About a month ago, the Times had several articles marking the 50th anniversary of On the Road
I was a year or two out of college working for $18,000 a year as an editor at Simon & Schuster. I’m still surprised that someone was stupid enough to make a 23 year old a full editor. My friends and I would stay up until 5:00 am at blues clubs and then go into work the next day. But my boss prided himself on being unconventional, so he gave me a shot. I also think he had a thing for redheads.
I was in my little office going over a manuscript, when my buddy, Robin, called. She was driving her old Volvo to San Fransisco, where she had just found a job. Did I want to come with her for the week drive? Sure, I said.
My mom thought it was a lousy idea. I had just been accepted at the University of Chicago, and I would have to save my money for grad school. Mom is also not big on acts of utter randomness, so I had to listen to her gripes on the phone for a week. But I went anyway.
Robin had the car packed to the brim with all her crap. The trunk and the backseat we completely filled, except for a couple of inches for my bag. The first night, we stayed with my brother at the University of Virginia. The next night, we camped in Tennessee. And we bopped our way through the Southern states crashing on people’s sofas or pitching a tent in the woods.
There were some mishaps. In Oklahoma, her tire lost an inch of tread. We stopped at some gas station by the side of the highway where they gave us a new tire. Apparently, the idea of a new tire in Oklahoma is to glue the tread back on the old tire. We discovered this in the middle of the Arizona dessert where I had urged Robin to take us on a two hour detour to check out an archeological site. We were in 110 degree heat, on the side of a dirt road, 50 miles from the highway with no tires. We had also lost muffler on that dirt road, because the car was hanging so low with all of Robin’s crap. The muffler snapped off when we hit a ditch in the road. She reattached it with some duct tape. Yeah. After the tire and the muffler incident, we didn’t talk until we got to San Francisco.
But before that car drama, Robin and I had a fabulous time. She had brought a tattered copy of On the Road. And we took turns reading from it out loud, while the other drove. David Brooks pulled out a fabulous quote from the book,
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn.
After On the Road, I read a bunch of Hunter Thompson and had some adventures that were mostly harmless, but terribly fun.
Brooks despairs that kids today don’t have that wild period of life where they do the acts of utter randomness that make life so interesting. The things we tell stories about when we become saddled with responsibility later in life. He blames the "new gentility," which finds the Sal Paradise story sad and depressing.
They run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid down by the
health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety
advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate
the lives of the young. They seem dangerous, childish and embarrassing
in the world of professionalized adolescence and professionalized
intellect.
If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of
the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga,
on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a
politically engaged Manitoban dance troupe that he hopes will win a
MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55,
wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.
My students aren’t having random adventures, not because of the mommy state, but because they have more financial worries than we had. They have monumental student loan debts. They face the prospect of having to save for ten years before buying a home. (The average cost of an apartment in Manhattan just jumped to $1.3 million. Homes in my area start at $400,000.) Certain careers simply don’t provide a living income anymore. Teachers, writers, artists are being pushed to more distant suburbs. So, everyone is a business major. They don’t have health insurance.
Sal Paradise grew up, became an investment banker, voted Republican, and jacked up the cost of home prices. And now, when I take a break in a lecture and advise the kids to backpack through Europe or move to the city, they look at me like I’m out of my mind.
Apt. 11d 
You know, it occurs to me that maybe because of so much hovering over and pressure on kids of this generation, that’s why they have so many risk-taking behaviors related to alcohol, drugs and sex. They can’t take their chances by backpacking across Europe, so they drink/smoke/hook up indiscriminately? I don’t know–maybe I’m simplifying things too much.
When I was in Maine teaching at a CC about 5 years ago, one of my students wrote about the greatest thing that ever happened to him–he and 2 of his friends decided to drive down to Florida and live there. They did, and the whole enterprise failed, but he *enjoyed* the failure so much.
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Writers and artists never did make a living wage, but they did live in cities. I suppose the bourgeois bohemians have pushed out the real bohemians.
With the ongoing housing meltdown and the recession that we are due in a year or two, I think that your analysis is true for the recent past, but not for the near future. Housing is going to be cheaper soon (the traditional 3x median in most places, with maybe 5x median income for coastal California or NYC). When the next recession comes, no one with an insecure career is going to want to touch a house that they might have to sell at a loss in a year or two. In light of that situation, school teaching or some other moderately paying but stable job is going to look really good. Your students will still be stuck with fearsome student loans which will probably spend a number of years on hardship deferral, but on the bright side, thousands of units of affordable housing (AKA condos) have been built over the past few years.
Meanwhile, a lot of members of the soon-to-retire generation have treated the inflated value of their houses as a big part of their retirement plan, and many have very little other savings. That isn’t going to work post-bubble, so how to take care of them will become a major political issue.
