Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

Photo by giarose

Not everyone grows up to be Gandhi. Not all of us are meant to change the world and live capital L lives. There’s only so much paradigm-shifting talent, opportunity and luck available and you’re not a failure  just because you didn’t receive what you believe was your generationally-mandated portion of the above, although it’s easy to see why you might feel that way.

Those of us who grew up as part of the middle-class North American majority learned that we could be anything we wanted, but somewhere along the way, we got it twisted around in our heads that we had to be everything the world wanted/needed in order to be successful. Money wasn’t enough, nor was the love of family and friends, we wanted to matter, to make a difference, to prove ourselves, even if we couldn’t define exactly what this entailed. But we knew it was big, bigger than the lives we’re living now, bigger than our cubicle jobs, our weakness for reality tv and organic, fair trade espresso. You’re nobody until the Nobel committee comes calling. We’re not supposed to settle and settling has become anything less than being multi-tasking, globe-trotting, world-saving, well-paid, well-partnered prodigies. The desire not to hide our individual lights under a bushel is a laudable one, but not everyone is going to be a game changer. And there’s no shame or failure or inadequacy in working  an “ordinary” job, in leading a quiet life, in surrounding yourself with a handful of close friends and family. In fact, those are the lives most of us end up with, with the smarter of us realizing that they’re every bit as meaningful as the marquee existences we feel we ought to aspire to. There doesn’t need to be a higher purpose, a greater mandate, a pissing contest of who has more frequent flyer miles and a bigger LinkedIn network. It’s okay not to end up a shining star and it’s more than okay not to have ever wanted to be one in the first place. It’s okay to work at Whole Foods or be a stay-at-home dad or never finish your PhD thesis. Never owning a home doesn’t make you a failure, nor does buying one four doors down from your parents. Who the hell cares if you’ve never even heard of Herzog and that you like Bon Jovi and drink PBR without a trace of hipster irony? These aren’t moral failings, folks.

I’m absolutely not telling you to give up on your dreams, or jettison your idealism in favor of the “simple” life. Both are valid choices and they aren’t even mutually exclusive. What I am encouraging you to do is to stop living for your legacy and to take a moment to examine the implicit privilege in assuming the self-imposed middle-class Gen Y burden of “making the world a better place” out of a sense of duty instead of genuine altruism (which I’d never argue against, obviously). You’re the one choosing that yoke and you can choose to cast it off. Noblesse oblige, especially of the guilt-driven variety, is totally overrated.

Had variations on the same discussions with two different people this week*. I know that when that happens, it’s a pretty good bet that there’s a GenMeh piece in there somewhere (also a good bet that I will use the conversations to hone my thesis, complete with wild gesticulations, maybe some sporadic pounding on the table a la Khrushchev, depends on the day). The gist of these discussions centered around whether an utter lack of caring about the future/one’s prospects/the world as we know it was a sign of the times or the sign of a personal problem. Considering that my conversational partners were two smart, accomplished and grounded twentysomethings, I’m inclined to say that their malaise isn’t a character defect, but representative of a common (if rather rarely acknowledged) phenomenon among Gen Y. To put it succinctly, we’re burned out on caring. We’re hungry for something, but we can’t tell you what it is because we don’t know. We long for a specific feeling, but we can’t accurately name it (satisfaction?  fulfillment? contentment? self-actualization?) and we don’t know how to achieve it. We’ve grown up with the understanding that we could be anything we wanted to be, but we let the dizzying array of choices overwhelm us and instead of determining how we’d go about figuring out what it is we wanted, we stand paralyzed in front of our options, or reel drunkenly from job to job, relationship to relationship, holding our breath, waiting for an audible click.

Photo by wili_hybrid

And as much as we worry about never achieving that specific feeling,  we also worry that we won’t even recognize it if we ever do. We have no means of conceptualizing such a vague notion as a feeling we can’t even agree on a name for. If you don’t know where you’re going, how the hell are you supposed to know when you finally get there? Riddle me/us that.  At least with romantic love, even if you haven’t felt it, books and film are filled with a million examples, you can see it in your families, friends, the couple sitting across from you on the bus who have no issue with gratuitous PDA. You can think about instances of non-romantic love in your own life (if your life has been fortunate enough to include it), add a patina of lust and come up with a proxy for the feeling that you’re longing to experience firsthand. And if someone tells you that you’ll know love when you feel it, well, you’re inclined to take them at their word because you have no doubt about the veracity of love itself. Not so with the unnamed emotional salve that Gen Yers of a certain stripe are fixated upon. Think of it as heroin addicts chasing the dragon, except we have no previous experience of the perfect high and no tangible proof  that it exists (after all, your happy isn’t my happy). But we’ve been told not only is it awesome,  it’s the answer to all our problems. So we soldier on and with a surprising amount of blind faith for such a supposedly cynical and jaded generation. But sooner or later, we get tired of seeking and never finding. I  imagine it’s akin, on a small scale, to the weariness of living through decades of Cold War nuclear posturing or spending your entire life on the edge of your seat waiting for The Rapture to finally kick off. Eventually, to conserve emotional and mental energy, you just go numb. That’s what happened to the friends I mentioned and that’s what’s happening to so many of us, even if we’re loath to publicly admit to such unflattering apathy and disinterest. We’re burned out and all of the good intentions, platitudes and woulda/coulda/shouldas in the world have lost their potency. Become a barista? Have a baby? Pop the cork on another bottle of cheap wine and commiserate? Yeah, the person who comes up with definitive means of getting our generational mojo back is gonna make a mint. And then, if they’re one of us,  probably still feel empty and lacking while rolling around on their pile of hundred dollar bills. I jest. Maybe.

