What about that thing — “the future”?

In five years, I see myself in some position of political activism. Having just gone through an election, that idea may seem like the idea of moon aliens attacking: really, really dumb. But, I see myself doing something beneficial, and something worthwhile, in political activism.

Maybe that means redefining the idea of lobbying, or even of being an activist, or undoing the damage done by Super PACs. For now, I want to focus on my education and on learning about how political marketing works. Most people I talk to about this either have an emotional response or they ask if that stuff is even legal (yes, it is). To me, that all says that people don’t know how a substantial part of our political process works, and the actual impact is has on society. That’s what motivates me to try and do something about that.

In ten years? Who knows. If I’m successful in that first five years, maybe I could keep at it, work in some elections. That all depends on how life goes, but the absolute dream that I have for where I would like to be is the owner of an independent tea room, not a coffee shop, but a tea room in some smaller city where people can escape from the broader, louder world. I’ve been playing with the idea of running my own small-scale tea business for over a year now, but life keeps getting in the way.

And about that whole life thing. I have no idea if I want to get married or if I want children. I have no
idea if I aspire to the standard ideal of a successful adult with a glorified home in a glorified suburb with a glorified school and a glorified sense of self-entitlement that, from my perspective, has done more
damage to this society than anything you hear from a single politician.

I don’t want a life of privilege or entitlement. I would prefer to help other people and use any success — if I ever get any success — to help even more people.

I know this all sounds confusing. I literally do not know if I want to be a glorious success with wealth and privilege or a little hermit in a tea room with a book and a cup of tea — or is that the glorious success? A time frame is difficult, since it’s all heavily dependent on more education, more experience, more time with the right people in the right circumstances. It’s a complicated task to predict the future.

For now, I’ll try not to be disappointed, or optimistic, about a future that I can’t see yet.

Every generation talks about how they live in the end-times for their society. Every pundit talks about the fall of U.S. hegemony or the “rise of the rest.” Either way, everyone agrees that us twenty-somethings won’t have the same quality of life as our parents. I feel like we can have a bit more say than that, and, even more than that, I feel like we’re perfectly poised to tell the pundits and other talking heads of the airwaves and blogosphere that their little corner of privilege in the world isn’t so insular, and not to discount us.

If you tell us that we’re going to fail, and really hammer it into our heads for a decade or two, then sure we’ll fail.

I could quote Nietzsche or someone more elegant, instead I’ll go with Einstein here: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

The last year saw a great shift in my relationships.

While my father passed, I watched my relationship with my mother grow closer as the tie I had to my dad’s side of the family grew more distant. Granted, there was a great deal of physical distance and three or four decades between me and them.

My relationship with my friends changed dramatically — from the bubble of college and the hundreds or thousands of people around me to the dozen or so in a closer social circle melting away when I moved home and then out of the house and into the real world. Many of my old friends in college? Hundreds of miles away, scattered to far-flung states, looking for some way to pay their own student loans.

My career situation is stable, sure. Some of my relationships with my closer friends are still strong, sure, but I feel as though there’s a basic reason for why so many of us never quite make it back together (outside of LinkedIn). Upon graduating, we took off in our various directions and put a laser-focus into getting a solid resume and job and income and place to live and something that might resemble a stable new life.

We all lose so many relationships immediately after college, especially if college is far from home, because we are trying NOT to be in college anymore. Clinging to past relationships makes life more difficult.

Now, it has been eighteen months since I had to say goodbye to many of my old friends. I stay in contact with a few, but it’s the same way anyone keeps in touch with a few random Facebook friends. But I have moved on to a new life. It’s weird, I have to learn how to make new friends. Well, I did that. A few, at least. I also found a girlfriend (which, at the point of this writing, we will have been together for nine months to the day).

Making new friends is an extremely frustrating experience for me. I’m not great at bar culture. I work from home. I’m socially dependent on my girlfriend sometimes, but I can’t help it. She knows the area, she knows people who host parties. Without her, who knows if I’d have any friends.

