An Open Letter to Twenty-Somethings

Dear Demographically Important Consumers of Generations X and Y,

You are now finished with your college years, and are beginning your so-called Adult Life. Even if you did not graduate from college, the chances of you later returning to finish your degree, now that you are employed, are very slim, though you will talk for several years to come of your desire to do so, without ever doing so. As you enter this brave new world of cubicles, mandatory overtime, ulcers and the “ladder of success”, there are a few things that you should keep in mind that will help you to navigate through your Adult Life.

You are probably going to spend the next thirty plus years of your life doing something that you have no particular intersst in or aptitude for. You will do this because it will enable you to make the minimum payments on the credit cards you will use to purchase things that you don’t really like or want. You will purchase these things partially because your coworkers will also be purchasing them and will ostracise you if you do not, and partially because, after wasting all of your waking hours doing confusing, meaningless tasks for someone who is your superior at work by benefit of their seniority or the cost of their diploma, you will feel entitled to some sort of “reward” for your wage-slaving. The products you will buy because of this urge will be designed to provide you with all of the dissatisfaction necessary to convince you to buy replacements and upgrades to them for the rest of your life. These upgrade and replacement products will not count towards your quota of palliative purchases.

You will become a “lifelong learner”, which is to say that, having traded all of your waking hours to the agents of consumerism, thereby forfeiting any time you might have to learn interesting things on your own, you will have some of your time sold back to you in the guise of preapproved “continuing education units” designed to boost your work productivity and prepare you for different confusing meaningless tasks. This is called “advancement”, and you will eagerly await your next opportunity to “better yourself” and “improve your skillset”.

You will purchase a shoddily made, but very large, house in which you will house all of the things that you have purchased until it is time for them to be upgraded. Your house will also serve as a statement of solidarity towards all of the other recently divorced, upwardly mobile people in your less than a year old neighborhood. A statement that you stand shoulder to shoulder with them in your pursuit of the “finer things in life” as advertised in Cigar Afficionado magazine.

You will develop a deep and abiding interest in watching sports on television, also as a statement of solidarity, but more so as a way of sublimating the rage and self-loathing you will feel, but not be able to understand. Football will exert a primal hold on your psyche, and you will exhort the participants on television to sacrifice themselves physically in the name of raw conflict and competition as you do psychically at your job. This love of sports will increase as you age, in inverse proportion to your enjoyment of your daily life.

You will slowly loose all of your friends. Your conflicting schedules will provide you with ample excuse to not make any social effort whatsoever, and they will do the same. Over time you will forget that what you now call friendship ever existed, and if you do remember it, you will just think wistfully of your college years on the morning commute. Your dynamic career and mushrooming debt will prevent you from attending your high school reunion, which is just as well, since anyone who has the free time to take such a pointless, non-revenue-producing trip must not be successful, and you will only associate with successful people like yourself. You will meet these successful associates in sports bars to watch the above-mentioned sports and to lie to each other about how much you enjoy each others company.

You might get married, but if you do, you will not stay so. You and your spouse will expend all of your collective emotional capital during work hours, in soothing irate bosses and commiserating with fellow cubicle dwellers, and upon returning home at night will not have the minimum amount of attention and caring left to maintain an unhealthy marriage, much less a joyful union. You will begin by resenting your spouse and their inattention to you. Then you will begin to pick fights in order to have some sort of intercourse with the other person living in your house. Eventually you will both fall into a sullen television-lit detente, until one of you accidentally happens across soneone else who will go to bed with them, and then you will have one last fight, and the lawyers will take over and the last battle of your war will be fought by proxy. However, it will not be nearly as traumatic as it seems to you now, reading this. You will not have had the time or attention span to copulate often enough to produce children, so your break-up will be a largely financial affair, with few, if any emotional components. The upside will be that with the other person gone, you have more room in your house for your stuff. You will probably remarry quite quickly though, as you will discover that the silence in your house is creepy, and makes it hard to concentrate on work.

You will begin assembling, and will maintain throughout your Adult Life, a list of things that you are going to do “later” or “after your retire”. You will never accomplish any of those things. You will, in all likelihood, die before retirement age, and if you do make it to that magic year, you will find that your credit card bills and multiple mortgages far outstrip the meagre retirment income you have neglected for three decades. You will them begin mentally maintaining a new list; of all the ways things were better “in the old days” which is always demarcated as before you begin your career. This new list will be your comfort as you spend the last decade or so of your life shuffling from doctor to doctor trying desperately to recover some of your lost life by paying them to undue the decades of abuse you have heaped upon your body.

I hope you will enjoy and embrace your newfound Adult Freedom, and will endeavor to be the best, most productive consumer you can be. You’d better hurry up though. There are so many things to buy and rebuy, time’s a wasting, and the really dedicated graduates stopped reading halfway through this post so that they could get a head start on their MBAs.

If you have any further questions, I’ll be the guy you see every day from your office window; the one sitting at the cafe, eating breakfast at eleven am, not a suit or Blackberry in sight.