I
skipped my first BlueJeans lecture to
buy a pair of shoes.
The sole employee at the Ann
Arbor Running Company looked surprised
to see me. He kept pulling the wrong sizes
and I kept feeling too socially anxious to
correct him. It had been six days since Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer announced a state of
emergency, and we were both a bit rusty
on our interpersonal skills. He untied a
size-too-small sneaker from a stool rolled
six feet away and went through all the
correct small-talk motions: How was my
running going? Was I a student? What year?
President Donald Trump was announcing
new restrictions from the flat screen in the
back of the store that usually played silent
reruns of pixelated cross-country races.
“This is a bad one,” Trump proclaimed
from the store speakers. “This is a very bad
one.”
“I’m a senior,” I replied to the salesman
while tying up a size-too-large shoe, one
eye on the screen.
“Neat,” the guy replied. “Got anything
lined up?”
Before the COVID-19 outbreak defined
our daily lives, my habitual reply to this
dreaded question had been a good-natured
“nahhhh,” friendly in its lingering “h,” or
perhaps a more optimistic “not yet” if the
questioner appeared genuinely concerned
about my future or was related to me by
blood. But in the Ann Arbor Running
Company, while Trump announced we
“may be” diving head-first into a recession
(but will be “raring to go” by Easter),
I began to feel uncertain in a way that
resisted friendliness or optimism.
“I, uhh, I really don’t know,” I told him.
And I realized, for what felt like the first
time, I seriously believed it.
L
ast week the United States
Labor Department released data
indicating that, from March 7 to
March 14, the rise in initial unemployment
claims outnumbered that of any week
during or since 2008. In a recent New York
Times article analyzing this data, Justin
Wolfers, professor of economics and public
policy at the University of Michigan, pointed
out that this is unlike a “normal” recession,
which typically takes months of joblessness,
two consecutive quarters of negative
GDP and a bureaucratic declaration to be
universally recognized as an “official”
recession in every sense of the word.
“The last recession began in December
2007, but even half a year later, some
economists were still debating whether the
economy had entered a recession,” Wolfers
wrote. “This time, there’s no debate.”
But other experts have scrapped that
vernacular entirely, insisting that the
dystopian extremities of the COVID-19
economy cannot be explained with normal
jargon. We are living in the most intense bear
market on record: unprecedented declines
in stock and security due to widespread
sentiments of fear and pessimism.
“What is happening is a shock to the
American economy more sudden and severe
than anyone alive has ever experienced,”
stated esteemed policy journalist Annie
Lowrey in The Atlantic last week. “This is
not a recession. This is an ice age.”
Right, wrong or indifferent, trauma
has a history of changing the way we talk
about things, each disaster with its own
little vocabulary nebula. McCarthyism,
Trumpism, Stalinism, the War on Drugs,
the War on Terror — these phrases didn’t
exist or matter before cluttering the
national (or international) conversation
with paranoid frequency during their
respective moments. They carry their
emotional history with them, grim little
linguistic keepsakes fossilized into the way
we speak. The alt-right. #MeToo. The dot-
com bubble. Social distancing. Flatten the
curve. No Record Covid. Economic ice age.
Another
term
has
squeaked
into
being amid this century of change: lost
generation. Gertrude Stein is credited
with coining the phrase, which Ernest
Hemingway then popularized in the
epigraph of “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926 —
“you are all a lost generation.” Just peachy.
Stein and Hemingway were originally
referring to the generation of people
coming-of-age during or after World War
I — the first global conflict to trickle down
into American daily life in a way that felt
personal.
Since 1926, though, the term “lost
generation” has slowly become unstuck
from the context of its inception alone.
The
long-revered
Oxford
English
Dictionary
clarifies
that
the
largely
historic phrase is “also used more generally
of any generation judged to have ‘lost’
its values.” Lexico, a more colloquial
collaboration between Dictionary.com and
Oxford University Press, gives the term an
additional entry below the definition of its
literal origin. It reads:
“An unfulfilled generation coming to
maturity during a period of instability.”
M
aggie Li, an LSA senior
studying
biomolecular
science, was breaking up with
her boyfriend around the time the World
Health Organization named the outbreak
“COVID-19.” Li went home to weather the
breakup with family, returned briefly to
take her midterms and then flew right back
home for spring break. She was recharging
for the second half of the term, hopeful
to return and end her final semester on
a high she could ride into the start of her
independent adult life.
