Didn't like this article very much -- lots of words, very little content, which may be thoughtcatalog's specialty -- but I thought some of you might have things to say about it. [EDIT: I was right!] Does hubski have any veterans?
I had a worldview very similar to the author's when I first exited the service. Who the fuck were these college kids who knew nothing about the world? I'd meet people in my classes who had never left the city they were born in, save for maybe a vacation with the parents to an all - inclusive resort in Cancun. I'd hear them complain about such petty shit and it would drive me up the wall - how can a person like this be in the same place I am? What good is the stuff they're learning going to do with such a limited worldview (because mine was so complete because I went to iraq...)? When I was 19 I was nervous about my Chinook flight from Bagdad international airport to the intermediary fob before going to my patrol base. When you were 19 you were nervous about the next semester. I made the same mistake the author made and applied naive kid stereotype to a diverse group of people. But I got over it and I suspect that sometime in the near future the author will regret writing that article. The only takeaway I got from it was something I'm still working out for myself, which is the foray many veterans took into the darker side of human nature. It's one thing to be the victim of malice and sadism and a whole other to grab the reins and enjoy doing it. I'd never dreamed of intentionally hurting people for the fun of it, but over there I was a demigod. I punched children, shot a lot of dogs, burned small mammals, spit on detainees, out my rifle barrel in their mouths while they were blindfolded and laughed to their face about it. I perfected a tone of voice and intonation in order to make them think the rumors about what Americans do to detainees were true. I never let them sleep. I knew most of them were likely innocent. They were blindfolded before we put them in the humvee and stayed so for up to a week. Usually this all begins with a raid. "Raiding," aside from its practical definition, means we can destroy everything they own. This meant cutting open their mattresses and pillows to find whatever, rolling their tvs down the stairs, throwing everything they owned onto the floor, just generally making sure their lives and everything they owned would be fucked for a good while. After we had the detainee in the humvee it was free reign. The gunner did his best to knee him in his face and stomp on his balls and feet. The roads were bumpy so our rifle butts ended up in his ribs. Etc etc. I enjoyed all of it, which is weird for me to say. And let me assure you it wasn't a feeling limited to myself, because most of my platoon mates disliked the limits of what we could get away with. Many people have done much worse. I don't know if anyone cares about any of that, or if my Catholic-esque confession was necessary to make my point. But I was a "normal" teenager who would've had a life experience similar to the college kids the author pretends he's not complaining about, because of my choice (it's constantly necessary to emphasize it was my choice when talking about veteran stuff otherwise people will tell me about the choice I chose to make) I learned about what the kind of darkness every person is capable of if the circumstances are right, first hand, because I was that. I don't think it makes a dichotomy of gen y so much as it has made a dichotomy of every veteran/civilian generation from every war. In college you don't have abject power over the entire populace of a country, as least in the face to face kind of way. Other than that, the differences between military life and civilian life aren't really worth writing about. The danger isn't really that affecting. I get more scared riding passenger on the freeway with a bad driver than I ever did overseas. Everyone experiences loss. Everything is subjective and relative to that subjectivity. I don't know. This article isn't good and I don't think this comment is either. Wrote on my phone sorry for mistakes.
I think that your response is an interesting one, particularly when you mention this: which for me, runs alongside this line from the article: The thing of it is, that military or not, "college age" is about the age when people head out into the "real world" and have brushes with that darker side of humanity. I'd also say to the writer that "real world" is a strange term to use, since the majority of "the real world" does not exist in war. In fact, war is a very special circumstance where social norms, values and mores are suspended to make way for all kinds of behaviors. I've never been a part of the military, but from the outside, human beings doing awful things to each other is somewhat expected. It's not ok, but I can see how it would happen. Give a kid a gun and the backing of a military and a government and I think it would be really hard not to give in to a sense of power over other people. What I have seen, is some pretty awful behavior perpetrated by people who did things without any of that support, people who were not otherwise pretty decent people. People who chose to do shitty things through some sort of twisted rationale. In another thread, I mentioned that I haven't come up against anyone I thought of as truly evil and that's so. But I will say that I have met people of very odd morality and only through observing them for a long time was I able to understand where they were coming from. What I have seen even more often of college-aged people is people testing their limits as well as the limits of the societies they exist within. This is how an otherwise "good" person by the standards of a society might do something truly awful, for example taking sexual advantage of an inebriated person. The difference is, the kid in college who does something like that, still lives in a place where that is not ok, whereas the kid in the war zone might be surrounded by people who are doing similar things, without any consequences except for how it will affect them personally down the line. What I see this article suffering from the most is attribution: that is, projecting one's expectations on to another person or group of people and then not bothering to verify whether or not that is so. Of course, this is hard to do when choosing to speak in such broad strokes, but it is almost always easier. Military training as I understand it, exists to help soldiers function under circumstances that are not considered the norm for most of society. For example, if people's initial reactions to threats were to destroy, kill or dismantle those threats, it would be very hard to maintain the kinds of social bonds that allow societies to function in the ways that they do. From what I understand, transitioning from the military back to the civilian way of life can be really difficult and very much a culture shock. I don't know who this guy is or what he's been through, but I do think that you're right that his views may well change a bit over time.The only takeaway I got from it was something I'm still working out for myself, which is the foray many veterans took into the darker side of human nature. It's one thing to be the victim of malice and sadism and a whole other to grab the reins and enjoy doing it.
