During a recent lunch hour, I withdrew the last $5 from my checking account. My savings account had only the required minimum balance of $5. I was at work and needed to eat something, lest I starve. And even though I asked for ranch dressing to accompany my chicken finger platter, I was given honey mustard. I didn’t complain and ate it eagerly.
When I got home, all there was left to eat was half a ham slice and enough asparagus for me and Chris, my boyfriend. I wasn’t sure where we’d get money for more food since our rent was due the next day and a check for an assignment from a local magazine that I completed six months ago had yet to arrive. But was I miserable? No.
Let me tell you why: Because my boyfriend was home after 12 hours of work, and I had gotten six more writing assignments in the last week. Life doesn’t get much better for me. And I write that with a smile.
Lately, I’ve read a lot about how college students and recent graduates are depressed in these days of economic turmoil and social unrest. Economics experts collect and analyze data about millennials. Baby boomers call my peers lazy. A lot of writers offer their advice to twentysomethings, and most of these would-be advisers are much older than those they’re trying so hard to guide. Then there’s Lena Dunham, creator of HBO’s Girls, who is labeled the voice of my generation and who, with her depiction of unsatisfactory or nonexistent careers and sex lives, makes young adulthood look pretty bleak.
By all media accounts, being young today is hard and depressing. There’s no way I can be happy, they say. And there’s no way I’m smart enough to figure out how to live my life to the fullest amid all this drudgery, right?
Don’t tell me how hard these times are, I say, or how you pity me because you had it so much easier when you were my age. I don’t want to hear it.
To read more of this roughly 700 word essay I wrote for Philadelphia Magazine's The Philly Post, click here.
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