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In the fall of 2010, I had coffee with an elfin-featured, blond-haired twenty-seven-year-old law school graduate, whom I’ll call
Mark Nickelsen, in Washington, DC. (He asked not to be named because he doesn’t want to rock the boat with his current employer.) The only son of an auto-parts machinist and a secretary, Nickelsen grew up in Toledo, Ohio, went to public school, and put himself through the University of Cincinnati, working two jobs and graduating debt-free. But when he was accepted into law school in Boston in 2006, he didn’t hesitate to take on a student loan, which would eventually total $145,000. “I figured it was ‘good debt,’ ” he said.

In the fall of 2008, entering his final year in law school, he lined up a job with the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, but because of state budget cuts, the offer was rescinded early in 2009, after private law firms had largely finished what little hiring they did that year. He applied for various federal legal internships, and got to the final round of interviews for one of them, but then that position was cut, too. To try to maximize his possibilities, he sat for both the Massachusetts and New York bar exams shortly after graduation in the spring of 2009, passing both. But he couldn’t find legal work in either state.

In August, Nickelsen sold most of his furniture and moved to Washington, figuring the legal economy there might be better insulated. He made the rounds of the city’s law firms, federal agencies, university law libraries, and professional temp firms—13 of them—showing up in person, in a suit, to deliver his résumé. He also sought out informational interviews through networking contacts. For three months, he spent much of each day in a corner of Rosslyn, in Northern Virginia, where he could access free Wi-Fi, scanning job listings and setting up networking appointments. “I tried to treat it as a job—just go every day and focus,” he said.

In October, with his savings depleted and his credit cards nearly maxed out, Nickelsen took a job in the café at Barnes & Noble for about $8 an hour, a little less than he’d made at Arby’s in high school. Cass Sunstein, a famous legal scholar he admires, ordered a coffee from him once, but Nickelsen didn’t introduce himself. “There was a line, and besides …” he said, trailing off with a shrug and a pale
smile. His parents took out a home-equity loan to allow him to consolidate his credit-card and bar-preparation-course debt at a lower interest rate. And they offered to give him his room back if he wanted to return to Toledo. “It just got very dark for me for a time,” he said.

In January 2010, things brightened somewhat: Nickelsen got a two-year job at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through a federal fellowship program. “It’s professional work,” he said, a reassurance that may have been meant more for himself than for me. He gathers information from other arms of the government, updates spreadsheets, takes notes in meetings. The job doesn’t make use of his law degree, and he doesn’t advertise that degree around the office, he said. Whenever a colleague finds out, “they’re like, ‘You went to law school? What are you doing here?’ ”

Nickelsen told me he realizes that other people have taken much larger hits than he has. And he’s grateful for his salary. Still, it’s nowhere near what lawyers typically make, and even with the night job he’s taken with Kaplan Test Preparation, he doesn’t have much left over after making his monthly debt payments. What gnaws at him most is the sense that the things he used to take for granted about his future—not riches, necessarily, but merely the basic pleasures and privileges of a fully adult life—keep receding from him, rather than drawing closer.

“My dad worked in a factory … and when he was twenty-two, he had a house and two children,” Nickelsen said. “Maybe I bought into it, but you’re sort of fed the line that you can’t have a normal life unless you get an education. And so you take on this tremendous debt. And so I’m just starting out now at the age of twenty-seven, with prescription glasses and all these payments coming due. And I’m living in an efficiency with a roommate. I had a nicer apartment in law school; I never would have thought that.” A house? A family? “There’s no
car
in the near future for me. Everything’s been pushed back so far, I can’t even see it. How did this happen?”

• • •

T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
many Millennials and their parents has become complicated since the recession began. In one recent poll, 39 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they regularly received money from their parents to help them pay ordinary expenses, and many have moved back home. But these arrangements have worn on both parties. Recent research by the Purdue University psychologist Karen Fingerman indicates that while modern parents do provide more financial support to grown children who are struggling, by and large they prefer to offer their continued guidance and companionship to those who are already succeeding, perhaps because time spent with successful children flatters the parents more.

A May 2010 “Shouts & Murmurs” column in
The New Yorker
captures the ambivalence felt by many “helicopter parents” as their children have returned to the nest. Titled “Your New College Graduate: A Parents’ Guide,” it begins, “Congratulations! It took four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you’re finally the parents of a bona-fide college graduate. After the commencement ceremony is over, your child will be ready to move back into your house for a period of several years. It’s a very exciting time.” Around the country,
family and financial consultants have begun to offer their services to assist with this transition; one consultancy in Los Angeles has created a four-step program that seeks to settle in advance certain questions: What will the child do to earn money if he or she can’t find a full-time job? What domestic responsibilities will he or she undertake? What’s the target date for moving out?

Near the height of Japan’s economic boom in the late 1980s, a relatively small but growing number of teens and twentysomethings began to turn away from well-worn corporate career paths (or at least defer their entry onto them),
instead living at home with their parents and taking a string of temporary or part-time jobs. By and large, they valued self-expression and a flexible lifestyle, and many had artistic ambitions. A new term was coined to describe them—
freeters
—and while many criticized them as coddled and lazy, a certain glamour seemed attached to the term.

With the bust of the 1990s, the number of freeters grew rapidly. Aging freeters could not find permanent work; new ones, typically with relatively little education and no designs on an artist’s life, found traditional career paths closed off from the start. In 2002, perhaps 2.5 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four were freeters, and year by year their ranks were both increasing and aging. Since the bust,
freeters
has been joined in the Japanese vernacular by a host of other new terms to describe single young people living with parents:
NEETs
(not in education, employment, or training),
hikikomori
(men, mostly, who do not work or socialize, seldom leave their room, and are in some cases physically abusive to aging parents), and several more.

