The Passport Generation
Picture this situation: it’s a warm evening, you’re sitting outside in a very nice terrace, drinks have just arrived, and so has your long-time disappeared friend, the one that has been tied up studying for his final exams during the past months.
- Hey, congratulations! You’re finally graduating! What are you planning to do next?
- Er… I don’t know.
- What about that company where you did a summer internship?
- Ugh, no, I didn’t like that. Actually, I was thinking about going away for some time. To the UK, maybe. I’ll find something to do there. Anything.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve lived this conversation in the past years. College graduates with good marks that after five or six years of hard study just can’t imagine themselves working as such.
And the getaway fantasy doesn’t die once they engage in the workforce.
I have a friend with a double degree in Law and a double LLM that actually worked in a firm for about a year, just to drop it for babysitting in the Highlands. Another lawyer friend is working as an au pair in Rome; a geography teacher fled to wash dishes in Colchester. And then there’s one of my closest friends, a kindergarten teacher in a tri-lingual school, just about one of the most qualified people I know, who’d quit in a heartbeat to, let’s say, make beds in a youth hostel in Argentina. And she LOVES kids.
What’s with my generation, the 90s vintage, that feel so repulsed to take up the positions they (presumably) studied for?
Well, I think the bottom line is most company jobs were designed by our grandparents’ generation for our parents’ generation, and haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. But we have.
With a later prospect of creating a family and our basic needs covered, we are left alone to deal with our own emotions. And the prevalent feeling in all the conversations that I’ve reproduced, nonsensical as they may seem, actually has a name for itself: wanderlust.
Wanderlust is that passion, or rather urge, to travel. To discover new places and new people. The uneasiness of staying in the same location for too long.
As best put by Robert Louis Stevenson:
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Because that’s what this is really about. Menial jobs provide my friends with something that fancy qualified jobs don’t: freedom. Freedom to work seasonally and travel the remaining time; freedom to arrange their work schedule weekly, to put in more hours when more money is needed and then take days off when an exciting adventure comes up. Freedom can become a top priority over everything else. After all, we were hunter-gatherers once. Settled life also started off as a trend.
What if some of us are just more connected to that nomadic past than others?
