Society interviewed me recently. Presented without further comment is the full interview, complete and unexpurgated.
Content warning: language.
Work and Career
Society: Identify yourself.
Me: My name is William. I’m 37 years old, I’m from the United States, and I work as a revenue integrity auditor at a major regional health system.
Society: What is your level of education?
Me: I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science–
Society: [interrupts suddenly] Computer science? Why aren’t you working in your field? You would make a lot more money in programming than whatever the fuck revenue integrity auditing is.
Me: I applied for 1,100 programming jobs between 2010 and 2014. The industry refused to allow me entry. Your argument is invalid.
Society: What, you didn’t do any internships?
Me: No. I worked for my parents in the summertime between classes.
Society: What do they do?
Me: Commercial cleaning.
Society: Why didn’t you work in something closer to your field?
Me: Nobody would hire me as an intern. The internships I tried to get into required me to work without pay in another city or–
Society: [interrupts again] So why didn’t you go?
Me: I still can’t afford to drop everything and move cities for three months to work without pay. I damn sure couldn’t afford it back then. Plus, I know what my time is worth and it’s not worth zero dollars an hour.
And stop interrupting me. It’s rude.
Society: See, that’s the problem with your generation. You people just don’t want to work.
Me: Dude, I’m on a break from work right now. Here’s my badge. [holds up the work badge hanging from his neck] I love to work. I work my ass off. And yeah, you’re right – if the pay is nothing but experience, then yeah, I don’t want to work because when I work, I expect to be paid. That’s how the social contract works: the worker sells his labor to the labor market, the labor market buys what he’s selling, and the worker is compensated in the form of a wage, college credit, or some other kind of reward. “Experience” and “exposure” don’t count because it’s not a fair trade, whereas college credit has monetary and academic value, and the value of a paycheck is self-explanatory since it’s actual money that you earn.
Society: So why aren’t you climbing the corporate ladder faster?
Me: Because you people aren’t retiring fast enough. See, I can rush to hasty generalizations just as easily as you can.
Society: Is that so. Well, why are you changing jobs so frequently?
Me: Huh? I spent 12 years working for my parents and 6 more at my last employer. I’ve changed jobs once in the last three years and twice in the last five, one of those being an internal promotion.
Society: If you worked more, you’d move up faster.
Me: To the morgue or what? I watched 60- and 70-hour work weeks destroy my father’s body and nearly destroy my mother’s mind. I refuse to capitulate to that.
Society: I bet you’re still in debt for student loans for that useless degree of yours. You knew what you were signing up for.
Me: Firstly, my degree wasn’t useless. The analytical skills I learned in college are things I use every day. I have an uncanny ability to detect the stink of bullshit, which is a key part of how I earn a living. And I have exceptionally strong computer skills that make my job significantly easier. Secondly, fuck you because I graduated debt-free.
Society: Good for you, snowflake. I bet you feel like you were lied to, don’t you?
Me: That’s the first thing we’ve agreed on for this entire conversation.
Society: Please, elaborate.
Me: From the time I could understand language until I was 18 years old, I worked very hard on my education and got a full ride to the state flagship university. When I got there, I fought a depression that almost killed me and managed to graduate with a B+ average. Considering my degree and my mental state, I’m pretty damned impressed with how things turned out.
As for my brethren who are drowning in student debt, to circle back to a point you think you made: no, a lot of them didn’t know what they were signing up for and the system you seem to have some kind of weird fetish for did nothing to educate them. I did understand what was at stake because I took accounting classes in high school and thus knew what compound interest was, but even then, it’s hard to understand when you’re 18 years old just what that kind of a commitment entails – and you’re still high on the possibility that you were raised to believe the system has to offer you – get a degree, get a job, pay off the loan, easy-peasy. What they do a poor job of telling you is that the interest starts accumulating from the day you sign up for classes, that if you’re on an income-driven repayment plan you may never outpace the interest, and if you’re stupid enough to go to some bougie private school, you may incur so much debt, and at such a high interest rate, that you will die in debt. And they certainly do a poor job of telling you that the debt isn’t dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings, so not even getting a court to agree that you’re insolvent is enough to get that monkey off your back.
The system lied to so many of my fellow students and has continued to do so in the years since. I blame the system because the system is to blame. Simple as.
Society: And yet you continue to blame the system. Why don’t you just work harder?
Me: You still don’t understand it, do you? I was sold a narrative for 18 years of my life that a university degree would be my ticket to the middle class. When I tried to break in, I was turned away over a thousand times. That’s a systematic failure. Why not blame the system when the system has failed me?
As for work ethic, you shut your face about work ethic until you get off your ass and do something about the climate, racism, anti-intellectualism, and the perplexing fact that James Blunt is still allowed behind a microphone.
