Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30? If you don't get it when you're 30, then you're not going to get it at 35 or 40. Age

Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30? If you don't get it when you're 30, then you're not going to get it at 35 or 40. Age without progress decreases opportunities. He's 29 and has shown no progress, and you seem to be surprised that he's expecting progress. We can mock his douchey goals, and perhaps we should, but the fact is that a whole generation was bred for executive positions that are no longer available (and shouldn't exist). What he probably needed to do, in order to pursue his douchey vision of a cushy cigar-smoking executive job, was get an investment banking or management consulting job. Those aren't my favorite industries, but a few years of time in them will open the kinds of doors he wants. The BMW and the fatal heart attack at 45 could be his, if he had made the right moves years ago. However, it's too late for him now. With an empty resume, he can't compete against 22-year-old college grads. That's just how it works. In the Mad Men era, a college degree got you a junior executive job. You became an "account executive" or a marketing person. Sure, you were still someone's bitch-- being at the bottom of the executive-track totem pole-- and you probably had no direct reports, but you were on a track toward something better. Those junior executive jobs are gone. Why? After 3 decades of downsizing, the corporate "fat" has been trimmed. That's probably a good thing, but what it means is that all those junior-executive jobs have been filled by people who used to be senior executives. Companies don't have the slots to take on 22-year-old proteges anymore. Again, it's probably good for the world that we're not generating all these supernumerary "executives" who do nothing but annoy the people doing the actual work, but it's not good for people who were bred (through parental expectations and undergraduate education and, in some cases, graduate degrees) for these positions. Undergraduate college is the liberal arts. (Sciences are liberal arts.) "Liberal" in this sense has nothing to do with political ideology, but rather means "for the free". The contrast is servile arts. It makes me angry when self-righteous Baby Boomers complain about "entitled" Millennials. On Sunday, they write on the Internet about these supposedly entitled schmucks who won't settle for anything less than a career-track job. Then on Monday, they turn down the 27-year-old barista who did take one of those crummy jobs and now has "no relevant work experience". They made and supported this world and they can fucking eat it. The real problem is that the whole concept of "management", in the traditional sense, has become pointless. College breeds you to be one of three things: (A) an academic or researcher, (B) a highly-skilled professional with high autonomy, or (C) a manager. Class A is dying out. Class B is losing autonomy, as the professions are eroded and traditionally intellectual fields (e.g. software engineering) are commoditized in an idiotic lurch toward a manage-or-be-managed corporate world, and class C is becoming obsolete enough that these junior executive jobs don't make sense and have been cut.