Read books. Write poetry. Kiss Girls.

I try my best not to like Giles Coren. Smug, arrogant, preening - but the man can write. And I found myself cheering silently at his latest Times column, which suggests ‘Generation Crunch’ should stop complaining quite so loudly about the imminent implosion of the graduate jobs market:

Do not curse your fortune, but rather thank your lucky stars. You have been saved! You’re an arts graduate, for heaven’s sake. You didn’t want to be a banker anyway. You wanted to read books and write poetry and kiss girls…

…For the past 15 years or so, graduates have emerged blinking into the white light of a witless and capricious boom time. The “milk round” was in full flood at the major universities, allowing corporate raiders to rape the best and the brightest of each new generation. Men and women who might have made great academics, teachers, writers, doctors and scientists sold themselves, like a thousand Fausts, to the corporate Mephistopheles with his shiny brochures and six-figure starting salaries.

And they are the lost generation, believe me, not you. They work now for monstrous institutions that came to get them when they were 19 or 20, before they were able to make any sort of informed choice, fed them money with which to have fun at college, and then threatened to withdraw the supply - like drug dealers - unless they gave them two, five, ten years of their lives afterwards. And so the very best of the best, for the first time in history, became salarymen - dull, acquisitive, witless, bloated….

Read the full article here.

February 7, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

Leave a Reply