A few months ago David Brooks wrote a column entitled “The Odyssey Years”. In it, he describes a new life phase that takes place between adolescence and adulthood. During this phase, he says, “20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.” I was struck by Brooks’s article and by how accurately his description of the odyssey years fit my own life.
After graduating from a liberal arts college, I experimented with different jobs for two years – I waited tables, played music in bars, worked for a public health company, got certified as an Emergency Medical Technician – before finally finding a full time job with the Teaching Fellows, a spin-off from Teach for America. After another two years, I stopped teaching and went to graduate school. When I finish my master’s degree this spring, I will probably take a break from school, during which I will experiment with more jobs, before going back to school again. In fact, since I graduated from college, I have done everything on Brooks’s list except live at home. I could write a similar bio for any number of my college friends.
So I certainly agree with Brooks that the odyssey years exist – at least for the upper-middle class children of Baby Boomers - but what does the existence of the odyssey years mean for those of us who are living them? Do we benefit from having more time to find ourselves or do we just end up spending more time in a state of existential bewilderment? Where will we be when the odyssey is over?
I think Brooks is dead on when he says that, “The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities.” The odyssey years are about establishing one’s professional self, and not only is there a lot of competition, but we have been raised to believe that we can have any career we want and that our careers can feed our deepest passions.
Since I read Brooks’s article in October, I have been observing people in my generation, and what I see are three dominant ways people in my generation navigate the odyssey years. First, there are those people who have a traditional idea about what makes a successful career, for whom a job is primarily about making money. People in this group work in technology or finance, or in a profession like medicine or law. The odyssey years take their lightest toll on this group. Second, there are those who want to earn a living while saving or serving the wider world. People in this group work for non-profits, are passionate about international development and social justice, and often end up teaching in inner city schools before going to graduate school for social work or public health. Finally, there are those who want to get paid to make art. These people spend countless hours crafting personas on social networking sites and work jobs they don’t really care about, hoping to eventually get a big break. For these latter two groups especially, the odyssey years can be a time of intense self-doubt and confusion.
I think what is notable about my generation is how many of us fall into the second two categories and how serious we are about making a go of it. That so many of us believe we can make careers out of doing what we love is either a mark of extraordinary privilege or of deep delusion. I suppose we’ll have to make it to the other side of the odyssey years before we can look back and say definitively which it was.
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