Night of the Unemployed Yuppie

So I had noticed that the NYT's favorite fear-mongering technique this year has been the "John (or Jane) Doe was college-educated and holding down an executive position. Then they lost their job, and now they have to work in the service sector. Boo!" They did this to offensive good effect in a Magazine piece, "Commute to Nowhere," which includes, among other gems, the sentiment that: "For most women, survival trumps ego; they simply adapt and find some job. For men, grappling with joblessness inevitably entails surrendering an idea of who they are -- or who others thought they were."

After I wept for this assault against historical male privilege (and enjoyed it when Alternet wrote "The Truth About Women and Recession"), I began keeping my eyes open for the inevitable flood of articles by or about people who, frankly, had gotten lucky in the boom and were reeling from the shift in fortunes now. Salon's article today doesn't disappoint: "Falling Down" details the same woes as all the other articles I run across in other publications. Once these people were yuppies; now they're not, and they're irritated that people don't know they used to be "better."

And here's where we enter the "What's My Rant" portion of the Rage Diaries: a college degree is not a God-given guarantee of a white-collar job. A white-collar job is not a God-given guarantee of future white-collar employment. And it is rank and hypocritical to look down on the same service sector jobs you used to rely on for what you might have called your "quality of life."

It's the sense of entitlement and social consciousness that kills me in these stories. Barbara Card Atkinson takes a lot of pains to describe how poorly dressed her fellow applicants for food stamps are, because she can't believe she's anything like them; she makes sure we know that she's really a writer and not some presumably brain-dead cinema slob. She treats the whole experience of working in a movie theatre as somehow beneath her, the same way the executives profiled in "Commute to Nowhere" regarded things like teaching as a step down. The sullen resentment that they can't spend freely, the irritation they feel when other people fail to be impressed by what they used to be just ... it's the worst kind of snobbery, like threadbare rubes who remind you that their ancestors once signed a piece of paper.

The hard facts are these: no job is stable, no job is permanent, no skill set is perenially valued. It is your responsibility to make sure you're employable -- not anyone else's. It is your responsibility to provide for yourself. And if you have a shift in fortunes while doing so? It's better to decide that you'd rather be judged on how you handle your life now than for what you used to be. Everyone goes up and down; the question is how well you handle the trips.