Type ‘jilted generation’ into Google and it turns up a variety of results, largely relating to media coverage applying this title to those born in the eighties. The BBC refers to a generation ‘poorer than their parents’. The Telegraph laments over how they’ll never afford their own home. A Guardian article comments on how the jilted generation got ‘a raw deal’. Is all of this true?

 

Born in 1985, I am supposedly one of these misfortunate. A hapless victim of the modern recession, I have no career - despite being educated to postgraduate level. I work two jobs and spend most of my spare time writing. I currently live with my parents so that I can afford to save for a car (I can’t get finance because my job is on a temporary contract). My two degrees hang redundantly in my parent’s living room, waiting to be prised from their frames and produced to an employer who cares about them. I stubbornly refuse to be sucked into a corporate graduate scheme that doesn’t care for my background in the arts, and my dreams of a creative career persist, waning as the years go by.

 

Part of me wants to blame society; the recession, the pricey cost of higher education which currently has little remuneration, and how whatever creative jobs are out there expect you to work in an unpaid internship or voluntary role. Should I be content with attributing fault to the global economy and national recession? Should we, the ‘jilted generation’, wallow in the cost of living and succumb to the fact that we’ll never own our own homes or even earn enough to pay off our student loans? Did we really work so hard for nothing?

 

For us, mortgages are either achieved through hard saving and risk-taking, and that’s only for the fortunate ‘jilted’ with permanent jobs. Starting families is delayed, and the career we once thought possible dissipated as soon as we walked out of our graduation ceremony and actually started looking for a job. Our wealth has been stolen; paying for the retirement of the old and shifted to the generations behind us. So, what do we do with ourselves? Protest, like we did with the Iraq war? Object, as we did with top-up fees? Give up entirely seeing as this seems to get us nowhere?

 

The answer is, neither. What people need to realise with the jilted generation is that we’re not acting jilted at all. We’re taking our degrees and PhD’s and becoming baristas and office workers. We’re sucking it up and moving back in with our gracious parents despite being close to thirty. We’re not giving up, or relenting or wallowing. We’re doing what we always did; our best.

 

Our great-grandparents lived through two world wars. That’s decades of debt, destruction and rationing (not to mention loss of life). Since then, education has become a widely held commodity. Women’s rights have come a long way. Budget airlines are helping even those on modest incomes experience the world outside their own country. Technology has advanced incredibly. People of every creed and religion live side by side in an increasingly multi-cultural society. If you ask me, the UK has never been richer.

 

With every generation comes re-alignment, and with this comes much necessary acceptance. The global economy crisis produced another need for re-alignment. We need to accept that it’s time to make different choices, and make the best of whatever choices we have. Fury, blame and bitterness will get us nowhere. Yes, we got a raw deal. It’s the fault of the government. We might be renting for the rest of our lives. We may forever be underemployed.  So, we allow the baby-boomers to shower us with sympathy from the safety of their retirement funds. We leave the government to fret over our debt despite their inaction. We’ll even permit the generations behind us to send their condolences.

 

But let’s not allow them to label us with such an eliminatory term.  Let’s not refer to ourselves as the jilted generation. What happened to us is not our fault; there’s little we can do about it. The lack of prospects, money, and sheer unfairness of at all may eventually be forgotten by the future privileged. Do we want them to know us as ‘the jilted generation’? I don’t. We’ve worked too hard for such a disparaging label. So let’s continue to be the generation that persevered, and that’s how we’ll be remembered.