“We are the 23 year-olds.” –Molly Sprayregan
Corporate tempers, Masters students, entrepreneurs, interns and those just plain lost; Five Trinity graduates talk about their first taste of life beyond our hallowed walls and try to capture what it’s really like to be 23 today in Ireland.
Robyn Hamilton
If I were to sum up being 23 in one word it would be ‘directionless’. As unassuming as the word might seem, right now, to me, it’s downright intimidating. I’ve spent most of my life in education up until this point and there has always been a clearly defined goal, the perimeters of which were usually set up by someone else. As a teenager it was to study hard to get the best Junior Cert I could get in order to train for the real test; the Leaving Cert that would get me into the best university that my abilities could afford. Once in university, though the format had changed a bit, the ultimate goal was still to work and study to the best of my ability to obtain the most favourable results I possibly could… but for what?
Here’s the thing; there is no neatly set, defined path to follow anymore. There’s no one to hold your hand and tell you the direction you should take. It’s all up to you and depending on how you look at it, your options are vast and endless- which is terrifying. When I finished up college last May, after spending my most wonderful final year at Trinity, languishing without a care in the world in my on-campus room with only four hours of lectures a week I never really considered or anticipated the near crippling mental anguish and stress that awaited me just around the corner where my lack of forward thinking and “ah sure it’ll be grand” mentality would surely catch up with me. Six months on I’m still at a complete loss as to what to do. I find myself constantly vacillating between the idea of getting a less than desirable full time job just so I can move out of the family home and holding out for divine inspiration to strike and inform me of the perfect and most fulfilling (and viable!) career path to take but for now I’m just sort of floating in a sea of anxious inaction. Constant questions still nag at me daily; “Should I do a masters? Is there any point? What will make me happy?” Except now they’re also coming from an increasingly anxious surrounding family as well as myself. To make a definite decision and go for something seems entirely daunting. I ignore the prospect like you would ignore a pile of dirty dishes that need washing. They’ll pile up but will get dealt with eventually… right?
Aside from the perpetual stress that arises from cyclical worrying and ceaseless introspection, I often wonder is it just me or are these feelings symptomatic of my generation?
It’s no longer the teacher/business man/civil servant trifecta our parents chose from. Rather, with cheaper education and more accessible options than ever before there are so many choices and it’s harder than ever to tell which is the right one.
I know I’ve lived a pretty charmed existence by many standards. I’ve a wonderful supportive family and I’ve been afforded every opportunity that’s headed my way, but is it wrong for me to ask, aren’t all these opportunities a little daunting?
Either way, 23 sucks man.
Peej Moloney
From what I have read, the statistic and reports all suggest I’ve entered into the most depressing period of my life. Not that I’m exactly an old man or anything but while I’m still technically a “young adult” I also don’t feel that young anymore: hangovers are starting to be that much more visceral, all of a sudden I like Club Lemon more than Fanta (orange) because the taste is that bit stronger, my childhood pet of 19 years has kicked the bucket and I’m pretty certain that I’ve started to go a little deaf in my right ear from listening to the new(-ish) Tensnake album one too many times on full volume.
And now I have also entered the workforce. No bang, no boom, no celebration for finishing college just a plain letter from the HSE telling me I can no longer be on my parents’ drugs payment scheme. I am now a part of a fundamentally human foundation holding up a society which has consistently suffered economic collapse over and over again since the 70s and which seems to use the few booms dotted around its economic history to justify how the state-of-affairs are run.
I am a filmmaker and much like other industries on the Emerald Isle, the competition for entry-level work is so fierce that people do extravagant work, for nothing. I recently heard of a filmmaker who was looking for someone to produce an intricate piece of woodwork for a film, for nothing. I’ve heard of another filmmaker who was looking for young’uns who could drive him around, for nothing, save-for the slim chance that he might understand their creative filmmaking potential through their ability to steer.
Regardless, I do have one thing to say about being 23 right now: the world seems to have stopped making sense and this is a prime time to take educated, opinionated risks. What I mean is that the world has become unrecognizable: people in not-so-catholic Ireland have begun to dress in Japanese fashion styles, the physical has become digital, Zoey Brooks (a.k.a Jamie Lynn Spears) is 23, the political globe is eastwardly rotating, and nobody seems to have a goddamn clue what any of that means!
In this jungle of jumbled philosophies and ideologies some of my friends and I set up a film production company called Aminal Productions (sic). We’re properly incorporated and everything! Importantly, our goal is not simply to make films, rather it is to redevelop the idea of how people make money out of the film industry, and that is the exciting part of being a 23-year-old in Ireland. Out of market necessity young adults are being forced to actively (and passively through mediums such as the internet) create a new economic language. Whether the market my generation develops in the coming years is a more worker-friendly one however remains the future’s little secret, but I am hopeful.
Cassandra Alex
I have a confession: I am a recent graduate and I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Up until recently I felt very guilty thinking that, or god forbid saying it out loud. Growing up in rural Ireland it was always impressed upon me that education was a privilege not a right; the opportunities that were available to me were non-existent during my parent’s youth. Therefore I took learning very seriously – taking on extra subjects for the Leaving Cert, and then after arriving in Trinity to study History and Political Science taking up a night-time Law degree as well. I was assured that education was the key to solving all lives problems, so I’ve spent all of my life studying and I can’t help feeling it’s all been for naught.
Sure, I’ve cultivated a healthy sense of curiosity and I’m a very eloquent dinner party guest but after emerging from the education system I feel lost. Everyone tells me how lucky I am to be young and educated in 2014, but am I? After graduation I moved to Washington DC sans friends and family. I came here because I wanted to try something different and discover could I “make it” on my own. DC has the lowest youth employment rate of any metropolitan area in the United States. Sounds great, right? Wrong; here is a city brimming over with the brightest minds in the country (and me) working for nothing. Zilch. Nada. Am I a spoilt millennial for thinking I deserve to be paid a fair wage for working?
