It's exactly this.

I'm a member of this group.

I was told growing up by first-generation college graduates that any degree was better than no degree. I had persistent doubts, but was told by those same parents year after year before and during college that "You may not want it now, but you won't regret having it in the future."

So not knowing better and not being told any better by the university I attended, I got a history degree and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. When I graduated in 2012, I was reluctant to leave the town that I grew up in (where there were no jobs, being essentially only a university town) and could only find service sector work. The same baby boomers that told me to put myself in debt to secure a degree now told me that any job was better than no job at all.

I eventually was able to get a job at a call center after being a temp (twice) at the same corporation. Yet within a year, I hit a hard income cap. In this job that I had worked so hard to secure, I could only pay off my debt over more than a decade throwing all my disposible income at it. And the job was soul-crushing. All my coworkers were warm-bodies that life had shat upon; my bosses were all sociopathic and incompetent PMPs that could barely open Outlook and constantly took the credit for any and all off-paper work that I did. For some reason, I started drinking heavily.

I was fortunate enough to be able to support my wife while she learned how to code and through fate, diligence, and diversity metrics, she was able to secure an IT job. She convinced me to quit soon afterwards and try to follow in her footsteps, but with apparently less favorable odds. Who wants to hire an unemployed self-taught 30-year-old white male with an unstable work history in an entry-level role?

And now, if looking down the barrel of economic obsolescence wasn't enough, I have to deal with baby-boomers, who by their own admission waltzed with ease into careers, constantly looking down on me for not gladly and immediately selling what remains of my youth to pernicious corporations whose five-year plans inevitably include either automating my position or shuttering because of the brick & mortar apocalypse.

Yes, it's a very perplexing hole, this lack of participation.

Our pipedream at this point is for me to be a stay-at-home dad and develop FOSS software when I'm not caregiving or doing home economy, with the eventual goal of buying a farm somewhere where we can both be doing what we really want (i.e. living as ethically as we possibly can in a dystopian hellscape far, far away from the gods of the Marketplace). I don't think this feeling is in the minority.

user:	ananonymouse
created:	November 7, 2018
karma:	3