Culture and Values
Society: There you go again about social issues. What is it with you people and social issues? Why not focus on yourselves?
Me: Martin Luther King shared his dream in nineteen-sixty-fucking-three and Black people are still treated as an underclass. Women’s rights over their own bodies are receding faster than my hairline. ICE is forcibly and violently breaking families apart and deporting US citizens to countries they have nothing to do with. The ice caps are melting. Palestinians are being denied their right to self-determination by the genocidal Israeli regime. Ukrainians are being denied their right to self-determination by the genocidal Russian regime. And don’t even get me started on Taiwan, North Korea, South Sudan, the LGBT+ community (especially trans and nonbinary people), et cetera, et cetera. We walk through the world with our eyes open, thank you very much, and when our friends, family, fellow students, and work colleagues are having their rights taken away from them, we stand beside them as allies. That’s the very thing you taught us to do and you have the unmitigated gall to then proceed to ask what it is with “us people” and social issues. Do you fucking hear yourself? You sent us all to university, where critical thinking is expected, and we walked out as a generation of people who ask uncomfortable questions. Why are we so focused on social issues. By Plato’s beard, I don’t think I’ve heard such a stupid question ever in my life.
As for the focus on myself, yeah, no. I am who I am because of those around me. You, as a society, are what you are in part because of my contributions. It must go both ways. If my brothers and sisters are hurting, then so am I. Sorry that I have a conscience and that exercising that conscience appears to offend you.
Society: Sorry I asked. So, uh… what’s the deal with rejecting the institutions that built the world you inhabit?
Me: Let me answer this question by way of analogy. Suppose you are in a romantic relationship with someone of your desired sex and gender. This person is the dog’s bollocks in your eyes: they can do no wrong, not even if they ripped a massive fart during sex or had an allergy to your favorite food. Now imagine that this match of yours is deathly allergic to telling you the truth. You ask where they’ve been, they say they’ve been to the bowling alley. You ask what they ate at the bar, they say hot dogs. You ask how many beers they drank, they claim two. And then come to find out, they were at your best friend’s house, eating pepperoni and anchovy pizza, drinking Wild Turkey, and screwing like rabbits. You wouldn’t believe a word that left that person’s lips after such a discovery, would you?
Society: I suppose not.
Me: Now swap your best friend for the labor market and the pizza for entry-level jobs… or something. I should have thought through a better analogy. But my point is that back in your day, things had a definite flow: graduate high school, marry your high school sweetheart, get a job at the factory, buy a starter home, pop out two kids, buy a pickup truck and a car and a color TV, and you’re set – and all on one income, too. Do you know what the average house goes for in my town?
Society: No.
Me: Nearly seven times my annual salary. I’m getting paid $29 an hour to do the job I do, and even making twenty-nine dollars a fucking hour, I still couldn’t afford a house payment on top of all my other obligations if I were to try to live alone. If I had a wife, we might be able to live together in a house of our own depending on what she earns.
Society: So you still live with your parents?
Me: Yes, and do you know how fucking embarrassing that is to admit at age 37?
Society: Just try harder, maybe?
Me: To do what, exactly? I can’t lower housing prices through sheer force of will.
Society: You just don’t have any ambition.
Me: What?
Lifestyle
Society: You heard me. You don’t have any ambition. You’re anxious and burned out when you’ve got more conveniences than at any other point in human history. What gives?
Me: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t use DoorDash or UberEats, I drive everywhere I go, I pick my own groceries at the supermarket… aside from having fiber at home and an iPhone in my pocket, I’m still pretty solidly stuck in 1999. Well, maybe more like 2009 since I do use Gmail filters. But yeah, not much has changed in that stretch of time.
Society: What’s the deal with the phones, anyway?
Me: I don’t follow.
Society: You’re constantly on the thing.
Me: Am not. If you actually took care to watch me, you’d observe that I read, cook, crochet, work, drive, maintain my car, do yard work (when it’s seasonable), so on and so forth. I’m not on social media. If I texted everybody I knew, I could send both texts in a couple of minutes. I’m single, no kids, no friends, just my parents. I mean, yeah, I look stuff up because I have the internet in my pocket, and I do have my AirPods in a lot because I listen to a lot of music and podcasts. But I don’t sit and doom-scroll. Not when I have Anne Brontë and my electric lawnmower beckoning.
Society: I bet everything you consume is some kind of liberal claptrap.
Me: Actually, I shy away from political content. The real world is depressing enough without willingly consuming political podcasts.
Society: Bullshit. As eagerly as you reject tradition–
Me: Stop right there. If you saw me between the fourth Thursday of November and the first day of January, you would know that I’m a big ol’ softy around the holidays and that I take my holiday traditions seriously.
Society: But what about marriage? Having children?
Me: They simply aren’t important to me. I don’t want children and I don’t want to get married. I fail to see how that is even remotely material to the stuff of this interview.
