it seem like every young part-time corporate hack is living in constant fear that the dagger over their heads will drop, but they seem to be thanking their lucky stars for their status as Office Bitch.  Perhaps it is the now very real prospect of unemployment at the tail end of a five or six year university slog, but it just seems that the days of picking up your backpack and taking to the road seems less and less likely.  Even those commerce kids who are being offered the choice to take a lump payment and bugger off for nine months are too scared of the prospect of losing their grad jobs altogether to even consider taking a leap that five years ago may have been viewed as the chance of a lifetime.  

It just strikes me, in my sleep-deprived, exhausted state, that we’re all so worried about what the Financial Crisis will do to our long term job prospects, that none of us seem to be thinking laterally.  So UBS, PriceWaterhouseCooper, or Goldman Sachs can’t give you the grad job that you have been singularly focussed on throughout your degree – do something different.  Perhaps it seems naive, but surely there are opportunities out there that most people have never considered, which in the long run will make you a more interesting and desirable employee in the long run.  

Today it struck me, that there is a very real possibility that people working at my law firm could end up working there for a large proportion of their adult lives.  This will be lucrative, sure.  And some people would find it very intellectually stimulating.  But surely there is a little bongo-playing hipster in all of us who longs to be unleashed on the world: to do the great American road trip, to try to find that drug that William Burroughs sought out of the jungles of South America, to work for the NGO instead of the corporate factory.

 I just think that people my age should stop acting like they are in the mortgage belt, and start embracing the uncertainty of being a young adult.  

And thus ends the rant.  Now I’m going to bed.  I’ve got work in the morning.