Youth In The Office: Confessions Of A Fed-Up Employee

BY: Jenna Goudreau,

This is a guest post and the second in a series about youth in the office. The author has asked to remain anonymous. 

 

I’m 24. I live in New York City. I hate my job. Of course, I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to feel accomplished to be young and employed and have benefits in this economic environment.

My life is a series of boxes on an assembly line. Today is just another box on my calendar. Every day I shuffle between a city apartment and an office cube, typing into rectangles, sending papers, signing papers, filing papers. What I do is not important. That’s the problem.

Employment data for people my age is grim at best. Work-seekers between the ages of 20 and 24 faced an ugly 15.5% unemployment rate by the end of 2010, and it’s hard to imagine much has improved in 2011. Comparing my situation to the general plight of my age group makes it very hard to complain about my job. I found and kept work through some of the nation’s leanest years this side of the Dust Bowl, which should be good enough to keep me satisfied. It’s not.

The job situation being this bleak only increases my frustration. Now I feel a heavy burden to cherish the personally unrewarding job I’m “lucky” enough to have. How can I justify being so disenchanted with a cushy, white-collar job when some of my friends have to scratch and claw just to get by?

This distaste for my current work stems, I think, from a deep-seated idyllic belief that a career should be built around doing something you enjoy. Your work should be your passion, not just a paycheck. That was the common refrain throughout my years of schooling. I, and many like me, took on nearly $100,000 in student debt to earn the college degree that was supposed to unlock my own occupational Utopia. We’d graduate, get our dream jobs, pay our bills and do something rewarding and meaningful… right? Wrong.

When the dust settled over a decade of education there were no dream jobs waiting for us. Instead, there was seemingly insurmountable debt and an equally daunting employment landscape, where you had to find a job, any job, sometimes multiple jobs, to get by. Dorm-room hopes and aspirations? Things get much more primal when you’re faced with making rent, trying not to overdraft your checking account and fending off Sallie Mae.

So I took a job, and showed up. I traded up, slightly, and held on for dear life. Yet it has never felt right. The jobs have only loosely connected to what I wanted for myself back in the days when a career was still theory and not practice.

Now I’ve reached the point where I’m boiling with discontent. I’m toiling away as a bottom-of-the-barrel paper pusher with little control or impact on the bottom line. I get nothing from the work, except a headache and feelings of guilt for wanting to voice these complaints. I’m sure to some I’d be considered spoiled with an unrealistic sense of self-worth and entitlement, but that’s precisely my issue: I was raised to feel this entitled when it comes to a career!

I feel duped by a long con; led to believe that a great and fulfilling job was easily attainable if I followed the right steps. Only once it was too late was the setup exposed. I’ve tried to uncover the nooks and crannies of my field in search of the perfect job for me, but it all seems the same. More boxes. More paperwork. Maybe I need more time, or to change careers entirely. However, a career switch would likely mean more debt and starting again from the bottom, and it wouldn’t dull the feeling that I’ve been misled.

So it feels both natural and unacceptable to hate my job, to complain about it, to dream of getting a new one. I hope a day comes when that dichotomy disappears, and I wish there were more people to share my frustrations with. But unfortunately many of my peers have larger concerns.

Still, I’m fed up. Blame it on my youth if that’s easier for you, but I will continue to blame an upbringing and a culture that led me to believe something would be waiting for me at the finish line. Turns out the finish line got moved in the middle of the race, and it feels like I’ve finished both first and last.

This is a guest post and the second in a series that will examine youth in the office, in the words of young workers themselves and others around them. Please share your own insights and experiences in the comments section below.

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SOURCE: www.forbes.com