Long-term wanting is taxing enough when there’s a prize for you to fix your eye on.  But without a concrete goal such as saving $40 000 for a down payment, finishing med school or training for a triathlon, it becomes absolutely exhausting if you can’t even put your finger on what it is you want (The Victorians were off the mark; pining ain’t all it’s cracked up to be). There’s just that damn, never-ending rainbow overhead. It seems to take up the entire sky and no matter how long or far you walk, you never seem to get any closer to the end and even if you did reach it, you’ve started to doubt you’d even recognize it as such, not to mention actually setting eyes upon the mythic pot of gold. And yeah, your feet are really starting to hurt, you know?

*I also saw a newspaper ad recruiting people for a medical study. The criterion was that you had stopped caring about or being interested in your life, but were not actually suffering from diagnosed depression. Yes, it made me giggle.

List Served is a semi-regular feature wherein I present you with an ordered grouping of (at least tangentially) related points. I love lists and the internet loves ephemeral minutiae. It’s all good.

Photo by Rakka

• A gift bag containing three giant Lush bath bombs that were meant as a present for someone whose birthday party I didn’t end up attending.
• The business card from this story.  No sentimentality involved,  I just never clean out the bottom of my purse.
• Two bottles of ibuprofen, neither of which were anywhere to be found last week when I had a splitting headache.
• The box for every single box-bound item that I have bought in the last three and a half years. Never know when you’re going to have to repackage your $9 can opener.
• An drawer filled entirely with safety pins.
• Approximately 431 scraps of paper with phone numbers, dates and random words scrawled on them, all without context, of course. Apparently, Oct 17, 2008 was a red-letter day. Somewhere. For someone.
• Three non-working laptops, two of which I had forgotten I even had in my possession and one of which weighs approximately as much as an early model VCR.
• A 2006 calendar featuring 12 months of dachshunds.
• The sunglasses my sister  shamed me out of ever wearing again after she disgustedly informed me that they looked like ones our uncle would sport out on the golf course. Point taken.
• A pair of silver-green child-sized Crocs, of which I have no memory of purchasing or being gifted with.
• Four Susan B. silver dollars. These made me smile.
• My MA degree certificate. In a box of scarves and mittens.

The other night I was listening to a webcast from the excellent Amanda Palmer (I predict that her star is on the mainstream rise after the whole naked on the red carpet at the Golden Globes thing) while catching up on some email. At one point in the show, she was responding to Twitter questions from her fans. One of the questions involved advice Palmer might have for aspiring artists. Her words caught my attention and I decided that they would make excellent post fodder.

Photo by Art La Flamme

In a nutshell, Palmer said not to bother with a Plan B. Convince yourself that what you aspire to will come to pass and give yourself no choice but to succeed. No fallback position, no back-up. In other words, put all your eggs in one basket and guard said basket with your life. Be desperately ambitious and wildly confident and convey that to others, that’s what will make them want to hear you out, to help you. Be ambivalent and everyone can sense it like blood in the water.

Her sentiments ring true, especially for those on high-risk career paths – artists, writers, performers, entrepreneurs, etc. They have an uphill battle to be successful (and I’m conservatively defining success as making a viable living from their craft/business, not being the next J.K. Rowling or Donald Trump) and in fields such as theirs, hunger and perseverance are more important than raw talent. Gotta be a grinder. Arrive earlier, stay later. Outhustle every other hustler. In these cases, having a back-up plan (different from a gotta keep from starving in the here-and-now gig) encourages complacency*. If you know that you can always go back to being a lab tech or a personal trainer, the publish or perish/sing or starve impetus isn’t there. And you’ll end up losing out to the individuals who do have that impetus. They need to succeed; you merely want it. And if doesn’t work out, you know you’ll still be okay. Crisis averted.

But what about the rest of us? Surely, there’s no harm in back-up plans for those of us who are of a more quotidian stripe? Not so fast. Firstly, I think it’s useful to draw a distinction between back-up plans and contingency plans. The former being a viable (and likely more or less palatable) option in case your first choice tanks. Plan B is the Miss America first runner-up. Should Plan A be unable to fulfill its duties for any reason (sex tape scandal!), Plan B shall step seamlessly into the breach. A contingency plan is more of a response protocol to a given event. If X happens, do Y. Think of an elementary school fire drill. If the gym goes up in flames, proceed in an orderly fashion to the parking lot and line up alphabetically by class and grade.

