It’s 1999 and I’m seven, a tiny toddler in Mrs Locke’s Year Two class. Sitting there bug-eyed and excitable, my teacher asks: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I stare up at her, a smile stamped across my face as my imagination runs wild. I could be an astronaut or a doctor, a policeman or a UN diplomat, prime minister or transformer; I could be anything I could ever dream of being, because, as my teacher always reminded me, I have the whole world ahead. I’m a blank slate ready to be filled with anything I want.
It’s 2012 and I’m coming up to 21. I’m in my third year of university and before me lies what looks like the dullest book written since The Bird Watcher’s Manual. It’s The Times’ 100 Best Graduate Employers brochure, the ‘holy grail’ for the thousands of students around the UK wondering whether that debt engulfing degree was actually worth it. Every page has already been scanned in minute detail, every word read and reread, every job looked at twice. And it hits me: all the dreams of doing whatever I wanted to do have slowly passed me by and I didn’t even notice.
By doing what I enjoyed at school and abandoning those subjects which I didn’t, I have set myself on a path to a job that I didn’t even know I was on. I ridded myself of Biology without thinking that I would never be an world renowned surgeon without it, I cancelled French without wondering how I would become an international peacekeeper, I gave up Physics when I realised Optimus Prime wasn’t real. I chose the subjects I studied for the same reason most of us did, for the fact that we liked them, never really thinking about utility or prospects. Unbeknownst to be me, ‘the whole world ahead’ became a world filled with unemployment, recessions and workaholic Chinese students.
So I’m left with the unsettling feeling of mediocrity. That feeling of final realisation that you aren’t going to just walk into that dream job, that you’ve found yourself in a hole full of other students all with the same degree and grades, all waving their hands around madly to be noticed by that barely interested employer. Dreams of walking straight into Number 10 or being flown up to the International Space Station have all but vanished, replaced by never-ending unpaid internships and application forms as long as The Oxford English Dictionary.
Yet, the worst part is how this feeling seems to take over more than just my thoughts on future employment. The feeling slowly begins to encompass even my position in the world. It dawns upon me that I’m one of millions in the country, amongst billions in the world, in a universe not affected by any of us. I’m not even a skid mark on the underwear of the cosmic realm that is Everything. I’m just another inconsequential ant begging for a place in the colony.
The moral is that looking for a job can most definitely bring you down a notch or two, and it is coming to terms with that which can be just as important as applying to any job. While the humbling experience of job searching may make you want to crawl into the foetal position, in an odd way it can be quite liberating. Yes, we’re in the middle, but the middle is a good place to be. A place from where we can work our way up, or just stay, content where we are. And while you might not hear the word ‘mediocrity’ bandied around at those hellish graduate development seminars (the ones where they write words like ‘progress’ and ‘teamwork’ in a big brainstorm and think it means something), it’s definitely worth thinking whether you’re happy with the path you’re on. Perhaps you are mediocre, but so are most people. Not being prime minister won’t mean you’re less happy, just that you’re less powerful. As they will one day say, with great mediocrity comes less responsibility. Personally, I think I can deal with that.