The Quarter-Life Crossroads
A writer examines why some in her generation prefer the ‘not-so-real’ jobs.

BY ELLA LAWRENCE

Like many young people, my teenage years were spent dreaming romantic visions of adulthood.

I wanted to travel to Africa and study the Mali. I imagined interviewing peaceful tribespeople, while the sun beat down on my safari hat and the gentle breeze ruffled my pastel-colored Banana Republic shirt. I’d be in love with my photographer, and we’d eventually marry and raise our children in a native village, homeschooling them while they grew up to be compassionate liberals like us.

Instead, I’m a waitress.

It’s not that Africa stopped beckoning, or that I was a slacker and dropped out of school. In fact, I have two degrees in cultural anthropology. But while in the process of completing my second degree, I came to a realization: I didn’t want to slog around in the world of academia, brushing off dusty bone slivers for some ancient professor 12 hours a day as a graduate student on the way to achieving my National Geographic dreams.

And yet I didn’t know what I did want.

I started working in restaurants when I was barely 18, busing tables in some of the Wine Country’s most prestigious locales, then moving up to hostessing, bartending and finally serving.

But for some, once you get into restaurant work it’s hard to get out. The fast cash is addictive, and when you’ve been doing it for a certain number of years you can turn on autopilot, impressing guests with words like “meritage” and “Quilcene,” while zoning out to think about which cocktail to have after work.

Though now in my mid-20s, I have no urge to exit the restaurant business entirely.

But after being asked repeatedly, “What’s a smart girl like you doing still waiting tables?” I started wondering as well.

And as I considered my co-workers, the bulk of them college-educated and out of school more than a year, I had to question why they were still working in restaurants, too.

But the idea of young college grads sticking it out in the service industry is not exclusive to waiting tables—as advanced-degree-holding video store clerks, boutique employees and bookstore staffers are becoming a fast-growing demographic.

So fast that the college-to-career stalling phenomenon has even earned its own sociopsychological label: the Quarter-life Crisis.

The Quarter-life Crisis, originally described in 1965 by psychologist Elliot Jacques, is loosely defined as a state of mind many 20-somethings enter into as they struggle to find direction in the “real world.” The condition is associated with such “symptoms” as: confusion of identity, insecurity about the near future, insecurity about present accomplishments, financial stress, nostalgia for college life and a re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships. Although these emotions and insecurities are not uncommon at any age, they’ve historically been associated with people on the other side of 40 who feel their lives are largely behind them.

Now it’s for those whose futures could be limitless—which, when one thinks about it, is quite a frightening thought.

Aisha Guler, branch manager of temp agency Nelson Staffing, says the majority of job-seekers coming through her office are 20-somethings, many of them college graduates.

“In the olden days, temporary work was being a file clerk for a week,” Guler says. “Now, especially in Marin, these jobs can last permanently.”

But is life at 25 so daunting as to keep the young and educated in “transitional jobs” when they could be breaking into the fields they strived toward in college?

One theory is that the roots of these feelings can be attributed to a difficulty in adapting to a workplace environment. In college, professors’ expectations are clearly given and students receive feedback on their performance. But in a modern workplace environment this is not the case.

The fact that Generation Y has more debt than any generation before them might also be contributing to the phenomenon. Damian Barr, author of Get It Together: Surviving Your Quarter-life Crisis, cites statistics that show 20-somethings finishing college today graduate straight into crippling debt: $23,600 on average (and startlingly, nearly the exact amount of my college loans).

Barr writes, “Feeling you should be having, doing or being more is the core of the Quarter-life Crisis. Real life sets in, and it’s expensive, ugly and competitive. We feel stressed, inadequate and somehow not quite as good as our peers. We feel, even though we’re only 20-something, that our lives are in crisis.”

As a result, adds Barr, “20-somethings are abandoning the comfort of their family home at a later age and pursuing more transient careers.”

Why pursue a transient career? A better question may be—why not?

Most professions have become highly competitive, and positions of relative security (such as a tenured professor or a partner in a law firm) have dwindled. This, combined with downsizing trends, means that many in Generation Y will never have true occupational security. They’re paying into Social Security, but they know they can’t count on it being there when they reach retirement. Jobs are scarce and cutthroat, even once you “make it” into a coveted corporate position. Everything seems big and scary, and many 20-somethings are taking a different approach. Instead of striving for the “American Dream,” which may or may not be attainable, many college-educated young adults are remaining in so-called “temporary” or “transitional” jobs, such as waiting tables and working in retail. Many young people working these jobs—often looked down upon as “not real jobs”—say they have higher job satisfaction and overall quality of life than their counterparts working as corporate drones.

