Living at home is the new normal (or a return to the old normal), The New York Times asserts in a piece on Millennials who have returned to the nest. While the reality of financial insecure twentysomethings relying on their parents is incontestable, the fact that the NYT quotes an expert, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, as praising young adults who prefer living at home and lying in wait for the perfect career opportunity to present itself instead of settling for something less than their ideal is all manner of wrong. The truth is that the job missteps and dead ends that Millennials are trying to avoid while holing up in their childhood bedrooms are exactly the kind of experiences they should be rushing to embrace. You shouldn't be reluctant to take a lousy job out of college, you should be ecstatic to do so. Here's why:
You increase your employability
I'm not talking about being able to add bullet points to your resume, but building the understanding of how to navigate the work culture of your chosen field. The central value of your first post-college job is that it functions as a form of daily socialization that teaches you the norms and expectations of employability. Think of it like basic training for the world of work. You come in a raw, clueless recruit and, if you pay attention, ask the right questions and file away knowledge, you emerge as someone who understands group dynamics, time management, interpersonal communications and negotiation skills and has a solid sense of what "business casual" really means. "The major thing you learn at your first job is how to keep a job,” author Austin Kleon quipped to me on Twitter. He's right. It's a skill that will serve you well in all of your subsequent positions.
Experience begets self knowledge
Experimentation isn't just for your love life. How do you know that you hate eggplant and would never date a smoker? Presumably, you've been exposed to both of these things at some point in your life and decided they aren't for you. The NYT describes one interviewee who has lived with her mother for years as, "nowhere closer to figuring out what she’s going to do with her career. 'Everyone tells me to just pick something,' she says, 'but I don’t know what to pick.'" A bolt of career clarity isn't going to strike you out of the blue at age 27. If you don't know what you want to do with your life by then, you simply need to dive in and start kicking some tires. You need firsthand information in order to determine what kind of careers will be the best fit and you can only get that info by test driving your options and understanding more about how you operate in specific settings. Do you work best solo or in a team? How are your customer relations skills? Are you a good delegator? To know these things, you have to (try to) do these things. That less than amazing first job will give you the opportunity to learn about yourself and use this intel to make more appropriate future career moves. Finding a career that fits is about testing, failing, learning and iterating. Lather, rinse, repeat as quickly as possible.
You can plot your next move from a safe place
While a little bit of physical discomfort helps us make better decisions, choices made from a place of scarcity and desperation don't tend to serve our long-term interests. You can contemplate your options in a more clear-headed manner if you have a degree of stability in your life — stability that comes from a steady full-time gig, even if it isn't your dream job. Knowing that your rent is paid, you have somewhere to go tomorrow morning and people are relying on you gives you some psychic room to consider your next career steps without feeling as if your back is against the wall. You have the luxury of researching your options and making a well-educated next move. You have the security of a steady pay check and routine, but are likely without the constraints of a mortgage or multiple mouths to feed, which means you're risking less if and when you trade in that security for another opportunity. And don't get hung up worrying about complacency and how that subpar opportunity you settle for now might ensnare you in its unfulfilling grip for the next 30 years. On average, Millennials change jobs every four and half years, so the odds of you getting into a decades-long rut are slim.
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