Failure to Launch
Privilege and Real Struggles of the 20-Somethings
Photo by Damian Zaleski on Unsplash
As a volunteer for the Saturday morning Beginners’ Running Group, my job is to latch onto one of the beginners and distract them from the pain of running. It’s good for me, because I was a sucky runner this winter and need the slow pace of the beginners to get back in shape. And I talk with one new random person every week.
Last week, I talked with a lovely woman in her late 20s. The law firm, where she works doing corporate events, had recently transferred her to their New York City offices from Philadelphia. She explained that she only found this job after a long hunt. She had to spam the Internet job engines with hundreds of resumes per day until a company finally called her for an interview. 1000 resumes might equal one interview.
Yes, there are many young people who living their best lives with high paying jobs and standing online for an hour to get an Influencer-approved donut. A handful are already married. But mostly, I talk with young people who are struggling.
Some young adults struggle because they don’t have the right pedigree to provide them with a swift ramp to work, like my running friend. Others struggle because they don’t like the jobs that are available. Some never got over the Covid crisis. Addicted to their vapes and TikTok, their lives are deeply unhealthy. I have to wonder if college protests and encampments with their incoherent demands are more a reflection of their low level of misery than any real political statements.
My running friend didn’t come from a big name college with internship programs. She didn’t have connections. When she graduated, she was just one of a million job seekers throwing their resume on Indeed and hoping for the best.
Just as the Common App lead to a massive spike in college applications, the ease of online job applications means that it’s possible to send out your resume to hundreds in a day. One click and your resume is theoretically in front of an HR person. Applicants don’t even bother with a cover letter anymore.
So, all these companies get thousands and thousands of resumes for one administrative assistant job. They clearly can’t read all those resumes, so they rely on the website bots to surf through all those resumes to narrow down the options. Those bots are easily fooled by keywords, so young people need to Search Engine Optimize their resumes with those keywords. Since their parents have no clue about SEOing a resume, young people have to hire someone to insert those keywords into the resume. They have to find headhunters to help them.
While the Internet made the application process easier, it made it harder to get a human to read your resume. College grads require an SEO expert, a headhunter, and a shotgun to spray their applications into the ether. And the statistics back up the anecdotal stories that I’ve been hearing. It takes about five months to find your first job out of college.
Modern job hunting is a miserable process, but kids are pretty miserable even before that. College sucks for most kids. 40 percent of college students dropout and never finish. Non-activist type kids feel marginalized on their campuses. All those kids who missed their high school graduation in 2020 are now missing their college graduation, too, on campuses that have had to shutdown for the protests.
I wish I could take the college activists seriously, but I can’t. They don’t show a consistent interest in human life. They say they care about dead Palestinian children, but didn’t protest when Israeli children were killed last October. They didn’t protest when Russia abducted Ukrainian children.
Also, their demands are silly. They are spouting hateful stuff. They are preventing other students from studying and feeling comfortable on campus. They are breaking things. They seem to think that Gaza is a place of progressive utopia where their gay friends will flourish and women have freedoms. This isn’t 1968.
Some people look at the protests through a lens of privilege. These are kids who have been pampered and don’t take responsibility for their actions. They know their parents will bail them out of any trouble. I see kids that are miserable and immature - part of the “failure to launch” generation.
Of course, there are plenty of young people who do just fine after college. It definitely helps to have done a handful of internships during college and to have family connections. But even those without those advantage seem to get on their feet by age 25. It’s not pretty to watch that struggle, but they all get there. And once people have jobs, they stop pitching tents and yelling hate speech.
LINKS
I’ve been making autism TikTok’s. (picture) I’ll share links later. The first few efforts were very much of a first pancake.
I wrote about the autistic brain on my disability newsletter, A Great Leap and for NJ Education Report this week. Read more here.
Watching: Shogun
Reading: Launch, and Reskilling America
Travel: Making plans for Spain. I want to check out this hotel.
I enjoyed the essay but I thought the comparison with Israeli and Ukrainian children was odd. There was international support for Israel and very strong support from the U.S. after Oct 7, what else could protests have possibly asked for? The US doesn’t support Hamas. Similar for Ukraine - though that’s an interesting point more recently with how Republicans have turned - mass protests in support of more help would IMO be a very good idea. But the U.S. really is not doing all it could to stop Israel’s actions against civilians. Not even close.
I also think the idea that students don’t realize how repressive Palestina society is, is unsupported by any citations and seems to come from an inability to imagine someone can be really upset at how someone who hates them is treated. But look, a majority of Palestinians would and do absolutely hate me and I would not be at all safe in any future Palestine… and I still think it’s unacceptable to starve their children. Not even to save my life would I be willing to do it or agree with it. Personally it does keep me from declaring myself pro Palestinian but I am fully against famine and other people’s comfort with various words vary. And yes some of the students are pro Hamas but it’s definitely a minority.
I’m borderline annoyed with the ongoing protests, mostly because they are not constructive - the generation looking at most boomer models with a jaundiced eye seems not to be questioning this model all.
But then I remind myself that the reporting is so superficial that I may not really know what’s going on. There is a great piece in the Atlantic about how the media are reporting on the protests without asking specifically what they’re protesting.