We may have had a later start in life on our formal education, but our real world knowledge runs deep.
Agree with the assessment of the article, disagree with the assessment of the comment. I don't see how a supply of weapons, a mandate to use them, and an indoctrination to remind a bunch of foreigners who's in charge won't affect teenagers. I also think it's important to note that kids going to college are experiencing an exponential expansion of their freedoms; kids going to war are experiencing an exponential reduction. The more vets and prisoners I talk to, the more parallels I draw: two years in lockup and two years FOB have a lot more in common with each other than either does with two years in community college. And that's what it comes down to: when you're deployed, your life is on hold. You are volunteering to give up your individual initiative to your country. This choice is usually made at or before the point of legal adulthood. There will be blowback. The article is a screed from an angry teenager. Following one of this links: I nearly enlisted for four years running through college and I'd have to say "d: none of the above." What I just read is an angry diatribe in defense of the unexamined life. I think this sort of thinking is where "thanks for your service" comes from: "I acknowledge that you have done something I have not, and I need a quick equalizer so that we can continue to communicate on equal footing."So you decided to join the United States Army because:
a. You are super patriotic. America!
b. Your high school sweetheart broke up with you.
c. You had nothing better to do and going to war sounds cool.
I seriously don't understand the point of this article. "Hey dude, we're just like you, except oh yeah, our lives were more 'real' than yours, and your pussy trip studying abroad" (which by the way not all of us did, but the rampant generalization, that's okay, I'll let it pass, it's only one of many and probably not the most egregious) "is NOTHING compared to what we went through overseas, but I'm going to compare the two just so you feel like a pussy for thinking you're culturally enlighted, we're stronger than you, we've been through 'the hardest part of our lives already' and you haven't, so we might be in the same spot, but" (pats self on back) "I'm a veteran so I know I can make it through this while you stand there in your big glasses and your plaid and your skinny jeans smoking pot in the basement of your parents' house." - These lines directly contradict each other, don't they? "We don't think we're better than you" but the "one key difference between us" is we [the veterans] "have already been through the hardest times" and know we can handle whatever's thrown at us (implying non-veternas haven't been through shit and don't think they can handle whatever's thrown at them) - I also deeply resent the implication that because I went to college, my life wasn't hard. There's no need to hash out details here but I dealt with sexual predation, abusive/manipulative boyfriends, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, shitty-job-turned-into-no-job, not enough $ to pay for medical procedures I needed , estrangement from my family and almost all of my high school "friends," severe depression and anxiety, disordered eating, suicidal urges, hallucinations, paranoia, fuck all sorts of SHIT in college. I failed so many classes. I overdrew my bank account constantly , eventually the ATM just ate my debit card. Those don't feel like first-world problems to me, even though that's basically what this dude is trying to imply throughout this whole article. And you fucking know what? I still graduated on-fucking-time. I didn't have grenades thrown at me and I wasn't shot at and I wasn't overseas. But I think it's bullshit to try and quantify "hard." - That's point #2. It's bullshit to say "my hard was worse than your hard." "I'm better than you because I went through more shit." I'm going to bring up a TED talk now and look. I know there are problems with TED talks. (I watched the TED talk about it, that makes me an expert, right?) But if you're on Facebook or hell half the internet at all, you heard about this one. It's the one where Ash Beckham, a clearly-gay woman, discusses coming out of the closet, a little girl who asked her if she was a boy or a girl, how we all have closets, no matter what they are, and how we need to stop comparing each other's "hard." That simply put we all have hard, it comes in different shapes and forms, and it's stupid and impossible to say "My hard is worse than your hard!" In fact in my opinion it's simply butthurt. This dude who wrote this article? He's saying his hard is worse than my hard. And FUCK. He doesn't even know what my hard is , he is making countless baseless generations about me and people who went to college like me instead of - by the way - choosing to enlist. We both made choices and we both thought we knew what we were getting into at the time. We didn't. So fuck him. He doesn't even know what my hard is, he's just trying to make himself feel better about his . Which brings me to point #3... - This guy has a giant, massive chip on his shoulder. Maybe he thinks veterans don't get enough respect. Maybe he's tired of reading about Gen Y in the news, the Gen Y that stayed at home, the Gen Y he's alienated from. Maybe