Vacation?

Ah, spring: that blissful season when a young girl’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of summer jobs. Outside, birds are singing, crocuses are springing, that guy with the machine is trying to induce green grass. Inside, you are crouched over your laptop trying to find lucrative internships whose application deadlines weren’t in November. You are not succeeding. Everyone you talk to either has had a job lined up for months or is running around like a decapitated chicken trying to find one.

But it can’t be just any job. If you want to mingle satisfactorily with your upwardly mobile peers when you return in the fall, your job must meet a number of criteria. You can’t, say, work at Ben & Jerry’s. Unless it’s in the creative marketing strategies department. After a dispiriting bout of cover letters dispatched into internet oblivion, I contemplated applying to work on a cruise ship. But then I’d have to write a book about my experiences.

Forget the demise of childhood. What happened to summer? Summer was supposed to be when you went to the beach and caught up on your reading. Now if you don’t have a job lined up, you feel like a malingerer.

Yet this is only the logical outcome of decades of upbringing. Ours is the overbooked generation, a bumper crop of overachievers who spent their childhoods dashing from Gifted and Talented classes to volleyball practice to tutoring sessions for underserved suburban youth. Our summers before college were spent at chess camps, on traveling soccer teams, or managing our eight lemonade franchises. We couldn’t even go camping for eight weeks without its being somehow tangentially related to leadership. By the time we got into college, we had amassed enough experiences to fill several personal essays.

But now, at the brink of full economic adulthood, we find ourselves in a bind. College is the last time we will have three months to ourselves, unless we go into academia. And accustomed to such concepts as “Spring Break” and “Summer Vacation,” we forget that, once we graduate, the seasons will be things we glimpse in passing through our neighbor’s cubicle window. Of course, when we are thrust into the pell-mell melee that is the corporate world, that internship we had at a reputable firm with an ampersand in its title will look nice on our resume. But is this the best use of our time?

To some extent, we have convinced ourselves that it is. In his book Bobos in Paradise, columnist David Brooks makes the case that for the current generation of “Bourgeois Bohemians,” or “Bobos,” ultimate fulfillment comes through work. What you do defines who you are, and as a consequence people find themselves working harder and longer at jobs they care more about. College, for young Bobos, is a period during which we can adjust ourselves to the idea of a work-centered life, consoling ourselves with the thought that when we graduate, we will be doing something we love. (I, for instance, love living under a bridge and having little earning power. That’s why I chose to concentrate in the humanities.) Yet while this is certainly preferable to hating your job, when taken to its logical conclusion, it destroys summer. And this seems somehow wrong.

Indeed, the overbooked generation stands the risk of becoming the overwhelmed generation if this trend continues. We have grown up without a conception of spare time. Left to ourselves, we fidget and grow paranoid. It always seems that there is something we should be doing.

Hence the birth of the productive-unproductive summer, the overbooked generation’s answer to relaxation. A typical productive-unproductive summer allows us to do something we enjoy because of its underlying academic or charitable purpose. Often it is as much work as a real job. Our desire to travel across Europe forces us to retrace the footsteps of Attila the Hun and write a travel narrative afterwards. If we want to lie around just doing nothing, it is because Kierkegaard once spent his summer lying around doing nothing, and we’re preparing an 80-page thesis on it.

Perhaps we should blame Richard Henry Dana. In 1840, this Harvard student’s Two Years Before the Mast transformed his nightmarish apprenticeship aboard a sailing vessel into an equally nightmarish—but bestselling—memoir. He was a trailblazer of the productive-unproductive summer. The consummate Harvardian, he glimpsed the potential in his seemingly wasted time on ship, taking his diary and converting it to a popular narrative and plea for better shipboard conditions. After this shining example of literary advocacy, experiential learning, and cross-cultural exchange, you couldn’t just run off to sea anymore. You were expected to do something with it.

Indeed, the idea that the only good summer is the productive summer is so ingrained in the Harvard mentality that those who ask you what you’re doing always make the optimal assumption. No job plans? You’re probably preparing a debut album. Working at a supermarket? Must be microfinance.

But what’s wrong with just holding down a job? And what’s wrong with holding down no job at all? Can’t someone go down to the sea and work on her browning and Browning?

Only if there’s a book in it.



Alexandra A. Petri ’10 is a joint English and American literature and languages and classics concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.