Tess Malone reveals the real guardian angels of the global economy: hipsters.

The saviour of the economy won’t be wearing a suit and dress shoes, but flannel, skinny jeans, and Converse. The trainers are more than just an emblem of the hipster culture that sports them. If the Converse name is taken literally, they also represent how that generation interacts with the world; conversation. Our generation has been deemed the Millennials (or Generation Y or the Echo-Boomers), a group that has been self-promoting since primary school. We are the gold-star generation, getting recognition for all of our achievements even if it is only we who acknowledge it. Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are our lingua franca. We use them not only to comment on the latest micro-brew we’ve tried, but to micro-finance. We self-publish, drop out of university to become Mark Zuckerberg, and have turned small businesses into the new big business. Even Barack Obama agrees, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.” We are the entrepreneurs.

Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, Marxian/Hegelian/Lacanian cultural critic and, most surprisingly, stand-up comedian, has deemed the entrepreneurs as the symbolic class. This new class is made up of academics, PR people, managers and artists. They are emerging and unstable and just from their moniker, they will never have a place in the current economic structure. Therefore they must reinvent the economy.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, more like finally removing the proverbial training-wheels. Currently, our generation is busy getting degrees in unemployment under the guise of the liberal arts. There are more than enough lawyers and teachers (the supposedly burgeoning job markets), but soon enough they will have no one to sue or educate if our generation cannot afford to pay for them. The new de rigueur degree is in STEM programs, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. However, recent studies proclaim that 40 per cent of students not only drop out of STEM programs, but university all together. Whether unemployment happens immediately or four years after undergraduate starts doesn’t really matter. Changing how we view drop-outs does though.

The recent near-deification of Steve Jobs after his death has been promising for this. Almost as quickly as we learned of his passing, the YouTube video of his 2005 Stanford University commencement address circulated. In it, Jobs described how he dropped out of Reed College only to start “dropping in” on various classes like calligraphy, which he transposed to fonts later. In another fortuitous bout of failure, after Jobs was fired from Apple, he entered what he called one of his most creative periods, which resulted in the founding of Pixar and rehiring by Apple. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” Although Jobs was technically a failure, dropping out of university and losing his job, he used it to pursue what he loved and thus this article is being written on one of his devices. However, Jobs is an extreme example. Evidently, he already possessed the skills that entrepreneurs need: creativity, networking, and most importantly an understanding of the value of failure. Not all of the Millennials have these characteristics, but with the current economy they will have to make do with failure and learn the rest.

Entrepreneurship is not a degree yet, so how do we take advantage of it? First, as corny as it sounds, find your passion. This doesn’t mean find your degree, but find something you’d be inspired enough to do even if you weren’t paid for it, because chances are you’ll be proactive enough to find a way to make money off of it. Second, network. Last week was Global Entrepreneurship Week in the UK. Since 2004, the event has connected budding entrepreneurs with financiers and expanded to 104 countries. However, the principle of pursuing potential investors works all year round because they are always looking to discover the next big thing. Through these steps we could start to change the symbolic class into the real class.