The latest installment of the American Dream Essay Series (door is always open to submissions) comes to us from Chanelle Schneider. Also known as @WriterChanelle on Twitter, she runs her own blog at ToThereFromHere where she offers career and life advice for Generation Y, with a specific focus on those older GenYers who have yet to graduate from college. Chanelle is the founder of the generational chat #GenYChat on Twitter and manages the @GenYChat account. She is also a freelance writer and is currently working on a film script.

Photo by Esther Gibbons

The American Dream is only the American Dream for those who have been privileged enough to have access to the raw materials to construct their own. For those who don’t, the American Dream is a distant star in a sky filled with such similar platitudes as “a piece of the pie.” I want a piece of this pie. Where is it? Who baked it? How much does it cost? You know nothing is free.  “The way they get that slice is through education.”

The one thing that is supposed to be free?  Love. But even love is being monetized lately. Love and support go hand in hand. The key to obtaining this piece of the pie is in finding the support to build your dreams. Support can be pretty difficult to find, though.

It would be quite altruistic of people to support everyone they loved. If love is supposed to be unconditional and granted a priori, then it would be sufficient to say it would be quite altruistic of people to support everyone. Since love is becoming a capitalist endeavor whereby one must have some measure of financial prosperity, or, at least, be headed toward it, support is getting harder and harder to come by. For those who have access, support is a given. For those on the bottom rung, support is hoped for and rarely received. For those in the middle, though, they assumed that support would be granted. In a society where upward mobility is often dependent upon the class you were born into, the American Dream is closely linked to financial success. Financial success is tied to employment. Employment is tied to ability. Or…wait. Is it?

For example, I often wonder about the purpose of a resume, a tool that is supposed to be useful in identifying ability and talent. However, for most people the resume is a perfunctory document given after the connection is made to a potential employer. If jobs are found through your personal network by someone who has given you a recommendation, why is it necessary? The employer recognized your ability only after the support of someone in your network. Thus, employment is tied, first, to support, then to ability. And the American Dream hinges upon support. Obtaining it, though, leads directly into a Catch-22. When you’re part of the middle class, people want to support you only when it’s clear that you’re not a financial risk. Much like trying to obtain credit or a student loan without a history of repayment, you need a co-signer. The co-signer is willing to vouch for your future ability to repay (in dollars or productivity) the support. Without this support, it’s impossible to get further in the application process, and you have to wait until you can prove your ability on your own.

And there are a lot of us out here who just can’t find that support for one reason or another.

-Chanelle Schneider

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 metal1944

For all of our big talk about doing things on our own terms, defining and measuring our success by benchmarks other than the traditional, being less consumptive and more self-actualizing, Gen Y is remarkably puritanical when it comes enjoying the here and now sans guilt. We’ve got a punitive streak a mile wide and ain’t no one gonna convince me otherwise. If we haven’t made it yet, we don’t deserve to enjoy what we do have until we have made it, or so the thinking goes. Not only do we not have/make time to savor our current good fortune (nothing new, that’s been the MO of every 20th-century generation), but we don’t feel as if we even have the right to do so until we have more to show for our effort. The better to fall even more hopelessly behind others who eschew stopping and smelling the roses, my dear. All of the location independent, lifestyle-designing, nomadic cheerleading in the world isn’t worth jack until and unless it addresses the ghost of the Protestant work ethic that haunts us and influences our evaluation of self-worth. End of story.

In our heart of hearts, many of us still believe that there’s something self indulgent, cavalier or heedless about taking time to enjoy the ride. Forget having a scavenger hunt in the park, or skipping town for a few days to visit family or live it up in NYC or even indulging in a weekly fancy-pants triple mocha, we should be blogging, networking, job hunting, overtiming, penny pinching, etc. Who are we to enjoy what we haven’t earned through sacrifice and character-building deprivation?

But what if it takes us the next five years or ten years or a lifetime to feel as if we’ve “earned” our “success”? Talk about taking the long way around.  What exactly are we supposed to do in the interim? Live in austerity? Castigate ourselves with parochial guilt every time we take a time out for self-directed dilettantism? Gen Y talking heads claim that our cohort is all about the journey and not the destination, but how many folks are genuinely enjoying the trip?

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 foreversouls

I’ve been more or less off the grid for the last week or so, but that doesn’t mean that life has been lacking in the edification department. Time spent visiting my family never fails to prove illuminating.

