When I left Binghamton the headlines weren’t dominated by the imminent collapse of the American way of life. Everyone expected that we Bearcats would shuffle into an apartment in Brooklyn, get a job somewhere, and drink ourselves into comas three nights a week for a few years. That narrative may seem as distant now to you as my home in a machine gun and razor wired protected compound in Saudi Arabia seems to me. There would have been jobs waiting for me, some more fulfilling than others, but I packed my bags and left.

In 2006 I was milling around Showa Dori, a bar lined street in a small city in southern Japan, watching the Japanese national team get manhandled by everyone they played.

In 2010 I sat at an outdoor coffee shop here, sucking apple flavored shisha from a hookah, watching an American ball roll slowly into the back of Algeria’s net. I had a fever, but it wasn’t for the World Cup.

Between World Cups I got a master’s while living in Shanghai, and after feeling a little Asia’d out spent a less than drunken year among the sandy beaches and brown mountains of Oman. The longer I stay abroad though, the worse my prospects of finding gainful employment in my New York hometown have become.

Any meaningful sense of the word ‘generation gap’ would put the freshmen of 2010 and the freshmen of 2001 in completely different generations. I may have been mostly apathetic and confused, you’re kind of screwed. When I graduated, unpaid internships were a right of passage for undergraduates between semesters; they have become a way of life for kids in their mid- to late-20s still living in their parents’ basement. We all face the prospect of living less affluently than our parents, even our grandparents. Fraternities can no longer rely on their secret handshake to get them into Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs. Philosophy majors might as well just go out and buy a megaphone and stand on the curb with a painted cardboard sign and start shouting about the end of days, because tenure track positions in the humanities are about as common as polio.

This is actually a good thing, though. There’s no denying that our universities have been growing more corporatized by the minute. The K-12 system has largely become a series of state wide tests teachers are made to pander to. White collarization has made a vast swath of career choices a mindless, bureaucratic milieu (Office Space anyone?). Undergrad degrees are losing their values while becoming more expensive. So what are recent grads to do?

Get out of dodge. Get out of the country, go East or West or South.

In the end all directions come back home anyway. You can get a certificate to teach English online in about a month. If you decide to become a certified teacher, you can teach the American curriculum in an international school in almost any major city on the planet. You’ll probably get paid better and have a much higher standard of living there too. The foreign service is another great option, too: you get to suck off that fine government tit while you’re bouncing around.

In the end,though, getting out of the country is important for its own sake. We’re saturated, not only with unemployed people, but with ignorance. The world isn’t filled with terrorists and drug cartels, it’s filled with people that have vastly different ideas about how to live than we do. We hear all the time that our democratic duty is to stay informed, but you could watch an hour or 100 hours of news a week and still be completely in the dark.

Now’s the chance for an entire generation to take advantage of the fact that English is the most spoken language in the world. Explore. Not just for exotic sexual escapades, though they’ll be there, but to start moving Americans from the pursuit of comfort, to the pursuit of experience. When you travel, you will replace statistics with context and stereotypes with exceptions. For America to truly build immunity to ignorance and propaganda, to become confident again, we need our citizens to go out beyond the veil of what their told, and what better time to go than when what you’re being told is that you’ll never work in this town anyway.