Who Says

Hello, my name is Katie, and I'm a 24 year old who lives with her parents.

Don't judge me, because odds are, you are too.

A survey of Collegegrads.com found that 80% of college graduates moved home with their parents in 2008 and not just as a brief transition. College graduates are moving home and staying there, and the statistics keep rising. In 2006, CBSNews reported that 50% returned to their parents, and 44% stayed there for over a year. The numbers grew every year seemingly in a direct inverse of the economy's plummet. Perhaps one of the primary reasons is that c 70% of graduates didn't have a job lined up after college.

In hordes, we've moved home, or in my case stayed home, glued ourselves to our laptops and kept Careerbuilder and Monster open for months on end while we sent out our resumes. We began with lofty ideals and standards of what we wanted in a job; government agencies and contractors, think tanks and NGOs were all I was willing to consider. You see, I had a relevant degree in International Relations in a world at war. I was a Dean's list student. I studied at Oxford.

And then the truth came out.

So did everyone else, especially in the Washington, DC area.

Even more startling was the realization that as the economy fell farther and farther into a recession, a B.A. barely meant anything, even for entry level positions, because there were people with years of experience who were unemployed. They were willing to do anything and take low wages because it was better than the alternative of not feeding their families.
For eleven months I played this unemployment game from the safety of my family's home. I was securely tucked in my room, with my laptop, my new Explorer parked in the driveway, and my mom feeding me home cooked meals every night. I had odds and ends jobs, house sitting, temping at law firms and the circus (don't ask), babysitting, all little ways to pay the bills. But the bottom line was while it was an emotional blow to my ego, I wasn't suffering. If anything I was quite comfortable, staying up and sleeping late, lounging around in my pjs, having a wide open schedule to write and take photos all the live long day if I so chose. I'll admit, there are a lot of days when I wish I could go back to that.

Now I'm employed, in the job I initially scoffed at, and I'm still living at home. For my position and this economy I'm making good enough money. Some would argue that right now making money at all makes it good. I have a number of friends who make roughly the same as I do. They have their own tiny apartments and they live by a tight budget in order to make rent each month. For all intents and purposes it's what you're supposed to do in your twenties, embrace the lean years and put your nose down so you can make something of yourself.

Though survey says this generation's not necessarily doing that. We're moving back home and getting comfortable, and letting Mom and Dad take the sting out of the transition. Maybe we pay rent or pull our weight, perhaps we're so busy we rarely see them, and more often than not we're probably complaining about the dent it puts in our social lives. Still we stay. We let mom feed us dinner as we rush in the door from work, grab our school bags, and rush back off to class. We let our dad field the call as the insurance company calls and demands we take our car to B-F Egypt in the exact opposite direction of work, squarely in the middle of the day. We let our aunts and uncles ferret around our resume to shamelessly hand to their heavily connected friends. In short, we're letting others help, and not facing this brave new world alone. We're walking forward into uncertainty with the comforting embrace of the familiar wrapped tightly around us.

And by we, perhaps I only mean me.

I've resoundingly fallen back on the safety net of my family to make life a little easier. The alternative is daunting. Moving out and living by myself and making ends meat is a part of growing up. It's a right of passage and in an age when we don't move comfortably from our parent's arms to our spouse's embrace anymore, it's an important one that teaches us independence. Tradition dictates that through the struggle and the loneliness it helps us find ourselves.

Or maybe, just maybe, this generation is trying something new. Call us coddled or spoiled. Hell, call me that if you like. But while we're living at home and working, reveling in the creature comforts of our parents hard earned lives, we're saving. Perhaps as in my case we're putting it toward financing school without any more loans. Maybe we're putting it toward skipping the sketchy first apartment in the bad end of town.We might even be careless and reckless, blowing our money on high heels and Grey Goose.

But if there's one thing I've learned is that we'll figure it out. We'll make our way in our own way regardless of societal expectations.

We can be generation LZY.