This young lady feels sorry for herself because her full time well paying writing job does not afford her the adventure and glamour of a TV show’s heroine. I know lots of people who would say she’s flat out made it at age 22.
Seems to me the world is her oyster. My dear, just consider how very, very much worse it could have been. You could have made the same mistake so many of your peers did, and gone to law school. Instead you’re being well compensated to do something you love. Mazel tov.
We went out to meet the folks at the other site (which was out in the middle of nowhere) and I thought that a nice gesture would be to bring a dozen doughnuts, given that it was O’dark-thirty. We arrived, I gave the doughnuts, and the first thing that That Guy said was “next time, bring breakfast burritos from (place)”.
About six months later, it was time to go out there again and I figured, hey, why not? I stopped and picked up a half dozen breakfast burritos from (place). He said “they’re not hot anymore.”
Truly, there are people who will complain about anything.
“They’re not hot anymore.”
“”Considering where I’m going to shove them, you should be grateful.”
Nah, I just didn’t bring anything the next time.
(Yes. He complained about that too.)
I wouldn’t have said it either. (Or thought of it until the drive back home. Isn’t that always the way?)
My Clever Rejoinder Reflex works on a 45-minute time delay. Soooo frustrating.
To bring us back around to the person who wrote the article, it seems like her problem is not the issue that she is doing everything she can to communicate that she’s resentful of others, but that she just doesn’t have a baseline for knowing how good or how bad she has it.
If I had to guess (and I don’t know if this is me being charitable or being uncharitable), I’d say that her closest circle of friends has a semi-regular meeting where they complain about how difficult they have it and she feels somewhat left out because she can’t complain like they can… and complaining that you can’t complain like your circle of friends is really, really tacky when your friends have just finished a story about how awful it is to be trapped and not know what’s going to happen next. What’s left to do? Why, write an essay for HuffPo.
My Clever Rejoinder Reflex works on a 45-minute time delay.
Which is one of the great things about blog commenting. We can pretend that these things are spontaneous, it’s just that we read the post three days later.
That Guy must have been raised by wolves.
Editor’s Note: This is one post in a series on the quarter-life crisis.
I started to scream when I came to this line. Given that it is the first line in the linked piece, it was a bad sign.
The grass is always greener on the other side. If she had pursued a different path she would writing the same thing with different words. Everyone thinks about what their life would be like if they had chosen to do x instead of y. It’s not a generation y thing, it’s a human thing.
And she sounds like a complainer, but there are people who identify with her, I’m sure.
Just like How I Met Your Mother. The main plot of the show is that Ted is miserable because he can’t find the right someone to be with. Meanwhile, Lily, who met the love of her life in college and has been with him ever since, intermittently whines about all the cool singles stuff she never got a chance to do.
Or, to quote R. A. Lafferty,
We are all cousins. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being.
Yes, just like Lily and Ted. When I lived in the dorms my hallmates and I would gather in the basement every week and watch How I Met Your Mother and Heros.
Maribou and I were discussing this last night and she pointed out the existential crisis at the heart of the complaint and brought up Sartre.
The author here is saying “I did what I’m told, things worked out, I’m still not happy”. Sartre pointed out that half of his friends died violently in war and he, too, was still not happy.
I went off in the whole “well, then, here’s how you should think about things direction” but it turned into a rant and the conversation kinda declined after that point (which, I admit, was my fault).
In any case, this whole “stuff happened, still not happy” thing is one of those things like falling in love that each person pretty much has to wrestle with as if they were the first person on the planet to do so.
But you can see why the Greeks didn’t let people talk until they were 40 when you read some of this crap.
I often find myself lamenting the fact that I’m not living at home and not working a part-time job.
She wants to find out what it’s like to struggle? She should drop that line on someone who can only find a part-time job and can’t afford to move out of mom and dad’s house. Overcoming the resulting traumatic injuries should be a great character builder.
And she sure as hell sounds like she needs some character building.
She should talk to some billionaire whose tax rate might go up a point or two. They’re the real victims.
Meh, this one didn’t work, Mike. She’s not complaining that she couldn’t find a real journalism job, or that the car and house she can afford aren’t as nice as what she’d really want.
She’s complaining that she’s got it too good, and is missing out on the romance of suffering. A better analogy would be a billionaire wondering if life would be better if he didn’t have that vacation home in Aspen.
On a related noted, that Anne Marie Slaughter article about “women still can’t have it all,” pissed me off to no end, because there seems to be an implicit assumption that the inability is particularly unfair to women, as though men can possibly have it all.
If the belief, implicit or explicit, is that men can have it all is the standard, then somebody’s going about this equality business with blinders on that are going to doom them to disappointment no matter how their life turns out.
Did you read all of the follow-up to that? It spawned some really interesting conversations, some of which along the lines of what you’re talking about.
Yeah, I did. And I felt the same as most of those folks. While my life is pretty damned good, each year I have students I’ve come to care about graduate and move into that tough world of trying to make a living. I even created a career seminar course because I didn’t think we were properly preparing them. (Whether we’re properly preparing them now is still open to debate, but at least I don’t have seniors walking across stage to get their diploma without ever drafted a resume or having gone through a job interview.)
I think of my students, and I want to kick this girl’s ass for her fatuous self-indulgence. I know a number of people her age who would love to have the luxury of being able to complain about not having to struggle.
And I’m with the good doctor; the “quarter life crisis” line revulsed me. The whole thing made me spitting mad, angrier than anything I’ve read in quite a while.
Oh, I see you’re talking about the followup to the “Women can’t have it all article,” not the “quarter-life crisis” one. Bad reading on my part (that’s how mad I am!). No, when that article came out I didn’t have time to follow the followup, but I’d be shocked if nobody had mentioned it. It’s not exactly an obscure enough point for me to clap myself on the back for thinking of it.