I’m a Harvard grad who can’t hold a fast-food job

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Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 2009

I have a history of depression and I’m back at my parents’ — but I have an Ivy League film degree!


Dear Cary,

I am a week shy of my 25th birthday, and I am back living in my parents’ home. I have a degree from Harvard and a year of grad school under my belt, but lifelong depression and social phobia have crippled me such that I can’t capitalize on my achievements. There’s never been a problem getting good grades, but I’ve never been good at setting my own goals and following through with them. Only too late have I realized that one has to get good at something (besides passing tests) to be able to make a living. Everybody just assumed that because I was book-smart, I would be life-smart, and nobody pressured me to plan out what I wanted to do with my life.

I’ve also been so sheltered that I can’t give directions to my own home, nor do I keep track of how much money there is in my bank account. Basically, I haven’t had to learn the ins and outs of daily independent living and it’s driving me insane, because I am 25 AND I HAVE A HARVARD DEGREE!

Since I’ve dropped out of graduate school I’ve made some attempts to get a job, but not wholeheartedly. I was fired from a fast-food job a couple of months ago, which has shot my confidence for getting a higher-paying, higher-status job. I’m scared to death of getting one, because I don’t think I’ll put in the effort to do well. I don’t have to worry about paying the bills (my parents take care of it all) so there’s no external motivation to get serious.

Besides my lack of ambition, I have trouble maintaining relationships. Never dated. Friends come in and out of my life, and I either get bored with them or I get so annoyed that they have ambitions and passions that I feel uncomfortable sticking it out. I have no loyalty to anyone and even my family says that I am duplicitous and hard to read.

I spend most of my days sleeping or surfing the Net, away from people, tuned out from the world. Whenever I try to tune back in, I feel self-conscious due to all that I’ve missed out on. This again makes it hard to connect with others — what the hell can I talk about?

I know I’m smart, but I’m lazy, and am nowhere near to approaching my potential. The separation between my ability and my actions is driving me crazy and has brought on suicidal thoughts.

I wouldn’t mind being isolated or having a low-status job if I were independent (not relying on parents). But “settling” for a “McJob” while under their roof seems to be the very example of slacking off because there’s no pressure to do better, and I feel embarrassed doing that.

I know there’s a way out of this — maybe finding a different set of friends; a mentor; making a plan and not caring what other people think of it — but getting out of bed to do it is the trick. I’ve even thought of running away to California (I studied film) but I don’t know how the hell I’d survive.

Thanks for reading.

Stalled

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Dear Stalled,

Now, I know that mental illness can cripple the smartest among us. But I also know that this can be dealt with in many ways. See a doctor or a therapist. It may be that you are one of those people who has what is called Asperger syndrome. If it’s Asperger, there are ways to manage it. If it’s depression, try cognitive therapy. Try anything. You have somehow been managing this all your life, functioning well enough to excel in high school, acquire a Harvard degree and do a year of graduate school. If you are experiencing a particularly difficult bout of it now, then with the help of a doctor or therapist attack it with fearless vigor. Fight these thoughts of helplessness and hopelessness with the facts: If you can graduate from Harvard, you can fill out an application for employment at Lion’s Gate. And if you need certain things in order to function — order, quiet, exercise, diet, then you have the resources to get those things.

Among those resources is courage. If you have come this far, you obviously have courage. Call upon it now.

And know this: It’s as hard to escape your own privilege as it is to escape your own deprivation. Hell, if you hitchhike to California, they’ll probably put a tracking device on you for insurance purposes. So at the risk of consigning you to the kind of chaos and uncertainty that I lived through in my 20s and early 30s, I say, what are you afraid of?

Unless you lack sufficient whiteness, you can hitchhike to California drenched in blood like a serial killer and some nice young person from Brown will give you a film job.

If you lack whiteness, it’s going to be harder. You’ll have to show your Harvard diploma.

When I set out in my 20s I understood very little but I understood this much: Any educated white person in America is privileged, and no one is going to allow us to starve. We can’t even starve if we want to. People keep inviting us to dinner to talk about Robert Lowell.

We can try to starve ourselves but other white people will force-feed us like foie-gras geese. We can’t escape out whiteness even in Tenderloin hotel rooms.

They send their gardeners looking for us.

We’ll be smoking crack on the third floor and hear Spanish in the lobby. “Is that the voice of my mom’s gardener?”

It’s too much for their delicate constitutions to see their educated white children starving. It breaks their hearts. They must control us. They’re like missionaries.

So don’t worry about it. Your parents would rather pay all your bills and have you live at home and stay in your room than see you miss a meal or direct a grade-B zombie flick. Even if you come out here they’ll send you money.

