The Great Recession Saved My Generation

The Great Recession Saved My Generation
Shaun Rein,

Until it came along we had nothing to bring us together and no big challenge to rise

I used to laugh at the aluminum foil my grandmother had squirreled away when we visited her at one of those golf retirement communities along the Florida coast. "Reusing aluminum foil!" I used to exclaim, rolling my eyes while slurping Coca-Cola and munching on McDonald's. My father would rebuke me: "Young man, Grandma invests those pennies she saves so you can go to college." I would giggle and scurry off to jack up the air conditioner and play Nintendo in the den, leaving behind my half-eaten Big Mac.

As I reached high school and started looking for my own identity, as my friends experimented with grunge, I began to envy my grandmother. Not because I understood her habits, why she was so intent on saving when it seemed so easy to make money, but because she seemed to share them with her whole generation, the Greatest Generation, united and defined through its shared experience of overcoming the Great Depression and beating Hitler. It was as if people in her generation had all attended the same schools and read the same books and listened to the same music. Whether in California, New York or Oklahoma, they had what looked like a shared identity and common values.

My father's generation had a similar bond, united through Vietnam, Woodstock, free love and bell-bottoms. They together developed an unshakeable belief that American capitalism had prevailed over the evils of communism and that real estate and stock prices would keep going up forever. Blips like Black Monday in 1987 were merely road bumps on the way to prosperity and the triumph of the American way.

My generation had nothing. Some people called us Generation X, or maybe it was Y. But those distinctions came mainly from overzealous commentators searching for something new to say. In reality I shared little with other Americans my age. AIDS scared the heck out of us together, but that fear eased as we witnessed the effect of medical cocktails on people like Magic Johnson. Sept. 11, 2001, gave the nation a rallying call, but that fell short after President Bush moved us into Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Even our protests seemed like posing, like feeble attempts to recreate the excitement of the '60s.

As I neared 30, I realized that many of my classmates were still living off their parents, or were crammed into little boxes with four or five roommates while slaving into the wee hours at firms like Goldman Sachs ( GS - news - people ) and Google ( GOOG - news - people ). They had all gone to the right prep schools and the right colleges and had gotten into the right analyst programs at the white shoe banks, but they still didn't seem to be living up to their own or their parents' expectations. The vast majority of them were laid off at least once in the era of the dot-com bust, and several more than once. But still we didn't have a shared identity. The dot-com blowup only affected the more affluent swaths of America, and the hedge fund boom of the 2000s certainly didn't touch America's heartland.

Now with the crisis of the last two years, we finally have our shared experience. Now we are shell-shocked. Our stock portfolios and savings accounts have been blasted, and, more important, we have seen our way of life threatened. No longer does rooming with friends look like a temporary situation until we reach managing director. Even when the markets improve, and they will improve, we will always be conscious that we can lose within months what we spent decades working to build.
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With all due respect to the author's respect of the Great Generation, losing portfolio value and rooming with far too many annoying people for far too long in less than attractive apartments does not....

We are scared that we're about to hit what should be our highest-earning years and be getting nowhere. We now question unfettered capitalism, and, more important, have lost faith in the American way. Our trust in our government continues to fall as we watch Republicans and Democrats alike waste time bickering away our future. We see Congressman Joe Barton from Texas apologize to British Petroleum ( BP - news - people ) when he should be apologizing to the American people for his pathetic performance as ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Many of us voted for Barack Obama not because we believed in his policies but because we felt we needed to believe in him as a person. Unfortunately, the person we thought we saw seemed to disappear. He seems impotent in the face of the BP disaster, and Cheney's Guantanamo is still there.

But of course all is not lost. My generation should stop being so fearful. We should stop prematurely predicting the demise of American democracy and capitalism and the rise of state-sponsored economies like that of China. It is true that China's economy is roaring, because of the sound economic policies of China's government, and it's true that the Pew Center has found that 86% of Chinese are satisfied with the government there. America will have to deal for the next century with China as a superpower. But China's rise does not foretell an inevitable and imminent collapse of the American way.

America still has a strong foundation built by the Greatest Generation. That generation bequeathed to us a well-functioning way of life of freedom of speech and information where anything is possible. Even though our government seems broken, there is no better form of government anywhere else. In reality, our form of government is not broken. Our political leaders are.

My generation finally has a shared identity like my grandmother's had. We, too, now have a unified experience forged in the hardship we have faced. I hope and expect that our grandchildren's generation will look at us not as a generation of fear and failure but as one that stayed optimistic and overcame difficulty.

Shaun Rein is the founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group, a strategic market intelligence firm. He writes for Forbes on leadership, marketing and China. Follow him on Twitter@shaunrein.