The strangest thing is: the friends that I have made who are older say they think I’ll be successful. It’s always this future-tense thing, though — they view me as someone who could, actually, do something cool with my life. I’m not sure how to take that. Should I embrace the idea that I’ll amount to something someday? It’s confusing to try to understand where the tipping point between the day-to-day distraction of life gives way to something bigger.

I know that many of my actions and circumstances are beyond my control. The idea of control is silly. My current circumstance, the one that I walked into a few months ago and have been in for nearly a year now, is one in which I work from home and desperately try to figure out a future in public policy.

In the end, all I can really rely on for control is my own mind. Outside of that, I’d say I have a level of control that sits at around 10 percent.

Okay, working in marketing is a little off the mark. It’s the job I could get, it’s the job that was available, and it’s a saving grace — so I have a hard time harboring malevolent or disingenuous feelings about the situation. I am looking (read: clawing) for a chance to go into policy, analysis, etc., and I’m even considering cobbling together the legal know-how to create a Super PAC. I mean, let’s face it, “Founder of Awesome People for a Better Universe Super PAC” would be an excellent boon to any resume.

I look longingly into the distance and think about what I need to go back to school. The obvious things I need are money and a plan. Which is easier? The plan is easier, but everything is still a pipe dream. What can I control from here on out? I can control the little bit of my life that’s at the very edge — cheap wine or semi-cheap beer?

I just took the GRE. In the weeks leading up to the test, I saw a great deal of how my life was outside my control. Expectation: A few hours of uninterrupted studying. Reality: Go to a wedding, go to a birthday party, go visit my grandfather over a hundred miles away, see a friend from out of town, and face thirty other responsibilities.

Life is chaotic. Life is a giant pile of things you want to do and things that crop up, plans that fall through, and a million other things. If you want control over your life, you’ll suffer a death from a thousand paper-cuts.

College debt and credit-card debt are, thankfully, a thing of the past.

I went to a $40,000-a-year school and ended up with around $70,000 in debt, after scholarships and grants. Not bad, I know people with a lot more than that.

Everyone thought that we would be okay with that debt level when I graduated. However, I was not counting on both of my parents either resigning or retiring from their jobs before I had even graduated. Call it an outcome of parents having a child at ages 39 and 40, respectively. Not to mention my father having to be in and out of the hospital straight through my graduation until he passed in September, 2011 — only four months after my graduation — and suddenly debt was an extremely real, more burdensome aspect of my life.

In past posts, I have mentioned that I would not have changed a thing about college. If I could have done anything different to avoid the high debt level and still have gone to the same school, I would have tried it. No one in my family could have predicted what happened afterwards, which left me with $850-a-month student loan bills until my father’s life insurance policy finally paid out, very nearly a year to the day after he passed.

In my final semester of college, before things like the real world were even a passing thought in my head, a seminar I was taking for political science was focusing on education, so naturally the cost of it had become a regular topic of discussion. On the college-level, we were able to identify a number of reasons for the cost.

1. Everyone expects a well-groomed showcase of a campus when they take a tour.
2. Everyone expects their college to have the resources they need at their fingertips.
3. If you go to a school that offers smaller class sizes, you’re going to expect that there are plenty
of highly trained professors to make that a reality.

Of course, anyone can identify more reasons. In fact, the thing that is truly “broken” about the cost of higher education is that the last decade has seen a drastic cut in state investment in public and private colleges. I won’t explain my logic — you can find it in nearly any news article on the subject. The actual costs of running a college haven’t necessarily changed, it’s how the burden of it has shifted to students.

Going forward, since my loans were paid off in one fell swoop, I definitely feel like my lifestyle is going to improve. I haven’t done that much with the remaining money from the payout. Bought some new silverware, planned a trip to California in February, started thinking about grad school.

However, before the life insurance payout, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to stay afloat for much
longer. If Romney calls the middle class those who make $200,000 a year, then I’m only 10 percent of the way there. I never picked up summer tires, I had been putting off computer repairs, I had to settle for a very small apartment with my girlfriend — it’s been a crapshoot. I was loathing every purchase, from coffee to vegetables.