Everyone reassures me that it’s just the way it is and I should be thankful to find work at all. However I cannot help but think my parents generation wouldn’t stand for such a state of affairs. Here I am a double university graduate and I should be glad, no – delighted even to work 40hrs a week for free? If the same scenario was transplanted into the context of a developing nation we’d all be up in arms at the injustice of it but why are we happy to accept it as the norm for ourselves? No wonder I haven’t a clue what I wish to do with my life, what’s the point of deciding if I’m not even going to get paid for doing it. It’s a demoralizing concept; like all your education and hard work has been devalued. I know this system is not unique to DC, and indeed such unpaid internships are becoming the standard at home too. It makes me angry that on one hand the cult of education is what is preached from baby infants to senior sophister but in the ‘real world’ being over-educated is nearly as bad as being under-educated. The only piece of advice I would be happy to impart to future graduates is this: stand up for yourselves and demand more. There is a world of difference between being an entitled college grad and someone who knows their own worth.
Elizabeth Brauders
23 comes with a constant nagging feeling that you left your umbrella somewhere (except you never had an umbrella in the first place), and the relentless ghost of an oven you left on once, a long time ago, probably in a student flat.
You get up, you brush your teeth, you eat a bowl of cereal, you delete The Kinks’ “Well-Respected Man” from your iTunes because it makes you feel even less individual than you ever thought possible. You start listening to Dolly Parton’s “9-5” a lot more, even though you work from 8.30 past 6pm and used to think country music was the first harbinger of insanity.
Your job’s not bad, the co-workers are friendly, humorous things happen and you laugh a lot, and you start to think The Office actually probably was a documentary. But the voice in your head becomes slowly more judgemental and skeptical of your lifestyle, like an anal roommate. Masters applications gathering dust, are they? it sneers. Wearing the same thing you wore yesterday, is it? Making great headway on that artistic portfolio, eh?
You’re still not sure you picked the right choices for your CAO form, while at the same time thrashing out a career with the fruits of your third-level studies. You ask yourself if you’re still equal to the destinies dreamed up for you by friends, family, and yourself, that you’ve all just stopped talking about.
You wonder when you’re going to start feeling like an adult, and you have a sneaking suspicion it’ll be the day you no longer consider Haagen Dazs an acceptable dinner. Then you remember Peter Pan and decide you’ll stay young and bohemian forever, have frozen desserts for every meal, until you recall the fictitious man-child had a psychological syndrome named in his honour for a reason.
Mostly you complain, caught in the horrible between-space of an overlong adolescence. You still struggle with the identity questions you had as an awkward teenager, but now you’re slowly finding the time and space to tease out those answers. No one else is paying your bills, and the roof you’re under is finally your own. You briefly wonder if you could borrow someone’s child just so you can trot out “while you’re under my roof…” Instead you acquire a cat and the very idea that it’s your house, or that you carry any authority, is laughable once again.
But 23 is still a baby in the real world and the bright sides are still painfully obvious. There is time to answer the voices in your head, and to draw up and scrap any number of blueprints for your future before you commit to something. Not every corporate worker is a broken-spirited drone, not every on-hold childhood dream is doomed, and you’re still young enough to apply the terms “youthful excesses/indiscretions” to your mistakes.
Kayla Walsh
Molly Sprayregan’s article, “The Brain on 23”, caused a storm on my Facebook newsfeed when it was published on the Huffington Post website in October. Her analysis of what it is like to be 23 years old and fresh out of college struck a chord with many of my friends and sparked a lot of debate.
When I read Sprayregan’s words, I was amazed that someone could understand my life so well. The guilty Netflix binges, the exponentially growing love for Taylor Swift, the realisation that there arepeople my age who have done incredible things with their lives, whereas I can’t even motivate myself to go to a Pilates class – it summed me up. I swear, I almost ran to my room to check she hadn’t stolen my diary.
I am 23, and have just graduated from Trinity with a degree in English Literature and French. I spent most of my final year in a state of wild panic. After four years in university, I was only marginally closer to deciding what I wanted to do as a career.
I went to endless talks, fairs, and CV workshops. I spent hours researching various jobs online, doing ridiculous careers quizzes (apparently I should be a zookeeper) and asking everyone I knew for advice. After I came to the sad conclusion that my degree didn’t really qualify me to do anything, I looked at my interests and skills, and I decided to do a Master’s in Journalism at DCU.
I still worry about whether I have chosen the right path for me. I have a deep love for journalism, but there is so much negativity surrounding it, and the extent to which publications, broadcasters and radio stations exploit interns is scandalous. I’m sick of people telling me that print is dead, and that I won’t be able to get a job unless I work for free for 20 years, shining a newspaper editor’s shoes until they finally let me make them coffee.
I miss being an undergrad. I miss Trinity, my friends there, the societies and the publications. I miss watching horror films for class and having only six hours a week. I miss getting hammered on a Wednesday night and not having to crawl into college at 10am the next day to listen to a lecturer tell me my radio documentary idea is shit.
My Master’s programme is so demanding that I barely have a social life any more. I don’t have time to go out and meet the love of my life, so I downloaded Tinder. I then didn’t have time to reply to guys’ messages, so I deleted it. I spend most of my nights at home, working, or trying to coax my flatmate into watching terrible TV shows with me.
Yet, all in all, I’m glad I chose to go straight into my Master’s. It has taught me so much, inspired me and given me a sense of direction. And most importantly, it has allowed me to put off being a real adult for one year longer.