“And then right when I got back that
Wednesday, they literally announced that
all classes are going to be online for the rest
of the semester. And I was like, ‘Are you
serious?’ ” Li said in a phone interview with
The Daily.
“I was just ready to come back and swing
into things and, like, get my life on track.
And then now, nothing is normal.”
Instead, Li found herself back home
in New York for the third time in three
weeks, grappling with much more than her
lingering breakup.
“I’m taking a gap year before med school,
and I’m in touch with a lot of research labs.
But I don’t know what I’m going to do with
my life because all of the labs obviously are
not focusing on hiring right now, which I
completely understand. But now my life is
on hold.”
Through the phone, Li paused to take a
breath. Later in our conversation, she told
me that she actually had had a lab contract
lined up with Massachusetts General
Hospital, but it happened to be in close
proximity to her then-boyfriend. She turned
the offer down when they broke up, to open
her future to positions and opportunities
elsewhere. And labs elsewhere — including
Mount Sinai in New York — had been really
receptive to her application. Things were
looking good. Empowering, even. But that
was before, as she put it, “this whole thing
blew out.”
“Now the MCAT is canceled for quite
some time … and if they’ve canceled school
(through spring and summer terms), then
they’ll probably cancel testing, and then
when am I going to take it? Like, am I
going to have to take another year off just
because of a situation that’s kind of out of
my control?”
Rachel Rudd, a senior in the School of
Nursing, expressed similar uncertainty
about the NCLEX, the nationwide exam for
graduating nurses.
“We all have to take the NCLEX in order
to get our RN licensure, and we don’t really
know what’s going to happen with that,
because usually, we take them in late May
or June,” Rudd told The Daily in a recent
phone interview (note: starting March
25, the NCSBN, which administers the
NCLEX, has reduced testing to “a limited
number of test centers” according to federal
guidelines). “So, it may be over by then and
it may not be. So, I think that’s just like a
wait-and-see sort of thing.”
While some seniors are questioning the
status of their already-scheduled exams,
others have been freshly motivated to
consider
taking
them
in
the
first
place — the binary
tension
indicative
of a populace near-
robotically uncertain
about which way to
turn. Public Policy
senior Elise Rometsch
expressed
as
such
in a recent phone
interview with The
Daily.
“I
don’t
have
anything
lined
up
… and was looking
for a job, but I also
had plans of going to
maybe grad school
or
potentially
law
school
down
the
road, and I’m like,
‘Should I hurry those
up?’ Because I know
when the economy’s not doing well, that’s
generally like, ‘Okay, time to go to grad
school.’ ”
I
eventually confessed to the man at
the Ann Arbor Running Company
that I was a size 8.5, that his 7s and
9s weren’t going to help me meet the sick
mileage goals that had become
increasingly integral to my sense
of self-worth with every day and
email since March 11. They had
none in stock, which I refrained
from
reading
symbolically.
I
ended up ordering a pair through
the store, making some comment
about how I’d rather give my
money to them than a third party
on the internet. “Thanks,” the man
told me, unimpressed, gingerly
holding out my receipt.
A week later, I called the Ann
Arbor Running Company to check
on my order. It was March 23, and
when I woke up, Whitmer had
issued her “Stay Home, Stay Safe”
Executive Order, toppling a domino
network of tense conversations
and packed bags between friends,
family and loved ones statewide.
I too was throwing socks and
books into my duffel, phone
wedged between shoulder and
ear, preparing to move to my
boyfriend’s
place
a
whopping
block down the street. He and his
housemates had decided to use
the Whitmer’s order as grounds to
self-quarantine their house for two weeks,
legitimately, to ensure they didn’t have the
virus before going home-home to more
immunosuppressed or elderly familiars.
I was invited, so long as I followed the
sole Spartan rule: No one goes in or out.
I was down to confidently delay my own
seemingly inevitable breakup for two more
weeks, so I agreed.
In or out. Together or not. Life had really
gone binary.
Back on the phone, a non-identified male
running voice spoke: “Sturm … I remember
your name, let me check the book.” It didn’t
sound like the guy I had talked to in the
store from the week before, which relieved
me. “Hmm. OK yeah, order placed, but not
in yet. Soon, though. We’ll give you a call.”
“Okay,” I replied, dropping a pair of pink
silk pants that I would never wear into my
bag. “But I’m kind of moving to a sensitive
household, we’re in town but I don’t think
I can …”
“We’ll bring it to you,” this anonymous
man said, cutting me off. “Of course.”
“Whoa. Like, to the door?” I asked. Mom-
and-pop running shops don’t operate like
Grubhub.