The analysis above is expanded from discussions I’ve read on thehousingbubbleblog.com.
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I’m 24. My generation has been so throughly scheduled that it’s tough to have “random adventures.” We are under lots of parental/teacher pressure to succeed. Throughout high school and college I was very, very aware of what would look good on a school application or resume. Activities that weren’t going to get me future brownie points with an admissions officer or employer were dropped. Summers had to be full of impressive volunteer work, extra college classes, and sports training. My dad spent his college summers hitchhiking from PA to CA and back. Now everyone thinks that’s too dangerous and a waste of time.
My generation was bred on responsibility and safety. Mom and Dad kept a close eye on us. We have a fear of being away from our computers and cell phones.
Also FYI — my husband and I started marriage four years ago with $45,000 in undergrad debt. We chose to skip grad school, live frugally, delay kids, move to the city, and work hard at jobs with benefits in the for-profit sector (I’m a writer with health insurance in a D.C. suburb.) We saved enough to pay off the debt and just bought a $400K+ house with 20% down. We also have a baby on the way.
Today’s 20-somethings can achieve marriage/homes/children — but it means making wise choices and not blowing money on beer/movies/cable/restaurants/
travel/designer clothes or useless degrees.
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But, Mrs. Ewer, Brooks and I are saying that you’ve missed something by being responsible too soon. I admire the sacrifices and the careful planning that you and your husband have done. But I learned a lot from backpacking through Europe on five dollars a day. I spent a lot of time hanging out in bars in the Village chatting about politics and gossiping with friends. I never spent a ton of money. My parents had none to spare, and I was living on less than $20,000 for years. I was all about the experience of meeting new people, going new places, and finding the alternative. It was a lot of fun.
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I do think it’s sad that there is less and less room in this world for screwing up. No one of any age can afford to fritter away anything.
I guess it makes me realize more than ever how fortunate certain generations were/are. Which in turn makes me really mad sometimes. Like when my parents go on and on about how younger people don’t save. (Whatever.) Or for example last week the UAW signed a contract that protected their own retirement and job security, but sold out a bunch of the new people who get hired. New hires in non-core jobs no longer receive union wages. Maybe it’s just my perspective, but for me, as part of a generation that will already get screwed out of my social security — I now view that thru this lens of “inter-generational unfairness”.
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Jen,
I don’t know how unfair things really are (and by the way, your mom’s right). (Here come some gross generalizations!) The WWII generation grew up in the Depression, went to war, and their idea of a good time was raising a large family in a 1200 square foot home. They seem to have been phenomenal savers, and often on very moderate incomes. Meanwhile, the boomers made very good money but didn’t save. (The US savings rate these days is negative, they say.) It’s not clear how this is going to turn out for them. Most likely, it means working into the 70s if healthy, and living in poverty if their health gives out. Those of us who are my age (30ish with a young family) actually are in a very good position right now. If we pay attention and plan, we can avoid the classic errors and we have a good 30 years ahead of us to get ready for retirement. For a solidly middle class family, that’s really enough.
Personally, it took a long time for me to open my eyes on these issues. After my husband got his first tenure-track job in the DC area, it took quite a while to realize that we were actually poorer than we had been as graduate students in a low-cost city. For the first year after our first baby was born, I cooked and couponed like crazy and we had no car, but no matter what I did, we were doomed by the fact that our rent was 50% or so of take-home. We eventually escaped from the quicksand by living in residence and cutting our housing expenses to zero. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the DC housing market took off, and the little brick 1950s boxes that were once 250K were now 450K. We’re now in Texas and could buy a very nice newer home for between 150K and 200K, and based on the stagnant home listings I see, we may buy quite a bit cheaper, although I may wind up seduced by a gorgeous house in the historic district. I will think of lead paint, foundation issues, taxes and maintenance, and try to be strong.
My dad turned me on to Dave Ramsey over the past year. He’s way radical (he has radio listeners do on air credit card shredding and has a ritual where callers scream “I’m debt freeee!”), but his “Total Money Makeover” book has been a very helpful influence for helping me think about our finances globally: debt, emergency fund, life insurance, retirement, car, house, charitable giving, college fund, etc. You get to hear from people who are broke on 140K a year, and others who are doing well on a third of that, as well as those being eaten alive by homes or cars. I heartily recommend the show, as well as his Total Money Makeover book.
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I wonder how common it has ever been for 20-somethings to spend time ‘having adventures’ v. being responsible. When I graduated from college in ’93, I only knew one person besides myself who planned to do something crazy. (He decided to become a vintner. In upstate NY. I moved to Eastern Europe.) Everyone else went to grad school or got a job with P&G.
