A Person's Bend (Part 1)

I remember reading a few years ago in a major news magazine the cover story, which was a discussion of why so many people in Generation Y wind up back at home after college, living with their parents, skipping from job to job. I remember thinking that I didn’t know why either…even though I think I’m technically part of Generation Y. I flew my parent’s nest at the age of 18, moving nearly 1,200 miles away from home, visiting some summers for three weeks at a time, but rarely making it home more often than that. Well, other than Christmas, I guess. After four years that far away, I graduated from college and moved even farther from home, where I spent three great years making great money in a fabulously underrated location. I felt invincible. I was young, single, determined and completely incapable of thinking of a day when I would want or need to move back in with my parents.

Then, my older brother moved back in with my parents after college. Not long after, my twin sister moved back in with my parents…after college. My brother moved back in because he decided he wanted to go to graduate school. My parents suggested that he live with them while he commuted to school to save money. My brother didn’t want to move back in with my parents, but he did after the reality of how much it would cost to pay rent and tuition really sank in. After he graduated, he decided to go to graduate school again, but this time farther away. He finally flew the nest for good when he moved to Indiana for school, fell in love with a girl and married her. I think it’s a pretty sure thing now that he won’t be moving back in with my parents; and I don’t think that my parents would let him now even if he wanted to. I think it’s kind of like an unspoken line in the sand.

My sister’s story is much more typical of the Generation Y college graduate. She graduated from college the same year as me. Although she had looked for work while she was finishing her studies, she couldn’t find any. Something about it being the spring following the 9-11 attacks and the slowing of the economy probably didn’t help her much. So after graduation, my parents went down to her college to pick her stuff up and moved her back home. She lived with my parents for nearly three years. She prepared to move out once, but as she prepared to move out, her boss prepared to terminate her employment by fax as the company went under so she stayed in my parent’s house. Eventually – it took awhile – she found a new job. But she lived with my parents still because her job did not really pay her enough to pay rent, make a car payment and cover other costs associated with living – like buying food. One day she moved out. After a few months, she moved back in. Her roommate situation didn’t have the appeal she’d hoped it would. My parents even moved to a different house, and my sister moved with them. Finally, after nearly four and a half years living with my parents after college, at the age of 26, one month away from the age of 27, my sister moved out of my parents’ house and into her very own.

And after nearly four and a half years living on my own after college, at the age of 26, one month away from the age of 27, I moved back into my parents’ house. To occupy the room that my sister moved out of. The move was the last one I thought I would ever choose to make. But choose it I did. Because I didn’t (and still don’t) know what I want to do with my life. Or maybe I do know what I want to do with my life but I don’t know exactly how to get there, or maybe I’m afraid to pursue it.

If I remember correctly, the story from the major magazine said that people my age were choosing to live with their parents because the economy was bad and they couldn’t find jobs, or because they’d been babied so much growing up that they were unprepared to make the adult decisions they needed to make concerning which college to attend or which job to take, or even where to live. I don’t remember if the story mentioned that people my age were choosing to live with their parents because all of their dreams diverged in the woods, and they didn’t know what path to take. Because it seems to me that my trouble is not a bad economy or being unprepared for the decisions that I’d have to face as an adult. It seems to me that my trouble is that I have too many options.

The thing is, I don’t think my generation is too babied or too troubled to find steady, well-meaning employment. I think that more than ever, we’ve been encouraged to be whatever we want to be but we haven’t entirely escaped the pressure to just get a “nice job and settle down” and the conflict between the two can lead us astray. Instead of having one option, we have many, and by and large, we’re more than adequately prepared to pursue and succeed at any of them. At least that’s how I see it: I have too many options because I’m entirely too capable of doing whatever it is that I want to do – all I’d really have to do is apply myself a little bit. It’s not that I can’t find a job. Because I can. I’ve applied to many of them. But none of them really interests me that much, so I don’t do the requisite follow-up phone call to see if they’d received and reviewed my application. Which in turn makes it appear as though I don’t really want the job, that I’m not really that interested. And so my not calling kind of sabotages the entire situation and then they don’t call me and I don’t get an interview and we all know that without an interview, there is no job offer and rarely have I seen anyone get a job without first being extended an offer of one. It’s just kind of how it works.

Truth be told, I might really be interested in the job. And I might be really good at it. But I cannot tell you what all the job entails when I apply for it. I cannot tell you if I will get bored doing it, if I will stress out doing it, if doing it will almost require me to give up my workout time. And so I don’t call.