• • • •

TERRY WOODFORD IS 27 years old. He attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he received his degree in agriculture and urban planning in 2002. After graduation, he got a job as a food-runner in a high-end restaurant and hasn’t looked back.

Smart, sardonic and with an extremely subtle sense of humor, Woodford isn’t necessarily the type of person you’d expect to find running the line as an expediter at one of the county’s finest restaurants, but that’s what he does.

Socializing after the shift is part of his lifestyle, he says, and the restaurant schedule allows him to stay up late and sleep in the following morning—echoing the Quarter-life Crisis’s nostalgia for student life.

Woodford’s father, a biochemical researcher at Yale, and his stepmother, a tenured law professor at that same venerable institution, “are happy for me, I think,” Woodford says. “They’re cool with my career choice. I never felt a lot of pressure to become something super great.”

Although he’s earned a college degree from a quality university, Woodford says he works to make money, and not to save the world or satisfy himself spiritually. “I can find that kind of satisfaction outside of work,” he says. “I think that a lot of people aspire to be something that they feel is not necessarily virtuous or important, but makes them a lot of money.”

Although Woodford admits that he doesn’t plan on working in restaurants long into the future, he enjoys it now. “It’s very easy for me,” he says.

But when does the future become now? What will Woodford think if someday he wakes up and realizes that he’s 40 and still working in a restaurant?

But Woodford rejects that view of a career trajectory: “Personally, my belief is that most people don’t really love their jobs” no matter what it happens to be.

At the prestigious Boulevard restaurant in San Francisco, more than half the servers are college-educated.

“I started waiting tables in college to pay off credit card debt,” says one server. “Now it’s six years later and I’m still here!”

• • • •

HEATHER FERGUSON IS a smartly dressed, articulate young woman with a liberal-arts degree from College of Marin and a degree in fashion design from a private school in San Francisco. She believes so-called “temporary jobs” are only perceived as such because American culture is money-oriented. Ferguson comes across as intelligent and well-spoken. In short, she’s the sort of woman you might expect to run into working at the DA’s office or on a political campaign. Instead, she works at Maison-Reve, a Mill Valley home furnishing store.

“What I realized going to fashion design school,” says Ferguson, “was that I didn’t want to have a lifestyle that was rushed, with a frenzied pace. [Fashion design] is a rather cutthroat career choice so I decided to do something that’s much more calming.”

Like many people, when Ferguson finished high school she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. A creative girl with many interests, she started taking classes at College of Marin. “I feel like the whole point of going through life is to always be able to learn new things and grow as a person,” she says. “What I love about education is that it expands you as a person. The more you learn, the more ways you have of looking at things.”

Ferguson began working in retail her first year in college when she was hired at the Pottery Barn in Corte Madera. “I liked how flexible retail was,” Ferguson says. “I was able to go away for months at a time and travel in Europe.”

Often, though, people don’t understand why she is “still working in retail.” She says it’s because she doesn’t have the same priorities as many college-educated young people her age.

There’s an interesting thing going on with Generation Y, she says. Half of the generation is marching along, going to college, picking a degree (sometimes arbitrarily), plowing through school, getting an office job in their field and realizing, perhaps after a decade, that they don’t really enjoy what they’re doing and don’t know why they started doing it in the first place.

But others in Generation Y are starting to question this avenue. They’re examining the reasons some people choose to work where they work, and what role their professions play in their lives.

Ferguson admits that she has no particular career goal in life. For her, a job is more about enjoying what she’s doing on a day-to-day basis.

“Every couple of years you change,” she muses. “If your job allows you to do that, and expands with you, that’s great. But if it doesn’t, I think it’s time to move on.”

Ferguson believes that making a lot of money at, for instance, a corporate job, entrenches workers; the more money one makes, the less likely that person is to let go of a job he or she may not like in order to do something more fulfilling.

“I’m so happy I never got into that whole scene in the first place,” she says, “because it seems so hard to get out of.”

Ferguson measures her success by happiness, health and good relationships—not by income. And she believes that so-called “temporary jobs” need to be relabeled.