“Yes. We’ll bring them to you. Doorstep.
Don’t worry about it. We’ll give you a call,
and we’ll bring them.”
A
t the time of my interview with
Rometsch, my recent Google
searches included “GRE,” “GRE
when,” “how long writing sample English
Ph.D.” and “LSAT casual.” Safe to say,
my feet were firmly planted in the same
tenuous camp as Rometsch re: continued
education. And, as she pointed out, it was
economic anxiety that sent me there, not
my boundless zeal for specialized study.
I went into this year tabling grad school
because I didn’t want to waste my time
diving so expensively into something I
wasn’t 100 percent certain about. Now, I’m
just seeking refuge.
Historical data, as usual, tells me
this plan is unexceptional. In October
2009, the number of LSAT examinations
administered reached an all-time high of
60,746, a 20 percent increase
from
the year prior — that is, before the 2008
financial crisis. Similarly, the number of
Americans who took the GRE in 2009 rose
13 percent from the disastrous year prior,
peaking at 670,000 test-takers.
What that does to the selectivity of the
applicant pool, I don’t even want to know.
But Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby has
studied the pattern and confirmed that
interest in higher education has indeed
increased during every recession since the
1960s.
Who can blame us? On Monday, Vox
published the “scariest unemployment
chart ever,” depicting a projection from
Goldman Sachs — 2.25 million new claims
— that pushes the y-axis to a point where
an illustration is moot. The labor market
doesn’t even feel like an option.
“Most people at our school usually get
a job coming right out of college. That’s
just, like, how that works. … But is anyone
really even going to be hiring people right
now?” Stephanie Stan said, an LSA senior
studying biopsychology, cognition and
neuroscience, in a recent phone interview
with The Daily. “It’s not only the people
who have a job lined up (who are impacted)
or those that won’t make as much money as
they would have coming right out. It’s now
people who are still applying, or thinking
about applying.”
And although Rudd is pretty confident
that she’ll find employment upon her RN
licensure, she’s wary about the larger labor
pattern that will eventually cut into her
industry as the pandemic naturally ebbs.
“A lot of people are talking about how
there may be this surge in (health care)
workers, but then when COVID-19 is over,
what are we going to do with all the extra
people? I’m not sure if that’s even going to
affect me or what’s going to happen,” Rudd
said.
The rules we’ve been raised on don’t seem
to apply to the class of 2020. Stan is right,
the University frequently tells us that most
people at our school usually get a job
coming right out of college. But that data
doesn’t account for an economic ice age.
Similarly, labor statistics tell us that nurses
are projected to remain in high demand.
But job security seems more complicated
when entering an industry at a time when
demand is so disproportionately inflated.
“Graduating generally is terrifying,”
Rometsch told me. “And now, not only are
we dealing with classes we’ve never had
anything like (before), we have to deal with
adapting to new situations. We have to deal
with trying to find a job in an economy
where no one knows what’s going on.”
L
ike most self-conscious writers,
I began to gaslight the validity
of my own piece about halfway
through my research. What if this isn’t
actually happening on an individual basis?
Data can say most anything if you just zoom
out enough. Am I misreading the signs? Am
I going to publish something that stirs more
panic for less reason?
As if on cue, I got an email from a
publishing firm that I was prepping
for a round two interview with,
declaring “all summer internships
canceled due to the ongoing health
crisis.”
I
dissociated
momentarily
before texting my mom “the thing
I made second round for was
canceled lol.”
She replied immediately: “That
sucks. Andrew’s job postponed
indefinitely, too.”
My brother Andrew graduated
from a small liberal arts school
with a degree in aquaculture
this past May. He’s been living
at home most of the past year,
doggedly applying to jobs. He’s on
the Asperger’s end of the Autism
spectrum — more than capable of
doing excellent work, but outside
neurotypical. And, of course, job
interviews are implicitly designed
around
(and
evaluative
of)
neurotypicality.
Andrew works three times as
hard for an “average” degree of
opportunity, at least according
to University standards. He and
I have never enjoyed the same
amount of agency in this world, especially
regarding academia and work.
In late February, Andrew finally got a job
offer. Now?
“Oh shit,” I replied.
Friday, March 27, 2020 // The Statement
4B
5B
Friday, March 27, 2020 // The Statement
BY VERITY STURM, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
INFOGRAPHIC BY MARIAH PARKER
Class of COVID-19:
Seniors commune around
increasingly uncertain future
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com