Lost generation?

Katharine McIntosh describes her experience of unemployment

by Katharine McIntosh 18th February 2010

Today I have the doubtful honour of becoming an official government concern. This went unmarked by the government, or indeed by any outward sign at all, save for a note scribbled a month or so ago in my diary, reminding me (as if I needed a reminder): ‘six months unemployed today’.  Now that I have been unemployed for six months, and being in the ‘sixteen to twenty-four’ age group, I have become eligible for government-backed job and training schemes, intended to prevent me from becoming part of a ‘Lost Generation’ of young people with impaired life chances: there were over a million unemployed eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds according to recent figures. According to Wikipedia (source of all knowledge to said generation) this term was ‘originally used for those who died in the war… many felt that “the flower of youth” and the “best of the nation” had been destroyed’.  Mine is the generation of student top-up fees, meaning that graduates can expect to amass debts of at least fifteen thousand pounds before starting their careers. The recession has operated to spur young people to incur further debt and, critically, to inhibit the chances that we will gain employment enabling us to eventually pay it all off. But the clinching factor securing this new use of the term ‘lost generation’ is our lack of control over our situation in a system created for us: the financial system that provided the Baby Boomers and Generation X with free education, sound pensions, early retirement, even second homes, has stymied its inheritors, in providing us with manifold aspirations and expectations without means of attainment.