"How good were the good old days?
Well, I've upgraded both Movable Type and my web browser (now proudly using Firefox 1.5) and for the first time in, like, a zillion years, I can see the nifty little buttons that let you hyperlink and make things bold and so forth. So now that I don't have to make all the damned HTML tags I want to celebrate by blogging my little heart out.
Luckily for me, there's a lot of fodder out there. Starting with this post by Laura of Apartment 11D:
Due to a gross miscalculation about the time it takes to write a dissertation, my son was born before either of us had finished. So, we lived in a seedy fourth floor walkup in Washington Heights with waterbugs the size of your fist flying into the baby’s bassinet. We were on welfare. My parents slipped us money at family gatherings and dropped off bags of groceries. Suspicious paint flaked up at the window sill.
One day, I walked into the court yard of my building and braced myself for the long haul with kid and stroller up the stairs. As I paused, I realized that the drug dealers had taken their pit bulls off their leash, and the dogs with studded collars were bounding for my kid. “Get your dogs off my kid!†I yelled at the guys in their black puffy coats, hoping that they would leave me alone, because their grandmothers loved me.
We were not only “elaborately educated†but positively festooned with degrees and here we were, living in poverty. After one year, degrees were finished, resumes submitted, but the jobs were too rare. We could either live in separate cities and far from family support or we would have to start over.
We started over. Husband ran out and got the first temp job he could find, an assistant job at an investment bank. We had tried fulfilling work, but it didn’t work out. His new job was demanding and inflexible and not interesting. At first it only paid enough to get by. If I worked, we would go into further debt. So, we assumed a traditional family structure, an imperfect situation for both of us, but the most important thing was to keep the pitbulls off our kids.
The temp job turned into an important job, Finally, after five years, we were able to take the two kids away from the pitbulls and waterbugs and drug dealers, and bring them to a place with a tiny backyard and a good school system.
We’re doing okay now. We still have to work our way through the student loans. And with all those years in grad school, we have no retirement money. We had to buy at the top of the market for the house, so we’ll always have to be very careful. I still buy the kids shoes at Payless and my meat on sale. But we’re okay.
That experience changed me. Made me a utilitarian. The number one purpose of work is to keep the pitbulls off your kids. Everything else is gravy. A fulfilling job. Gravy. A nice social life. Gravy. A job that benefits humanity. Gravy. A job that helps to overthrow the patriarchy. Gravy.
I think that these utilitarian notions of work are more common with my generation than with older generations. We don’t believe that we’ll have social security to rely upon. There are fewer jobs in key fields. Academic jobs were a dime a dozen back in the seventies. We’re saddled with student loans and the knowledge that our kids’ college tuition may exceed a year’s salary. Housing costs are insane. Mobility is much more difficult. There is little room for either gender to experiment with career changes or alternative plans. Whatever is working, you stick with, be it two incomes or one, fulfilling or drab.
On the one hand, I thoroughly agree with the sentiment of hte penultimate paragraph. My generation of nice upper middle class white kids was given a ferocious sense of entitlement by our parents and teachers. As long as we played by the rules we were taught in school--do your work on time, study hard, put work first--we were supposed to have wonderful jobs, terrific spouses, adorable children, a house whose tasteful bibelots and appropriately offbeat furniture all our friends could admire.
If you're a long time reader of this blog, you know what happened to me. I got into a top business school at the height of the internet bubble, went about $100K into hock for tuition, books, and living expenses, and by October of my second year had already secured a high paying job as a management consultant, complete with hefty signing bonus, relocation expenses, and a new new economy "live anywhere you want" policy. I spent most of my second year blissfully studying things that would have no relevance to my future job, travelling, and co-producing the annual GSB follies.
Then the recession and 9/11 happened, and they fired my entire associate class before we could start. But not before they strung us along with ever-later start dates, so that by the time we started looking for another job, we were competing with next year's class of business school graduates. Every time I went into an interview, I could see the interviewer thinking "What's wrong with her? Why doesn't she have a job yet?" Of course, they knew that I'd lost my job through no fault of my own; I simply bet on the wrong horse in the management consulting stakes. But still, why take a chance?
