Why All the Yuppies Spend So Much

I’m not 100% sure about this yuppie thing. I’ve been quarter life crisising pretty hard over the past month or so, and I can’t shake this feeling that my life isn’t much deeper than a stereotype.

I know exactly how I got here, though. Put anyone in a completely new life phase in a new city with a new job and new friends, and most will slip into prefabricated, cookie cutter existence in an effort to get integrated and get by. Personally, I’m a little bundle of social anxiety, so fitting in was a sufficient victory, much less feeling an actual sense of belonging.  

But then I started dating a guy. At first he seemed like my usual type – smart, driven, athletic. But after a few dates, I started to notice some things that were weird. He lived in a tent for a few weeks during an out-of-town hospital rotation. He spent weekend nights drinking martinis and playing chess. He didn’t have a slightest clue as to what Miley Cyrus was up to these days (Twerking, Wrecking Ball – none of it). He made most of his furniture out of unfinished 2 by 4s and most of his clothes are free.

And in a rather close-minded fashion, weird made me uncomfortable and made me want to shut it down. But weird also the source of fun and novel conversation, perspective changing questions, and really good book recommendations. So he ended up sticking around to intrigue and inspire me until he matched for residency. (It’s ok though, I made sure to twist his arm into being my weird muse/mentor for the rest of time.)

It all prompted me to take inventory  of my own weirdness and whether or not I was embracing it and living authentically. In order to really answer this question, I had to parse apart the things in my life that I was actively choosing versus the aspects I just picked up as a part of the young professional package.

So like any normal girl, I went on a Kindle shopping spree and bought a collection of social commentaries on all things related to yuppie-dom: adult psychological development, behavioral economics, urbanization, capitalism, and the information age, and then I had a manic book binge for about a week.  

It’s striking how many signature yuppie tendencies are rooted in our environment and circumstance, but for today, I just want to talk about ambition, wealth, and materialism, as they’re some of the most fiercely disparaged qualities about the young, white collar crew. And while it’s a story of my personal financial mantra, I’m by no means trying to give anyone financial advice. We all know I’m not qualified for that.

I think I like working in private enterprise. The private sector gets a lot of heat for being greedy, and I think concerns like wealth distribution and corruption are completely valid. But I also don’t think the pace of innovation and our quality of life in this age would’ve been the same without it. I also like to think that capitalism is slowly becoming more steeped in humanity. The recession-inducing investment banks that employed a majority of the yuppies in the ‘80s are now seeing steeply declining application rates from top universities. Those students are going to the likes of Apple and Google – sometimes at a pay cut – to find a job with more creativity and relevance to everyday life.

But in order for private corporations are competing to be innovative and to better meet the needs of their consumers, they have to also compete for talent. And that more often than not comes down to compensation, sometimes to the point it seems weird. The average new grad from my alma mater makes as much as the average household in the US, despite the fact that none of us have any more experience than a few internships and credit hours in relevant courses. It’s my guess that they’re compensating more than just performance; that it’s also about potential. But it’s all of that discretionary income that can get a little questionable.

The science behind materialism is absolutely fascinating. Our non-routine, discretionary purchases trigger neural reactions that make us really happy, likely due to the evolutionary usefulness back in the caveman days, and researchers got interested in how that fact affects modern life. Some of them did a really cool study looking at materialism throughout adolescence and found that it looks like this as they age:

Notably, self-esteem looks like this:

And they found similar patterns in adults who had experienced periods of identity redevelopment. And what other group experiences a lower sense of self-esteem and identity? Young adults (further reinforcing the middle school stage of real life hypothesis). From there, self-confidence only continues to grow with age, and spending slows down accordingly. It makes sense though. A lot of us move away from our families and life-long friends for the first time, we start new jobs where we’re at the bottom of the totem pole, and we’re so transient between cities and employers that we don’t have time to cultivate many deep connections before either we or our peers are on the move. But it’s those family roles, friendships, and professional callings that self-confidence and our sense of worthiness are built on. Spending becomes a bit of a coping mechanism and a short spike of happiness for the times our sense of belonging is called into question. I’ve definitely been there. Just a few weeks ago, I was carrying around a lot of work stress, really missing my move-away friends, and of course, generally quarter life crisising, and they all accompanied me on a trip to the Lululemon warehouse sale to get some replacement yoga shorts. Naturally, I left with six tops. The bargain hunting buzz only lasted for the rest of the day, and now I’m stuck with six tops that I don’t need and that don’t fit in my dresser. I’ve realized I don’t even like two of them and I’ve still been wearing the same $3 cotton Jimi Hendrix tanks to the gym every night. At least it’s a healthier coping mechanism than disordered eating or substance abuse?

Maybe. But if I was blacking out in my apartment every night, I think my friends and family would step in and say something. Materialism, however, ends up getting celebrated. Our society values a strong work ethic, intelligence, and professional success, but these are hard things to measure and recognize when we all work in different industries and companies. But we can correlate them with our earning potential and our earning potential with our stuff. So when we see signs of wealth, it becomes a testament to the owner’s intellect and hustle. Imagine a guy emerging from an Audi, dressed in some casual JCrew garb, checking his messages on his latest model iPhone, and tell me you don’t assume he’s at least a little bit smart. (Unfortunately, I think if we did the same for a woman, we’d make those assumptions about her husband or father. I’ll get off my feminist soapbox now.)

 

When stuff becomes our success-o-meter, we can practically buy credibility, yet we wonder why we’re the most indebted American adult cohort of all time or why credit card debt increases so quickly between 20 and 30, regardless of marriage or kids.

I think a lot of the pressure also comes from working in an office environment. As an entry level hire, I’m one of the bottom 10% of earners I come into contact with throughout the week. Renting with a roommate in a downtown condo by the park with underground parking and a sauna suddenly indicates that I’m poorer than average. The biggest financial struggle I might witness in a week is my own inability to justify the $60 heat protectant spray that my stylist recommends. It’s crazy. And it creates this really skewed view of what “normal” looks like.

But does that mean that all yuppie spending is bad? Not necessarily. We can finally afford to be part of the value-driven consumer class and make purchases that give us the most bang for the buck. We’re able to retire the EasyMac, coin-op laundry, and $6 Forever 21 tube skirts that never survived the washing machine. We get that quality generally costs more, but we don’t always take the time to do the research on whether or not we’re really getting the best value. And we start making assumptions about price and quality that don’t necessarily hold true. It all adds another layer of confusion around how much money we really need to be spending.

So how do we combat all of this?

• Learn the difference between the things you like and the things you like because they give you status. Would you carry the same handbag if it wasn’t by a readily discernable designer? Or would you buy the same top if it came from Walmart? Would you go on the same vacations if you could only share photos with your closest friends and family instead of publishing them on Facebook?

• Volunteer. I swear that this is the all-encompassing remedy for every one of the yuppie vices. Help people who need it. It reframes your idea of struggle and helps you feel thankful for the situation you’re in. Thankful and gracious people are shown to be both the happiest and the most financially stable. So go get a good helping of it. Bonus points if it’s an organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters or Hospice or Dress for Success where you can really form a bond with the people you’re serving. We’re at a stage in our lives where connection doesn’t come quite as easily or is quickly fleeting. But there are tons of organizations whose work will leave you with the feeling that you’ve built someone up and changed their life for the better.

• Embrace simplicity. It’s liberating to take yourself out of the “stuff hustle.” From Thoreau to Chanel to Steve Jobs to Da Vinci, so many great thinkers were proponents of simplicity because it removes the clutter and distraction that gets in the way of greatness. But it also extends so much further than yourself and affects everyone else who sees you as one of the Joneses that they’re supposed to be keeping up with.

