I have struggled to manage my personal finances for the last decade…and mighty has been the struggle thereof.  Education was not the problem.  I knew I shouldn't be charging up the credit cards.  I knew I should be saving and investing my money.  No, education wasn't the problem.  Self-control was the problem.  I knew what I should and shouldn't be doing, but I also knew that, really, I deserved the things I was buying.  Or, more accurately, I completely convinced myself that, not only did I deserve them, but I needed them.

As part of my continuing path toward developing better financial self control, I listen to podcasts about money issues.  In one recent episode, I heard an interview between two columnists from financial publications talking about the state of the financial system.  Over the last several months, the economy has begun to pick up again, after two and a half years of a very bad recession–the kind of recession that has the power to change people's financial behavior.  These two columnists, who were supposed to be in a point-counterpoint type of argument, were discussing what changes we could expect to see from the general public following this recession.  They both agreed that there really aren't going to be any lasting changes in behavior as a result of one of the worst financial meltdowns in American history.  The savings rate went up for a little while, but it was always one of the lowest in the world, and it's already started back down again.  Wall Street has already started recklessly throwing their money around again–doing risky things with it and pissing it away on massive salaries and bonuses.  People who call into the show are already starting to ask about whether it would be a good idea to take out a HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) to buy something they don't need.  Credit card spending was down, but it's starting to rise again.  And all of this despite a nationwide unemployment rate of well over 9%.

I've thought a lot about this financial crisis over the last few years.  I actually predicted the burst of the housing bubble in this post about four months before it happened.  It has been interesting to watch, both from the point of view of an MBA student learning about the financial system, but also as a person who has a good job, lives in a nice location largely unaffected by the recession, and who was entirely unscathed by the financial system.  I didn't have anything invested at the time of the market collapse, so really, I've benefitted quite a bit.  I was able to invest money when the market was at the bottom.  I bought low.  So, my perspective of the financial crisis is different from someone who was affected directly.  And I've been thinking a lot about the causes–not the economic causes, because those are fairly well understood.  Rather, I'm more interested in the social causes.  What made the culture buy the houses they couldn't afford?  What made the culture spend insane amounts of money in credit card debt that they couldn't repay?  What caused the Wall Street culture to gamble so flagrantly with other people's money?

Over the last 100 years, the nature of being a working man has changed significantly.  For much of history, a person's career path was determined by the career path of their parents.  So much so that family names were often determined by what a person's family did (e.g., Smith, Cooper).  And that was only for those fortunate enough to have a family career path.  Many had to resort to simply picking up whatever day labor they could or, in extreme cases, selling themselves on the street.  Many of the people who came to this country in the early stages of its development came as indentured servants or, far worse, slaves.

In an environment such as this, work had a very different meaning than it does today.  Much like those whose marriages are arranged and never have the opportunity to choose their spouses, many men and women in history never got the choice to be what they wanted to be.  Their path was established for them before they were born, and there was precious little opportunity to diverge from that path.  It is likely that, in most cases, the simple fact that choices for alternatives didn't exist actually helped people to enjoy their work–they knew that they would continue to do the work they knew, and they found ways to adapt.  Or, they simply lived in ignorance that something "better" was out there.  And in the case of the workman of the past, it's quite possible that ignorance really was bliss.

But something began to happen in the workforce around the time of the industrial revolution, and exploded after the conclusion of World War II.  The working economy changed, and education became so readily available that people began to see other alternatives than the life established by their parents.  People began to expand and move past the well-established family farms and businesses.  The rise of the office worker and the death of the agrarian and manufacturing economy in the United States helped to expedite the departure from ancestral employment.

Along with, or perhaps as a result of, the increase in employment flexibility and education over the last century, a great change has taken place in the way we talk about work with our children.  No longer do we assume that a child is born into a line of work or a station in life.  Instead, there is constant reassurance that "you can be anything you want to be."  That message is everywhere.  It's repeated like a mantra in children's programming.  It's preached from the pulpit of the public schools.  It's built into the fairy-tale endings of nearly every form of popular media.  It's even preached (far more insidiously) in the realm of higher education.  I can vividly recall my professors in college telling me, "It doesn't really matter what you study.  What's important is that you get a college degree."  The message of "you can be anything you want to be" has become thoroughly and completely ingrained into our societal subconscious.

There's only one problem with that.  It's not really true.