Contingency plans can save you in a jam ($20 in your shoe to take a cab home from an obnoxiously loud and overcrowded party), but Plan Bs are meant to ensure that you don’t end up in the jam in the first place. Why invest fully in Plan A and risk capital F failure (heartbreak, bankruptcy, etc.), when you can simply hedge your bets and bank on good ol’ B to save your bacon? Plan B lets us off the hook. We can put in a little less effort, be a little more moderate in our desire, want it, but not too much and definitely not to an unseemly degree. And if we don’t get it, well, we’ll deal.

Plan B (and C and D, etc.) is born from insecurity. We fear we won’t get what we want the most, that it won’t last, that we don’t deserve it. So we scale back, we downgrade and downplay. If it doesn’t work out, at least we haven’t lost much. But it’s just this mindset that dooms it to not working out in the first place. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We expect less, give less, get less and then praise ourselves for our pragmatism in having a back-up plan to cover just such an outcome, an outcome that we all but conjured into occurring with our 80% effort.

People have varying tolerance levels for risk. I get that. And while not everyone is all about risking it all on a turn of pitch-and-toss, there’s a difference between having a solid idea of what you’ll do if you throw everything you’ve got at your dreams and still fall short and never committing fully to those dreams in the first place because you’ve got a few options on the backburner that you’ve been keeping an eye on. If you choose the latter option, don’t kid yourself about what you’re choosing and don’t be surprised when you end up needing to put your back-up plan into play.

I’m sure Amanda Palmer would agree.

*And you know how I feel about complacency.

Today, kids, we’re going to talk about being unemployed. You’ve all heard the conventional wisdom about the need to get dressed every day, not sleep in until noon and to apply to positions as if it were your job (which it kinda is). And while I’m not going to dispute the idea that watching Judge Judy in your pajamas with a wine cooler (or three) in hand is a less than stellar choice, I assume you already know this. And you can assume that I already know that unemployment is an absolutely dire state for many people, especially for those with heavy debt loads, mortgages, mouths to feed, etc. Pith isn’t what these folks need. No, my advice is aimed squarely at those of you who have the relative luxury (and it is, even if it doesn’t feel like one) of being able to go without a job for a month or two and not start panicking about having to live in a refrigerator box under the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe you received a severance package, maybe you’re getting employment insurance, maybe you have a partner who can shoulder the full load in the interim or maybe you’ve just been very careful about your savings until this point and know that you can squeak by until your next gig. This isn’t advice on how to find said gig, but how to use the time that you have at your disposal in the most constructive (or least anxiety-inducing) manner possible.

Photo by John McNab

Get a routine going

Unstructured days that just blur together will seem like an energy-sapping eternity. Impose some order and focus, even if it feels artificial. Get up and go to bed at a consistent hour. Determine a specific period of the day when you’ll conduct your job search. And when that time is up? Back away from the computer and call it quits until tomorrow. Don’t let job hunting be a 24/7 albatross around your neck. Devote a defined period of time to it, buckle down and ignore all distractions and then shelve it until next time. Get outside once a day (even if it’s a walk around the block). Give yourself an hour or two for email, IMing with friends or catching up on football scores. Etc, etc. The point is to structure/fill your time and cut down on the possibility of staring off into space for hours on end thinking about the worst case scenario (What’s the going black market rate for a kidney these days?) or berating yourself for not having landed a new opportunity within hours of being pink-slipped.

Start checking items off your bucket list

Use this time to work on projects that you’ve always wanted to tackle, but have never had the time to address. Unless you win the lottery or retire early, free time is going to be a very precious commodity during your working life (especially if you have a family), so use this block of it to your best advantage. Sure, backpacking across Europe might not be in the financial cards, but what about teaching yourself Photoshop, learning how to make sushi, brushing up on your high school Spanish? In this case, there’s no time like your unoccupied present.

Take stock and focus on course corrections as necessary

Maybe you’re totally happy with your particular field and it’s just a matter of looking for a replacement job for your former position. But if you’re questioning your career choices or have realized that you want to make a change, use this time to figure out your options. Research industries or alternate careers of interest to you, think about your most and least favorite aspects of previous jobs, get professional input (look into whether hiring a resume writer would be a worthy investment, for example) as needed, with the goal of figuring out where you want to go and what it would take to get there. Does it require going back to school, moving to another city with more opportunities or simply reframing your resume for a new industry? Do this now when you have little to nothing to lose, because I guarantee that once you’re re-employed, making a big shake-up will once again seem like a risk you don’t think you can afford.

Do not feel guilty

You did not lose your job because you’re a bad person* and you shouldn’t treat being unemployed as some deserved punitive state in which you live in self-imposed misery as a means of reprimanding yourself for having the gall to have been downsized. You are not a loser and taking up permanent residence on your couch, refusing to venture out to see friends and family and telling yourself that you’re never going to find meaningful work isn’t productive, helpful or remotely compassionate. You shouldn’t feel guilty for focusing on yourself while you’re unemployed, for taking time to learn new skills, read more books, get out in the fresh air and/or re-evaluate your career path. Self loathing and guilt are terrible motivators and aren’t going to get you back into the labor force any faster. In fact, wallowing in ‘em will just make the days seem even longer and more empty.

*Unless you were fired for harassing your coworkers or embezzling, in which case, you probably are a bad person.