From
by Hadley — Age 28 — Media, PA
I graduated from Princeton University six and a half years ago, the product of 16 years of well-rounded and thorough education. My boyfriend after college used to threaten to hide my alumni magazine each time it arrived at our apartment, as it would send me into a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life funk. Classmates regularly reported on their new promotions to some important and abstract position for international business firms with prestigious-sounding, lengthy names, or on their humanitarian work in Honduras, Rwanda or Pakistan. As I write, members of my high school class are gathering for our ten-year reunion, reporting great satisfaction in their new families or in their jobs as lawyers or accountants, or else sending their regrets due to their busy medical residency schedules or impending due dates.
After college, I worked in New York for three years in a job I found respectable but dull. My subsequent life-crisis resulted in my leaving everything to work in what I would consider my favorite job to date ““ as a deckhand on small cruise ships off the west coast of North America. My most recent high school update read, “I am currently unemployed and living in a van in New Zealand.” To elaborate, I have just returned from a year in New Zealand, where I worked six months in two minimum-wage hospitality jobs, and hiked and traveled the South Island for six months while living with my partner in our Toyota van. An incredible experience, for someone just out of college. But I’m charging towards 30 ““ shouldn’t I be doing something more with my life? My education? My intellect?
We live in a country where the number one conversational opener is, “So what do you do?” Your job validates your existence while neatly classifying you in a comprehensible package. I feel like I am the product of a Type A environment who is only now realizing that I am actually a Type B. Am I wrong to choose a slower lifestyle of travel and simple needs, even if it means I can’t necessarily afford to go out for dinner with friends from high school or college? Moreover, isn’t it selfish of me to throw away the benefits of my background without offering any contribution to society? I don’t know. I choose to believe, however, that I am working towards the same life-work balance that others are seeking; I am just approaching it from the opposite direction.
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