Life is a Highway

Last Thursday I saw something disturbing that I hope to never see again. No, it wasn’t a Canada Day streaker or anything of that nature. It was a guy, probably in his late teens or early twenties, lying down on Highway QE2 South on the thin v-shaped strip of pavement between the highway and the airport exit. He was alive, awake even. He was there by choice, hanging out or, more likely, taking a break from hitchhiking. From not that far away he looked like a pile of rubble, pieces of someone’s tire that had blown out or debris that had fallen from a truck. He looked like something a person could easily run over without realizing that they had hit a human being until it was too late. He was something one didn’t see, didn’t really see, until you were zooming past him at highway speed. Judging by the quick glance I got, he seemed relaxed and not at all concerned about his very dangerous whereabouts, as if highways were the new cool place to relax. All I could think about after we had driven on by this young, unassuming, man was how many times I had driven over similar thin, v-shaped strips of pavement when I had decided at the last possible second that I had wanted to exit that highway. Actually, all I could think about was how many other people had done, and would do, the same thing.

What made this man decide that this was a good place to hang out, a safe alternative to hitchhiking on the shoulder of the highway or in the ditch? Was he even hitchhiking? Was he desperate for some rest? In the split-second I looked at him, he didn’t look desperate. I think he might have even had his Ipod buds in to drown out the noise from the traffic that was whirling by him at breakneck speed. Did this man who decided a nap on the highway was worth the risk of dying simply lack common sense? Or had he simply stopped caring about which side of the thin line between life and death he stayed on?

Is that what this generation has come to? Have we become so apathetic that we ignore our common sense and risk everything? Have we become incapable of making good choices? Or are we simply tired of feeling like all our choices have been made for us? Are we merely an exhausted symbol for the economic crash and all the terrible effects it will wreak on the working class for the next decade? When I graduated from my first university degree, it was 2008. Things were good, especially in Alberta. It was still easy to find a job and people were flocking to our province because we had a lot to offer young, hardworking folk looking to make some cash or build a career. I left Alberta for dreamy east coast Halifax. During my one-year journalism program, the economy plummeted, taking every twenty-something’s dreams with it.

My generation grew up thinking that if we worked hard and got a decent education or learned a trade we could make a nice life for ourselves and be successful. That’s what we were told. So we went to school, learned our asses off and did our best. That was supposed to get us far in life, we were told.

We soon learned it was all just a bunch of crap, or rather, that the old life rules would no longer apply to our new, recession/post-recession lives. At my convocation the speaker actually apologized to my class, telling us that her generation had made a huge mess and that sadly it was up to us to fix it, though she didn’t know how we would manage to do that. That apology, that speech, has stuck with me for almost 14 months. It’s hard not to be mad about it sometimes. We were told we could do great things. All we ever wanted was to be successful at something. But the world changed the rules on us when we were just getting started, making it nearly impossible, or at least financially difficult, to be as great as we had hoped to be. We’re stuck in a world where most of my university-educated peers are happy to get minimum wage jobs or unpaid internships. We are trapped in an economic climate that won’t allow many of us to move out of our parents’ basements until we are married or outlive them. We are stuck lying on the thin strip between success and failure, happiness and defeat, life and death on the hypothetical highway that is our disappointing situation. Most of us have no idea how we got here. And none of us know how or when we will get to exit.