Senior year, and everyone has so many options! Nobody knows where they’re going to be! Except everybody seems to, and a lot of people aren’t happy about it.
I know there’s a lot of pressure to find something, anything, and pin it down. I also know that 1) your parent(s) and 2) your upbringing all say, “Do something upper-class, something white-collar…something worth all that education.” It certainly is a lot of education. And some of you do have pressure to earn for other reasons that won’t go away, like supporting your families and paying back loans, and that really sucks. I mean, damn. Some of us, though, feel compelled to “our kind” of jobs not by financial obligation, but by some sort of lifestyle imperative. Please, question this.
Our parents wanted us to have choices. Choices. And, hurray, we do. We have the choice to work on Wall Street as a banker (although I guess less so now than a few months ago), or as a janitor. And why not? Probably we’ve all thought about volunteering with the Peace Corps or something, but in sort of a hypothetical way, or with a, “Maybe if I were someone else.”
We hear everywhere, “Having a great high-paying job doesn’t make you happy,” but come on, it couldn’t hurt, right? If your only option is to stay at the top, that isn’t really a choice. If you get a great education and decide to get a crappy job, that education wasn’t wasted. You chose that crappy job, dammit, of your own free will. That’s worth something.
Listen, I’m writing this because I’ve had friends tell me they envy my position. What position? I’m going off to volunteer somewhere (not sure where yet) or get one of those just-out-of-college, extremely low-paying jobs. Last summer I visited an honest-to-goodness hippie commune (seriously!) while fielding e-mails from my mom with Craigslist postings for office jobs, “It’s not too late to apply here, honey, and you’d only have to take one train to this one.”
Okay, so I’m an ungrateful brat. My point is: none of these options are unique to my situation (within the parameters specified above). You, too, can be an ungrateful brat. You too can work below your station, or even decide that your job is not that important to your happiness. Volunteer, even-maybe by the time you’re finished doing it, the job market will be better. And what better time to do so? Just out of college, not tied down, no kids, no house. And hey, volunteering is kind of a fun way to be an ungrateful brat and still be living your ideals and all that.
Why not?
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