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My feeling is that people are having responsible adventures. I was a Peace Corps volunteer after college, and my fellow volunteers really did have adventures (playing with a Siberian tiger cub, being detained by a militia officer for taking a photograph at a train station, nearly losing a paycheck to a hypnotically gifted Gypsy woman, building trails near Lake Baikal, being drugged and robbed in Moscow, seeing the illuminated ice village in Kharbin, China, introducing bemused Russian villagers to Cinco de Mayo, etc.). However, Peace Corps service gives one a boost for civil service purposes as well as informally in the NGO world, and a good number of my colleagues were able to leverage their service into careers. Likewise, I have a very serious and intelligent cousin who spent this past summer with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. She is also applying to medical school, and if she gets in, that will probably have been a very important part of her application.
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Amy, I don’t have an issue with anyone who grew up during the Depression. But this conversation is not about Depression-era generations. They were not crossing the country on motorcycles. (If memory serves they were beating the crap out of people who *did* cross the country in motorcycles.)
I am specifically referring to the Boomer generation, who have been able to reap massive rewards without the level of effort required by those who are younger. Boomers were able to take advantage of much lower-cost education; they got into the housing market when it was reasonable; they had health care. And yet they’re STILL broke, and they’re telling *us* we should save more, and lighten up and have some fun?
Should we save more? Absolutely. Why do we not? It’s not because it’s a character flaw — it’s because we’re BROKE! The standard of living and real income in this country have gone nothing but down since 1973. And everyone’s all amazed that it’s tougher out there!
Today’s kids are such a contrast to On the Road. It’s just sad to see them forced to be automatons. And as I said, it makes me mad to see older generations, who so benefited from many things provided by our society, unwilling to fight for those same benefits for those just coming out of school now.
I try to do my part in a small way: I interview people for jobs who never finished college, or who wandered, or got that masters’ in music. (One of my best employees is a former opera singer.) Stop rewarding the automaton approach with job offers, and the automaton thing will disappear. (I hope.)
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Yay, jen. good comment.
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Amy P – I really think there should be a place in this world for doing things that don’t look good on the resume. I think that there should be more room to be irresponsible and random. And we should be random and irresponsible and careless about our future not because we learn a lot from those experiences (though we do), but because those things are what make life good.
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There are Boomers and there are Boomers. My grandparents sent their children to private college with the help of a three incomes (grandpa’s cedar mill job, grandma’s much-hated job as a grocery store checker, and 50-60 head of cattle and a farm to be taken care of during their off hours). I suppose it’s true that my grandparents couldn’t have managed that today, given college costs. My parents married in college and got MAs. They moved back to my dad’s home town and started having kids in the mid-seventies, my dad supporting the family with a variety of ventures, mainly hard, dirty, and dangerous, with no employer, no monthly pay check, and no insurance. They started building a home 30 minutes outside town with the nearest neighbor half a mile away, and we moved in as soon as there was a roof on. I was 12 and the oldest of three kids the first time I can recall my dad having a pay-check job. My parents became much more prosperous starting in my older teens, but to this day they have never had health insurance. I suppose I was blessed to have avoided the now conventional soccer-violin-service-trip-to-Guatemala pattern of contemporary upper-middle class childhood which must make college admissions officers implode from boredom, but my parents’ choices could easily have gone horribly wrong.
Anyway, no need to worry about the Boomers. They’ll get theirs (well, unless they grab enough political power that they can tax the rest of us into oblivion).
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Laura, I haven’t read the comments yet, but I strongly suspect the reason that S&S took a 23-year-old as an editor was that you would do it for 18K. Red-head or no.
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$18,000 was a big raise. I started off making $15,500, which also higher than other editorial assistants at the company who started at $14,000. My first position required computer skills. A lot of people in publishing are society rich types who are looking for something to do. I remember that one of my rich work mates bragged that she had budgeted enough, so that her $15,000 covered her meals for the year. (Daddy paid for everything else.)
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Like Jennifer, I too wonder how common it ever was for 20 somethings to go off on random adventures. I suspect it was only the children of the upper and upper-middle class that ever had this option. Backpacking around Europe has never been a pasttime of the American middle or lower middle class let alone the poor. How many Americans even have passports?
I grew up in a lower middle class area. The only people I knew who ever went to Europe were stationed there in the military or (rarely and usually only for a big event like a 25th wedding anniversary) visiting children stationed there in the military.
What was common was taking a semester or year off from college (or trade school or community college) to work and save money – custom combining or construction was popular. Most of the people I grew up with received no help from parents with college expenses. The only way to pay for school was through aid and work. Aid never covered the whole bill.
