If you're looking for someone to blame, yes, young adults are the safest demographic from righteous blame. On the other hand, if you're looking to make your way in the world and having a hard time, blame will not get you any closer to putting a meal in your belly. Well that is unless you want to be a talk-radio wacko, but even then I hear those guys have to fight like rabid dogs for low wages for decades with only distant hopes of any kind of middling success.

If you believe that the 18-34 demographic are still the biggest spenders, as has been conventional wisdom, perhaps they are to blame?

For example, how many 20-somethings stroll down to their local grocer and buy food produced by 50-somethings†, instead of sourcing their food from people their own age? It is difficult to complain about the lack of jobs when you are not willing to support your own peers.

† About forty percent of the farmers in the US are 55 years old or older: http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html

Your handle is oh so apropos, I have no idea what to make of this it's so off the wall.

The assertion that young people are "unwilling to support [their] own peers" is comically absurd. How does the demographic of existing farmers support this? What I can see is that young people don't really want to become farmers, or maybe it's just not a promising field to go into (no pun intended) what with factory farms driving the margins down. Consider the converse, young people spontaneously start demanding food from other young people. They go on a hunger strike until all food is sourced directly from young people. But farming isn't enough, they need everything to come from young people. Old people must be sacrificed so that the young can have a vibrant economy. Forget class warfare or racism, now we have institutionalize ageist segregation where there is an economy for young people and an economy for old people.

How is that a solution to anything, and what would cause people to rally behind such an abstract idea?

> How does the demographic of existing farmers support this?

The point was to just highlight that people don't even think about who they are buying from. The chances of buying from a 55 year old farmer at your grocery store is statistically greater than a 20 year old, making it difficult for 20-year olds to break into the industry.

> Old people must be sacrificed so that the young can have a vibrant economy.

It is not a binary issue. You do not have to stop supporting older people in order to also support the younger people. If you allocate, say, 25% (picked at random) of your food purchases to 20-year olds, you will allow them more room to establish themselves while still leaving room to support the older farmers as well.

It is not just about food. It just seemed like one example that everyone can relate to. It is about spreading the wealth around, instead of everyone buying from a single source. That is, of course, if you care about a vibrant economy for the youth. If you don't, buy from whomever you want.

I'm all for thinking about where your stuff is coming from, buying local, paying for sustainable practices, etc. Ensuring that young people are involved though? That's just weird and unactionable.

The fact remains that if you spend your money in places that flow to predominately older people, you can't really complain that there are no jobs for younger people. It is those explicit purchasing decisions that causes the wealth to not distribute more evenly.

You're right.

However, you can blame them for the entitlement almost all of them seem to feel. I say "them" even though I just recently turned 26 and for a long time did have that feeling of entitlement. At the risk of parroting the article, you can't go to college and expect anything, particularly in tech. You've got to be willing to make below-market, almost slave wages in a crappy entry level job or internship.

I changed careers a year and a half after I graduated with a Poli Sci degree in 2008. The first gig I could get was a 6-month internship for $2,000. It's taken me that and consulting quite a few web clients to get the point where I could accept my first entry-level professional (corporate) programming gig less than 4 months ago.

The entitlement was instilled in us by our parents. "If you don't go to college you'll never get a good job, you'll just flip burgers!", and our teachers (like the guy who stapled burger king applications to the tests of students who failed). It's instilled in us by the universities when they tell us they have an X% job placement rate post graduation.

Most universities don't prepare students for the real world, and when we graduate we feel very bitter and abandoned. It's not entitlement, we were raised to believe that going to college meant getting a job, and suddenly when the economy goes bad everyone starts acting high and mighty; "Well, you shouldn't expect a job just because you went to college."

I'm sure you can understand the frustration as you've experienced it yourself. Don't blame the young adults who just graduated, blame the people who told us we would only get a job by going to college who now criticize us for not being able to get jobs after we graduate.

I just don't like the "quit whining" part of the title. Times are hard, you can at least agree with the 20-somethings that far. The article should be presented as methods of coping with a bad situation instead of pretending to be a solution.

Edit: massive edit

The problem is that if you write an article about coping, people will use that as an excuse and not put in the effort needed to actually get a job, because of the "bad economy".

Yes, the economy is bad. You just need to think of ways to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other people trying to get the same position. Will it definitely work? no, but it will give you a better chance at finding a job.

I don't mind that people are so un-creative and entitled. It just gives me a leg-up on the competition.

I can't agree. Your advice seems to be that everyone should differentiate. But how would that help improve unemployment? No matter how "creative" everyone gets, many of them will still be unemployed.

Because there are so many people unemployed, a potential employee really needs to be at the top of their game to get a good job, but it also requires marketing yourself (to stand out among the thousand other resumes).

When I was looking for work, I would tailor my resume to the job. I might only send out 5 resumes/day, but my response rate was many times higher than the machine-gun approach.

If you really want to improve unemployment, make it easier for businesses to survive through something like tax incentives. The businesses are the ones hiring. Most people don't want to hear this. They would rather tax them to death (and then wonder why they are leaving the US or laying off half their staff).

> Times are hard, you can at least agree with the 20-somethings that far.

If times are hard, perhaps one should act as if they are. Whining is counter-productive. How many counter-productive things can you afford? Why does whining make that list?