Give me "meaningful work"

I had a hard time keying in at work during the worst parts of my quarter life identity crisis. I had been questioning what my “calling” was, and whether or not I was in the right job or the right company to pursue it. There was a chance that the 40+ hours I put in a week were a waste of time from a personal development, dream-chasing standpoint. It didn’t help that I was coming down from the high of an awesome season as holiday captain, where my team had posted our best results in years, but as I moved on to new projects, I wasn’t reaching quite the same levels of success.

So my first instinct was that I needed to get out of here and find a place that could guide me through this exploration process and help me find my life calling. I decided grad school was that place and cracked open a book on the MBA application process. I was in the first chapter before I read that “for most schools, an MBA just for education and exploration is not enough. You have to have a plan for your – and their – investment,” and that this plan was the cornerstone of your application essays. I wanted to throw the book off my deck.

So instead I Googled “How to make a life plan” and got about 15 pages deep without finding much of value. I shut my laptop and took off to a yoga class, a practice I’d restarted to cope with all of my life uncertainty. And I ended up getting some really great career advice from my yogi that night. He’d twisted us into a bunch of half-squatting pretzels and left us there to hold it for what felt like hours, and like most teachers prompted us to simply observe the sensations in our body without judgment, and then he pitched one of my favorite pieces of yogi wisdom of all time:

“Practicing yoga is like looking at yourself under a microscope – physically, emotionally, spiritually – and it’s only once you intimately understand every particle of your being that you can tap into them to create power and best serve those around you.”

I realized that even though at first, this all sounded like fluffy, mystical nonsense, it actually had some really practical applications to my professional development. For the first year and a half of work, I evaluated how well I thought work was going simply based on the numbers I was producing and not whether I actually liked it. And while I still questioned what my dreams and passions were, suddenly everything that I was doing at work had meaning in that I could at least evaluated it for the way it made me feel.

So I set off to work with my microscope and made an effort to check in with myself occasionally while I worked. For example, my manager asked me to pre-sell a tool I had been working on with a few of my peers before I presented it to my division, and immediately I started to feel the nervous sweat kick in. How did I feel? Anxious. Why? I dreaded getting negative feedback on it. Why? Because I’m a perfectionist and if I didn’t share my work, then I didn’t have to know if it wasn’t absolutely flawless. Is this reasonable? No. With their help and feedback, I could actually make it perfect, not just pretend. Was there a way to take the edge off? Yep, ask for their help and ideas outright. Negative feedback rarely stings as badly when it’s actively solicited. And it was through these internal interviews that I started to tap into not just my strengths and weaknesses, but also what weaknesses I could develop past and how to do so.

I also looked for moments of “flow,” the term used by psychologists to define that state where you’re doing that you love so much and you’re so good at that you completely lose yourself while you’re doing it. The hallmark researcher maps the relationship between our feelings and our abilities and the way this combination makes us feel. Flow happens when we’re well equipped to do hard things:

I noticed that a lot of my flow moments centered around data. And funnily enough, my "flow" moments and my results are strongly linked. When I’m working with stats, I feel like Tom Cruise interrogating Jack Nicholson at the end of A Few Good Men, where you push and push and push and suddenly an answer pops out that results in a most triumphant victory. It's the nerdiest way to get high. That’s what made me good at championing our holiday season. I got to spend 9 whole months combing through a single data set and learning every intricate nuance about how people shop and planned an inventory strategy that coincided. I worked late most nights and came in on the weekends, and only took one full day off between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and absolutely loved every last minute of it.

But in order to really build a career around the meaningful work that gives us “flow” moments, we have to be honest about the things that aren’t in that category. My office employs the most likable, socially gifted people I’ve ever met. And as a socially anxious introvert, sometimes I struggle with that sort of thing. The captainships and projects that require you accommodate and align different priorities within a team are definitely the most stressful for me and live in the “anxious” section in the chart above.

