In Praise of a Misspent Youth
Are 20-somethings too serious, too young?
When I graduated from college, I went to the Tenafly Public Library and found a book that listed all the names of book and magazine publishing companies in New York. (Yes, there really was something like that back in the old days, kids!) I had my resume printed on some nice thick paper. Using my dad’s Apple 2E, I wrote some cover letters and folded everything up in an envelope, stamped, and mailed it out. I only got as far as the B’s in that publishing book, because Brady Books, the computer book imprint for Simon and Schuster, hired me as an editorial assistant for $15,500 per year.
That low-paying, but fascinating job was just one of the gigs that I did in my 20’s, while juggling graduate school classes in highly impractical topics — The Political Thought of Max Weber! Rational Marxism! I always had enough for a cheap apartment in a semi-safe part of New York City or Chicago. I went to a lot of parties, and had a lot of fun. My husband was living a similar life throughout his 20s in Cleveland and later in New York City, when we finally met at the end of our 20s. We didn’t buckle down and get serious about 401K plans and proper careers until our mid-30s and didn’t buy our first house until our late 30’s.
But talking to young people and their parents today, I am often shocked by their deep conservatism*. They (with a whole lot of stage management from their parents) start planning out their careers in high school and then get the “right” internships in their junior years, which then funnel them out to a career immediately after graduation. They take jobs in their 20s, which honestly sound gruesomely boring. They are in serious relationships. They buy matching furniture sets. These 20-somethings are acting like middle-aged bores.
I suppose it’s natural for a person in their 50’s to look back on their years of effortless beauty and boundless energy with rose colored glasses, but I really did have a lot of fun. I took jobs that I liked. If I didn’t like them, I quit. I made enough money to have a crappy apartment, hauling my furniture off the streets of New York on trash day.
One time, Steve and I found a round orange arm chair on the streets of the Village. Fueled with beer, we rolled that thing home to his apartment on W. 146th Street. I have no idea how we rolled it down the subway stairs and onto the 9 train, but somehow we did it.
We were always part of roving groups of friends, who would adopt a particular bar for a season — Red Lion Inn, The Dublin House, Phoebe’s, The Bob Bar. Over cheap pitchers of beer, we would laugh and drink and smoke all night. Sometimes we would flirt with the boys at the next table. Sometimes we would end up dating them.
When we weren’t ensconced in a booth at a bar, we would go to apartment parties. Rocking cheap frocks bought at flea markets or Soho sale racks, we chatted with Columbia professors in their book-lined apartments and salsa danced with grad students in Park Slope. And the city itself was our playground with art openings and street fairs and bands in underground clubs.
We saved our money and had great adventures, though not in exclusive resorts in places like Cabo or Aruba. For our honeymoon, Steve and I backpacked through Spain and Morocco for a couple of weeks. I think the entire trip cost $1,000. We still talk about that trip.
I’m a little sad that young people are settling down too soon. Locked into $3,000 per month apartments, they don’t have the freedom to take those low-paying, but fun jobs. They are expected to leave college and immediately embark onto life-long career. Because COVID narrowed their worlds so severely, many of them became locked into serious relationships, but have few friends. They don’t seem to have the imagination to travel to exotic places. Weirdly, their parents are still involved in their lives, even helping them decorate their apartments.
Admittedly, I probably should have taken out of a few less loans for graduate school. I could have been a tad more concerned about a 501K plan in my 20’s, since that’s the best time to start investments. There were definitely some great career opportunities that I ignored, because I wasn’t ready to buckle down and be serious. I could have taken that big promotion at the publishing company and started business school, instead of quitting to go study Marx and Weber at the University of Chicago. Steve and I are doing well now, but if we had made different choices, we would be doing very well.
Still, I wouldn’t trade my 20’s, those years of adventure and wonder, for the narrow, 50’s-like conservatism that I’m seeing with today’s 20-somethings. The decade was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore and learn without the pressures of a mortgage and childcare. I hope that young people do a little rebelling. They certainly deserve some years of bohemian fun to recover from the grey and somber years of the pandemic.
* Disclaimer: I am, of course, talking about privileged young people in this piece. I have a whole newsletter devoted to young people who aren’t so lucky. I think it’s possible to talk about the lucky ones in one newsletter, and the less lucky ones in another.
LINKS
Last week, I wrote about Uvalde shooting and toxic school cultures. I followed up on Wednesday’s disability newsletter — The Great Leap — with ideas about how to make schools and communities work better for ALL kids.
Nobody seems very enthusiastic about student loan reform. This is going to bite Biden in the ass — Olen, Yglesias, Sasse, me.
Lots of pictures and descriptions of life in Apt. 11D here and here.
There are not enough places to put disabled young people with disabilities. It’s sinful.
I would like to be an old influencer.
Watching: 1883, Kenobi
Above picture: me, Sue, and Joy from 1991. Below picture: Steve and I walked by through the West Village with the boys last weekend. When we walked past the Village Cigar, we reminisced about the time we bought some Indian bidi cigarettes there and got really sick.
I used to ask my community college students about that very thing--many told me they watched their parents lose their jobs in the 2008 financial crisis, sometimes losing their houses, cars, and access to healthcare, and then chose deliberately in-demand jobs that had pensions and benefits. It may be that like so many things, much of what we see now is related to that terrible time.