They did everything right: the corporate trainees

I know of several people who find themselves upside down and underwater in the aftermath of having done everything right. More than one came from lower middle class poverty — heroin-addicted and alcoholic parents, young adulthoods spent working multiple jobs, full ride scholarships and 4.0 GPAs, the works. All of these people landed good, executive positions with benefits in their early 20s. They were all frugal, prudent with their money, and debt free. They delayed or avoided procreation until their 30s or 40s, when they finally perceived themselves as having “enough” assets to support a family. They are all responsible, hardworking, honest people. They have all been taken to the cleaners and currently find themselves drowning in debt.

Goody Two Shoes believed a lie. She waited tables in high school, earning straight As while foregoing sleep. She eschewed normal teenage initiation rites such as drug and alcohol experimentation and romance in order to become the Most Virtuous Scholar. She went to college on scholarships and graduated Magna cum Laude. She paid off the modest amount of amassed debt she accrued by the age of 23. She bought a house by age 25. She proved that someone with a junkie mom and an alcoholic dad could do it. The public school system and the college cheered her on as their favorite. She was proof that it wasn’t only rich kids who were allowed to succeed.

Years later, the cushy corporate job she landed promoted her case in much the same way it had been buoyed in high school and college. She received promotion after promotion until she was one of the top earners at her company. She deserved and earned every accolade and pay raise. One day, the company was abruptly bought by another corporation. Though she was promised that she would have a place in the new hierarchy, they lied. She was laid off. It was nothing personal, they said. The elimination of her position was part of the reorganization, they said.
She went on unemployment for the first time in her life. She rebounded because she was always scrappy. She managed to pay her bills and keep her house. She got another corporate job by pulling a bunch of strings. It paid less but it was enough to get by. This lasted a few years until she was laid off again.

She put out thousands of resumes. Most never got to the interview phase, but when they did, the quiet subtext was that she was overqualified. She was anything but lazy: she never gave up and continues to this day to sift for the golden parachute among the scams and executive grunt work that might as well be fast food because the pay is about the same. She has pinched every penny, but despite her best efforts, she is going to lose the house. She has frightening amounts of credit debt and loans. She is going to have to live in a van with her two dogs as the best possible outcome. Furthermore, her indigent parents will be homeless or as she was the one supporting them.
She’s not real… or is she?

The person described above is not real, or at least not specifically real, but you get my point. She gave up her youth, her diligence, and her potential for absolutely nothing. In every case like this, school utterly failed to prepare a gifted, hardworking superstar for the real world.
They never teach about lifestyle creep in school, yet if there is any lesson that needs to be learned RIGHT NOW, lifestyle creep is it. Our entire civilization is beset with lifestyle creep, and it is equally the fault of everyone on all political sides. As expectations attached to living “standards” rise, the untold luxuries of the past become normal.

My father grew up in the South side of Chicago in a modest duplex. His dad worked in a bar as a bartender. Their local vacations, if you can call them that, were tied to the German-American club they belonged to called Turner Camp. My mother grew up in a family of six not too far from where my father came of age. I have seen the pictures of the house where she and her three siblings lived: it is still there and it is tiny. Just like in the TV series Shameless, the whole family shared one bathroom.

None of these people considered themselves poor. Perhaps this is because my Chicagoan parents lived in the city during a time when the streets were safe and a working man could support his wife and children on a single income.

My parents, for better or for worse, aided in the gentrification that is responsible for immiserating so many common people today. They raised me in the posh, ungrateful suburbs. Unlike Ms. Goody Two Shoes, I did plenty wrong and did not maintain a 4.0 GPA or anything close to it. My husband and I were so stupid/unfortunate on the finance front that we ended up living with them no less than four times in our near-25 year marriage. But at least I did not stick myself in a corporate position that trained me to depend on a failing system for my livelihood. I had to make my way early on as a bohemian creative. I had to figure out how to exist and stay mentally healthy outside the corporate system. I had to scrap, hustle, stand up for myself, and make do with far less this whole time. I never made six figures, so at least I had the privilege of not getting used to it. Ms. Goody Two Shoes is getting the education I earned in my 30s and 40s, but the difference between us is that her real education was delayed and mine wasn’t.

Mama, don’t raise your babies to be office drones

The corporate system is an ever-more-frantic game of musical chairs. It has been that way for a long time now. I find it especially painful to watch kids being groomed for it. With every school choir trip to Europe and every elite soccer tournament, they are being trapped in a mentality of extreme dependence on a rapidly failing system.

The climate controlled, internet inundated lifestyles of the current generation of children are going the way of the dodo. They have been shielded within walls of ignorance and dissonance that this is the “only way”. They will waste their most productive years twiddling video game controllers. This waste will not truly make itself known until it becomes apparent that only a select few can maintain the lifestyle of corporate luxury they took for granted while growing up. Unlike my generation, they do not have parents who taught them any form of self-sufficiency, such as cooking, home maintenance, or budgeting. To make things worse, may of today’s youngsters are saddled with autism spectrum disorders which were most likely caused by early childhood vaccines. When their parents become elderly, sicken, and die off, the Peter Pans who frittered away countless years in gaming and social media obsessions will find themselves in the asylums and poorhouses of the future.
As most everyone knows, I chose not to have kids in this incarnation because I recognize it is the world’s toughest job and very difficult to get right. I would ask today’s parents of school children to consider getting your children out of the school system and to examine your alternatives. There is no fixing the system. The egregore of schools is too corrupt and the rot is too deep. College was a joke when I went there in the mid-1990s. Though I somehow managed to eke out a music degree that I use every day, college and especially grad school are usually expensive wastes of time.

We are not yet in the age of apprenticeships, but I believe apprenticeships will be coming back. Most commonly, apprenticeship will happen informally as parents train their children to ply the family trade. I believe it will be more and more common to see adult kids running their parent’s restaurants, taking over the family’s repair shop, daughters of teachers taking on their elderly mother’s students, children of doctors and nurses learning the healing arts directly from mom or dad, and woodworkers teaching their sons and daughters to mend walls and build furniture. I myself would like to take on an apprentice to take all of my music students someday but at the moment there seems to be no logical framework for that to happen.

If nothing else, kids need to learn “adulting” from the adults in their lives: paying bills, conserving energy, living with less, cooking on a budget because they won’t learn it in school. Advanced math, literature, constant tests, and hideously expensive school trips need to be thrown in the deep freezer. I hope that someday that schools will start teaching useful skills again. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen anytime soon.