It seems that it has now become impossible for people (even those who have known each other for years) to take the act of seeking employment at face value. The unemployed friend, family friend, whoever, must at all times be questioned, scrutinised, and treated with contempt. The questioning that followed included poorly-veiled accusations of laziness, an undercurrent of derision, and not so subtle hints at having ideas above my station.
Having remarked that I had recently quit a job that was incredibly low-paid and long-houred (£1 per hour in my last week of work), I was met with the contemptuousness, from the friend's mother's friend, usually reserved exclusively for those who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.
The why don't you get a job you lazy bum? You are exactly what is wrong with this country. Oh you had a job but quit because 'it doesn't pay enough to survive on'? Work harder then you moron. Stop smoking drugs!!!!*
All of that nonsense I can happily deal with. I shrug it off as the tabloid inspired, unthinking, nonsense that it is. What did hurt was the hinting that I was aiming for something above what I was capable off. That the career I would like to pursue is not one that is accessible to someone from a working class background. More importantly, that I should not be aiming to harness any of the (limited) social mobility that my degree has potentially opened up to me. The classic "you're aiming too high" and "you're being too picking" featuring as favourites from this conversation.
Now I know that what I want to do is a competitive field of work, I also know that I am unlikely to ever find work in the field, and it is even less likely that I will ever be able to meet my career goals. However, I will continue to try. It is not like I am someone who wants to find work in a truly closed shop for the countries elites (like trying to be a judge). Aspiring to become a newspaper columnist only requires that I be 47% toff.
Which gets me to the crux of this post. The only reason I began to write it. The reason that the conversation stuck with me. Through questioning my my career aspirations in a way that suggested I should give in, or not hold such high hopes altogether, they made me feel like a class traitor. It was almost as if now that I had gone to university, and returned with ambitions beyond 'proper' manual labour (or worse retail work), I had kicked the collective working class straight in the knackers.
It is a feeling that is not entirely new to me. I have grappled with it since I became captivated with the idea that I could break this cycle of deprivation that has characterised my family. I do not want to spend my life meandering from low-paid, insecure jobs to lower-paid, more insecure, and worse jobs, all interspersed by months (or years) spent in the dole queue. I want to be more secure whilst waiting in anticipation for the forthcoming revolution, perhaps even doing a job that could help agitate the masses.
It is probably a feeling that is familiar to many who have come from a working class background, dragged themselves off to university despite pressures to work, and emerged somewhat triumphant at the other side. All too often only to find the immense pressures for them to gain 'proper' employment very quickly resuming. Sadly, much of it coming from within the working classes, through both an adherence to the outmoded idea that this is our place, our lot in life, and the simple fact that work means survival in relative comfort (at least compared to life on the dole).
However, it is that which makes it so uncomfortable for us who, upon completion of our studies, find ourselves feeling as though we fully belong to (or indeed are wanting by) neither the working nor middle classes.
*that wasn't said, but it works for the JK analogy
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