As if it isn't already easy enough to hire someone to work without paying them or even the intention of doing so, well fuck it... who gives a fuck what a rich privileged person has to say about it... basically you're fucked anyway. The job market in Canada for young people is hyper-competitive and relatively small, and most get to circle the drain of uselessness working shitty jobs and part-time just to get by, many others live 'in their parents' basements', and prospects are such shit that even the head of the national bank is telling kids to join the Peace Corps or whatever organization will take their unpaid work. Even stacking up degrees is less useful than it was. You'd pray for an unpaid overworked internship now, and if you don't know how to network: get ready to belong to the underclass.
Soon enough it won't be enough to be willing to help out a charity with anything but money, and they already generally like money better than people. You'll need 1-5 years' experience just to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and the police will be called on you just for walking down the street looking suspiciously unemployed, show your volunteer card please. Capitalism is hell, actually, and it keeps proving it more succinctly than any ignorant campus marxist ever could. Impure Capitalism like we have now is even worse, it's simply a bunch of cancerous money tumors that fuck everyone over while their collaborators twiddle their thumbs and tell a chronically underemployed generation to get over it and toughen up, then thumb their noses at them on their way out. The crab bucket is so full that nobody even knows if the ones getting out have qualifications or anything, the sheer volume of jobless fucks and underemployed losers is beginning to reach critical mass, and no amount of start-ups will solve what may well be a systemic problem.
Meanwhile the immensely profitable banking sector in Canada, the ones who used to be purely profitable banks but now also offer 'financial services' and sell boneheaded products to the gullible and afraid masses, is laying off every greasy wage-earner they can find so their profits don't get sullied by collusion with normal working people. I think the question on everybody's mind is "Where is this hellscape leading us? Will things improve?" The answer is maybe, but more importantly: why don't you just go volunteer somewhere for a whole year so you can demonstrate that you are using your post-secondary bachelor's degree properly and gaining experience? Learn to be a good worker before you become a paid worker. They're gonna have to cut the bottom out of the crab bucket, and all signs indicate they're sure as hell willing to.
The only upside is that maybe everyone who is young and unemployed or even underemployed will go volunteer and somehow that will result in... more jobs? More experienced jobseekers? The betterment of society seems more likely. Maybe it's time those sitting in big comfy corner offices start doling out some of that experience they've been hoarding in their corporations, and actually hire and train people, instead of pontificating from the position of material and professional comfort. Until then, they're a bunch of callous, insincere windbags making judgments on a situation they can only pretend to fully understand – one they likely never had to face when they were in your shoes.
This is all starting to seem so parodical.
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
12/8/10
"The Best Years"
This might just be a sensitivity on my part, as an 'underemployed' and/or 'out of work' young man, but there is no overused term that puzzles me as much as when somebody (usually almost always on TV) refers to 'the best years of your life.' Yeah. Those years.
Sometimes, it is true, the person referring to their best years has been abused, or incarcerated, or somehow put in a position where they have possibly missed the best years of their life due to limited or withheld freedom or outside interference of another sort. But, if you rob a bank, you might be able to get a best day out of it before someone traces the money, at least. The jail time is just shit icing on your overpriced cake, and maybe you'll learn a lesson so, by the time you get out, you'll be wise enough to actually appreciate those 'best years' you almost threw away.
What's worst about anyone referring to 'best years' is it's usually referring to the years between 19 and 29. I don't know what happens to numbskulls between 29 and 30 that makes them incapable of appreciating life or even having a 'best year' after the hallowed twenty-something phase of human development, which is typically the largest chunk of a human biology textbook, is elapsed.
For comparison, the TV show Friends was notably less enjoyable than Seinfeld, and the latter show as about older people who were, arguably, less cool than Chandler and company. This was an important lesson, from an otherwise untrustworthy medium, about things getting funnier the older and more pathetic you get. You used to have to go to Shakespeare for these kinds of lessons.
I did a search about 'best years', and the internet search I did confirmed my worst fears, except that they are even more ageist than I thought. Today's "best years" are the teenage years, which makes sense, because when I was a teenager I had two shows convincing me that the best years were in later life, and if nothing else the unknown-but-ruling forces of the world prey on making you think you lost your best years but can buy them back. I could cry when I remember that I actually believe in safety scissors or adult supervision. I don't even think a two-year heroin binge could deaden the knowledge I've fought for and won, like that there is a shadowy consortium built around the idea of 'best years'.