A note to parents: If you have a 25-year-old college graduate living at home, do that person a favor: Next time he or she leaves the house to “meet up with friends,” gather up all his or her stuff, put it in the car with a $100 bill and have a locksmith change the locks on the house. (Chances are you don’t know how to change a lock yourself, right?)

And if you’re 25 and sitting in the bedroom of your parents’ house, hear this: We need you! The planet is melting down. Get out of your goddamned houses and change the world. There’s work to be done.

If you must fear something, fear dying without living.

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4 comments

  • I LOVE the last three paragraphs of Cary’s answer! It’s the call we should all be making to the lost children who think they don’t matter.

  • Cary was coddled by strangers through his lost years because he was charming and he still makes a living being charming. He’s confused that with being white. Being white isn’t why people saved him from himself over and over again, it’s because he made them think or laugh or feel a part of the bigger whole.

    People will let you sink through the holes if you are unfriendly or they can’t figure a way to relate, no matter who you are. And as a recovering alcoholic Cary knows the geographic cure is a delusion of change which may only bring in greater loneliness and isolation. LW, you’ll end up still being you wherever you go.

    Get out of the parent’s home. That’s your reason for living now, acquiring a home of your own and then filling it with things you think are cool. Don’t just get a white box and put your tv, couch and bed in it like most guys. Fill it with posters of movies you love, stacks of books and DVDs. So that when people walk in your place, they get a sense of what you think is interesting. Put your Harvard diploma on the wall or a table with a burning tribute candle underneath it and other reliquaries (make fun of yourself!) Buy memorabilia and trinkets if you don’t have them. The point is plaster yourself all over the walls with storytelling — that’s what you studied, that’s what you love. That will make you relatable.

    You’ve got means! Rent a room with other film majors or artists, or get a house or a large apartment and advertise for roommates with the caveat they’re film makers or other artists. They’ll forgive you of almost anything because they’re observers, loners and overly-analytical too.

    And you will watch and live with how it is to act out a passion through them because they don’t have your means most likely and HAVE to support themselves, live in the world and hopefully are actively doing something to tell stories and film. Maybe they’ll need you to finance a film or ask you to help them out with theirs. You need a leader in your life who sees you as a useful cohort or at least lackey. Then you’ll get to react with others, to the world. You’ll fail but other things will be going on too so you’ll focus less on it.

  • My dear,
    Forget NYC or LA. Those cities attract the worst people in the world: the careerists, the vain, the stupid. Move to a different country. Shock your system. Get out of that war-mongering country. You’ll breathe fresh air and feel different than you have ever felt. Start with a language program in a different country. Sounds like maybe your parents will support you financially at first.

  • I’m commenting not to disparage your generation, LW, but my own. The people who are parents of todays 25 year olds are the approximately the same age as the people I went to high school, and subsequently to university with–lets say now roughly between 40-55 years old.

    I don’t know why my generation has done such a terrible job parenting yours. I have no idea why so many of you were deprived of all the freedoms and opportunities we had, including the freedom to “roam” (the woods or the neighborhood or at least the bus routes), to “rebel” and to be “alternative” (i.e. hang out UNSUPERVISED with friends, go to parties, have sex (!), be in bands, go to clubs (sneak into clubs underage), make art, make really really disturbing art, teach English in Japan, or whatever). I don’t know why the “Great De-Skilling” (as I call it) that began for us back in the 70s was continued on with you guys throughout the 90s and the 2000s. I’m sorry that your generation was brought up to be so timid and fearful of everything outside your front door. I am sorry that you were never allowed to learn how to make choices.

    I say, buy a ticket for the Greyhound (or whatever bus line you have there), go to California or New York or maybe a place a bit closer to home to start (or come up here to Canada for a bit) or maybe even eventually further afield. See at least SOME of the world, and learn the joys of just poking around a different city by yourself, even for a day or two, take some photos if you need to look like you are “doing” something, find some work to support yourself, live cheaply–and start building your own life.

    Once you start making some decisions for yourself, even small ones, you will become more practiced in making the bigger and bigger choices, related to who you are and what you actually might want to do. Youth is precious, and yours has been hijacked. Take it back while there is still time.

    Oh, and you don’t need your parents’s permission for any of this. You give yourself the permission you need.

    One other thing: start looking around at some affordable, practical skills training of some kind (maybe in trades or technologies), so you can start finding ways to feel confident about knowing exactly the right thing to do on a job. That way, you’ll always be able to earn the cash you need to support the choices you’ll want to make later.

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