Japan’s economy has been troubled for decades, and its culture is in many respects sui generis; one should treat comparisons to the United States with caution. But the evolution of freeters’ portrayal in Japan is perhaps telling. By the mid-1990s, most traces of glamour and indulgence were gone. And by the late 1990s,
freeters
had been subsumed into a newly popular term—
parasaito shinguru
, or “parasite singles”—who were blamed for everything from low economic growth to low birthrates. Even as the phenomenon became less a matter of personal choice, the tensions and criticism resulting from it seemed to rise.

Whether the intensive and incessant involvement of today’s parents in the daily lives of their children has, in the end, helped the Millennial generation or held it back is a hard question, and one outside the scope of this book. At its worst, one can see in the relationship between helicopter parents and their teenage or twenty-something children a new form of codependency, destructive and debilitating. But it is difficult to criticize parents for offering whatever assistance they can in these times. And it is more difficult still to criticize young adults—particularly those with no degree and few imminent prospects—for taking it.

What often gets lost in the discussion of parents’ continuing assistance to their children today is that the children, by and large,
have always planned to return the favor. In a 2005 Pew poll, 63 percent of Millennials said they felt a responsibility to allow an elderly parent to live in their home one day if the parent wanted to do so. That’s a slightly lower percentage than in Generation X, but much higher than in the generations before that. (Only 55 percent of Boomers and 38 percent of the Silent Generation felt the same way.) By a variety of measures, the bond between this generation of young adults and their parents is stronger than those between past generations of parents and children, and so is the sense of mutual obligation.

But obligations of nearly every sort—current and future—are growing harder for young adults to meet, as high expectations collide with limited means. According to one recent poll, just 16 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds were saving money, and about two-thirds were in debt. In 2009, according to Pew Research,
12 percent of adults younger than thirty-five said they’d acquired a roommate, 15 percent had delayed marriage, and 14 percent had put off having a child. Surely all those numbers are higher now.

In nearly every way, the Great Recession has delayed the ability of young adults to reach the milestones that society has always associated with full adulthood, and to assume the responsibilities that many of them want to accept. With each passing year of economic weakness, more and more of them find themselves swimming in a seemingly endless adolescence, whose taste has long since grown brackish, and from which they cannot fully emerge.

A
S ECONOMIC MALAISE
lingers on, the ideas and ideals of twentysomethings—about politics, society, the nature of life—are slowly changing.
Millennials entered the Great Recession as the most politically liberal generation in many decades, and as the most socially liberal ever. And between 2008 and 2010, the number who called themselves liberal held steady. Yet cynicism about government’s efficacy is growing. By 2010, 37 percent of Millennials said that although
they might like to see the government play an active role in the economy in theory, they weren’t sure they could trust the government to do that effectively.
When asked whom they trusted more to solve the country’s economic problems—President Obama or Republicans in Congress—27 percent said “neither.” Confidence in elected officials fell between 2009 and 2010.

Economic troubles are sanding away the generation’s openness and confidence as well. According to one 2010 survey, just 28 percent of adults younger than thirty believed that most people could be trusted, a lower figure than in prior years. And nearly one in three said they believed their financial well-being primarily depended not on their own actions but on events outside their control. Forty-two percent, a plurality, believed globalization had decreased the opportunities available to them.

The changes now taking place in Millennials’ political ideals and social attitudes will shape American politics and culture for decades.
A recent paper by the economists Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo shows that previous cadres of young adults who endured a recession emerged with different beliefs than they’d held before—and that those new beliefs then stayed with them for the rest of their lives. They became more concerned about inequality, more cognizant of the role luck plays in life, and more likely to support government redistribution of wealth, but also less confident in the efficacy of government institutions—changes, for the most part, that can be seen happening again today.

The optimism of the Millennial generation has not been completely dispelled. A Pew survey early in 2010 found that even among those who were struggling financially, 89 percent were confident that they’d have “enough” income in the future, a characterization that was basically unchanged from 2006. Fewer Millennials were dissatisfied with the country’s direction than were other adults. And overall, Millennials were as happy with their lives as other generations, or happier.

This period has not been without silver linings for some young
adults. Due to poor job prospects,
college attendance has risen since 2007; as a result, some people who would not have gotten a college degree now will; whatever the economic climate today, they’ll almost certainly find better long-term prospects than they would have otherwise. Houses are cheaper throughout the country, allowing young adults who have good, secure jobs to buy sooner if they wish to do so. For some twenty- and thirtysomethings on the fast track, aggressive workplace restructuring has meant bigger responsibilities more quickly. And to the extent that young adults embrace thrift the way Depression-era twentysomethings did—still an open question for the generation as a whole—they will leave themselves less vulnerable to shocks that happen later in their lives.

Many factors throughout a lifetime affect generational character. No one can know what technological and scientific breakthroughs await us in the coming years, but it’s hard to believe that the nation’s material standards in 2030 and 2050 won’t be far higher than they are now. Nonetheless, for young adults, perhaps more than anyone else, the key question is: How much longer? How much longer will we remain mired in a weak economy with bad jobs or no jobs for people just beginning their careers? The Great Recession has indelibly changed the lives of many twentysomethings already. The longer this generation marinates in it, the more widely those changes will spread and the deeper they will be. Over the past year, as I’ve talked with young adults around the country, I’ve often had the sense of lives in abeyance—particularly among the jobless. Many hopes and many futures can still be realized—or at least nearly so—if the job market soon rebounds. But as the months and years tick by, more of those hopes and futures will become irretrievable. The urgency of recovery is highest for the young.