The world doesn’t owe you a living (and other bullshit cliches)

Technically, on the promise of millenia of evolution, the world does owe you a living.

Taking a gamble based on the previous generations that have handed down your DNA, the chances of you being the fuck up that fails to get by on this planet is actually quite slim. Thus far, your ancestors had a 100 percent hit rate in the survival stakes, so taking out a mortgage on my chances of survival from the bank of life, my parents were fairly confident the planet would hold steady on the promise it had made my forefathers, and so on down the generations, and pay out. Evolutionary market forces being equal, whatever combination of beauty and brains had enabled them to reproduce and protect their offspring until adulthood would no doubt work out as well for me (I would add athleticism to the mix, but that particular evolutionary advantage was bred out of the gene pool a long time ago, if Jonah’s coordination is anything to go by).

That the world is becoming dangerously overdrawn is, in some respects, a cautionary concern for us all. The possibility that I might fail to provide adequate food, shelter and resources for my own children is one of the reasons I’m tempted not to do more than replace myself and my husband, and stick, as David Attenborough would have us all, at two.

We are living less well, this generation, than our parents, so much is true, particularly trying to eke out a living in one of the more expensive capitals in the world; me, on a copywriter salary – less, I might add, than my children’s schoolteachers, for all my degree, masters and years of editorial experience.

That my children will not have what I had doesn’t concern me so much. The posh holidays and absent parent guilt spending of my childhood always felt a little soulless, and the annual Christmas orgy of stuff a little de trop – I’ve always been more comfortable with too little than too much – something, I think to do with being force fed by my father concerned that I was too thin.

I hope, at least to be able to provide them with the basics of good food and shelter, the luxury of their own room and a patch of space outdoors where they can run around naked before they enter the awkward embarrassment of adolescence.

The reason for my diatribe on genetics, and evolutionary market forces is because in a drunken ramble, all skewed eyes and jabbing finger, a Scotsman with bald politics and a straggly ginger beard told me exactly that: that the world doesn’t owe me a living; Copywriters are ten a penny, he said, and he is right, in this overwhelmingly childless capital, there will always be someone who is ready and willing to grist to the mill and earn tuppence for scratching out a line or two.

Market forces dictate it, and as we as a generation leave it later and later to have children, women born in the 1980s are as likely not to have kids as they are, which means that for those that do, they will be up against a host of DINKYs pushing up house prices, able to work longer hours on less pay because they haven’t got childcare costs to factor into their spending, and so the market gets skewed in their favour, and those who do choose to bear the costs of children will take a much heavier burden.

And so, I don’t ask for sympathy, but at least a form of understanding that I am incrementally, bit by bit and day by day, working harder for my pay than the rest of my childless colleagues, and if I can’t stay until ten, it’s unfair that this should be held against me, or prevent me from getting promoted; the fact that I sometimes need to Facebook my husband to make sure my childcare arrangements are in place is surely made up for the fact that I often work through my lunch to get my work done, the fact that I have to organise my work so that I have enough in the files to cover my holidays because there won’t be someone in to cover my absences; that I work from home when my children or myself is sick so as not to fall behind, and that when I do take time off, I am cooking, cleaning and educating my children, not pursuing my own interests, relaxing or in anyway recuperating from the week in week out of doing what it is I do for a job.

I don’t think the world owes me a living. I am prepared to work hard, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that it is getting harder and harder, and that trying to forge a career after having children (when we are biologically programmed to procreate, as a woman, in our early twenties) is like climbing a mountain in reverse. So I take your comments on board, Mr Beard, but please don’t think I’m not trying, because the RSI in my wrist and pain in my hunched shoulders, and antidepressants keeping me from giving up are telling me quite a different story