Opinion

SLICE OF HUMBLE Y

Meg Prossnitz, a 23-year-old who graduated from Vassar with a degree in French and English, is now on her fourth stint as an intern for a magazine, no paying job in sight.

Moving to New York last year into a shared apartment in Bedford Stuyvesant, she says, “I thought at least by now I’d be living on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg and, I don’t know, have my photo all over PatrickMcMullan.com,” referring to the Web site that catalogs the movements of Manhattan’s Beautiful People. Figuring that she’d have a job in fashion by now, Prossnitz says, “I thought I’d be saving up for a Louis Vuitton Speedy and get to buy my first designer shoes.”

Matt Skibiak, a 23-year-old who lives in Alphabet City, had similarly high expectations. After graduating from William and Mary last spring, the government major says, “I had this grandiose idea that I would immediately get snapped up for jobs at CNN and MSNBC and they’d be like, sure Matt, your desk is right this way!”

Reality’s a bitch, isn’t it? Wasn’t it only a year ago that we were reading about workplace heroics of Generation Y, those 76 million souls who were so talented SAT boot camps, Mandarin lessons, overprotective parents that no cubicle could bound them?

Consultants actually held seminars about how to keep younger workers engaged so they wouldn’t quit (!), how to cater to their unique needs, how they needed a lot of positive feedback and playtime. And during the boom times, many young people felt secure enough to brashly knock on their bosses’ doors and demand better assignments, better titles, better salaries. Gen Yers looked to their elders and imagined them as engaged mentors, there to help usher them to the corner office stat.

The stark new reality, of course, is that life is not “The Hills.” Many Gen Yers now have to settle for a job at odds with their quest for meaning, affirmation, and fun. A job that may frown on you spending half your day on Facebook. A job that pays please, remain calm minimum wage.

No surprise: Some experts think this is a good thing.

According to Jean Twenge, PhD., author of “Generation Me: Why Today’s Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled And More Miserable Than Ever Before,” this generation is bound to feel the economic downturn as a major jolt.

“Growing up, they heard over and over again that you can be whatever you want to be,” she says. “Compound that with the reality TV culture, the notion that everyone can be famous, everyone on TV has an exciting job as a fashion stylist or a video game designer with very little drudge work, and you have millions of twenty-somethings who are understandably disappointed.”

So what do they do now? “The world also needs teachers, social workers, plumbers, administrators,” Twenge says. “Young people who grew up thinking they’d be a star are now reassessing their value systems.”

The fact that many of this generation’s boomer parents are suffering financially as well could be a positive thing for the youngsters’ sense of self, Twenge adds. “The cutting of the apron strings is in some ways a good development. If a parent is looking at their retirement and saying, ‘I can’t prop up my child’s lifestyle forever,’ it’s a lesson. To have to stand on your own two feet is a good thing.”

Bruce Tulgan, a management consultant and the author of “Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y,” says Gen Y parents spent all of their resources, “trying to shape their kids as a new race of Super Humans. If, as a kid, they got a trophy just for showing up at the competition, it’s going to be a difficult adjustment when there are 200 applicants for that good job.”

This time around, he says, the lesson is that “there will be winners and losers.”

Youngsters are finding that all of their resume-building, all of their glittering ambitions, may still not put them at the front of the pack a humbling but ultimately realistic notion. As a result, aspiring fashionista Meg Prossnitz has taken a more pragmatic approach to life. Instead of lusting over expensive bags, she is now thinking of joining Teach for America, taking her LSATs, or moving to Portland, Oregon, where, “obviously I’d have to give up on the idea of working for a big magazine.” She may even apply for food stamps.

Matt Skibiak also has had to swallow his pride. Instead of landing that news desk job, he says, he got “stuck temping in back rooms at companies I didn’t care about, putting stickers on books or filing.”

Now, he says, with the economic crisis deepening, even those positions seem to have dried up and he’s applied for part-time gigs at Blockbuster and Whole Foods.

But both young people say they see a silver lining, and it’s one that older managers and employers may well benefit from. For Skibiak, the upside has been that he’s gained a new sense of responsibility. “My parents used to say I was spoiled about money, and now I’m living off of a strict budget of $80 a week, cooking at home, sipping a tonic water at bars instead of being a wreck.”

Prossnitz says graduating at this period in history has made her more politically engaged and more grounded. She’s gradually coming to understand that even talented people don’t just breeze into great opportunities. “I think I’ve re-set the dream a little, and realized it’s going to take a long time, and a lot of work to get that amazing job if I get it at all.”