Welcome to the Real World; It Stinks

A meeting with a childhood friend of his twentysomething son—an Ivy League grad making $250 a week as an intern with a street fair—got Joe Queenan thinking. His inescapable conclusion: the millennials are screwed. "With the obvious exception of youngsters born during the Great Depression," Queenan writes for the Wall Street Journal, "no generation in American history faces more daunting obstacles."

People born from 1980 to 2000 are utterly unprepared for the disastrous economy, 17% unemployment in the 20-to-24-year-old cohort, and the demographic burden that awaits them. "Who's going to support Baby Boomers as they suck the Social Security system dry while wheezing around Tuscany? Gen Y," writes Queenan. "Reality is a mean trick that grown-ups play on the young. You really have no idea how awful this is going to be."