Crappy but predictable career advice

From the ABA list serve:

Michelle Obama got this advice after confiding to her mother that she hated being a lawyer

And what, pray tell, was that advice:

“You know, my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made,” Obama said. “She was live-and-let-live. So one day she’s driving me from the airport after I was doing document production in Washington, D.C., and I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t sit in a room and look at documents.’ I won’t get into what that is, but it’s deadly. Deadly. Document production. So I shared with her in the car: I’m just not happy. I don’t feel my passion. And my mother—my uninvolved, live-and-let-live mother—said, ‘Make the money, worry about being happy later.’ “

Let's look at that again.

Make the money, worry about being happy later.

Michelle Obama was born in 1964, one year later than me.  Her mother, Wikipedia reports, was born in 1937.  So at the time this advice was given, her mother was at least 50, maybe older (we aren't really informed when this advice was given, only that it was give prior to Mrs. Obama meeting her husband. . . we know that Michele Obama graduated from Harvard Law School (of course) in 1988 (she's a Princeton undergrad by the way) and met her future husband in 1989 (their first date was to see "Do The Right Thing").  So, this conversation must have occurred in 1988 or 1989.

Michelle Obama is a really smart person.  And extremely well-educated, to say the least. So if she was relating to her mother that she hated being a lawyer and wanted to hang it up. . . well that really says something either about the law as a profession (and the propaganda surrounding it) or maybe the place she was working, or maybe her personality.  Any of those could be true.

But it also says something huge about that generation that her mother was part of.

Now, Her mother was born late enough that she's not really part of that Depression era generation that Tom Brokaw has grossly mischaracterized as being "The Greatest Generation".  The generation she would have been born into is the "Silent Generation", which according to the generational theorists Strauss and Howe, we've written about before, has the following characteristics:

• Silent Generation (1925–1942) (Artist) 

Again, this is a commonly used term for this generation.  I can't say much about them other than that both of my parents would have fit into it.  According to Strauss and Howe that would mean: 

Artists grow up overprotected by adults preoccupied with the Crisis, come of age as the socialized and conformist young adults of a post-Crisis world, break out as process-oriented midlife leaders during an Awakening, and age into thoughtful post-Awakening elders.

I definitely don't see that in my parents generation.  Indeed, I really think that there was very little difference between the World War Two generation and them, other than they were born at an age where they were either serving very late in the war, or in the next one.  In other words, if the artist category describes people born in the late 1920s, anyhow, this doesn't seem right to me at all. And indeed, perhaps the generational years assigned to this cohort are flat out wrong.  It wouldn't strike me, for example, that kids born in the Jazz Age year of 1925, who would have been eligible for military service in 1943, would share that much in common with people born in 1945.

Well, what I noted there, I'd note again.  I don't think there's a colossal difference between the World War Two generation and those born in the late 1920s and the 1930s.  Indeed, my guess is that the overarching nature of the twin global crises of World War Two and the Great Depression had a big generational leveling effect. To add to that, my mother, who was slightly older than my father, was actually old enough to have joined the Canadian armed forces, which she inquired about doing, if she had wanted to (she realized right off that her genteel upbringing made her singularly unsuitable for service life, and so she didn't pursue it).  My father was too young to serve in World War Two, but that generation that came close to fighting in it always looked to it and their late teen experiences such that it was a looming event in their life. . . in some ways even a larger event than the one that many of them did serve in (including my father), the Korean War.

I do think the name the "Silent Generation" is apt, however, as something in what appeared in the ABA article did really strike me, that being" my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made".  My parents, and in particular my father, didn't either. I sure wish he had, quite frankly, as he had a wealth of personal experience and had lived a really hard young life (he worked in his father's packing house in the 1940s as a teen, he became the head of the family in his late teens when his own father died, he had effectively become the father to his youngest brother when he was that age and on into his own twenties. He'd started off in manual work and then had been sent to college at his mother's command and had acquired a dental degree which he worked at until he died at age 62).  I would have liked his insights, but he didn't really provide them.

But when he did, they were basically of the same nature as Michelle Obama's mother.  He never told me "Make the money, worry about being happy later.“ but I recall that he did tell me, when I was thinking of becoming a game warden and majoring in Wildlife Management "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees and no jobs" and when I was thinking of going to law school "a law degree is something you can use for a lot of things".

He was flat out wrong on the last comment in spite of being truly a quiet genius.  He was probably right in his first observation, however, FWIW.

So what's my point?

Well my point is that this advice is both in error in objective fact (there's no guaranty that you are going to rake in piles of bucks as a lawyer), and in what it suggests on a larger scale.  But it's also common to generations that grew up in financial distress.

Indeed, it's frankly a common view for my own generation if they grew up around here.  People like me were born into a local economic depression and in some ways most of us never got over it, just like our parents that grew up in the Great Depression also didn't get over it.  Having a job, in and of itself, was absolutely paramount in people's minds, given that so many of us (myself included) at least at one time didn't have one.

This view, we're now told, is common to "Generation Z", the generation that is just coming into the workforce.  Some new studies relate that in terms of employment, they look a lot like the generation that came of age in the wake of the Great Depression.  They seem to value job stability above all else, and they don't worry about climbing to the top of the economic ladder.  Indeed, it's reported at least right now that they'd rather get a job in an established entity owned by somebody else, rather than try starting one up, which makes a great deal of sense if their personal youthful experience with that effort is watching things fail.

Maybe generational traits truly are cyclical.  If so, maybe we can hope for an abatement in some other trends that have come on post 1960.

But was Michelle Obama's mother right?  Well I don't think so.  I grasp what she was saying, but that can be a recipe for long term bitter disappointment.

Indeed, I frequently note that people who give these recollections in the public sphere often had their lives take a really dramatic turn that makes the value of their recollection questionable.  In fairness to Michelle Obama, she's not really conveying this recollection as advice.   More telling is that the Harvard Law graduate (and as I've noted in the past, while I think it's singularly unfair and a bit absurd, Harvard Law graduates pretty much get to write their own ticket) only briefly practiced law and put her license on inactive status in 1993.  She was admitted to the bar in 1988. So, in fact, she basically rejected her mother's advice.

Probably wisely.  Things worked out, and her career, while it probably wasn't as lucrative as the one she started to pursue in 1988, turned out no doubt to be more interesting.