There we were, four glamorous young people, talking about things that glamorous young people talk about. By and by, our conversation turned to the recession, musing over the soul-crushing impact that mostly older people had told us the crisis would soon be having on our lives.
“It seems I’m going to have to hold on to this job for a while,” said one, brushing the lint off his suit jacket. “Which is a shame because it’s such a bore.”
“I know,” I replied, sipping on my martini. “It’s all rather dreadful.”
Yes, there we were, four glamorous, deluded young people, each on the brink of popping our recession cherry, wringing our hands over thirty cocktails. There could be no clearer image of our generation’s misplaced sense of privilege or our wrongheaded sense of economic invincibility.
Wrongheaded, perhaps, but hardly surprising. This is, after all, our first recession, a thing most of us have no handle on in theory, let alone in practice. For my part, I was five years old during the last recession, a fact I like to bring up less to sound young than to make whoever I’m telling feel old. Australia was entering a period of negative growth and I was entering primary school.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the markets. Back then, an economic crisis meant an older kid had convinced me to give him my golden coins in return for his more impressive, twelve-sided silver ones, rendering me unable to afford lunch.
The first I heard of “the recession we had to have” was not from Paul Keating but from Keating!, ten years of positive growth after the fact.
Some generational experts have welcomed the downturn for precisely this reason, excited by the manner in which it will rid my generation of our naivety and ignorance. It will, they say, smash our rose-tinted glasses and force us to grow up.
Waving their fists at us from their porches at the think tank or their semi-regular column in the paper, these experts are looking forward to Generation Y-ers getting their comeuppance.
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It is true that we have high expectations and may well need to modify them. Studies here and abroad have shown that we expect higher pay and more personal time than previous generations entering the workforce, want to be promoted sooner, and have no qualms about quitting the moment we find we aren’t satisfied.
We are disloyal and insatiable, accustomed to instant gratification. We have been raised to put our wants and needs above those of all others and we have no idea about managing our money.
Sure, we know the difference between credit and debit cards in theory, but in practice it’s another story. Credit debt is our birthright. And we are likely to find, the generational experts claim, that none of this will hold water in the new economic reality. For the first time in our lives we’re going to have to cut up our cards and settle for gainful employment over immediate job satisfaction. For the first time in our lives we’re going to have to show a little humility.
But there is another train of thought to be considered, peddled by those more sympathetic to our self-centred ways, which holds that it is precisely this generation’s lack of humility that will serve as our best defence against recession. Disloyalty to our employers means we aren’t afraid of lay-offs. Our job-hopping tendencies have resulted in us being adaptable to circumstance, even when there aren’t any jobs to hop to.
And while many of us may be swimming in credit debt, few have mortgages, fewer still have lost money through poor investments, and practically none of us is planning on cashing in our depleted superannuation any time soon. We may not be recession-proof but we’re hardly going to be the hardest hit. In fact, we may well be the best suited to economic fallout, just as cockroaches are to the nuclear variety.
Of course I may be kidding myself, engaging in precisely the kind of self-delusion that the generational experts claim I am demographically inclined to engage in. Much of what appears above—like much that gets written on the subject of generations generally—is valid only to the extent that Generation Y is comprised solely of university-educated, bourgeois bohemians living in the inner city, which it isn’t.
Which is why I’m not sure whether it’s smart, stupid or a little of both to believe that my generation will fare well in its first recession, the result of rational thinking or of irrational delusions that we are bulletproof.
The Australian, 23 March 2009