Society: Let’s circle back to the whole ambition thing. Again, you don’t have any.
Me: By what right do you render such a judgment? You don’t know me. You know an idealized version of me that the media has sold you, like that self-aggrandizing gasbag Joel Stein back in 2013. (I bought a Time subscription specifically so I could hate-read that article. I was weird at age 25.) But you don’t know me. You keep claiming that I am unambitious and I have yet to hear any evidence to support your claim.
Society: Au contraire, mon frère.
Me: Vraiment? Then pray, tell me what my greatest ambition in life is.
Society: Lifetime discount on avocado toast?
Me: [laughs hysterically] You don’t understand us at all, do you? You certainly don’t understand me. Avocado toast is a waste of a perfectly good avocado, first of all, and second of all, this response has been brought to you by the letters C, F, and O. Do you know what they spell?
Society: Not any English word that I recognize.
Me: It’s an acronym. My goal is to become a chief financial officer in a hospital system.
Society: Oh. That’s a pretty ambitious goal.
Me: I like to think so, yes.
Society: Then why aren’t you already the VP of finance?
Me: I’m on the outside looking in. I’m still looking for my first exposure to working in finance. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.
Society: Fair point. Okay, then what are you doing about it?
Me: Glad you asked. This might be the first question you’ve asked me in good faith throughout this interview.
Work: The Second Helping
Society: Please, do go on.
Me: I’m going back to school. I’m going to get a bachelor’s in accounting and start working toward my CPA license, and once that’s done, I’m going to get a master’s degree with a concentration in finance.
Society: AI will take over that job in five years.
Me: No. Not even close. You have no understanding whatsoever of what an accountant actually does and I don’t have the crayons to explain it to you.
Society: Well then, fuck me, am I right? Okay, so what’s the deal with your generation and its insistence on authenticity?
Me: While normal teens were dating and going to dances and sports games, my ass sat at home and read Hamlet for fun. When Polonius tells Laertes to be true to himself, I took that shit to heart so hard it pierced through my sternum. And, for my part, I watched my mom work in misery for her entire career because she didn’t have the support she needed to go to college and then to law school. Her dream was to be a district attorney. Do you know what she ended up doing instead?
Society: Not going to law school? I assume she never ended up becoming a DA and channeling her inner Jack McCoy.
Me: High-five.
Society: I beg your pardon?
Me: McCoy was my favorite prosecutor on Law and Order growing up.
Society: Ah, I see. [high-fives me] I’m glad you appreciate the reference. Anyway, please, do go on about your mom.
Me: She saw how useless her high school degree was going to be – this was, mind you, in the day and age before standardized curricula, so she was quite literally learning fuck-all in her classes and was smart enough to realize it – and so she dropped out, married my dad, and a few years later, had me. When the divorce happened, she had to enter the workforce, which she did in a menial government job. Well, the work was hardly menial, but the pay certainly was. The system never got to work in her favor because she grew up in a poor family. She could have gone far. She could have gone far, fucking should have gone far. My dad dropped out of high school to go to work for his dad. You know what he could have done? He took TV broadcasting class the semester before dropping out, and he fucking loved it. He could have graduated, gotten a job at a local TV network, and made an entire career in broadcasting. Instead, he became a tradesman like his dad and granddad. Not to demean the trades, but again, my dad could – and should – have gone farther than he did, with less wear and tear on his body and more earning potential doing safer work. Instead, he’s put in nearly 50 years of honest work as a carpenter and commercial cleaner, and it has been hell on his back, shoulders, wrists, hips, knees, feet, and hands.
Society: Sounds like a generational problem, then.
Me: Yes. See, now you’re getting it. In both of their cases, they had to labor in unhappiness and the permanent sting of unrealized dreams and potential, instead doing whatever they could find in the newspaper to make ends meet. They inculcated in me the importance of finding my passion and following it. I did that with computers and it got me nowhere.
Society: Perhaps it wasn’t really your passion. That’s okay… we think. People start late and still experience success, people as diverse as Julia Child, Grandma Moses, Harlan Sanders, and Miguel de Cervantes, all of whom did their greatest work after age fifty. Lots of people follow something and find out the hard way that it’s not for them. We see it a lot in the business world, incidentally… if you love accounting and finance half as much as you seem to, then yeah, go for it.
Me: KFC is terrible fried chicken; Popeye’s and Bojangles’ are much better. But yes, you made a terrific point just now: age is only a number. And if you knew how much joy it brought me to do finance-related stuff – to do the computations, to analyze financial statements, to talk about risk management and stuff like that – then perhaps you would understand why I’m a lot more excited for my forties than I was for my twenties.
Society: Perhaps we misread you, William.