If nothing else, the concept of 'best years' makes people in various parts of their lives more liable to circle the wagons, more liable to be tricked into being content with what they have. Not that it's wrong to be satisfied with your life, but it's too easy sometimes. Even if it is not true that life continually gets better, like aged cheese or well-cellared wine, it's probably healthier to always keep pushing those best years ahead of you, no matter how persuasive the shallow arguments that your sexual peak was a decade ago, or that people who got published at 16 are better writers than you, or that older people can hold their alcohol better and know how to smoke a fine cigar. We live in a society where fruit is plucked from the branches before it is ripe, and where pumped ethylene gas replaces a few extra days in the sun...
...I actually forgot where I was going with that. The real points I wanted to make are lost in the past. Things were better then. But allow me to dispel any fears about best or worst years. The younger you are, the more likely you are too callow to appreciate the really fine points of living, and the older you are, the less likely you are to really notice the originality of life. Old or young, the amount of time spent thinking about best years is inversely proportional to the amount of enjoyment that could have been got instead. So, what troubles me, what I wrote this whole nonsense about, is when someone thinks they have life figured out enough to tell you that you missed that critical phase of life when anything would be better. With prevalent attitudes like this, modern ageism isn't such a mystery anymore.
Sometimes, it is true, the person referring to their best years has been abused, or incarcerated, or somehow put in a position where they have possibly missed the best years of their life due to limited or withheld freedom or outside interference of another sort. But, if you rob a bank, you might be able to get a best day out of it before someone traces the money, at least. The jail time is just shit icing on your overpriced cake, and maybe you'll learn a lesson so, by the time you get out, you'll be wise enough to actually appreciate those 'best years' you almost threw away.
What's worst about anyone referring to 'best years' is it's usually referring to the years between 19 and 29. I don't know what happens to numbskulls between 29 and 30 that makes them incapable of appreciating life or even having a 'best year' after the hallowed twenty-something phase of human development, which is typically the largest chunk of a human biology textbook, is elapsed.
For comparison, the TV show Friends was notably less enjoyable than Seinfeld, and the latter show as about older people who were, arguably, less cool than Chandler and company. This was an important lesson, from an otherwise untrustworthy medium, about things getting funnier the older and more pathetic you get. You used to have to go to Shakespeare for these kinds of lessons.
I did a search about 'best years', and the internet search I did confirmed my worst fears, except that they are even more ageist than I thought. Today's "best years" are the teenage years, which makes sense, because when I was a teenager I had two shows convincing me that the best years were in later life, and if nothing else the unknown-but-ruling forces of the world prey on making you think you lost your best years but can buy them back. I could cry when I remember that I actually believe in safety scissors or adult supervision. I don't even think a two-year heroin binge could deaden the knowledge I've fought for and won, like that there is a shadowy consortium built around the idea of 'best years'.
If nothing else, the concept of 'best years' makes people in various parts of their lives more liable to circle the wagons, more liable to be tricked into being content with what they have. Not that it's wrong to be satisfied with your life, but it's too easy sometimes. Even if it is not true that life continually gets better, like aged cheese or well-cellared wine, it's probably healthier to always keep pushing those best years ahead of you, no matter how persuasive the shallow arguments that your sexual peak was a decade ago, or that people who got published at 16 are better writers than you, or that older people can hold their alcohol better and know how to smoke a fine cigar. We live in a society where fruit is plucked from the branches before it is ripe, and where pumped ethylene gas replaces a few extra days in the sun...
...I actually forgot where I was going with that. The real points I wanted to make are lost in the past. Things were better then. But allow me to dispel any fears about best or worst years. The younger you are, the more likely you are too callow to appreciate the really fine points of living, and the older you are, the less likely you are to really notice the originality of life. Old or young, the amount of time spent thinking about best years is inversely proportional to the amount of enjoyment that could have been got instead. So, what troubles me, what I wrote this whole nonsense about, is when someone thinks they have life figured out enough to tell you that you missed that critical phase of life when anything would be better. With prevalent attitudes like this, modern ageism isn't such a mystery anymore.
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