Career planning is increasingly becoming a priority for young Americans. In an era of bad housing and job markets, a bachelor’s degree isn’t as alluring an investment as it has been in the past. More and more of America’s youth are doing the math, weighing the deposit of time and money versus the reward of a degree, and ultimately deciding they can just skip straight to not having the energy to get through the day.
“I don’t really see the need to move multiple times, spend all that time studying and socializing, building up hope and dreams, all ultimately to fuse my joints together standing at a cash register,” says 23-year-old New Yorker Craig Scott. “Fuck it, I’ll just go clock in and head to the register now.”
Interestingly, these young people have found a variety of ways to stay exhausted without an extremely flawed educational system providing a boost. With stereotypical backbreaking labor sparse in the modern era, mental stress has become the in-vogue method for slowly killing one’s body.
Many youths have taken to long hours at thankless repetitive retail jobs frequented by classless entitled clientele to provide a rich, quality mental degradation. Still, some people have had to get more creative.
“By pursuing a career as an artist, I’m virtually guaranteed to have an unhealthy heart rate at all times,” says Crystal Mayfield of Philadelphia. “I’d have to hustle my ass off in a good economy. Under these conditions, I could never be certain of food on the table for the rest of my life. On the bright side, I came to this conclusion 4 years earlier than many of my peers.
Colleges nationwide will now be faced with the same challenge: how to make college more appealing than a lifetime of employment malaise.