Me: Yeah, perhaps you did. You might try approaching in good faith instead of acting like a judgmental ass when my generation tries to talk about what we’re going through. Other people might do this, but I’m not asking for you to fix it. I just want to be seen and heard.
Society: We’ll listen, we promise.
Me: Yeah, no. Y’all have never listened. And if you think it’s bad for us, imagine how much worse it is for the generations coming up behind me. Gen Z can’t even break into the job market because it’s nearly impossible to get a starter job unless you know a guy. I’ve known some Gen Z’ers. They’re good people, just fucked over by society harder than – actually, I’m just gonna leave it at that before I make an extremely off-color joke that even Kevin Smith would find a bit on the crude side. And don’t even get me started on Generation Alpha.
Coda
Society: We’re sorry. Most of us are, anyway. It’s the ones in power who screwed us all. They called us slackers, or flower children, or the children of the self-esteem generation – the “Me Generation.”
Me: I’m aware, and honestly I’m willing to look the other way. My parents are Generation X and they kick ass. I’ve known a lot of X’ers over the years, a lot of Boomers too. I’ve managed to claw my way onto a decent path. Not a great path, just a decent one. Things are looking up but only because I will it to be so.
Society: And we’re proud of you. Legitimately, we’re proud of you for finally getting your head screwed on right. What you were hinting at, that sounds like the kind of circumstances that could mess with a person’s brain chemistry if left unchecked. The people in power kept moving the goalposts. They screwed the little guy, too, but folks like Ronald Reagan tried to convince us otherwise.
Me: Yeah. Let’s just say that buying work clothes at Kohl’s wasn’t the only thing I needed to do when I got my first healthcare job. And I’m all too familiar with how the little guy always gets screwed. That was my dad. He built beautiful houses, did excellent work with his own two hands, is still one hell of a carpenter without any formal training to his name. He was self-employed and it was never easy, but it seemed like it only got harder as the years went on, and not just because of his back or his MTP joints.
Society: Then we can agree on something?
Me: Maybe.
Society: I want us to agree to do what we can to help the upcoming generations. Mentor them, support them, let them work for us and prove themselves. We remember how it felt to be young and hungry, to be eager to prove ourselves. Only difference is that we actually got the chance to.
Me: Now you’re speaking my sort of language. [raises his can of PBR] A toast, to potential and promise. 乾杯!
Society: [raises its collective beverage] Sláinte.
If all it took was all of us raising our glasses and toasting to potential and promise, then every Gen Z person who currently wants to work in his or her chosen field would be doing so, I wouldn’t have had to languish in the job market long enough to drop out of the unemployment statistics, and I may very well be further down the road to my actual career goal of being a CFO. Instead, I’m busy preparing to earn a credential that is designed to be difficult to earn if you follow the canonical path of studying accounting right out of high school, never mind if you’re reinventing yourself mid-career like I am. What the video essayists and mainstream media think-piece authors want you to believe is that all of us in Generation Y got jobs immediately out of college, that we all bought little pink houses with white picket fences out front, and that we’re all living happily ever after married to the person of our dreams and up to our eyeballs in kids, cats, or kids and cats. I don’t need to tell any of you reading this – especially my Millennial readers – that that didn’t happen for a lot of us. That part of the narrative is conveniently glossed over in the name of gaming the algorithm.
Where Generation Z is right now is where Generation Y was 12 to 15 years ago, which is an eternity in the modern news cycle. And that is why it initially galled me that members of that cohort behaved as though they were the first to experience the collapse of the labor market’s social contract for workers new to it. But as I thought about it, and as I thought about what I went through when I was their age, it all made sense: what was completely without precedent for us was only worsened for them by the pandemic and the rise of AI in the enterprise. So before you judge, I ask that you stop and think – or pause and ponder if you’re a certain math YouTuber – and imagine how a few kilometers in their shoes must feel.
I used to subscribe to a school of thought I first heard in a Gin Blossoms song (hint: don’t take your life advice from ’90s alternative rock): don’t expect too much and you’ll never be let down. The problem with this advice is that you work to the level of your expectations. If you expect great things from yourself, you will do great work; if you expect bad or even mediocre things from yourself, you will do bad or mediocre work toward those goals. My choice to aspire to be a CFO someday is exactly that: a choice. There aren’t many CFOs in the workforce relative to the number of FP&A analysts, staff accountants, or even more senior positions like controllers and treasurers, so you might allege my goal to be a moonshot. I’d argue that that’s the whole point. If you aim for the moon, you either become Neil Armstrong, who’s famous for being the first Earthling to walk on another world, or Jim Lovell, who’s famous for failing to land on the moon and living to tell the tale. In either case, you could become an absolute legend, and even if legendary status is withheld from you, you can certainly leave a lasting impression closer to home, in your family, in your community, in the workplace. You have it within you, regardless of your age or generational affiliation, to do great things.
Be excellent to each other.