Being in your twenties and early thirties is really, really hard these days. Especially if you’re living with your parents, if you’re unable to find a job that relates to what you studied (or if you're even unable to find a job in the mall), or if you’re working a job you don’t like because it’s all you could find.
When the economy crashed in 2008, prompting media commentators to dub the ensuing years “the Great Recession,” today’s young adults were preparing for adventure and success in their 20s and 30s. Statistically, most of today’s young people are now living with their parents after college, drowning in debt, and feeling extremely unoptimistic. Young adults who have been unsuccessfully job hunting are coming to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the relationship between effort and results is broken. The worst aspect of the bad economy for young adults—whether they’re recent grads or they were employed for a few years out of college and were laid-off—is that they feel it’s not a good use of time or energy to pursue their dreams!
This is crap.
Enter Coming of Age in a Crap Economy, a new ebook series that candidly instructs today’s 20somethings and 30somethings to tell the bad economy to shove it and to take their futures into their own hands, written by Liz Funk with an introduction by the New York City-based therapist and executive coach Cathy Wasserman, L.M.S.W.
Sharing the anecdotes, stories, and heartbreak of dozens of 20somethings and 30somethings from around the country, as well as advice from career experts and psychologists, 22-year-old author Liz Funk ("Supergirls Speak Out," Simon and Schuster) uses humor and honesty to encourage young people to acknowledge how being young in a bad economy has popped their bubbles and shook up their plans like bad turbulence... but they'll bounce back.
Generation Y is the most ambitious, technologically-savvy, resourceful generation of Americans ever. If young people can figure out how to help each other and make opportunities together when there aren’t formal jobs to be seized, that’s how growing up in a bad economy is going to produce the next great generation of entrepreneurs, artists, inventors, and leaders. Orson Welles, the actor-director-screenwriter once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” And Orson Welles knew his stuff.
If you’re out of college and unemployed, what better time to come together with other people in similar situations and see what you can create together, whether it’s a new company, a guild of freelancers, a non-profit organization, or a product that could be under every Christmas tree by 2013.
More importantly, 20somethings need to take the inevitable period of tentativeness and restlessness after graduation or being laid-off and turn it into a period of reflection, reframing expectations, and fixing priorities.
If the purpose of life is to evolve as a person, the beauty of the crap economy is that it’s forcing us to figure out who we are when we’re sitting still (even if we have no say in our stillness) and how we can live without spending money to simulate satisfaction. If we can figure out how to be happy when we’re young and unemployed and unsure of how to move forward, can’t we handle anything?
When the economy crashed in 2008, prompting media commentators to dub the ensuing years “the Great Recession,” today’s young adults were preparing for adventure and success in their 20s and 30s. Statistically, most of today’s young people are now living with their parents after college, drowning in debt, and feeling extremely unoptimistic. Young adults who have been unsuccessfully job hunting are coming to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the relationship between effort and results is broken. The worst aspect of the bad economy for young adults—whether they’re recent grads or they were employed for a few years out of college and were laid-off—is that they feel it’s not a good use of time or energy to pursue their dreams!
This is crap.
Enter Coming of Age in a Crap Economy, a new ebook series that candidly instructs today’s 20somethings and 30somethings to tell the bad economy to shove it and to take their futures into their own hands, written by Liz Funk with an introduction by the New York City-based therapist and executive coach Cathy Wasserman, L.M.S.W.
Sharing the anecdotes, stories, and heartbreak of dozens of 20somethings and 30somethings from around the country, as well as advice from career experts and psychologists, 22-year-old author Liz Funk ("Supergirls Speak Out," Simon and Schuster) uses humor and honesty to encourage young people to acknowledge how being young in a bad economy has popped their bubbles and shook up their plans like bad turbulence... but they'll bounce back.
Generation Y is the most ambitious, technologically-savvy, resourceful generation of Americans ever. If young people can figure out how to help each other and make opportunities together when there aren’t formal jobs to be seized, that’s how growing up in a bad economy is going to produce the next great generation of entrepreneurs, artists, inventors, and leaders. Orson Welles, the actor-director-screenwriter once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” And Orson Welles knew his stuff.
If you’re out of college and unemployed, what better time to come together with other people in similar situations and see what you can create together, whether it’s a new company, a guild of freelancers, a non-profit organization, or a product that could be under every Christmas tree by 2013.
More importantly, 20somethings need to take the inevitable period of tentativeness and restlessness after graduation or being laid-off and turn it into a period of reflection, reframing expectations, and fixing priorities.
If the purpose of life is to evolve as a person, the beauty of the crap economy is that it’s forcing us to figure out who we are when we’re sitting still (even if we have no say in our stillness) and how we can live without spending money to simulate satisfaction. If we can figure out how to be happy when we’re young and unemployed and unsure of how to move forward, can’t we handle anything?
