The now infamous WaitButWhy article about Millennials paints a picture of people whose expectations will never match reality because they've been sold a dream of what real life is like. “Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.”
The popular refrain of the 80s and 90s was that people – especially women – could have everything. Turns out, not so much.
Dina Strasser writes about giving up her dream to do a Ph.D and become a professor.
So what has been the result of my decision to say no to the Ph.D.? To stay in a related job that pays double the national average with good benefits, in a decent school district, with marriage and family healthy and happy, in a big blue colonial that houses a fridge, pantry, and medicine cabinet that, by all rights, I should just empty into a cardboard box and mail to Haiti. I should mail the whole house to Haiti. This is not Sophie’s Choice.
On the other end of the having-it-all scale is Chris Copeland, who made his debut in the NBA at 28 for the storied New York Knicks.
Even at 6’8 it was sometimes easy to forget Copeland played professional basketball. He’s friendly and unassuming, and his round, vibrant face and long lanky arms covered in a layer of baby fat often made him seem younger than he was. When I knew him, there was nothing in his game, at least visibly, to suggest he could ever, even in the most outlandish of clichéd fairy-tale stories, end up playing for the New York Knicks.