That’s all wrapped up though, now I’m debt free and have a Spartan resume.

about what cannot be changed. However, that doesn’t stop me from making some general observations:

1. My tuition was likely more than double what it would have been if I had stayed in-state.

2. There was a lack of information provided to me in high school about the benefits of staying in-state.

Photo prompt #2: A picture from graduation.

If I had stayed in Vermont for college, my world-view would probably not have grown, I would have had a very small social circle, and would probably be stuck having to think more about my family and hometown versus a whole new world. Socially speaking, I believe I made a good investment.

The Political Science program at Western New England College looked strong, and the school did not go out of its way to be highly competitive as other schools did. When I’m competing, my capacity to perform plummets. It isn’t worth the stress if I’m going to do poorly. But the choice was also biased, in that the school was the same one my late-father attended. We toured the school and he thought it was beautiful.

I was officially under pressure to attend.

The ticket price was $40,000, and my parents were divorced school teachers. Scholarships helped a little, but, please, when your own high school writes you off as “not college material” and institutionally makes you believe that you aren’t cut out for tertiary education, you probably aren’t getting any of those massive scholarships people brag about. For the record, my high school gave me a $300 scholarship. Another student going to the same college got a lot more than I did. Probably because he excelled at sports. I’m not sure.

So, what about college life itself?

In college, my eyes were opened to the pretty awesome world of everything that wasn’t in the small town I grew up in. A movie theater was now two miles away, not twenty. High-speed internet and cell service was everywhere, and did not require a ten minute drive into town. Okay, my standards were low. I joined lots of clubs, made a lot of friends, actually studied, and did better than in high school in just about every respect.

And classes? Never had one with more than thirty students. Most of the time there were fifteen, maybe twenty. This is very important, as I really doubt I would have actually learned very much if I was forced into huge lecture halls and was learning more from TAs than professors.

What would I change? Nothing. Not one decision. College was a lot of ups and downs and expensive classes, but it was still a learning experience quite unlike any other, and it wasn’t at a colossal university. I don’t believe in changing the past. Sure, maybe some tweaks to cost here and there, but I “found myself” at school.

As for going forward,  this is where I get topical — a massive theme in my posts has been how the last sixteen months since graduation have revolved around my father’s declining health and his passing.

In the last few weeks, since this project with WBUR began, a couple things have changed. One, I now live with my girlfriend in our own apartment. We’re going strong, and just after our move the battle with my father’s life insurance company finally concluded. I was awarded the full amount of the policy plus interest. Now, here I sit, debt free, and turning the page in a more significant way.

September 17th marks the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing, and the 18th is the day I see the last student-loan payment I’ll ever have to write for my undergraduate education cashed. It’s been an interesting week. This is where I seriously begin thinking about graduate school, and stop having to think about sitting in the same tiny space twenty-four hours a day.

The circumstances behind my employment are as fortunate as they are depressing. There are some personal details to move through in explanation.

The question, though, is if I feel overqualified for my job. No, I don’t. In college, I majored in political science. I found myself in a position where I realized that, unlike many of my friends who were engineers or in the business school, I was gaining a skill that was altogether different. I was learning to think critically. I just needed to make it marketable.

Fast forward to graduation in 2011, and I was dead in the water. I was about to go home. I had a diploma, but had to move back in with my parents in the countryside — think dial-up internet, dirt roads, no cellphone service, etc. I spent what few dollars I had to get my car fixed, and started taking on minimum wage work. “It’s a job to make money and find a better job,” I told myself as I was getting yelled at by some backwoods dude who thought I controlled the price of cigarettes. “It’s a job to bump my networking prowess so I can find a better job,” I told myself as I sat in the basement of a small business, doing inventory on their computer for hours at a time.

Then, in early September 2011, my father, who had only turned 60 in August, was hospitalized, and in need of a liver transplant. At work, I got a voicemail from him. “Seth, call me. It isn’t looking good.”

We talked. I learned how bad his liver really was. A week went by, then another, the news swung back and forth but all we heard was, “It isn’t looking good.”

Then, on September 17th, the same day that the Occupy Wall Street movement began, and while I was changing a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, I saw there was another voicemail on my phone. My father had passed.

I tried going back to work, but constantly driving back and forth the hundred-plus miles to the hospital a couple times a week had drained what savings I had been able to accrue since graduating. I realized I needed a new job, something that paid at least ten dollars an hour, full time — the sort of thing I could move out of the house on.

In this time, a web developer who had had taken on the small business I was working for as a client had given me some tasks, basically as a social media guy who could do data entry for the site as well. It was semi-menial, and the tasks meant a few more hours per week of work. When the owner of the company asked why I had dropped off the map after the 17th, he learned of my father and sent me a long e-mail.

“We’re both brothers in a sense that our fathers were taken from us at a young age,” he wrote.

When I began looking for a new job, I asked him if I could use him as a reference on my resume. We had been working together in the last month or so professionally.

He offered me a job on the spot. It seemed simple enough. I would be an online marketing specialist, and become a well-rounded social media guru and Google pay-per-click specialist.

In the last year I’ve done quite well with social media, not so well with Google Adwords and pay-per-click advertising. I’m not living paycheck to paycheck anymore, but in the last few months I’ve started to feel like I’m over-qualified for some bits of my job, but the feeling has little or no philosophical weight to it.

Maybe I heard a statistic about people my age changing jobs frequently. Maybe I’m new to being in the real world. Maybe I’m feeling flighty since very nearly one full year ago my father passed away, or it’s a desire to live in a bigger city or to pursue a Master’s degree. I’m not entirely sure.

What matters most to me is that I have opportunity. I’m always trying to improve myself when I can, but I have a job in online marketing, so I telecommute (read: work from home). I have a professional title with a modest salary, but no co-worker experiences. Some days my only interaction with another person is my girlfriend.

Conclusion: I do not feel overqualified, yet. I feel inadequate or that I could be doing more with my life in general, at times, but no, I’m not overqualified. I have a future ahead of me, and while I do feel altogether stuck in a circumstance of working from home and trying to move past the death of my father, I am not overqualified.

I’m 23, hearing all sorts of stories about 1 percent problems, and identifying with none of them.

If it wasn’t for deferments and forbearance, I’d be paying $850 a month in student loans. So, all the financial advice for people my age from economists or people who never had to struggle — yeah, it’s pretty much all moot.

I went to college in Springfield, Massachusetts, and graduated in 2011 from Western New England College (now University). Now I live in Burlington, Vermont, in a telecommuting job, just barely able to pay off an $850 a month student loan bill, rent, phone, car insurance, etc., with a $24,000 a year job. Okay, I’m employed; I have a job that for many would be gem. The thing is, though, more than half of my income goes into loans.

That sounds pretty typical. What’s not so typical is my telecommuting job.

I do marketing, advertising, and data entry — all for one firm that does pretty well for itself and is very accepting. But I can’t afford anything larger than a tiny apartment, with my “office” being two feet from my bed, and it’s the same area where I typically socialize. It’s rather isolating and, while I’m proud of what I do and get encouraged to keep working on social media when I see a post or a blog or a tweet go viral, there are no co-workers, there’s no one looking over my shoulder, and there’s little to no social interaction period.

When my girlfriend is around, it’s easier, but when I’m in the same room for around 23 hours a day and I’m trying to save money by holding off on cafe or bar expenses, any interaction with more than maybe one or two “real” people in a given day is tedious.

There are days when the actual physical isolation that this causes has an impact on my work — and the occasional email from a boss saying I need to double-check and focus more on details.

From any standpoint, the idea of being “stuck” creates a few thoughts. From mine, it’s the standpoint of having a decent-paying job and being able to do nothing but work and sit. I can’t afford to relocate, nor can I save money, and I’m definitely the victim of inadequate dissemination of information from the private-college and private-loan system. If anything, the only personal skill I’ve been able to develop in the last 14 months since graduating from college is how to run a moderately popular blog.