What Is Your Aspiration In Life?

“What is your aspiration in life?”

“Oh…my aspiration in life…would be… to be happy.”

-Beyonce, Pretty Hurts

Talking to your past self is impossible. Talking to your future self is possible, though. Simply sit down with your parents and you have access to what your potential self might look like, sound like, and be like. You’ll also have access to what regret might look like. If you’re lucky, you’ll have access to see what true happiness looks like.

The 21st century has been labeled the most selfish in existence. Focus has shifted off the desire to be married and have children toward having the latest iPhone on its release date. At 17, you spend more hours researching universities, programs, majors, degrees, passions, apprenticeships, trades, traineeships, gap years, and travel options than every generation prior combined. We are the most optimistic generation about the future than ever before despite the signals about what the future will look like.

Caffeine drives us, passion inspires us, and hope guides us. We are willing to invest more personal time, energy, and money into our individual futures than ever before. The majority of parents will remind their children that the opportunities now are nothing like what they had when they were our age. Lately, however, it seems the landscape is only going to shift further.

Entry-level jobs require experience but experience is only gained via employment in entry-level jobs. Without experience- and even sometimes with- it takes hours of time invested, energy and money spent researching the jobs on offer, sending out resumes, compiling cover letters, and selling yourself during the interviews to win that kick start to your career. The issue arises one or two years down the line when you’ve committed blood, sweat, and tears in a single cubicle working 9-5, with mostly unpaid overtime, only to find your job growth has been made redundant. The glass ceiling is being lowered at an alarming rate and many young Australians are finding they’ve invested in a future that no longer exists or is stagnate.

The weirdest part about the economic predictions is how relatable they are to what your parents went through. Between 1990-2000, the job market fluctuated faster than anyone could really keep up with, especially with the new technological advances being made every day. The greatest piece of advice most parents will pass onto their children is ‘follow your passions. Travel more. Find what makes you happy and make a living out of it because the world is hard to catch up with.’

The thing is, the world is changing so much, and so fast, that the jobs available one minute seem to be gone the next. Once upon a time a single job or trade needed five people to accomplish a task, but now in the 21st century a machine has replaced the need for human expertise. And the difficult part is that the five are replaced by the one trained to operate the machine, rather than ‘teaching old dogs new tricks’. Companies aspire to efficient uses of time. Even for 20-somethings full of energy, after a few years in an industry with little potential for expansion, it can feel disheartening.

Predisposed ideas of success also hinder personal growth in employment. Big-ticket companies with splashy TV advertisements and campaign efforts to reel people in often cause disillusionment with what potential employees are really getting themselves into. Movies and television shows glamourise the work-force and fail to show the countless mind-numbing hours most will spend behind a desk, going on coffee runs, and pouring their heart and soul into their work with little recognition. Those moments of self-awareness our fictional characters find when they discover what it is they really want out of life are the ones we cling onto in hopes of finding our own. They are the times our parents can still remember from their own golden years.

In a world that changes trends as often as we change underwear, the options most often overlooked are usually the ones we need the most. Being a generation of selfish desires also means opening our minds to the possibility of finding employment in unexpected locations. We cheer for those fictional moments when our characters figure out what it is they truly want. Now, more than ever, we need to cheer for ourselves and our colleagues when they find their career paths in previously unexpected locations. And always, where one door closes another opens, or a window might, in which case we best learn to climb.