another idea

Part of reading travel books—the essays and stories type, not the guidebook type—means that I’m often confronted with the theme of “leaving.” Not necessarily escaping; unless you’ve literally coated your black and white striped garb with dirt during a daring venture, I feel as if the word escape has been co-opted by cruise line companies and vacation adds, encouraging middle America to “escape” their jobs and lives back home for a short period of time. False—it’s not escaping if you eventually come back. Escaping is a tricky proposition.
Leaving, on the other hand, is more attractive. Leaving takes you away under your own terms but leaves the option of coming back open. You leave school, but you can go back to visit. You leave things for safekeeping precisely so you can come back to get them later. With escaping the implication is once you come back you do so to the same grind, the same routine, your “escape” essentially amounting to a prolonged diversion. With leaving, as well-worn saying imply, things are different, having moved along one way or another while you were away. Even if things haven’t inherently changed since you’ve left you come back with new eyes, understanding things—for better or worse—differently. Leaving isn’t as dramatic as escaping—it’s more casual. Escaping is drastic; leaving is calm.
I just finished reading a book about an Aussie leaving London for Paris for a new job, itself the result of blind, dumb luck and chance. I’m reading a book right now about a twentysometing ditching a Manhattan law firm for Brazil. Both deal with the quarter-life crisis dilemma (just like a midlife crisis but swapping male-pattern baldness for hip clothes), both document the authors absolutely clueless as to what the hell they’re doing, and both have that brilliant epiphany where both authors ruminate that they’d rather wake up near destitute and hung over in their new adopted homeland (which they often do) than suffer another day in the former life they’ve left.
Ladies and gentlemen: the new American Dream.
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My generation is entering what could quite possibly be the worst time imaginable for work. The economy and the job market are in shambles. CEO’s, the glorified position we once aspired to work ourselves up to be, make headlines in controversy and jail sentences. Business school and MBA graduates are applying for entry-level positions alongside recent lay-offs in their mid-50’s, almost mirrors of the future. Today it’s entirely plausible be asked that time-honored query, “When will you get a job?” and respond with blank eyes, “what jobs?” While not utterly hopeless, times, unquestionable, suck.
Maybe the thing to do is the exact opposite of what we’re expected to do. Maybe we need to leave for a while, leave in our own way then return when the world around us is ready. When, eventually, we’re ready.