by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
Forget Crime and Punishment and Tess of the d'Ubervilles. Marcos Salazar's book The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide is destined to go down as the most depressing book in the history of literature.
Salazar makes the point a number of times that this book is not designed to help you build a better rÇsumÇ, find an apartment or manage your finances. Instead, it's about dealing with the emotional turmoil of one's post-college years. In other words, it's a self-help book.
Apparently, we need all the help we can get. One gets the sense from this book that after college, our identities wither and die. We have no freedom, no opportunity to make friends, no financial security and no sense of belonging anywhere. The world does not want graduates, it seems, and it provides no opportunity to settle down and start a normal life until you're stuck in a retirement home.
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But not to fear. Salazar has had access to all the work being done at the American Psychological Association, and has provided us with its findings. The author concludes from the findings that no matter how high your grades are, how intelligent you are, or how good you are at making friends, the world can still chew you to mush and spit you out. But as long as you develop "emotional intelligence" and focus enough energy on "self-actualization," you'll make it to 30 without jumping off a bridge.
In most of the cases Salazar references people who have skipped from job to job and city to city every six months since they left college. Because of this, most of them complain of feeling lost, disconnected and, obviously, poor.
But rather than give practical advice on maneuvering through this world to wealth, success or stability - that would be shallow, I guess - Salazar suggests techniques for improving emotional health in any situation. This might be very helpful to some, but I'd rather check out some of those books that give basic advice like building a rÇsumÇ and finding an apartment.
What most people want is a book that helps them escape their crappy situation in life. This book tells you how to deal with it instead. But rather than giving some cold, hard advice such as, "Quit whining and go to work," it gives pages and pages of disorganized quotes from psychologists about why we're so unhappy.
It's a sympathetic book that doesn't patronize its readers, whether they're out of college or, like most of us, getting ready to enter this miserable, hopeless world. It's probably helpful for people with serious emotional problems. It's extremely thorough, and even provides questions and exercises to help your emotional growth. But it reads like a textbook, and unless you take your emotions very, very seriously, you'll probably find this type of analysis more humorous than helpful.
As possibly the whiniest generation of human beings ever to infest the planet, what with our emo music, myspace.com blogs and the popularity of "The OC," it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we will splatter against the wall of actual work when it hits us. If you're one of the people who needs this book, or is able to take it seriously, then you probably just need to grow up.
The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide
Grade: C-