“The only reason people think of these jobs as temporary, is because they don’t make a lot of money,” she says. “But if you are really enjoying what you do and it fulfills you, it’s not temporary.”

Ultimately, Ferguson believes a change in attitudes about career choices is needed. “It will take a shift in viewpoint and it’s starting with this generation,” she says.

Fortunately, Ferguson has a supportive family that understands her lifestyle choices. “My parents are in the education field, so they obviously never thought money was important!” she laughs.

• • • •

DREW LANDERS GRADUATED from the University of Colorado with degrees in English and psychology. Coming home from his freshman year at college, his parents told him he had to get a job.

“All of my friends were either mowing lawns, working in retail, waiting tables or painting houses,” says Landers. “And none of that appealed to me.”

One day he saw someone climbing and pruning a tree in his neighbors’ yard and his interest was piqued. He called several local tree services and was eventually hired by a family-run business. “They had a real love of trees,” says Landers. “The guys who worked there were really into what they did. I ended up working there for four summers.”

After college, Landers pursued a career in the film business—doing grip, lighting and camera work. “It was a really tough business to break into in San Francisco at the time,” he says.

The longer Landers worked in the film industry, the fonder he became of his tree-pruning days.

His pivotal point was when “one morning at 7am, some guy from L.A., who was my own age, told me to go and get Chapstick in Chinatown. At 7am!” Landers started walking toward Chinatown and never came back.

“I called my mom and told her to send my tree equipment down,” he recalls. Landers contacted a few tree companies and was hired by the Maybe Tree Expert Company, where he worked for nine years. Now 40, Landers gives hope to those working the so-called “McJobs” that are taken straight out of college; he managed to turn the “temporary job” he had while in college into a full-blown career. He now runs the tree company Agrifolia, and has been his own boss for nearly six years.

“For a little bit, I wondered what the point of college was,” says Landers, who’s proudly not using his degrees in English or psychology for career advancement.

Rather than an end to a particular means, for Landers college was something important to pursue (and finish) regardless of whether he got a job in his field. And as a small business owner, Landers believes that having an education means you can follow a certain protocol.

“You can learn and process all the information that’s constantly being given to you. Those are all good tools, so college was not for naught,” he says.

Landers thinks many college graduates leave school and are a bit shocked to discover how different the world is outside of college.

“When you go through the educational system, it’s all based on instant gratification,” he says. “You take a test, you get a grade. You study really hard, you get a result. And life just isn’t like that.”

• • • •

RANDALL HANSEN, AUTHOR of Navigating the Quarter-life Crisis to Career and Personal Success, offers up strategies toward overcoming the confusion that can set in after graduating college and trying to find your path.

Developing realistic expectations regarding one’s chosen profession is a beginning.

It’s not likely that you’re going to score the corner office, a multimillion dollar salary and a McMansion while still in your 20s, he writes. Taking time to discover your passions is helpful as well; as Heather Ferguson points out, many people straight out of college take the first job offer they get, without conducting any serious self-assessment regarding what they really want to do with their lives. Setting goals and concretely visualizing the future will help put these passions into context. Questions need to be asked: Where do you see yourself in five years? What type of life do you want? Finally, Hansen says, don’t judge yourself by other people’s standards—develop your own.

When you figure out what gives you the most satisfaction and happiness, he says, that will be how you define success.

• • • •

WHAT IS A “temporary job,” really? Is it a job deemed so by a culture of 9-to-5ers? Is it a job that does not give satisfaction? Many in Generations X and Y seem to think otherwise.

For me, success is the freedom to work as much, or as little, as my whim dictates. I want to be able to head out the door on a six-hour bike ride if my legs feel good and the weather is perfect. I want to be able to decide what I write, for whom and when. I also want to be able to pay my bills on time and go out to dinner with friends without worrying about the cost. So for me, being a freelance writer and a part-time waitress is perfect. I can check my brain at the door when I arrive at whatever restaurant I’m working at this month, worrying only about the best wine to pair with tonight’s specials and if my tables’ cocktails are full.

I can take a leave of absence and head off to South America for the summer, because I know that the restaurant (or any restaurant, really) will be there when I return, full of platanos and fresh experiences. For that trade-off, I’m willing to field the question: “What’s a smart girl like you doing still waiting tables?”

PHOTO OF STEPHENNY GODFREY AT SMALL SHED FLATBREADS IN MILL VALLEY BY ROBERT VENTE

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