Helplessness Blues

This past week Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues came in for me at the library; I was 50-something on the holds list when I placed the hold some months ago.  As the first verse of the first track rolled and undulated from my stereo’s speakers, I was immediately struck; right away I saw my reflection in the lyrics, as if Robin Pecknold was holding up a mirror to my own thoughts. 

“So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter; now what does that say about me?  Oh how could I dream of such a selfless and true love?  Could I wash my hands of just looking out for me?”  The lyrics are self-critical, but it’s not wholly our faults.

The track reminded me of a book that I read sometime this spring I called Not Quite Adults by Richard Stettersten, Ph.D and Barbara E. Ray.  As a study in sociology, the book essentially discusses how, due to economic and social changes (but especially economic shifts), this generation is slower to undertake what are traditionally adult developments: moving out, starting careers, going to college, buying a home, getting married, starting families.  Traditionally, these things were all accomplished in the early to mid-twenties; these stages are now accomplished a decade late.  And here I am in the shadow of my 25^th birthday, and to me, these things are a lot to expect of a person, especially in this time of rampant uncertainty and defeat.  Life experiences cost more money than they once did and everyday labor earns less money than before.  My rationale is this: I did not ask to be born of a world that comes with a price tag; how could I bring a child into this world?  And I've always felt (even as a child, I recall) that there's got to be more to life than following what was traditionally expected of me.

I applaud the book’s unpretentiousness, and I am thankful that a member of an older generation has granted some legitimacy to the culture of my generation when so often my generation (and the generation after me) is the butt of jokes and resigned to both obscurity or absurdity (see those new Toyota Venza commercials?).  They call for more resilient and diverse industries that would employ people across the spectrum, an issue that I whole-heartedly support.  Ultimately, however, very near the end, I put down the book in frustration.  The dual-authorship produces not an inter-disciplinary study but a schizophrenic child, one just as idle as my own generation.  Despite discussing that economically careers are less diverse, plentiful, and lucrative as they once were and that a significant number of students drop out of college and graduate school because they are not ready (because of social immaturity, or academic unpreparedness, or financial strains, or a number of other reasons), the book kept pushing the need for students to pursue college and graduate school.  How is this going to placate our situation when it is clear that people feel burnt out and hopeless to compete for the small, homogenous pool of information/technology jobs?  The book discusses the ill-fated trend in which parents will take out mortgages to send their children to college, particularly ivy league schools, then turns 180 degrees to state that ivy leaguers truly have the best chances at landing into stable, high-paying jobs and propagates: “the time is now to invest; college debt is good debt.”  College, college, college, they kept pushing college.

I am weary of this advice.  Having laid out thousands of dollars in debt for a college education of which I am still weighing its lucrative usefulness, what rings more true and lucid to me is “Bedouin Dress”: “The borrower’s debt is the only regret of my youth.”

I feel slightly dooped; I vacillate between feeling angy and confused.  My misery finds company in Helplessness Blues.