Something terrifying happened the other week. Something well and truly terrorizing. Having stopped paying attention for a while due to the insomnia inducing effects of a 9cm futon mattress, I suddenly looked up and realised I’d made decisions that I couldn’t quite recognise as my own.

Although juggling paid and (interesting) unpaid work with various degrees of success, and with a confirmed Masters place that could easily become part-time, I seriously considered living out a year of full-time education whilst pretty much squatting in my mum’s could-barely-swing-a-rat-in-it office.

Now the pros of living with your parents are quite obvious: no rent, good food, a safe place to place your weary head… did we mention the no rent and (pretty much unlimited) free food. Furthermore, coming from an Italianate background where the lack of good job opportunities is more norm than recession, living with your parents until you are married/over 30/ they die is kinda the done thing.

However: this is not Italy; I haven’t lived with my parents full-time since I was 17; the room is so small that when the futon is open you have to walk on it to get to the window. And more than anything else, I can’t honestly say that I want to. Or even that I feel such a compulsion to do a fulltime rather than part-time Human Rights Masters in the midst of the recession that I would give my (scanty as it is) independence to do so.

Now this all feels rather rich as I sit in my parents’ living room, drinking (my mum’s) miso soup from her rather beautiful, probably hand painted, Japanese crockery. The plan for this summer is definitely to continue living in this here flat with its italo-japanese food and boudoir-ish décor.

(Although given my clumsiness, absentmindedness and general tendency towards having fingers of the buttered kind, the crockery could be a problem. And I’ve started following myself around the kitchen with a cloth to mop as I spill. And my limbs have become accustomed to folding themselves up futon style, as my expectations tidy themselves in dust-proof boxes.)

And the Folding up of limbs, restraining of unruly hair and tidying up of hopes and dreams is pretty much the point. Or rather, it is the fear:
- I witnessed a further education administrator getting quite emotionally angry at a university student when they suggested they might not take up a job offer in an Oxford Steet Shoe shop due to the Dragon-Bitch boss, because ”It’s a job, and not many people have one at the moment.”
- I almost kissed my imagined interlocutor when finally offered an interview for something I really wanted: an unpaid internship, but it’s a start.
- Our next female Prime Minister is currently working the doors at an (admittedly very upscale) entertainment venue.

Now a distinction must be made between fear and realism. There is nothing wrong with living with your parents, or working for free, or doing menial jobs to save up cash, or indeed working for scary bosses. What can be wrong, is our reasons for doing so. Because the overarching reasons for doing something are what determine whether we are working hard and dirty for our own goals, or working hard and low because we have been told that is all we can do.

With the Fear the question becomes more “What can I get”, and not “What am I worth?” This is supremely worrying because this tidying away of hopes and dreams can lead to a stifling of expectations. And the stifling of expectation can lead to the accepting and not pushing of limits.

Of course we are, as ever, in a recession. And as recent graduates with, say, a humanities degree, what we have spent 3-4 years learning is of little use in the job world. But we are also humans, and we are of worth. So if the choice is between working for Dragon-Bitch bosses for a pittance, or doing something we love, mainly for free, well then we are going to have to rethink those choices.

Our generation of people who are increasingly happy to work for free, because the jobs that pay are ultimately beneath us, must not become a generation of people who work to live and volunteer to be