I had never before experienced the feeling of being unable to get a job. A permanent job, I mean; by this time I'd been working at the World Trade Centre Disaster Recovery Site for quite some time. But that didn't really have any future. I needed work I could build a career out of, work suited to my educational background, skills, and ambitions. Unfortunately, such work was pretty damn thin on the ground. My classmates in similar situations started going back to their old fields. My old field was installing computer networks, a field that had attracted a flood of new workers in the capital spending boom that preceded Y2K, and had subsequently busted along with the technology bubble. One technology recruiter I called actually suggested that I find some banker to marry and have babies, since he couldn't find himself a job, much less anyone else.
You have never seen anyone as indignant as I was to discover that the universe was not going to automatically provide me with everything I thought I had earned. And after the righteous anger had waned, I experienced something perilously close to despair. I felt as if someone had told me that the law of gravity had been repealed: if going to a good business school and doing everything you were supposed to was not enough to guarantee you security, what was? If that universal constant could not be depended on, I began to feel that perhaps nothing I had believed in could be relied upon.
That sounds grandiose and adolescent, and of course, it is. But unless you have been out of work for an extended period of time, it's hard to understand exactly how desperate it can make you. In American society, what you do is what you are; everyone asks how you make your money, and if you are not working, you become an object of pity, even as everyone reassures themselves that there must be something wrong with you, so that they do not have to confront the frightening thought that this could just as easily have happened to them.
That was one way to discover that the promises the meritocracy held out to its elite students cannot always be fulfilled. Lots of people end in the same place, though they get there down different roads: there are too few jobs in your chosen field; or a sudden layoff forces you to take the first job you're offered; a child's disability requires Mom or Dad to stay at home changing diapers instead of overseeing mergers; spouses jobs pull in different directions, forcing one to sacrifice their career aspirations; or it turns out that your job just isn't as great as it looked when you signed onto that career track at age 25. The result is that many in my generation . . . or really, the handful of my generation that went from elite school to elite school, academic honor to prestigious job . . . feel somehow that we were cheated, that we'll never have it as good as our parents.
But I think that this is vastly overblown. And worse, I think a lot of liberals tend to generalise their experience to that of their entire generation. Now, there's nothing that sets my teeth on edge than someone claiming that conservatives possess some fountain of widsom undreamt of by liberals, but I haven't seen conservatives making this particular sort of argument; when conservatives look to the past as a lost eden, they romanticize its social structure, where men were real men, women were real women, and children got a kiss and a cookie from a loving mother every day at 3:00 on the dot. Liberals look longingly back at the security and flat income distribution of the 1950's and 1960's.
But when I look at what my family was actually doing, it looks like neither paradise. My great aunts worked all through the fifties and sixties, on the farm or teaching school. My grandfather had his own business, a gas station. He was certainly successful, but he spent most of his day pumping gas. My mother stayed home with us until economic insecurity and the sheer boredom of keeping house in a small apartment turned her out onto the job market, where she sold real estate, as she continues to do. My father stopped working for the City and took a job with a trade association. When I look back I don't see a halcyon era of secure, well paying and fulfilling work; I see people doing what they had to to pay the bills. Indeed, when I began freaking out about my drastically reduced income expectations, my mother pointed out that when my parents moved into the apartment I grew up in, she was 9 months pregnant, had just quit her job, and they had a (to them) giant mortgage, and less than $500 in the bank.
And that's for nice middle class kids with good educations. The lives of the working and lower-middle class were even less fulfilling. Yes, many of them had secure union jobs that were relatively well paying, and I don't want to minimize the value of that; economic insecurity is terrifying. But most of those jobs were like well padded prisons. Forget the visions we all have of those mid-century factories, culled from World War II propaganda films showing happy workers driving rivets, with the vision of a brighter, freer world always in front of them, even as they stop to wipe the honest sweat from their rough-hewn brow. Working on an assembly line is like working inside a clock . . . your entire energy is focused on willing that minute hand to move. Almost any of my readers who worked on an assembly line would find themselves going insane after fifteen minutes of the mind-numbing repetition. And then you have 7 hours, forty-five minutes to go. By the end of your shift, the minute hand moves too slowly for you to concentrate on; you watch the second hand, which advances so sluggishly that you begin to suspect you are trapped in some sort of Einsteinian relativistic vortex where time is moving at a different rate for the rest of the world than it is to you; your life is rapidly trickling away even though the clock is stuck at ten minutes to five.
