The Post-Grad Blues : Living at Home after University
Throughout my teenage years, I imagined that my 20s would be like the TV sitcom Friends. I was going to be young and attractive and living in a big city, surrounded by laughter and flatmates, going on a different date each week, splurging on cocktails and then scraping by to make the rent.
Well, I was at least right about the young part. I am, instead, living in the small market town where I was born. My net movement, from birth to now, stands at a measly 0.2 miles. I am surrounded not by the laughter of people my age, but by the ticking of the clock. My flatmates are my parents and - love them as I do - their current hobbies involve birdwatching, cycling, and taking a slightly manic interest in the health of our dishwasher. Where are Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe? Where are my hot dates? Slowly, I find myself morphing into a fellow 60 year old before my time, eagerly awaiting another double bill of Only Connect and University Challenge each Monday evening.
It’s not a bad life by any means. I have a warm bed and a hot shower to look forward to each night. There is always someone for me to chat about my day with over a cup of tea, and I get to do significantly less cooking or washing-up than I would if I were living independently. I also never have to worry about the likes of council tax, meter readings, or electricity bills.
But still, it’s a bit like bowling with the barriers up: you’ll never end up in the gutter, but you’ll never feel like you’re playing the game properly either.
I’m not the only one in this predicament. In fact, out of all of my friends from both home and university, only one of them is out in the world and paying rent to a real landlord. So why is it that so many of us twenty-somethings are mulling about in our childhood bedrooms? It’s simple: rents are high, whilst the average graduate pay is low. Admittedly, the pay issue is mostly reserved for those of us with degrees in non-STEM subjects. There are still good careers to be had in the humanities and arts, but getting a foot in the door of these fields is difficult, with more graduates than ever before bombarding employers with their speculative applications, Linkedin requests and cover letters. Faced with this predicament, most of us ex-students have only two options. Option A is to move back home until your fortunes turn, whilst your youth slips away in endless dressing gowned nights of tea and biscuits. Option B is to take any job offering a livable wage, regardless of your actual aspirations, and to move into an HMO in an affordable area - destined to spend your days haunted by invisible housemates who you’ll argue with about the bin rota via group-chat. Both of these choices involve a fair amount of isolation and absolutely none of the enjoyment I pictured for my Friends era.
So how are we to proceed? Last year, my resolution was to accept my situation. Accept the flaws of the rental market, the jobs market, the distance between friends, the lack of excitement in my life, and the way that time seemed to be passing terrifyingly fast. I realised that for all the worrying I might do about these things, there is nothing productive that I can do to change them. Instead, I try to focus on what I like about my life at home. There's the cosiness of it, the sound of birdsong in the mornings, the weekends spent driving down South to catch up with my uni mates. It might not look like Friends, but it could be mistaken for a slightly dull English spin-off of Frasier, and I’ll take that. Yes, I still have plenty of days when I’m overwhelmed by the urge to have my own space, when I’ll look longingly at the bags of kitchen crockery tucked away in the shed and dream of the day when my own life can begin again. But on those days I remind myself that this stage of life is just one big bus stop. My bus will arrive one day, and until then I’ll enjoy the scenery.
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