But I’ve been fighting that fact ever since I started working. My manager mentioned reshuffling projects in one of our meetings and reassigning some of my work to my coworkers. “This isn’t a sign of failure or anything,” he tried to assure me, “you’re working on a lot right now.” But it was failure, I explained. The girl I had backfilled managed the same business, the same projects, the same captainships and completely crushed all of them. His response? “True. But these are all the things she’s good at. You’re more geared towards research and strategy development.”

It made sense. Equal results don’t necessarily mean equal effort between two people. I think in an office with hundreds of new grads in very similar roles, it’s so easy to get sucked into comparison and competition. Who’s getting promoted? Who’s getting awards? I stumbled across a quote from Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection that helps free me from that: “When we compare, we want to see who or what is best out of a specific collection of like things. The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of ‘fit in and stand out!’” But when we understand and lean into our own gifts and talents and preferences – things that are completely original and unique to ourselves – it “helps us stay mindful that what we bring into the world is completely original and cannot be compared. And without comparison, the concepts of ahead or behind or best or worst lose their meaning.”

By letting go of work I wasn’t good at, I could stop hustling for competent and reallocate my time to things that me stand out. And I could start to fall in love my work again.

We can’t find our professional sweet spot of meaningful work – work that we find challenging and where we create stellar results – unless we're willing to differentiate it from the stuff we’re not good at. And that means swallowing our pride and admitting that we’re not good at everything. For a generation educated in an era of grade inflation, where A’s are given out like free condoms at orientation, it’s a little foreign and uncomfortable.

You might be wondering, “What about development though? Shouldn’t we be working to improve our weaknesses?” And for that, I’ll share some advice that came out of one of my interviews for Sr. Analyst. I’d been thinking about career development and asked my interviewer about whether I should be looking for positions that showcased my strengths or gave me an opportunity to practice weaker skills, he gave me the following answer:

“Definitely one where you can leverage your strengths. Every job at Target employs every facet of leadership; it’s just a matter of to what extent. You might have a job that’s centered around innovation or strategy, but at some point, you’ll be involved in the parts where you build a process around it or communicate your vision. You’ll get a chance to practice. But to try and build your career around a skillset you don’t really have is setting yourself up for failure.”

So with that, I've made a list of promises:

• I vow to keep using the microscope, to keep keying into the things that make me jazzed about my work. 
• I promise not to be smug when my strengths are yielding big wins and likewise I won’t tear myself apart for not being good at everything. 
• I’ll ask for help and patience from others when I’m working on the things I’m bad at and provide the same in return. 
• I promise to drop out of the comparison game. It's killing collaboration and creativity for all of its players.
• I’ll ask for the work that I want, even if that means it’s the less glamorous and less prestigious positions.

Because where passion and challenge collide, success is almost inevitable.

A Quarter Life Crisis

I think I’m having a quarter life crisis.

I know what you might be thinking. “Wow! That sounds all sorts of intense and dramatic! What sort sensational and traumatic thing could cause such an existential crisis?” And the answer is: nothing. Literally nothing.

It’s not that nothing happened. A lot of little things happened. When I looked at all of the closest people in my life, there was a lot to celebrate. A friend got a sweet gig at Amazon. Another got a sweet gig at Apple. A friend got promoted into management at her non-profit. A friend got matched for residency. A friend got into med school. Another friend got into med school. A friend got into med school and got engaged. My brother got married. My brother turned thirty. My brother finished a post-doc researching fuel cells for the army. Yes, these are all the same brother. The other one? Moved to Miami for a job in banking that he really seems to like and enjoys international travel with his girlfriend of almost a decade. Thanks for setting our parents’ expectations low, guys.

Meanwhile, I’m working movies through retail supply chains, developing a recreational happy hour habit, and serial dating a handful of the cities’ yuppies. I honestly think my biggest life accomplishment or societal contribution over the past year is renewing my car registration (three months late and after two tickets).