he feels we don't talk enough about veterans. But seriously this whole article is basically like "I went to Afghanistan. You went to some fancy ass liberal college" and underneath it all he is screaming "I RESENT YOU FOR YOUR EASY LIFE AND THE WAY YOU BITCH ABOUT IT." Fuck you, dude, you enlisted. I seriously can't tell if this guy is aware of the underlying resentment leeching through this article. Maybe he thought he's written a mostly-nice article. Maybe he's trying to be ironic, or satirical. (But doesn't he know? It's the kids who stayed at home who 'own' irony these days, duh!) I mean, it's on Thoughtcatalog so it's supposed to be mindless, uplifting fluff, right? But you know what it is? It's bullshit cloaked underneath a "we are just like you" that the author clearly doesn't even believe. And my closing shot, which is insignificant and pointless: This guy is clearly nothing like me. No one taught him how to use apostrphes overseas (P.P.S. Can we stop talking about how pointless Comm and English degrees are? If you are smart you can talk that degree into a job in ANY industry. What industry do you know of where you don't need to be able to demonstrate you can talk to people ?)*We don’t think we’re better than you* and don’t want your sympathy. We know we volunteered for the job and did it to the best of our ability. In essence, we know there is one key difference between us: we’ve already been through the hardest time in our lives , whatever else the world throws at us, we can handle it
Thanks for calling a spade a spade. I haven't run across this much, but it is a stereotype: "I served, therefore I am better than you." Okay, fine. "I was smart enough not to do that, therefore I'll humor you." It's not a problem you run into in nations with conscript militaries. THE PROBLEM WITH COMM AND ENGLISH DEGREES: You're talking about a basic proficiency at, well, "basic proficiency." That's the classic argument against liberal arts degrees: they teach you no specialization, they simply refine the stuff you should be good at already. Let's take two people: Amber and Eggbert. Amber has an English degree, Eggbert has a Chemistry degree. Both of them are free-falling into an economy with no jobs and a great deal of disdain for them. Amber is well-spoken, well-read, well-groomed and well-received everywhere she goes. Eggbert is awkward, plays Starcraft, wears Wolf shirts and can fix your computer. Amber can head out into the market and get "people-facing" jobs. At her level of experience, these are likely to be retail or volunteer. Her only true path from there is management. Once she has risen to the level of site manager, she is immune from promotion until she has a graduate degree, at which point she will be judged solely on her graduate degree. Her liberal arts degree is pretty much going to top out at $40k a year. Eggbert is completely locked out of "people-facing" jobs because he sucks at it. However, he can be a lab tech. He can work in manufacturing. His ladder is from "protected entry-level" to "protected industry-specific." Without an additional degree he's still on a pathway towards specialization where his income is going to outstrip Amber's. We can presume he's not going to get better with people, and we can presume he's not going to become a snappier dresser (a cruel presumption, but functional for this discussion). Eggbert, without spending an additional $50-$150k on an advanced degree, is on a pathway into the land of $80k jobs. Now let's take Amber's sister, Angela. Angela grew up in the same household as Amber and has the same people skills. She's also a snappy dresser. Instead of a liberal arts degree, however, she pursues Chemistry like Eggbert. She has two pathways open to her: Amber's and Eggbert's. More importantly, she has access to the management track within protected industry: she can write reports, she can deliver results at meetings, and she can communicate with non-experts from other fields. Should she spring for the same MBA Amber's looking at, she'll be in technical management and six figures isn't far off. Finally, Eggbert's brother Eddie hates school because he's seen what a wreck it's made of Eggbert's social life. He rides his skateboard a lot and smokes dope. He still needs a job, though. He lucks into a retail position at Starbuck's where, through the miracle of personal application, he learns the value of showing up on time, working hard, and not sucking at his job. He's on the same management track as Amber, minus the liberal arts degree. He's a lot less polished than she is, but not so much that it's critically injuring his employability. His manager suggests he look into the management track - or hell, Eddie gets pissed off enough at his boss that he thinks he can do it. He's held up by his lack of a degree, for sure… but he's also 4 years ahead in the workforce and can crank through a diploma mill on nights and weekends. And, dollars to donuts, he's gonna spend a lot less money to end up in the exact same spot as Amber. The argument against Comm and English degrees is that they give you more polish to do the basic stuff, but the basic stuff is rarely enough. The guy who wrote the article is a tard, and with an English degree, he'd be a tard with a better command of English. With a mechanical engineering degree he'd be a tard with a $50k a year salary.
