Lost generation?
Katharine McIntosh describes her experience of unemployment
Today I have the doubtful honour of becoming an official government concern. This went unmarked by the government, or indeed by any outward sign at all, save for a note scribbled a month or so ago in my diary, reminding me (as if I needed a reminder): ‘six months unemployed today’. Now that I have been unemployed for six months, and being in the ‘sixteen to twenty-four’ age group, I have become eligible for government-backed job and training schemes, intended to prevent me from becoming part of a ‘Lost Generation’ of young people with impaired life chances: there were over a million unemployed eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds according to recent figures. According to Wikipedia (source of all knowledge to said generation) this term was ‘originally used for those who died in the war… many felt that “the flower of youth” and the “best of the nation” had been destroyed’. Mine is the generation of student top-up fees, meaning that graduates can expect to amass debts of at least fifteen thousand pounds before starting their careers. The recession has operated to spur young people to incur further debt and, critically, to inhibit the chances that we will gain employment enabling us to eventually pay it all off. But the clinching factor securing this new use of the term ‘lost generation’ is our lack of control over our situation in a system created for us: the financial system that provided the Baby Boomers and Generation X with free education, sound pensions, early retirement, even second homes, has stymied its inheritors, in providing us with manifold aspirations and expectations without means of attainment.
Among my contemporaries at university expectation of getting a good job – with prospects and a healthy salary – was fairly implicit, and generally the motivation for attaining a degree. With the debt that we were all incurring, with the necessary student accoutrements of nice clothes, meals out, drinks out, phone, camera, iPod, laptop, expecting to be able to pay it all back was part of the deal. The consumer culture into which we were born as Thatcher’s babies operated to perpetuate the system – spend now, buy now (get good job), pay later. One of my course colleagues, six months into a lucrative banking contract, told me that she didn’t particularly enjoy her job, but nevertheless thought it a good post as she could pay back her debt in just two years.
Given the current state of the job market, perhaps we young jobless are culpable of maintaining unrealistically high expectations of obtaining a rewarding job in the industry of our choice? Of being unwilling to start at the bottom with hard graft and pull ourselves up? This may be true, but it is hardly surprising given the choice-oriented culture promoted by New Labour in which we grew up. And for university leavers surrounded by advice and books oriented towards getting on a lucrative graduate scheme – one has just to peruse the Times Guide to the top 100 graduate employers to see the kind of expectations of training, money, management skills and prospects imparted to graduates – it is difficult not to take on these expectations.
With the close link between our consumer lifestyles and personal identity creation, whereby the self is constituted through the products we choose, many automatically ‘buy in’, desiring jobs in roles that facilitate this process: marketing, advertising, management consultancy. Even those of us whose vague aspirations are less directly consumer oriented, seeking a career in ‘doing good’ or ‘helping people’, are building up identity portfolios appropriate to our context and vision for the world. The cultural and social importance of jobs is both inevitable and implicit, as evidenced by our standard meeting-and-greeting question: ‘what do you do?’
In the past six months I have become adept at ducking this question, usually by talking about the volunteering I have been doing. I have been reluctant to say the words ‘I’m unemployed’ for two reasons. Firstly, experience has taught me that this precipitates what is often a very boring conversation about all my job hunting efforts, and secondly, because of the underlying categorisation being made, and assumptions regarding status that underpin this question – especially in the middle class milieu I inhabit.
Like many others on the dole, I was diagnosed with depression – albeit mild – shortly after leaving my previous post. I felt like a failure, was very tired and had enduring physical aches. Being unemployed goes deeper than the surface implications of visits to the job centre, money difficulties and writing applications. It cuts to the very core of our beings, our sense of self worth and understanding of our place in this world.
So the past six months have been an uphill struggle to feel better. Determined to improve things, I invested in my social life and hobbies. I was referred to the local psychological therapies service, opting for a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. While I feel that the CBT has helped me to recognise and tackle the negative thought patterns that affected how I processed unemployment, and am most grateful to have been able to have it on the NHS, I feel that I was affected by a deeper current of spiritual malaise, which underlies our culture and induces mental health problems.
In a culture in which our portfolio identity forms the basis of our sense of who we are, our focus necessarily goes outwards to the impression we are making, the effect we are having on others and on the world. If or when this process becomes severely inhibited, as is the case in unemployment, a crisis point is reached, arresting the system. This is a very painful process whereby one is faced head-on by the inner insecurities on which our image-based culture and economy depend.
For me, this process has instigated a period of spiritual reflection. Through this system of arrest I am undergoing a process of, in traditional Christian language, ‘dying to myself’, and slowly becoming more aware of my relationship with God, and the possibility of finding my true self identity in the stillness within.
I read a text on the parable of the prodigal son recently, and had an uncomfortable feeling of self recognition in the elder brother. Outwardly good, follower of moral rules and living up to expectations, his self-righteousness actually leaves him unwilling or unable to accept the father’s love and acceptance. This is in contrast to the self-indulgent profligate younger brother, who has come to his senses and returned to the father. So God consistently loves and reaches out to us, whatever our weaknesses. The question is whether we are prepared to trust to it, and be loved.
So whether or not I benefit from the government’s various job schemes, I feel far from lost. If, off the back of this recession, my generation can usurp exigent material identities from our hearts, then we may even gain the maturity necessary to transform the consumption-wrought global catastrophes of poverty and climate change that we’re inheriting. As St Francis of Assisi put it, ‘it is in losing that we find’. Here’s hoping that it turns out I’m part of a Found Generation.
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