I have a friend who is a detective with a large metropolitan police force. I visited him recently at his office, which is a shabby and broken-down corner of a shabby and broken-down precinct house. He was sitting in a half-broken chair, drinking coffee from a vending machine, looking puffy and tired.
On television, of course, police stations are glamorous and high-style locations, filled with attractive people bustling around in flattering lighting. Television police stations have shiny new computers, glass walls, flat screen displays buzzing with technology, and detectives in slim-cut jeans and expensive haircuts.
I made the mistake of making a joke. “Hey,” I said, “this police station doesn’t look right.”
Dozens of detectives looked up from their work, irritated.
“I’m kidding, fellas, really,” I said as I tried to lean casually against a 40-year-old refrigerator.
But the truth is that I half-expected the precinct house to look like its art-directed television version. It really didn’t look right to me, though clearly everyone there was busily going about the hard, unglamorous work of policing a large American city.
That’s the trouble with actual work: it never looks as fun or as glittering – or as hard – as television and movies make it out to be. People in real life mostly work in windowless cubicles, on desks ringed with coffee cup stains, and are dressed in unfashionable and too-snug clothes. On television, they work in sun-drenched, ultra-designed spaces in clothing no real-life working person could ever afford.
Is it any wonder, then, that among the young, working has fallen into disfavour?
For decades, a venerable American polling firm has asked young people the question that old people always ask them: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Over the years, the answers have varied along with the times. When they first started doing the survey, in the 1950s, the answers were homespun and charming: firefighters, policemen, nurses and doctors topped the list. As the culture became more interested in science and space, newly popular jobs such as astronaut, computer engineer and jet pilot started to appear. By the late 1960s, rock musician became a mainstay.
As long as they’ve been conducting the survey, you won’t be surprised to learn, movie star and professional athlete have earned regular spots in the top 10 most dreamed-about jobs.
The one thing all of these answers have in common is that they are all, more or less, actual jobs that require a demonstrable (and marketable) skill. Say what you like about rock musicians or professional footballers – if, that is, you can tell them apart – but to get to any level of professional success in those fields requires years of practice and self-discipline. Despite his shambling and dishevelled appearance, for instance, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards can really play the guitar. David Beckham may spend his days swanning around fashion runways and men’s facial moisturiser advertising shoots, but he really can do amazing things with his foot and a ball.
Lately, though, another career goal has emerged in the annual survey of young people. Astronaut and jet pilot have slipped down the ranks – a sign, perhaps, of the times – and computer engineer has been replaced by mobile phone app designer, but the job that has zoomed to the top of the list for the past few years is the non-specific category of “celebrity”.
What do you want to be when you grow up? I don’t really know, and I don’t really care, as long as I’m famous.
You don’t have to train to be a celebrity, or spend lonely hours on the football pitch, or practice fingering chords on the guitar. All you need, it seems, is a moment of notoriety – perhaps a leaked video of a private moment, maybe a series of injudicious tweets, or possibly an appearance on a reality television show that captures your emotional imbalance.
Becoming famous used to be something that happened after you achieved a level of skill at something. Jonas Salk was famous because he discovered the cure for polio. Muhammad Ali was famous because he was a world champion boxer. Justin Bieber, no matter how painful this is to admit, can actually sing. All of these things – yes, even when it comes to Justin Bieber – take a lot of committed and solitary work, often in places that look a lot more like a big city precinct house than an idealised television or movie set.
But if young people are fed a steady television and movie diet depicting beautiful, slender people with unlined faces sauntering through designer interiors, it’s only natural that they want to skip over the unpleasant stuff – the learning and the training and the skill-acquiring – and jump directly to the being-famous-for-no-real-reason part.
Unfortunately, no working person wants to come home after a hard and tedious day, click on the television and be forced watch fictional characters having a hard and tedious day. In the entertainment business – and in life – you can either be realistic or entertaining. It’s impossible to be both. Eventually, one hopes, young people will figure that out on their own.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl