COLUMN: Gen-X to face rough times

From Siona Listokin's, "Think Different," Fall '00 From Siona Listokin's, "Think Different," Fall '00Booming success is so twentieth century. Or so the pundits and experts would have us believe. It is not a matter of if the economy will slow down, they say, but when it will happen. In the meantime, our nation has grown quite used to unprecedented levels of prosperity. Conspicuous consumption, dot-com millionaires and just plain old extra cash proliferate in a way that makes the rocking '80s look like amateur night.From Siona Listokin's, "Think Different," Fall '00Booming success is so twentieth century. Or so the pundits and experts would have us believe. It is not a matter of if the economy will slow down, they say, but when it will happen. In the meantime, our nation has grown quite used to unprecedented levels of prosperity. Conspicuous consumption, dot-com millionaires and just plain old extra cash proliferate in a way that makes the rocking '80s look like amateur night. We are the children of this success. About the same time many of us learned to shop, our parents had more to hand over. An insanely great stock market has meant trips to Europe, oh-so-in clothes and a fully funded private college to a large chunk of the Penn student population. Unfortunately for us, the sure-to-come slowdown should be concurrent with our initial years in the workforce. At Penn, where the badge of privilege is often taken for granted, we are just realizing that our Christmas bonuses won't be so grand in the future. Many students will be experiencing financial independence for the first time when they graduate; no longer will ATMs be giving out free money. The concept of saving money will suddenly mean more because our salaries will be smaller than our parents', and the returns we have come to expect from the market will simply not be so high. This makes for a somewhat unhealthy relationship with our future. Somewhere along the line, we are supposed to morph from child to young adult to adult -- which I'm not ready yet to be. Much of that maturation takes place in college, and part of adulthood is monetary responsibility. So the timing of the inevitable correction -- I am hesitant and reluctant to call this prediction a crash -- is quite important to students with thoughts beyond graduation. In many respects, our generation is faced with a never-before-seen challenge: ensuring that our returns are as high as the too-good-to-be-true results of the era in which we grew up. Those damn baby boomers -- excuse me, Mom and Dad -- hardly pity us. I suppose they should not. The world gave us a larger portion of the pie than they ever had; the good life has been taken for granted. Part of our inheritance is a roadmap for maintaining such levels of success, from private day schools to the Princeton Review to an alumni network intent on keeping the money within our little circle. But most of us in college now must face the fact that we may have been born just a bit too late to cash in on this upswing for ourselves. That roadmap for success might become outdated in the next few years, requiring some ingenuity and deviations from a recently risk-free norm. This all may be horribly depressing. My reaction to every good indicator in the market is a silent, heart-felt plea: just hold on a little longer, until I get a job, until I get a bonus, until I send my children through college. But I also recognize that predetermined paths are magnificently boring. So while I certainly do not wish to see an end to this party, I am not scared of having to make my way in a world that is suddenly less able to support a generation of spoiled, high-earning, dull twentysomethings. Besides, predictability is so 20th century.