I am a high school AND four-year college grad. I graduated high school with an unweighted GPA of 3.8. I have roughly 18-20 years worth of writing experience while only being 26, and I've self-published over 150 stories since 2007. Even though I have an art degree, I consider myself a creative and technical writer first and foremost, and my experience with a "useless" art degree has enabled me to learn a variety of new systems and programs with remarkable speed. Part of my daily ritual, aside from my writing hobby that I treat like a career, is learning something new in the sciences, doesn't matter what it is, as if I never left college. On top of all that, I have an IQ range above 140.
Despite all this, it took me 8+ years of relentless job searching to actually find anything, and all I got was a part-time job at minimum wage. I've been turned down by all too many jobs that are SUPPOSED to be entry level, all because I had no work experience or because I wasn't absolutely religiously dedicated to the company and what they believed in. I'm also the kind of person who gets the job done no matter what, even if it's not in my job description; if I can do it, I'll do it. Even though I come home from work close to midnight, I am still fired up and I spend the next two hours working on my personal projects while I wait for my body to wind down. Even though I play a lot of video games, I'm the kind of person who never truly switches off.
Despite all this, I don't consider myself a workaholic. I consider myself exceptionally high strung, who takes everything they do with a modicum of seriousness. I also don't do drugs of any kind, nor do I smoke or drink alcohol. Hell, there was a time I considered going vegan just as a matter of CONVENIENCE. And then conservatives, employers, the older generation in general will claim me and others like me in my generation are lazy good-for-nothings that just want to smoke weed in our parents' basements, collect welfare checks and sell our food stamps on the black market for heroin. The people who actually want to work, the people trying to make something of themselves, the people who are ethical not just because the law or their religion says so but because that's just who they are, they're grouped in with the worst of the worst. They're given a straw visage to the side trained to be opposed against them, to divide the sides even further. so the people who pull all the strings can run off with all the money.
That's ultimately what people care about most in this country: money. We're a consumerist country, where we are compelled to buy things. where we are expected to buy things, where our happiness and success is solely estimated by how big a house we own, how expensive a car we drive, and how much superfluous things like jewelry, expensive furniture, and NASDAQ stocks we own. According to the culture we've grown up with, our "happiness" is directly related to how much money we're making, and we base our entire existence around preparing to make money. Education isn't treated as a path of self-enlightenment; it's treated as this first stage of mindless acquisition. Degrees that aren't in medicine or law are treated as useless degrees,
Do you think I've been writing for so many years, publish so many stories, write during my lunch and break at work, and work so hard on my personal projects because I profit from it? Granted, it would be nice to make a buck from my hobby, but that's not my main reason why. I write and draw because I enjoy it. Because it makes me happy. I go to work so I can make money so I don't have to worry about sustaining myself, so I can focus on the things I really care about, the things that really make me happy. If I got paid to do what I love doing, that would be Valhalla.
But no, because I am part of the millennial generation, because I majored in a "useless" art degree, because I graduated high school with no work experience during one of the worst economic crashes since the Great Depression, I am typecast as a drug-addled hippie because that's what a generation several decades before my time did when that couldn't be further from reality. This is the true face of "millennial entitlement", a great big lie by puppet masters who try to make the generations and their different cultural values clash so they are distracted while the ultra-rich elites make off with whatever little pocket change we have left.