I must confess I am at a disadvantage (or perhaps a bias) here. I have had tremendous opportunities in the workforce which I acknowledge are not average. I have also used my initial work opportunities to leverage my way to even better work opportunities and so therefore have managed to kinnear* those opportunities into further opportunities which have given me a foothold in Corporate America (TM) which a person of my age is not usually afforded. But, caveats aside: I find people tend to forget the "back office" side of many jobs. For instance I work in the back office of a bank. The bigger a company, the bigger and more sprawling the "back office" is. If you aren't aware of these hidden back offices, you won't think to apply for them - and there the mystery is. These jobs are out of sight and out of mind but very real and occasionally very well-paying, certainly at least on par with the average retail role, but in general at minimum better for quality of life, and with better opportunities for advancement. You don't have to deal with customers or if you do, it's in a much more minimal role than a direct customer-facing role. You work 9 to 5 hours, which sure that might sound like 'slave labor' or 'buying out' but you know what? The hours are always stable and will never get in the way of your social life. You can get into these jobs with virtually any degree. I had a manager at a bank whose major was Etymology. My own major is (perhaps of course) in English. You all know what I do and how unrelated it is. Banks have these jobs. Big box stores have these jobs; that's what "corporate" is - the back office. Hell I just linked an article not too long ago about Target and their analytics department. Would you have ever thought Target had an analytics department? But they do. The insurance industry is another big one for this, but most places have some sort of back office where you don't have to deal with customers. You deal with more etheral, less tangible things, like say compliance. Or analytics. Or whether or not an insurance claim or a bank claim is fraud. In these situations, I assure you, your liberal degree will not top you out at $40k a year. No graduate degree is necessary, though if you have a nice company, they'll help you pay for it. I'm not saying there are jobs all over the places in these industries and again I stress that I was very lucky in getting my job - but these jobs exist. It's not all retail or specialty knowledge, especially if you can impress an interviewer with your personality, your knowledge, your ability to communicate - in other words if you can interview well. For a long time I felt I didn't deserve my job and that I brought nothing to it. You know what? They hired me anyway. Long story short I don't think it's all retail vs. specialized knowledge. I think there are jobs people forget about and jobs people don't know about, jobs that don't have minimum requirements for majors, just jobs that seem boring and unappealing. *This is a made-up word. In this context, I use it to mean something approximately like "finagle." There is a backstory here and here but I have further appropriated the word from "stealthily photographing someone" to mean "stealthily/trickily doing - anything."At her level of experience, these are likely to be retail or volunteer.
I agree with you about "stealth jobs" and that they're not a bad way to back door your way into something. Work experience is work experience. A parable if you will, however: My wife graduated magna cum laude with a degree in math. It did not do much for her. I acknowledge that she's still within that vaunted "STEM" cohort but the "M" is far and away the least useful from an undergrad standpoint. So she spent some time tutoring for Sylvan, she spent some time answering tech calls for Sierra. And, while she was busy being under-employed, she took a couple free courses at Egghead Software (back when it existed) in Microsoft Access. Up jumps one of these jobs about which you speak - back office at an insurance plan administration company. So she applies with her freshly-minted BS in Math, one of too-many applicants, even back then. She got the gig - basic data entry with a pathway towards her CPA, eventually, after a lot of time. Two months go by and a woman from another department stops by her shared cubicle. "I hear you know access." "A little," she said. "Why?" Within 24 hours she'd gone from "data entry" to "database administrator" and within 2 months she'd gone from "database administrator" to "software architect." Her new department head had let the data entry pool take the risk on vetting competent candidates and then skimmed through looking for anyone with the barest database competency. My wife's salary doubled and she went from "being on the path to being a CPA" to "being on the path to being a director." No offense meant to English or its majors - had I not had a driving and substantial need for financial independence as soon as humanly possible, I would have been one. But that drive did put me in the pathway to an elevated salary. Simply by taking "music mixing" as an elective instead of "music performance" gave me an after-school job that is most directly attributable to my current $63-an-hour-when-I-can-get it "profession." If it's remuneration you're after, there's a reason STEM tends to lead the pack.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. (A quote I used in my latest interview, I think, if I remember correctly.) I have advantages others don't. I can articulate well, I can present nicely - I have all those great people skills of the example-girl in your first comment. I'm smarter than your average bear. People seem to think I'm good-looking besides. Of course, I still make less than half you do ;) but my goal is 100k by the time I'm 30 and trust me, it's a reachable goal. (OKCupid, by the way, tells me I am "very ambitious." That and independence are my most exaggerated bars. It makes one wonder much less why one is single, sometimes.) I think the crux of your comment, (although not perhaps your intended point) is to learn as much as you can across as many useful fields as you can. I've taken like 12 hours of online Excel classes. Some day, maybe it'll come in handy. Maybe I should look into access instead. Maybe Python. I recognize that math and programming and logical thinking are better areas for me to sink time into than poetry if I want to move forward in my career. This, however, is why you help co-workers out. Because it helps you out a lot in the end. If you can establish yourself as a subject-matter expert in something, and let it get around the department, who knows where it will lead. At first you might be like "Ugh this is a lot of work for no recognition" but the truth of the matter is, the recognition comes. - unless you're at a shitty company.
