BY C.A. CHASE

In print | Published October 9, 2008

The market unease has brought into sharp relief a lot of mixed feelings about what it means to “make it.” As New York Times columnist Judith Warner described in “Waiting for Schadenfreude,” those not mucking around with speculations face a different standard when faced with “the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,” he said. “And now they’re earning millions and millions – in bonuses alone.”

As a writer and creative type, Warner was doing OK, but wanted more: “like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we were entitled to do better than that.”

Someone has to say it, so I might as well. If you want a job that can be described as “creative,” or fulfilling in a nonmonetary sense, be prepared to not have a lot of money, and if you want to live in places where there are a lot of other creatives, i.e. cities, be prepared to be around people who have a lot more than you. We really don’t know how to talk about money, and we don’t talk about how what you want often isn’t practical or something that will let you retire. That’s a harsh feeling, I’d say, that success is defined by a crowd of loose-spending vomiters — that what you do will be divorced from whatever it is that makes things the way are, and that you’re not supposed to say that that’s unfair. In that, you’re on your own.

From the ‘80s onward, latchkey kids have been a perennial concern, gaining attention alongside Tom Wolfe’s commentary on Wall Street mayhem, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Coincidence? No. What comes out of the synthesis of these disparate phenomena is a sort of latchkey culture, in that no one ever talks about how doing what makes you happy will make it really difficult to live. Market and meaning are divorced (were they ever really married? I sense a shotgun wedding at best), and make you pick which one you’ll live in. And the unpicked parent will disenherit you. In that sense, none of us are well brought up, but some are just more sensititve to that sort of broken home, I guess.

People often look back at college as the best years of their lives because it is right before when the results of the divorce court proceedings are made clear. It’s the last place where someone else will subsidize your contempt for the world, so I suggest you hate while you can, because you have to drop that when you work for real, when you “contribute.”

And it’s getting harder to live off of a job you don’t really like. The disjuncture between making money and living a life where Bowie is your unironic soundtrack is something that has to be bridged, usually at the expense of living life the way you think it ought to be lived. It’s something that your parents had to do to foot the bill for your first twenty odd years, and that goes a long way toward explaining why a lot of people resent their parents.

The scramble for success, in a way, will never be as satisfying as self-righteous teenage angst if you don’t think that the compromise of “success” means something.

So what happens when those kids who never really understood the whole divorce thing move to New York to live life their own way? It becomes impossible to imagine a life where you don’t have to foot the bill, that if you went somewhere else, life wouldn’t be so boring. Being somewhere else isn’t that different, apparently. In other words, maybe you had it best when you had a curfew. So just face up to it now, you’re going to turn into your parents, just with a lot more debt. Developing a bad case of the Morrisseys? Good.

C.A. Chase is a sophomore. She can be reached at cchase1@swarthmore.edu.

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