The Realization

Last night a friend from college and I were sitting at a snazzy LA eatery when we started chatting about how ridiculously we used to live. Five months out of our college bubble and there are no more swanky dinners out four or five nights a week, no more bottle service at clubs, no more hired help doing our laundry and take our dry cleaning, no more calls to daddy's secretary to re-fill the debit account and, most importantly, there is no more person to call when things need fixing...unless of course I am willing to pay for it. I realized that there are a lot of things I should know how to do, that people I consider stupid know how to do - and I don't.

I'm 22 years old and I don't know how to change a tire, jump start a car, fix a leak, fix a broken door hinge or knob or garbage disposal. I don't even know how to really cook. Sure, when in doubt we can google it out but I find that I need to consort with websites for almost everything. Movie times, restaurants, the nearest gas station, and with facebook and this blog it's like hours of my day spent sitting here. I hate how reliant I have become on the internet and how helpless I realized I would be without it - really.

Here's the kicker - I am unemployed. In these incredible economic times I have no source of income and my lovely Ivy League degree can't even keep me warm by firelight. My whole life I was told that all I needed was a great education and I would succeed. Well, after receiving that education I can honestly say that I am doing the opposite of succeeding. If the world as we know it ceased to exist tomorrow, 'we' would be the first to go. Outside the bureaucracy of government and corporations we don't know how to fend for ourselves. We are the rich kids, we are smart, and we are helpless.

My first class I ever took in college was philosophy 101 and the professor posed a simple question to us, "what is a good education?" My answer is that it is completely relative. For a kid living in the outback, an education would be how to skin a kangaroo and find water, not how to compare historical accounts of events or understand Ulysses. Sure I can analyze any book or film and write a paper about it, the other day I created a business plan of how to re-organize Hollywood - but I don't know how to build a fire....and I'm starting to realize that may be much more important.

For those of you who think I'm a spoiled brat and are shocked that I can't do these things - you're right, you should be, and by all means use this blog as a means to make fun of me and my peers who find themselves nodding along. I plan on addressing a different task or problem in each blog and how to take care of it without calling someone for help - think of this as Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" for rich kid's survival. And yes, I did just compare myself to Abbie Hoffman (there are probably some people who don't know who that is...and so maybe you will learn a little something out of this too, google him).

As for now, Gilt Group just started for the day so I have to dash.