The Found Generation
Originally published August 18, 2021
It’s hard to find a quiet place to chat in a house where 20 people live. I knew that would be a problem even before I moved in, but the pitch was enticing: a giant fully-furnished Brooklyn brownstone containing 4 separate units with 5 people living in each, connected through a communal basement decked out with cozy furnishings, board games, a Netflix-marathon-worthy flat screen, and a long wooden table for house dinner parties and late-night study sessions. During the evenings, the basement can get quite rowdy with the battle cries of a (mostly) friendly Smash Bros tournament, or the dramatic score of an action movie. But during the day, where most house residents are working in their rooms or out and about, it’s usually left quiet and empty. Perhaps that’s why Julia (25), our newest house-mate, often brings down her laptop and checks off her to-do list in the far right corner of the large wooden table. That’s how I knew it was the perfect place for us to have a chat.
When Julia first moved in she probably introduced herself 20 times that day: previously a PhD student in robotics at Stanford University, she decided to take a leave of absence from her program and move to New York City to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Our conversation on that day was brief, but I immediately wanted to know more. I think back to when I decided to move to the Brooklyn brownstone over a year ago and leave my cushion-y corporate job. My mother’s accusation rang through my head: “You’re lost.” I had no comeback to it. I wondered if Julia was lost too.
“In high school I was more of a humanities kid, and then I went to Columbia for undergrad and they have this prestigious journalism school and I just thought, they’re all really scary and intimidating.” I second that. I once thought about applying to Columbia’s journalism school but decided against the application fee since I knew I had no chance of getting in.
“Then, the people I lived with on my freshman year floor, a lot of them decided to take a coding class together, which I’d never done before. So I took the class and it was awful.” She laughs and I’m surprised. Robotics and coding aren’t exactly the same, but there’s surely an overlap. “Yeah… no it was bad. But then I decided to take this electrical engineering course that had a really good professor and everyone else loved it,” Okay, I thought, we’re getting closer, “but I was so bad at it.” I admire her candor but almost don’t believe her.
She continues, “So I went to talk with my academic advisor and he was just like, ‘you need to pick a major.’ I had no idea what major to do because I thought I wanted to do something related to English, or coding, or engineering, but none of those worked. So, he handed me a book of all the majors, and I just closed my eyes and I picked.” As someone who agonized over my major in undergrad and still sometimes do in grad school, I’m in awe. But her rationale brought me back: “I had no idea what was the right fit, so randomly picking was as good of a guess as any.”
When I told my parents I was leaving my corporate job, they couldn’t — no matter how hard I tried to explain — understand why I would do such a thing. But Julia’s words mirrored the exact ones I told them back then: it wasn’t the right fit.
But it seemed like for Julia, Robotics might fit. “I had this internship at NASA at the Robotics Academy that year, and it was the best summer ever. I would wake up at 6am before my alarm because I was so excited to work on my robot.” Somehow, weighing a tough job market, wanting more subject expertise, and the promise of another degree without the tuition costs, Julia found herself enrolling in a robotics PhD program in 2018. “There are a couple of common milestones that almost every PhD program will have. One of them is passing your qualifying exam to become a PhD candidate. Usually when you pass this exam it’s supposed to be a really big deal, but I felt zero happiness whatsoever. That was when I thought that’s probably a good indicator that I’m not really excited about this whole thing.”
Millennials, the generation group that both myself and Julia fall under, have had their fair share of negative media coverage. We’re “lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow,” or, because of the precarious conditions we grew up in and continue to navigate, we simply “don’t stand a chance.” But maybe the data on how millennials switch jobs three times more than non-millennials or how we were part of the driving force behind the recent “great resignation” paints another picture. Maybe we’re all just a bit lost.
Sometimes dubbed “the new lost generation,” millennials can relate to many of the factors that plagued the original cohort of young adults during and after WWI: disillusionment, huge cultural shifts, and a yearning to escape from constant devastation whether from war or from recessions, climate disasters, or a global pandemic. “I really couldn’t afford the sunk costs — both financial and time-wise — of continuing with my PhD program without knowing for sure that it was what I wanted to do,” said Julia. The stakes are higher for millennials, so we better be sure we’re investing in what we really want.
So, what are Julia’s plans now? She’s currently working part-time at two startups in different industries and exploring the great city of New York with 19 other housemates. “I think for me, the leave will become permanent if I find a full-time job that I really like. But I still don’t know exactly what that’ll be yet, just that it has to be compelling for me. So for now, my plan is to just go with whatever comes.” I know my parents would balk at that notion. Julia agrees about hers, but that eventually “my mom came around and said she’ll support me as long as I’m able to financially support myself.” Julia is not alone on the uncertain path she’s chosen to take. When I look around at the people in our shared home — an aspiring content creator, an independent game app developer, a TikTok mental health advocate — I see unconventional jobs that didn’t even exist in previous generations. But in the unconventional and uncertainty comes the realization that no matter what, our generation just wants to feel fulfilled. Because if American democracy crumbles, or climate change destroys our home, or we never make enough money to buy a house, at least we’ll have that. So, some people may call us the “new lost generation,” but when I really think about it, we may be the most found of them all.
