Another of my friends joined the ranks of the underemployed today. This is frustrating, or at least weird. So many of the people I know don’t have work, or don’t have enough. And it’s certainly not because they aren’t competent, or responsible people. I’m surrounded by the sort of people society can point to and relax knowing that the future is in ideal hands: intelligent, even keeled, responsible committed folk, well founded graduates of one of the best education systems the world has to offer, people who combine the best benefits of intellectuals and salt-of-the-earth accomplishers. Excellent hard workers who take personal pride in the products of their work. My friends are dream people, living up to the promise embodied by the young adults smiling out of every university recruiting poster. So why do they spend so much time out of work?

I’m not under the impression that society owes me or anybody a job. I don’t think I would want to live in a system so structured that employment was a guarantee, or that such a system would likely work all that well. And I’m also aware that not having a job has something to do with not having gone out and found one. But I regret that for whatever reasons, so much potential goes to waste. A lot of this, I know, is because along with traits of tack-sharpness and deep-keel responsibleness, my friends also tend to suffer from chronic idealism, and the idealism industry has always been a tight one for employment. So we bring it on ourselves. We also don’t seem to need too much by way of material goods, which means we can do longer than average spells with only casual work or relying on, say, treeplanting money, which reduces the impetus to find real steady sustaining jobs.

Wether it’s a fault of their own or the system or something in between, it’s an odd scenario wherein the best of my generation – trained, sober, reliable people, many of whom haven’t overthrown a government or sported a counter-culture haircut in years – spend so much of their time not really contributing the best of themselves to the communities they exist in.

postscript: I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg’s immortal poem Howl, which begins
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

I’m also reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s observation that he didn’t think that the best minds of his and Allen Ginsberg’s generation could really be found in the English Department of Columbia University, but were more probably working in particle physics or something.