I am sitting in a car with two other people. I am in the backseat. There is a debate about the future of our employment. The divide falls between whether it is better to take the paycheck and work for “The Man” or to strike out on your own.
The front seat is divided on whether or not following your heart in the name of commerce is possible in 2016. But the two front seats agree the dream is to own and operate your own small business.
Owning a small business has always represented a crucial completion of a section of the American Dream — mastery.
I have attained skills in a certain area, and I want to share these skills with a community of my choosing. This technique doesn’t only improve a place but it can also save the world.
To understand my generation, there must be a dialogue about the meeting point of profit and morality. Millennials are often cast as lazy, pretentious and unrealistic.
But I believe we are concentrating and putting all of our effort into finding the middle ground of satisfactory individual lives and making the world a better place.
It’s easy to see the motivation for starting a small business that a fledgling tattoo artist or an organic farmer would have. It’s easy to see someone who wants to start a day care in a community without sufficient childcare.
It’s about being a cog in a beautiful machine, but also about being in charge of the way your cog turns. To own and operate a small business is to give back the best of you to everyone else.
The small business has been politicized as a beacon of American accomplishment. My peers and I have heard about the modern detriment of the small business — we think its “inevitable collapse” is second nature.
This is when we fight back. We fight back with food trucks. We fight back with bars. We fight back with music venues and places that sell cars. We believe in the idea of the individual and we believe in the free market.
It’s swimming upstream against the norm in a place you know with people you love.
I am in the backseat of a car, and there are two people arguing about what happiness is in this age. There are talks of salaries and the morality of Big Business. The voices are exhausted. They slowly fade out, weary at the idea of having to choose between good and gold.
As silence falls, I break the fourth wall. Did I mention I’ve been thinking of opening my own business?
mcjack@indiana.edu
@jackmcgrew
