Corporate Dropout

In a time when technology is in a constant race with light to be the first one to make it to the end of the world, more and more twenty-somethings, disillusioned with the slow and sullen pace of traditional education, are strapping on their goggles and hopping onboard the corporate technology titanic.

We are a national culture of dropouts wearing designer suits, six figure salaries, doing drugs, claiming our own boundaries in the new universe, digitally, physically, however we can manage them.

This is not our parent's office - walking into today's corporations, hear the guitar on the speakers, watch the suits walking around, levitating on worn out converse all-stars. I am a high-paid corporate dropout, and I am not alone.

We have no college degrees. We have only upper east side flats, palm pilots with wireless internet access, paper thin sony vaio laptops with removable dvd-roms, on which we watch Half-Baked, Dazed and Confused, and Wall Street, all in a single weary and wary weekend.

We are riding the crest of technology's waning ocean and can forsee no land, only this forever expanding planet of blue, green, grey, white, gold.

We are reverting back to the middle ages. Drugs, sex, disease - life expectancies for our culture have reset themselves to their inital pre-technology equilibriums, finding rest again in the middle thirties. We are getting much further much faster, and we are energy burning out.

Hop on the corporate bandwagon at nineteen years old, a businessman by twenty, liquor, life, love, leading to early expiration, and it's because we can't handle it any other way. In one generation we have undone hundreds of years of mental evolution, we have recreated the American Dream, and where will we have left to go in ten years, when we should have just been graduating with our PhD's, ready to hit the road to mediocrity?

But as we speed up, the rest of the world tries to match us, and though the office this summer will replace our sandy beaches, I assure you we're quickly headed straight to the sun.