Coming to London as a graduate
Eeeh, in my day, we were sent down to London on the back of a coal truck and told to run for 14 miles to find somewhere to sleep while being chased by pack hounds.
We had no clothes so we'd make do with the Evening Standard and fish wrappers. If we were cold, we'd huddle up in't tent made of seaweed and hunt for burger scraps from the Thames.
You'd eat dust and hay if you could find it - and if you were lucky, you'd find a shilling in the ditch to buy 15 pints of lager.
No matter how hard it was, somehow there was always beer.
But toast was a luxury.
Sleep never happened. That weren't invented until Tony Blair.
Jobs as they are now didn't exist either. You'd work for 50p an hour, but you'd only be allowed to come back if you'd done 27 hours a day.
"Here boy, muck out these stables. And file these papers. Walk them personally up to York for me by morning, but don't think about charging me shoe leather or I'll have you sent down to the workhouse for six months."
"Yes, Mr Vanderhart."
"Here boy, secure these Cisco Networks on New Year's Eve, the night of the millenium, in case all the computers crash. Call me if there's an issue. I'll be tanked up on Stella so be prepared to take a beating if you do."
"Yes, Mr Vanderhart."
You felt lucky if you'd got that far.
It's all different today. You Gen Z lot have got it easy.
"Oh, I've got a 2:1. I'm going to get a job, buy some new Gymshark gear and film myself on TikTok getting a charcoal facial with lavender sticks up my nose."
"Can I bring my dog to work?"
"Can we have satsumas in the town hall area?"
No.
But the fact is, despite us kipping on bomb sites and making do with wood for a meal, you lot have it harder today.
You come to town - albeit in yer daddy's Tesla - and you have to talk to machines to find work.
We just hung around in bars and asked our mates.
If you find work, it pays today what it paid when I were a lad.
And when you get there, you realise you're not going to make a difference. You can't buy a house with your four peanuts a week. We at least could see a way to that.
(HSBC offered me a zero percent mortgage for my first shoebox.)
What them upstairs, the bosses, haven't twigged - is they can make yer dance through their AI, automated job applications. They can get you into the office. And - yes - they can pay you peanuts.
But if they don't give you hope and a line of sight to a better future, you won't be there long.
I wish we'd have been as wise as you lot today. Perhaps I wouldn't have sold my organs for pie and mash.
Follow your dreams (and don't be afraid to get on a plane while it's shit out there.)
Dan
The Executive Summary (for newcomers)
