It's hard to be an adult when the rest of your friends refuse to grow up.
Over the last few years, I've noticed a trend in myself and in my friends.
I have grown up a lot in the last three and a half years (since I got out of college).
I got a job.
I got married.
We bought a house.
We opened retirement savings accounts.
My husband got better and better jobs.
I kept my job.
I went back to school for a second Master's.
These are primarily adult things -- they require responsibility, hard work, dedication, and a lot of time and effort to achieve.
[The only one that doesn't is us getting married, but since we're still married three years later, I'm counting it. Staying married is what takes the work, and judging from the number of second marriages I see on Facebook in people my age, I'm thinking this is indeed an accomplishment.]
Bishop and I are pretty lucky in all this because we're also pretty happy. We have enough money to live comfortably and afford all our basic necessities. We don't go on exotic vacations or own fancy cars, but we have what we want and we like each other. Our lives are good.
But our friends don't seem to agree.
Sadly, those friends are also the kind who give being a nerd a bad name. You know, the stereotypes that always follow nerds around: One literally lives in his parents' basement because he can't/won't get a real job. Another took seven years to graduate college because he transferred schools about 10 times (not exaggerating), and another only talks about how much his life sucks because he can't get a date/laid.
Not one of them has any concept of being an adult -- when your parents support you and you refuse to try at life, when you complain and complain but make no effort to change your life, you aren't an adult.
Now: I realize it would be really easy to read this as my being mean to my friends who are struggling or for a reader to assume that I've done something inadvertently or possibly even on purpose to rub my success into my friends' faces.
I'm here to honestly say that neither is true.
I want my friends to be successful -- I buy art from my struggling artist friends, I shop at places where my friends work, I do all that stuff because I want to be a good friend.
My husband and I live by a pretty strict "live and let live" policy -- I've never questioned my friends' life decisions or been mean to them about what they're passionate about. I try hard to be a good person and support them, because that's what I expect in return.
But I'm finding that that return is no longer what I'm getting, and instead my friends act like we're all in 8th grade again.
The trend I'm noticing in myself is that, as I've gotten older, I've learned how to balance being an adult with enjoying myself.
The trend I'm noticing in my friends is that not only are they actively fighting against being adults, they will criticize and be downright cruel to people like me, who don't mind growing up a little.
We buy a house? Friends respond by making fun of the decor, the location, criticizing the paint color or the wallpaper in the bathroom.
We invite them over for game night? They call us losers for the magnets on our fridge, for the number of dry erase boards we have (lots, due to an obsession with working out and a lesson-planning board in my office), for the food we serve.
We attend a con with them? They harass me over the art I'm buying because they don't like the video game I love, the movie poster I found for my classroom, the model my husband got for his desk at work.
The logical reaction here is to either a) cut ties with them, or b) make fun of them right back.
Making fun of them right back seems like the easier of the two because that's how these friends operate.
So I've tried it. And you know what happens? They get even meaner. They behave like I'm being the cruel one in the room, even if all I've said was, "Hey, this song sucks, can we change it?" Once, after a friend spent 20 minutes telling me why my current favorite video game, Dragon Age: Inquisition, was the worst game he'd ever played, I jokingly said, "Well, My Chemical Romance (his favorite band) isn't that great anymore either, so let's call it even."
That's all I said, verbatim. He responded by calling me a bitch for being mean, for making fun of something he loved, for not allowing him to have the things he enjoyed.
See the problem?
My friends treat our relationship like it's a one way street with the added bonus of the attitude of a 13-year-old.
So then, on to option two: cut ties with them. And that just isn't an option because I feel too guilty about it. They're struggling; how would it make them feel if their friends suddenly dumped them too?
It's hard to support your friends when all they ever do is tear you down.
I've had it suggested to me by my other, better friends that perhaps this group of friends is simply intimidated by how successful Bishop and I are.
After all, we're quite young to be so stable -- house, good jobs, little debt, and so on.
I would understand this if I wasn't surrounded by ambitious people, including those friends that I'm writing about here.
One friend wants to own his own company someday. Another is an artist and wants to be famous for his work. Still another wants to climb the corporate ladder right to the top of his IT department, hot wife by his side.
These are all people who want things out of their lives, but whenever I talk to them about it, they seem unwilling to do the required work to make it happen.
I get that not everyone is ambitious -- not everyone aspires to a PhD someday like I do, or running a tech department like my husband does. I have no issue with that; every time I give up an evening of watching Breaking Bad to write a paper or read a chapter of some god-awful, boring textbook, I wish I wasn't ambitious.
But I am.
What I don't understand is making life difficult for others instead of pushing your own ambitions. These friends all have huge dreams, things they desperately want to accomplish in their lives, so why are they spending so much time fucking around in their parents' basements and making fun of my hard work and consequent success??
Maybe this is what it is that really bothers me.
I understand that life is a lot harder for Millenials than any previous generation, but shouldn't that mean that we work harder than any other generation?
When I got out of college -- with a Master's degree, which I finished in about a year -- I put in dozens of job applications. Of those, I got two phone calls. Two. I had worked hard enough during college to be qualified and have enough experience that one of those interviews hired me.
When my husband got a new job about eight months ago, it was on the tail end of almost 100 job applications, of which he got two phone calls for interviews. Again, two. That's not very many, but he'd worked his ass off to be qualified and got hired at one of them.
When he got his first IT job about two years ago, after having worked at Radio Shack for several years to support himself while he built his skill set, he put in close to 300 job applications before he got hired. That time, he got four phone calls. Four. Out of 300 applications.
The job market is not a happening place right now, especially not for people around my age and younger, fresh from college.
But it's clear to me that with some work, it can happen.
What's also clear is this: some people are not willing to put in the work to make it happen.
Just because I'm already working my ass off to be successful, and they aren't, is no reason to give me grief. If they're intimidated because we're successful, jealous that I'm working on a second Master's, whatever it is -- how will making me miserable help them?
The answer is that it won't. Instead, they're using that most base of psychology to make themselves feel better by putting down my accomplishments.
It's awfully hard to be an adult when the people you surround yourself with are all still kids.
PS -- I'm sorry this is such a downer of an essay. Some family friends were bitching about Millenials over Thanksgiving dinner this past week, and since Bishop and I are the right age, we got lumped in with the rest of them, despite sharing very little in common. It's frustrating to hear about how my entire generation sucks when I feel like everything I'm doing is in an effort to rise about that stereotype. And thus, this essay was born.
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