Comic courtesy of Wondermark by David Malki

The consistent repetition of the mantra "You can be whatever you want to be" is, in many ways, a great disservice to the youth of the world.  What the Sesame Streets and Musical Theatre professors of the world never tell you is that, chances are, it doesn't matter how hard you work or how hard you study–you probably won't be able to be anything you want to be.  Most people go through lives doing work that they don't particularly enjoy or care about.  Precious few find the jobs that help them to feel as though they fulfilled their calling, or that they have achieved some greater status.  The majority of people won't be rich, they won't be wildly successful, they won't be the top of their field.  They will just be normal, regular people.  They work to live, not live to work.  Some people despise every second of their working lives and can't wait for the instant they can retire.  But the collective "they" never tell you that.  The heads of youth are filled with dreams of grandeur and great possibility, and, far more dangerously, an undeserved and unearned sense of entitlement.

I have witnessed the result of this shortcoming both in myself and in others over the last 16 years of my working life.  People walk into jobs with a sense of entitlement: they will get promoted quickly or will get large raises–not because they've earned the right, but because "I can be whatever I want to be."  I have had jobs in the past where I felt as though I was being treated like cattle heading toward the slaughter or, especially in the theater, a human set piece.  And it infuriated me.  I had gone to college.  I had studied my craft.  I had worked hard.  And I knew that I deserved better.  I had jobs where I started my first day feeling as though, because I had "put in my dues" and worked hard, that I deserved respect, despite the fact that I had never done anything to earn that respect.  Workers who don't come to work, do illegal things at work, or fail to perform even the basic functions of their jobs, then scream "foul" when they are called out.

Aside from an deserved sense of entitlement, we as a society fail to explain to our youth that the natural functions of life also block off opportunity.  Ugly Betty tells us that if we just put in our dues, we'll go from being a frumpy nobody to a glamorous, beautiful, and successful person.  The Biggest Loser tells us that if we can go to "The Ranch" and get screamed at by a couple of pretty trainers for four months, we'll lose 150 pounds and win $250,000.  Well, my physical appearance means that, no matter how hard I work, I'll never look like a "leading man."  My lack of coordination means that I will never make millions playing basketball for the NBA.  The gap in my front teeth means that I'll never be asked to be a model for a toothpaste commercial.  My eyesight means that I'll never be allowed to fly an experimental jet plane for the military.  No amount of hard work, study, practice, training, or stick-to-itiveness (thanks for the word, Principle Skinner) will undo these physical obstacles.

"They" also neglect to explain the consequence of choices.  I'm not talking about the good vs. bad choices taught in Sunday School.  I'm talking about the directional choices.  The choices, not of right and wrong, but of option.  Every choice you make opens up hundreds of new avenues.  But at the same time, it also closes off millions of other avenues.  My dogged insistence on studying musical theater and my decision to pursue it for several years, meant that for the rest of my life, my work history and resume has an anomaly that I have to either minimize, rationalize, or lie about in order to make it make disappear.  It meant that, in order to become credentialed to be taken seriously for the types of jobs I wanted to have after I retired from performing, I would have to spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars getting an advanced degree.  As a result, I will be paying for my five years of musical theater for the next twenty five.  And that limits a lot of my choices.

If the point of the educational system is to prepare the youth of today to become the adults of tomorrow, I think it's time we as a culture re-evaluate the messages we are sending our children.  While I think it's a good thing to inspire the young to experiment and try new things, that experimentation needs to be coupled with blunt honesty.  People need to be told that sometimes, they're just not good enough–that they've got the wrong aptitude for what they're trying to do.  It will either spur them to improve or redirect them into more suitable paths.  Instead, we've developed a wishy-washy educational culture where there are no winners or losers, and where everyone gets an award just for showing up and participating.  A culture where you're good enough just the way you are, or where you are so sheltered from the consequences of making mistakes, you never really get an opportunity to learn and grow from those mistakes. 

The reality of the world, particularly the working world, is that sometimes, even if you work hard, your efforts will go unnoticed or unappreciated.  Sometimes, you won't get what you think you deserve.  Sometimes, nobody needs or even wants your opinion.  And sometimes they do.  Rather than teaching our culture that hard work is the avenue by which you can accomplish great things and become exactly the person you want to become, maybe we should instead teach the culture that hard work is, in and of itself, the true goal.  That building a life of peace is more important that building another giant McMansion that will end up in foreclosure the next time the stock market crashes.  That sometimes, what you have (and nothing more) is exactly the right amount.

And most of all, that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, maybe all your wildest dreams won't come true.  And that's okay.