Dealing with Existential Despair during a Pandemic
For many young adults, their 20’s should be a time to explore, mature, rejoice, and celebrate. Going to college, following their passions, traveling abroad, or simply spending fleeting moments with friends and loved ones — these are the new and exciting experiences we should be looking forward to.
Instead, many of us, including myself, don’t experience this kind of jubilation — and we haven’t for a while. Instead, we find ourselves anxious over the current economic state, depressed over the increasing difficulties in finding entry level jobs, and overwhelmed with antiquated societal expectations of what milestones we should have reached at certain periods of our lives.
Oversaturated degrees and overcrowded markets; rising costs and stagnant wages; lack of government aid; and many other systemic factors were merely the precursors for our growing collective cynicism. With so many of us losing our jobs, having our hours severely cut, or frantically sending application after application to hiring firms that have stopped accepting prospective employees, we’re left dealing with widespread anxiety and despair. All the preexisting flaws within our sociopolitical and economic systems have become more prominent in our lives in part by the 2020 pandemic, thereby further exacerbating our fears and worries of our futures.
Having recently graduated college during the pandemic, I’ve felt multiple conflicting thoughts and emotions about my future. Despite the excitement of being exposed to more opportunities, I also dread entering the workforce as I know that finding job security in the field I am interested in would be difficult given the pervasive competitiveness of other aspiring graduates also struggling to establish themselves. The amount of time I would spend starting my career is daunting, and it becomes even more so when factoring in higher education and the student debt following it.
Sure you can attribute our current struggles to poor individual choices, but this argument loses its validity when many young adults complain about the same systemic issues that affect them. No matter how hard we work to earn a living, no matter how many hours we spend studying, no matter how frugal we are in our spending habits, it never seems enough. Most of our earnings just barely cover basic necessities or essentials that have been mostly privatized by the wealthy and privileged.
With many of us struggling with the increasing difficulties of finding financial stability, so too are we struggling with maintaining emotional and mental stability. We turn our skills into marketable feats hoping a job finds us valuable enough to employ us. Our self-commodification has drastically altered our sense of self; we’ve detached ourselves from our personal needs to meet the demands of the labor force. We feel discouraged when we burnout, guilty when we take time to rest and recuperate, and shameful when we see ourselves not being as productive as we would like to be.
The idea of resource scarcities imposed upon us has led many of us to overwork ourselves in order to navigate the convoluted nature of various bureaucratic institutions. Lots of entry level jobs and graduate schools require years worth of experience which most 20 year olds don’t meet. To compensate, most of us have to take multiple unpaid jobs and work — sometimes at the same time — to prove our worth in order to be accepted into these elitist entities. With so many of us filling our planners with school, studying blocks, unpaid work, and/or minimum wage part-time jobs, we rarely have time to check in with our friends, loved ones, and, more importantly, ourselves.
Instead of feeling shameful of ourselves for not reaching the same kind of success and power as those few privileged, we should criticize the systems in place that work against so many of us. Cost inflation without wage raises has forced many of us to get into relationships not out of mutual camaraderie, but out of mutual fear to survive. The power of community efforts can be revolutionary alone, but it’s disheartening to see it threatened daily by more oppressive and exploitative powers at play. Moreover, the privatization of financial, healthcare, and academic resources has further disenfranchised us and even pits us against one another by enforcing a socioeconomic hierarchy built upon classism, racism, sexism, ableism, and other exclusionary categories.
When we see success stories praising seemingly self-made young entrepreneurs, we start comparing ourselves to them, then we become self-conscious of our own positions in life. We feel shame that we haven’t accumulated an equally exorbitant amount of wealth, widespread appraisal, and recognition for our labor. The heinous, depressing reality is that those few individuals featured in these success stories were able to skip many of the hurdles the majority of us have to overcome thanks to their wealth and privileges associated with their class, race, and gender.
If attaining success is reserved for those born into generational wealth, should we give up on trying? What’s the point of working if the majority of life is spent struggling instead of finding stability and living in comfort? These kinds of questions are what demotivate many of us and make us lose interest in working towards personal goals we’ve set for ourselves. Some of us have hobbies that help us cope with our existentialism; others may find it difficult to even afford to entertain their interests; but many of us are overworked to where we have little to no time and energy to explore our passions.
The mundane nature of life can put off many young adults, and the monotony of life — more pronounced now than ever during these times of self-isolation, physical distancing, and limited social interactions — can be psychologically debilitating. The harsh realities of high rent, inaccessible healthcare, elitist academia, merciless work culture, and archaic societal expectations have dispirited many of us; however, it is also these realities that have impassioned an entire generation to critique our bureaucratic systems and take initiatives to change them in hopes of improving our quality of life.
In spite of the setbacks and obstacles of life, our generation continues to find ways to overcome and thrive. A wave of social reawakening is surging throughout our local and global communities, and it is through our collective activism that will reimagine and rebuild our current systems into one that benefits the quality of life for all. Though downtrodden by the flaws and failures of a system that continually works against us, we can at least take solace in the fact that we survived this long against these oppressive forces that threaten our existence.
