Employment

A phenomenon I've only recently begun to experience, and one with a long list of rules and regulations. In todays day and age a job can decide not only your income but your standing amongst your peers, whether or not you even have time to spend with your peers, and conceivably your entire future, depending upon who you ask. I've even had a friend say to me that working as an usher in a movie theater means that I will one day be standing on an airstrip, holding lights to direct airplanes.
Really?
It's becoming all too common for my generation to regard their future employment with a sort of dread, thinking that their first job will decide all their ensuing ones forever. Were its implications not so disturbing I'd probably find it funny.
I'm not advocating living purely in the here and now, but look around you. Consider students that you may know or have known in high school or even middle school classes who had no time for friends, nor luxuries, nor relaxation, nor any time for themselves at all to be spared from the all important goal of their grades, their grades, their grades. And if you ask any of them why they devote themselves to such a goal with this level of zeal, why they forsake all earthly pleasures and a majority of the other ones too for this vocation, what answer will you get?
"For my future."
When did teenagers become such wimps? When did the future become something to regard with fear and horror, something to scrabble arcane writings over like some madman out of a Lovecraft novel keeping nightmares from beyond sanity away from the world?
I'm no advocate of the slacker lifestyle, but neither am I a supporter of allowing the degradation of the self in favor of ones duties. One owes responsibilities to their future, not fealty toward it.