Lessons Gleaned From Vacation

• How to properly tease one’s hair
• The difference between petunias and pansies
• The difference between golf hot and regular hot
• That my sister thought Cher wrote this song about Sandra Bullock’s husband
• That my mother is a texting fiend. If we were back in telegraphing times, she would have been all over the Morse Code thing.
• The wonder that is barbecued corn
• The wonder that is spiked iced tea.  Rum is best, but vodka is pretty okay, too.
• The correct method for splitting a pine log
• That my parents’ elderly dog has a beef with me, as evidenced by the fact that she peed on my bed twice in the span of  a week
• That comparing someone to a piece of raw chicken is an acceptable means of drawing attention to their paleness

Photo by cliff1066

The next installment in GenMeh’s American Dream Essay series comes to us courtesy of Bethany Moore. She describes her poetic inspiration as follows:

The piece American Daughters was written when I was living & working in Washington DC as a church-state separation activist on Capitol Hill, and I’d occasionally feel full of piss and vinegar enough to write a poem like this about the frustrations of being a woman who is limited or even threatened by her own role in society.

American Daughters

Founding Fathers!
Men of America who oversaw
The birth of this country,

Did you see it coming?
By it, I mean us?
Did you hear the cries
Of this nation’s labor pains echo through
the chambers of your declaration signing?

Did you see us coming;
The women, the mothers
Of the people whom you
Would govern?

Did you see us in your vision?
Could you predict that we
Would demand sovereignty
Over our wombs?

When you envisioned the Industrial Revolution,
did you see us as part of the grand design
as baby-making factories?

Would you see us line up
Not for an equal vote,
But to produce more workers,
To create more widgets,
To support a macho capitalist nation?

Would you create a country
Whose government agencies would
Sub-contract out our uterus, our wombs,
To replenish your military forces?

Founding Fathers,
Stop a moment,
Before you sign your
John Hancock,
Have you asked your wives,
Your mothers, your daughters?

Have you asked them what they will need,
What they will want,
Have you asked them
What’s in store for women,
What our stories will be
As our history books are written?

Did you envision the struggle?
Was it part of your plan
To hold us down, silence us,
Tie our hands behind our backs,
Slap an apron and high heels on us,
And send us alone to the kitchen,
Alone to the delivery room,
Alone to the abortion clinic?

Founding Fathers
While you were deciding on
An eagle, a hawk, or a turkey,
We were praying for doves of peace.

Founding Fathers,
Hear us now, your daughters,
As we wail and roar,
And sing for freedom

I’ve been visiting my family for the last few days and I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity.  My father and I were discussing deadlines (this pseudo vacation happens to be full of them) of the physical vs. intellectual variety and the usefulness of putting conditions on work that normally requires creativity and inspiration to fuel it. This conversation, plus a recent reader question about increasing one’s writing output, convinced me that this is a fine time to share with you my own productivity secrets, which boil down to getting yourself to sack up and do work when you’d rather do just about anything else. They’re not glamorous, but they keep slackerdom at bay, at least in my world.

Photo by jazzmasterson

Accountability

Willpower is overrated. It might help you to gut out the last five miles of the Boston Marathon, but it won’t take you from the couch to actually qualifying for next year’s Marathon in the first place.  We romanticize grit and stick-to-it determination as being hallmarks of strong character and gloss over the fact that we’re social creatures and that willpower often requires us to isolate ourselves from people or situations we fear might be a challenge to it in order to toil in a vacuum.  Better that we should focus on accountability – both to ourselves and our values and to others who are depending on us.  Whether it be the buddy system to get in your training runs or volunteering at your grandmother’s nursing home or a group project for one of your marketing classes, we are less likely to slack off when we know that doing so would publicly let others down and not simply disappoint ourselves. This is part of the logic behind the Virtual Brain Trust and part of the impetus that recently allowed me to bang out 24 consecutive think pieces on the Gen Y experience in modern America for Bitch Magazine*. Believe me, willpower and divine inspiration had nothing to do with those columns.

Environment

I’d love to be one of those people who can drag their laptops to a coffee shop to happily work or study for hours. I am not.  Too nosy curious about fellow patrons and their conversations, relationships and drink orders.  I know that I work best alone in the quiet (maybe with my headphones on, but never when editing) and that trying to produce a quality effort in cacophonous surroundings is a losing battle.  While most of us likely don’t have perfect control over our environment (especially if you live with others), knowing the context in which you are best able to focus and to be productive goes a long way in helping you to minimize the distractions (that’s why God made noise-canceling headphones!) within your control and to adjust your expectations as to your output under less than ideal conditions and the type of tasks that you shouldn’t tackle (hint: expecting to finish your MA thesis over Thanksgiving with your 35-person extended family might not be entirely realistic) in that environment.

Incentives and Consequences

Although it’s not the only example, money works particularly well in this context, especially for those who are conscientious about accruing/saving it and squeamish about wasting it. The need to eat and pay rent forces you to hustle to land clients or to sell more cars or houses. You leave yourself no choice but to be productive. Inaction is a luxury you can’t afford. Literally.  Or the fact that you’re coughing up almost $50/month in gym fees is a heckuva motivation to squeeze in as many fitness classes as possible each week (it also decreases the per-class cost and makes you feel all virtuously thrifty!).

*If you haven’t read them, you should. That was some hardcore productivity right there.