That's one day. Then you have four more days. And Sunday afternoon spoiled by the knowlege that you have to go back. Endure that torturous progression fifty times, and you've made it one year. Just thirty more to go before you qualify for that gold plated pension. And though it's tempting to believe that the only reason people like me find such work so intolerable is that we're just too gosh-darned bright, it ain't so. Slow and average people find assembly-line work just as stultifying as I do. The only people who find repeating the same action thousands of times a day challenging are too limited to be employed in most factories.
Most white collar jobs were almost as dull. It's hard to be sad at the loss of millions of payroll clerks tabulating ledgers by hand, secretaries dutifully typing up someone else's dull business letters, operators connecting long-distance calls, or any of the other jobs that have been destroyed by technological innovation. Some people are worse off, to be sure, and unlike most libertarians, I'm not willing to simply shrug off the very real unfairness of dumping workers in their mid-fifties on the job market with no help because they bet on the wrong industry 25 years ago. But fwe've replaced those jobs with jobs programming computers, selling software, helping users, designing robots. On the whole, that's a good thing.
It's easy for local tragedy to feel global. If you'd asked me in 2002, I would have guessed that the recession was the worst one since the Great Depression; literally half or more of my friends were out of work. Similarly, to academics, it feels like the whole world is going to hell because academic employment has become dramatically less secure; there has been a glut of graduate students, particularly in history and related fields, that has persisted since the 1960's, even as increasingly professional administrations rely more and more on adjunct professors who get no benefits, no job security, and get paid slightly less per hour than those Bangladeshi children who knot rugs. Though to be fair, the adjuncts are not chained to their desks, at least not literally. Of course, that may just be because the administration wants to keep them running around as much as possible.
But the fact that some of us have had to settle for jobs less lucrative or fulfilling than we expected does not mean that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. Yes, we probably can't rely on social security, but on the other hand, it's easier than ever to save for retirement, with Uncle Sam basically giving you a 30% match on every dollar you put into your 401(k). I think the most frightening thing for many of us is the feeling that we have no safety net--that we'll end up poor and abandonned in retirement. But for most of us, it would probably be easy to save for retirement if we were willing to live like your parents did--or at least like my parents did. One television, no stereo, no VCR, no cable, one (used) car, six rooms for four people, no eating out, no cell phones, no vacations other than visiting relatives, stretching meat out with egg and bread and noodle rings, jello as a salad, turn the light off when you leave the room and get off the phone--it's long distance!
That sounds dreadfully as if I'm lecturing Laura on how she'd be fine if she didn't waste so much money. Which is stupid. For one thing, I don't know Laura, and for all I know she pinches pennies so hard that Lincoln screams. And for another, I don't have kids, which I am reliably informed suck up 10% more income than any normal person earns, so it would be ridiculous of me to comment. And for a third, I know all too well just how deeply an intellectually rewarding trip to graduate school which does not result in the expected job can dig you into a financial hole. I know y'all think I'm joking about my student loan officer when I shill for you to buy stuff through my Amazon account, but without those commissions, I wouldn't be able to afford to buy books; the budget here at Stately Galt Manor is so tight it squeaks.
But the thing is, that even as I indulge in invidious comparisons between my apartment and the one I grew up in, and those my classmates are currently renting or buying, I have to remind myself that in so many ways I'm better off than my parents were at my age. I'll live longer (well, statistically, anyway), I have a fantastic job, and though I complain about lack of space, I have everything I need. The things I want more space for, and more money for, are incidentals that the human race lived happily without until, oh, last week. On the other hand, I have things they never dreamed of, like this blog, that enrich my life in various intangible, yet crucial, ways. Just like the song says, the good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.
Posted by Jane Galt at December 4, 2005 08:29 PM"
janegalt.net |
