by Ian Rygiel | Apr 18, 2014 | Ian's Blog
As with my last blog post, I’d like to start by referencing a previously written article, if only to start the conversation “The Dark Side of Getting Into College,” written by Lauren Stiller Reikleen, takes a look at the colossal amount of pressure being placed on children to get into college. It should come to no one’s surprise that all of the practices, tutoring sessions, and extra-curricular activities are leading to highly stressed, anxious, and sleep-deprived kids. This is not a problem that ends with a student’s acceptance into college either. I would argue this upbringing is one of the biggest underlying factors the generation of 20-30-somethings, most affected by the Great Recession, are now coping with. When a large portion of someone’s life and identity is wrapped up in the concept of higher education, the result is two-fold: Certainly, it cultivates a generation of intellectually-minded individuals who appreciate art, culture and music, but it also breeds a generation that will find it harder to cope when they are unable to put their education to work — say, when an economy collapses in on itself due to greed and predatory lending practices. What we have now is a new class of citizen. This class has been shaped and molded to become the new bourgeois, but has found limited employment opportunities within this social class, and instead, works in traditionally lower class, proletariat occupations. The result is the creation of the poorgeoisie. And the poorgeois are just as hard-working, motivated and intellectually minded as they ever were — but now, many of us are also more stressed and anxiety-ridden...
by Ian Rygiel | Mar 23, 2014 | Ian's Blog, The Poorgeoisie
For as long as I can remember, the American Dream was tangible: Get an education, work hard, and prosper. It was simple. It was straightforward. It was fair. It was American. And in my experience, it’s all we 20, and now 30, -somethings wanted. Yet, here I am, and very likely, here you are. We’re killing ourselves in dead-end jobs. We work in warehouses, in the back of trucks, and behind grills. We wait tables, we pour coffee, and we live paycheck to paycheck with bachelor and masters degrees that we earned by placing ourselves in crippling debt. We are a generation of highly capable and motivated individuals. We are highly educated. We appreciate high culture, art, and music, yet our paychecks barely leave our encouraged champagne tastes within our beer budgets. It should come to no one’s surprise then, that we are a highly transient and restless generation. We are a generation yearning for the challenges we were trained to face. We want to work, and we want a fair wage for that work, yet both have been denied to us. We are the lost and forgotten. We are the discarded. We are the poorgeoisie....
