When Nestlings Won't Leave The Nest

Italy has a growing problem that is causing its citizens some embarrassment. What could be the source of consternation, you might ask, in a nation that has conquered the United States with pizza, pasta, cappuccino and almond-flavored biscotti? 

It seems that the college-educated children of middle-class Italian parents are opting, with ever greater frequency, to stay at home with their folks rather than take demeaning low-status jobs. They worked hard for their degrees, no doubt. They emerged well-read and presumably eager to strut their intellects across the gilded stage of Italian cultural life. And they've found, like so many American liberal arts graduates, that there just aren't enough first-class jobs to go around. Rather than lose their honor (not to mention their enviable socioeconomic status) by working at the Italian equivalent of Blockbuster, they prefer the plush confines of their parents' domiciles. And why shouldn't they? Without straining their young minds and bodies, they can live as young aristocrats funded by parental labor. They have their computers, CDs and videos to comfort them, and if they're really desperate they can always slink out of the house for an occasional taste of amore. But they always return, and many of them are making a permanent lifestyle out of it. The nestlings are refusing to leave the nest.

I noted this development with a doleful head-shake of recognition, because I lived with my parents until I was twenty-eight -- nearly five years after I finished graduate school. Like today's fussy Italian stay-at-homes, I balked at the idea of taking work I deemed beneath my dignity. Manual labor was out of the question. (We history majors use our hands primarily to type footnotes.) Also out of the question was just about any job other than staff writer or editor for a reasonably prestigious periodical. 

But the offers didn't arrive at my door in bushel-baskets, and I finally had to settle for an assistant editorship at a humble trade magazine called (go ahead and laugh) 'Rubber Age.' As if that indignity wasn't enough, the job paid less than I had been earning as a mail carrier during my college summers. So, for that matter, did MOST low-level editorial jobs in New York, which should have tipped me off that the publishing industry -- like museum work, the art business and other genteel job sectors -- was essentially designed to accommodate trust-fund babies. How else did all those underpaid young hirelings afford those exorbitant Manhattan rents and still have enough left over for take-out meals from Zabar's? My salary wouldn't have bought me a walk-in closet on the Upper East Side. I was earning less than half as much as a New York sanitation worker, and I chose to live with my folks until my professional prospects brightened.

Big mistake. Those years I spent lingering in the nest were the sorriest of my life. Rubber Age! When will college graduates learn that some white-collar jobs are more demeaning than manual labor? Why do we persist in believing that salvation always lurks behind a desk? In retrospect (and it's always easier to see the light in our rear-view mirrors), I believe I should have held out for the kind of staff writing job that excited my intellectual lust -- even if it meant convincing my interviewer that I was Herman Melville's great-great-grandson, or that I roomed with Deep Throat's younger brother in college. But until then, I should have been living it up  on my own, a single guy at large in the wide world beyond my boyhood homestead. 

In the long years since the regrettable Rubber Age era, I've met dozens of intrepid young people who have labored as hired hands on cruise ships, as tour guides, as cooks who travel from job to job and eventually make their way around the globe. They might have taken up carpentry in Colorado or worked as bartenders in exotic locales from St. Thomas to Sumatra; they've been able to frolic on this festive planet and sniff its wild fragrances. They've been able to test their strengths instead of shrinking from their weaknesses. In short, they've taught themselves the invaluable art of survival. Then, at twenty-five or thirty, they can settle down to a permanent career -- confident of their prowess, experienced with cutthroats and satisfied that they can handle themselves with grace in any predicament. Too many of us are still emotional virgins when we launch our careers. We're easy prey for the prowling carnivores who dominate the business world.

Believe me, I can understand why those Italian kids feel reluctant to leave home. They're as cozy as hibernating bears, as comfortable as Proust in his cork-padded bedroom. They're justifiably afraid to lose their dignity by taking a low-paying or otherwise unseemly job. What they don't realize is that they're slowly, steadily losing their dignity by keeping their full-grown wings crammed inside their parents' nest. Unused wings, like other body parts, tend to atrophy. Let's fly, bambinos! Flap those wings and propel yourselves out of there! You might suffer a bump or bruise along the way, but it beats asking for an allowance when you're forty.

Cynic's Pick of the Week
Remember hearing the news tidbit that having boys can reduce a mother's lifespan? Yet another reason to bash the male of the species, right? Turns out that the findings were based on a tiny Finnish tribe of herders, and that the data was approximately two hundred years old. Aren't statistics FUN?