Non fiction

Realist or Pessimist?

Sitting here on my bed, supposed to do this homework for geography about employment in Britain... My dad has been on welfare ever since the steel industry went down. Everyone in our neighbourhood is on welfare. And I am actually looking forward to being on welfare myself - why wouldn't I? Life is simple if you do not have to work, and I mean, honestly, there are no jobs anyway.  Why try? I don't care if the rest of society is going berserk about the high unemployment and costs for the state and those big bosses keep complaining about "these masses of lazy people". I am not lazy. I am just realistic—why should I bother? I would rather be comfortable than feeling miserable all the time for the world going down and everything becoming worse and worse! Less employment, rising living costs, there is a lot out there to feel bad about, but I could not care.

I know my sister feels differently about this whole issue - she thinks she has to work like crazy in school in order to get into a good university. But what is next for her? She will have to keep working hard for her studies as well as working part-time to afford a minimum living standard. She has these illusions in her head - I see them as nightmares. She thinks they are the greatest, sweetest dreams. What will education do to her? She will only see life more analytically and if she is really going into these thinking-subjects she will only question her own existence. That's at least what our R.E. teacher is like... Where are we coming from? Where are we going? Who cares anyway? I think we could be more indifferent altogether and it would not hurt. Even the teaching assistants keep babbling on about the importance of education and how we should do work, volunteer, school, learn more. This is a fucking treadmill leading nowhere. This stuff is brainwashed into our brains—so I will not care. I would rather watch some TV and doze off. I seriously don't give a shit.

I don't need to strive for more, I will live an OK life being indifferent to others talking rubbish.

Reflection

This piece of writing is the result of our in-class-writing-assignment with slight adjustments to make it more to the point. I thought about characters who would be very much affected by the drop in British employment chances. This teenager is really affected by it, as his family belongs to the working class and even from a welfare background. Not seeing the point in education is a common issue amongst teenagers everywhere I think, but not even caring for their later life takes the desperation a little further. But as I tried to convey with the heading "Do I care?", one cannot be sure whether a character like this is really as indifferent as it seems on the surface. Perhaps there is much subconscious anger or fear which does not have an outlet. Also, if one thinks of the character as being a boy, one could argue that boys are loosing out more, recently, as they are underachieving percentage-wise. As a little side-remark I added the mentioning of teaching assistants, who are not taken serious by this youngster.

Another aspect I tried to cover was the value or importance of education and working on employability as being a necessity for anything. The piece talks a lot about "working" and this seems to be a major focus these days. We talked briefly about the work-life-balance (better put: work-free time-balance) in the last session and how the dissolution of boundaries within these two aspects of life get blurred by the modern capitalist neo-liberal view on life.

Anne Breckner