Go to School, Get a Good Job

When does your real life begin?

I’m terrified to come off as elitist as I write this so let me attempt to establish a set of parameters through which I’m thinking about the topic at hand. The service sector as it relates to the American Dream and the chip on my shoulder I’ve had when I’ve held jobs as a server knowing that this wasn’t the real thing for me. And later I’ll explore the irony of joining a restaurant again even after having had some degree of corporate success and how I think about it now. This collection will likely come in several parts over the next few weeks.

In the middle and upper middle class suburbs of New York in the 90s we were taught to do well in school so we could get a good job and have a nice life. Our parents were well intentioned, only wanting for us a better version of what they had. The key to mobility we believed was a college education and the inevitable ascension into corporate America. In cruder moments adults said things like do well in school so that you don’t end up working at McDonald’s. I don’t know who or where this came from but I do remember it being a phrase that was frequently used as a barometer of success and value. In order to understand why these metrics were so widespread and immune to critique we have to understand the world our Boomer parents were living in. 

A family says grace (Jacobsen /Three Lions/Getty Images)

They grew up in a world where a single member of the family could have a normal office job, meaning they didn’t need to be part of the C-suite to provide for their family, and that one income would be enough to raise several children and go on trips and buy a home and a car. The job would give them health insurance and a retirement fund with an employer match, often times a pension. People would stay in these jobs for a long while because there wasn’t much of a reason to leave. It was standard that the breadwinner would be home in time for dinner and technology didn’t allow for the work to come with them. If having a corporate job meant all of those things today, I would surely sign up with enthusiasm.

Now we are looking at unstable start up companies that frequently offer stock options or equity instead of or as a supplement to regular income, insanely long hours, the ubiquity of work following us everywhere we go and creeping into our personal time, health insurance where the employer requires employees to contribute to the premium, empty 401k opportunities without the match and I don’t think any person I know under the age of 50 has ever been offered a pension. Even with a six figure salary, if you’re living in an expensive city as the youth are wont to do, you’re still very far away from the option of purchasing real estate without the help of generous parents. Simply put, things are very different than when our parents came of age but the prevailing ethos of go to college and get a good job is strong as ever. 

Having chosen an artistic path I was prepared to take on a number of serving jobs in spite of completing a liberal arts degree. These jobs would build character, I could mine customers and coworkers for content and it would allow me the time to pursue my dreams while also paying my rent. I resisted the stereotype of actor working in a restaurant in LA in my early 20s by writing, producing and directing my own content. I relentlessly applied for assistant jobs while working at the martini lounge. I interviewed for the mailroom at the talent agency ICM which I don’t think I was even offered! Which in retrospect, literally what are they looking for, how was I not qualified to push a cart of mail around a basement? Maybe my royal blue J. Crew pencil skirt I wore to the interview wasn’t cool enough, too corporate perhaps. I finally landed one assistant job but the pay was so little that it wasn’t enough to quit the martini lounge and after a while of doing both, dealing with that man’s unpredictable neediness and idiosyncratic requests became too much. I finally quit when he asked me to come over on the weekend and clean out his garage for my meager penance of a taxable $15/hr without any benefits or tips. All the while, I kept telling myself this is just a part of my path on my way to the real thing… this isn’t it. 

I finally landed what I thought was my dream job as a content creator at a small creative agency. I was getting paid to shoot and travel the world for cool brands. I met a lot of interesting people and after six months of “perma-lance” aka we don’t want to pay your benefits or PTO they finally offered me a full time salaried job with health insurance. I was ecstatic. All of my friends already had this and I felt behind, now I was catching up. That was short lived. About a year later they did lay offs for all of the younger folks at the company and I returned back to a restaurant job after months of unemployment spent applying with fervor to production jobs without any success. 

Truly thrilled to be carrying 40lbs of weight on one shoulder

I had a fantasy that I could work at the buzziest restaurant in LA for only 3 shifts a week and make the money I needed to make and have a ton of free time for my creative endeavors outside of it. I was sorely mistaken. To this day I have never worked a more difficult job that drained me physically, emotionally and psychologically. It ended up taking up most of my time and I was paid just as well as my last office job granted without the health insurance or the PTO. I still had the feeling that this wasn’t it but at least this time it felt like I was part of the action. Powerful, important people came into dine all of the time. 

My sentiment has never been one of I am better than these people, I don’t belong here. It has been I did all of the right things, why can’t I find a “good” job in an office that’s related to my interests? I went to Tulane networking events, Women in Film networking events, tapped every connection I could think of and nothing came from it. I was willing to start at the bottom and serve a tyrannical boss if it meant getting my foot in the door. The door just never really opened wide enough and while my friends were getting raises and promotions I was holding a piece of marrow bone against someone’s mouth and pouring sherry down it in hopes of a fat tip. I’m proud to say that through all of these years I continued to produce and create film and video. What isn’t real about that?

Eventually I landed back in semi-corporate America after several freelance production jobs and one boss decided to keep me around. I was earning good money, had solid benefits, got to work at a computer, traveled at the company’s expense but I felt dead inside. And I stopped making my own projects because I was too busy, too tired, fed up with production logistics… realistically I was too comfortable. I finally got the good job I had been seeking but my drive to create all but sputtered to a halt.