Another Reason to Restructure the Economy
I quit my rent-a-poolboy job yesterday. Tomorrow will be my last day smiling as I tell rich people, “Welcome back.” Starting tomorrow I’m one of those full time social media people who pay their rent contacting bloggers and tweeting. It’s a job nobody can train you for, a job that reminds me that I’m glad I’m a millennial.
In a strange way, there’s more opportunity in today’s pathless economy. Look at Ryan O’Connell, one of my favorite writers. Fancy universities rejected him, and now Princeton pays him to talk about his career as a blogger, a career he reinvented.
My generation’s still fucked; you can’t have a hustler nation. We need more than loners. We need leaders and followers too. But we’re better off than people in their mid-thirties, people who worked their asses off for companies that laid them off and then destroyed their job, making them unemployable. People who worked their asses off but never rose to the positions that would have saved their careers, positions old baby boomers refused to give up. People that have fancy degrees for jobs that no longer exist. People that can’t switch careers, because intern is the entry level position. People that fate dealt an unfair card for no reason.
My generation’s confused, like past twenty-somethings. We have to design our own path. Corporations and the government fucked over thirty somethings. They destroyed the path after they had already walked half way down the road.
It makes me scarred that in sixteen years I’ll be fucked too, because the economy changed and I became thirty-six, the employers consider too old to restart. Our country’s concerned about millenial’s debt—as it should be—but we should also start a conversation about what’s happened to adults who already put in thousands of hours of work. We shouldn’t leave talented, hard working individuals behind.