Or, being in the right place in the right time. Those who are prepared have a better chance of being in the right place, and they tend to linger there longer. By and large, yes. And by all means, follow your bliss. If poetry really turns your crank, and you want poetry to be a big part of your life, study poetry. But if you're majoring in "college" and you're choosing majors based on workload, it'll come back to get you. My experience with college English was that it was high school English - in my case, a lot less rigorous at that. The tech writing courses we were required to take in the College of Engineering dusted the shit out of them for stringency but were still no great shakes compared to, say, Mohr's Circle. And granted - I never once applied Mohr's Circle once I was out of college, while high school english I use regularly in online forum fights. So what it comes down to, really, is are you studying stuff that you don't know in order to know it, or are you studying stuff you know in order to know it well? Proficiency goes a long way and excellence is nice, but graded on a curve. Someone with passable grammar and passable Perl will likely make it further than someone with excellent grammar and a deep and abiding loathing of Pascal. Had I learned how to program back before it was cool, hot damn the things I'd be doing now.Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
I think the crux of your comment, (although not perhaps your intended point) is to learn as much as you can across as many useful fields as you can.
Your good comment aside, this got me thinking: I have this hunch that a lot of people don't understand this. After being spoonfed what to do in education up to that point, I see lots of people just doing what they're told in college. Getting okay grades, never going beyond what's required to do. They just ride their college time out, never doing much special. Then the package is complete, they graduate, and suddenly they're not told what to do. So they don't see how far their own creativity goes, that hey, if you try, you can actually talk yourself into a job. I've been practicing graphic design on my own for at least six years now. Learning Photoshop and Illustrator, because I wanted to become good at it, not because someone told me to. When I recently used my skills in a group project, some people approached me asking how I made it, and asking me how they can learn to do the same. Instead of just trying stuff out and being creative, one guy got a book on Photoshop to study on. And I get the feeling that he just doesn't get it. At the risk of sounding blatantly arrogant, I think that a lot of people just don't realize they can lead their own lives. Create their own goals and try to solve them on their own. With degrees 'that get you job', there will be companies waiting at graduation to pick you up. To continue the conveyor belt that is live for you, instead of building it yourself, if that metaphor helps any with my ruminations.(P.P.S. Can we stop talking about how pointless Comm and English degrees are? If you are smart you can talk that degree into a job in ANY industry. What industry do you know of where you don't need to be able to demonstrate you can talk to people ?)
I don't pretend to know how you experienced or lived life in Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't lump all veterans into a single group or pretend to understand the nuances of each individual's experience through cliches and stereotypes. Please don't attempt to find your own identity by trying to understand my life and my identity. They are unrelated and silly. It is silly for me to attempt to find my identity by looking at one of my fellow liberal arts attending peers. This is downright ridiculous.
No kidding. What a tool. I have no prejudices against people in the military or not. This guy certainly does though.I assume a lion’s share of the readership of Thought Catalog are liberal arts degree bearing, student-loan debt ridden types who think those who joined the military were too stupid to go to college and were unaware cogs in the political war machine run by evil multi-national corporations with the goal of maximizing profit and exploiting the lower class.
the comment section is just one giant clusterfuck.