These experiences may not count as the random adventures you are nostalgic for, but people usually moved away to do it and had interesting experiences. But, they did it BECAUSE of financial worries not in spite of them.
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Not true about the backpacking. I come from a straight-down-the-line middle class family. I went to a public university, because my parents couldn’t afford a private one. I earned money working in a valve factory in college to go to Europe. The dollar was much cheaper then.
And, yes, I’m only talking about the middle class in this post. The poor never have these opportunities for fun. Still, I think it’s too bad that middle class kids are forced to be too serious too soon.
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The structure of publishing wages contributes significantly to the output, but then you knew that, right?
Tangentially, the savings from that near-publishing job and moonlighting as a graphic designer paid for several months of backpacking in southeastern Yurp. The plan was to go broke in Ireland, which I figured was better than most places to go broke. Instead I found a job in Budapest, but that’s another story.
One of the benefits of the 21st century is that it’s not just Yurp that’s available as a place to do what Laura’s talking about. Lots of opportunities in Asia, South America and, to a lesser extent, Africa.
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It’s economic, yes. But it’s also cultural. I’m from Israel, where the economic and especially housing situation is even tougher, but just about everyone I know spends at least a year after the army working at odd jobs and travelling aimlessly, usually in Asia or South America. It’s sort of weird to be too responsible and go straight into school/work/family mode. What’s different? Well, degrees are virtually free by American standards and there’s universal health care. People also have slightly different expectations economically, not because they’re any less materialistic but because there’s literally no room for McMansions, SUVs cost a hell of a lot more than they do in the US, etc. Most of all, though, I think, there’s a cultural value on exploring and “figuring it out” in strange situations. Most of my American friends would consider a hostel yucky, let alone sleeping in the train station. Okay, I’m generalizing both Americans and Israelis, I know, but I still think there’s something to be said for the role of middle-class culture.
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Tamar,
I’ve watched a bunch of Israeli films the past few years, and it’s been very noticeable how how small and bare the homes and apartments are, and how little stuff people have compared to Americans of the same social class. I think it’s worth pointing out, since one tends to think of Israel as being on the same economic level as the US, just really small. (I know films aren’t a great source of information (heck, all Americans are millionaires on TV), but it does seem at least symptomatic.)
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i sat on this overnight, and decided to go ahead and comment.
i’m sorry, but this whole issue just reeks of middle-class entitlement to me. yes, laura acknowledged above that poor kids have never had the option of backpacking through europe. it’s true.
the bottom line is that the standard of living in this country has fallen over the last couple of generations, and if the way that it is manifested is that
“…middle class kids are forced to be too serious too soon.”
well, welcome to the world of those not born into the middle class! working class kids have always been forced to be serious pretty much from the time they turn 18 onward!
i guess it’s all about perspective. laura points to her family sending her to a public university as evidence that she was not from a wealthy family. where i come from, the fact that my father could afford to send his kids to the state university made us one of the wealthier families in the community! forget about private colleges. nobody went to those unless they received some hefty hefty scholarships.
not one person that i went to high school with went on to backpack around europe. and nobody that i went to college with, either. we graduated, we got jobs. that was it. i had never heard of this thing called “backpacking around europe” until i moved to the east coast to go to work, and everyone asked me what i was doing there in june. (why wasn’t i off in europe? me: huh?)
so, yeah, my point is, there’s a huge segment of the population that starts supporting themselves either right out of high school, or, if they’re lucky, right out of college, and has always been that way.
i’m sorry if i can’t muster a lot of sympathy for today’s middle class kids if the way they are feeling the downsizing crunch is that they don’t get to go to europe…when their working class counterparts can’t get health insurance.
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trishka, this argument has come up before on other topics on this blog. Here it is “why should we care about the growing seriousness of the middle class youth, when the poor have always had to be serious?”
It’s also come up when we’ve talking about women and work, but with different language. “Why should we worry about middle class women’s pressure to work or not after they have a family; poor women have always had to work.”
It’s also come up before when I’ve complained about the expense of homes and how the middle class is being stretched further and further to own a home. The response has been, “why do we care about the middle class; the poor have never been able to own homes.”
I guess it all boils down to “why do we care about the middle class?”
That’s a big question. Too big for a comment section. Maybe somebody else can take a crack at it.
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I think that “backpacking around Europe” was probably just a historical blip for the American middle class youth of the 1960s-70s. My parents did it one summer, but that was just 25 years after WWII, and Western Europe was a much poorer and less expensive place then. I certainly don’t think that middle class kids of the 20s and 30s were doing it, and “backpacking through Europe” had an entirely different meaning in the 40s.
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