So as all my friends started taking their “next big steps,” I started thinking about mine. And that’s when the nothingness set in. I don’t have a clue. Other than a career with some serious power and influence that generates some sort of positive output into the world and a graduate degree in something at some point (because that's not vague or anything), I’m not super sure what I want out of life.

To me, it reminds me a lot of my move to Minneapolis. Open up your closets and re-evaluate every last thing you’ve amassed over the past twenty two years. Except instead of stuff, it’s my life. And this time I don’t get to know where the destination is that lies ahead.

Some people might see this as some sort of fun adventure. The possibilities are endless. And then there are people like me, the type A, high strung, and endearingly neurotic. And instead of feeling a rush of adventure, I experience a full-fledged panic attack.

I’m really, really good at following a plan. I’ve had a lot of practice. From the time I was a kid, Mondays and Wednesdays were dance nights; Tuesdays and Thursdays alternated between soccer and swimming, depending on the season. Fridays were for sleepovers and the rest of the weekend revolved around meetings for my Odyssey of the Mind engineering team and fulfilling my assigned viola practice hours before the next week’s orchestra class. I kept busy and ate my fair share of dinners in the backseat of a mini-van (which, to my mother’s credit, were a lot more nutritious and creative than they sound). This pattern continued right on up through high school to cultivate a strong, well rounded college application. And even right on through undergrad, the path for success was pretty obvious. Get good grades, get involved, be a leader, volunteer, and do some research. Check, check, check, and check.

While the critical life choices have been few and far between, they’ve never been easy. Decisions around colleges, majors, and entry level jobs all followed the same process: build a giant spreadsheet of options, get overwhelmed, procrastinate, cry, go with the most familiar option, and question your decision for the next two to three years.

So after 17 years following the highly structured and regimented formal education system, I find that I’m actually kind of ill-prepared to some of the most important adult things: creating your own definition of success, ascertaining your values and boundaries, and drafting up your own action plan to make it come to fruition. And while dabbling in a bit of everything helps pad your college application, “well rounded” doesn’t make for a very great life direction; it’ll only lead you in circles.

So why am I writing about this on the internet? Because I’ve always been more committed as a blogger than as a journaler, obviously. And the more I’ve reached out and talked to friends over the past week or so, the more normal I realize this is. We might put up pictures of our city apartments, patio happy hours, and weekend getaways, but a lot of us feel like we’re in the ugly, awkward middle school stage of real life. And we all hope it only lasts three years, max. I think we do too much to pretty-up and perfect our existence in hopes we might convince ourselves that we have our shit together.

Now, I should note that I hope this doesn't come across as whiny. See, in my extensive Google-searching any and all solutions for a QLC, I came across this really great piece from Humans of New York:

 

"I think we’re both going through a quarter-life crisis right now."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, so much of your energy in college, and immediately afterwards, goes into finding that first job. Then you finally get a job, and you get settled in, and you get past that initial hump of excitement. Then you start to ask yourself some big questions.”
"What kind of questions?"
"Things like: Is my work getting recognized? Is this job leading me toward my larger goals in life? Do I have balance?"

And it was one of those really great moments where I’m like “Ah, yes, that’s exactly it; they get it.” And then I scrolled to the comments section, full of #FirstWorldProblems lamentations. In a sense, I agree; I’m lucky. I don’t think you can have an existential crisis when you’re worried about making rent for the month, stressed about crushing college debt, or constantly trying to juggle the demands of work and family. I’m at a really unique time in my life where I have both the time and the resources to dream big and take risks, and I’m grateful for it. If big and influential and positive and powerful are in my long term goals, I’m both well-equipped and ill-prepared to make it happen. It’s that paradoxical combination that rouses a combination of hopeful possibilities, overwhelming possibilities, chaotic ambition, crippling anxiety, bewildered excitement, and paralyzing fear all at the same time. Here we go.