We’re always being told that Gen Y is screwed.

In a feature that went wild, The Monthly called it the ‘Boomer Supremacy’. The Guardian have called it a ‘30-year long economic betrayal’ on youth. And Hack’s been known to call it a ‘war on young people’.

So is Generation Y staring down the barrel of a future that looks unprecedentedly bleak?

In her book Generation Less: How Australia is Cheating the Young, author and Labor party staffer Jennifer Rayner says we are - arguing that young people will be worse off than their parents, for the first time since the Great Depression.

“The gaps that have always existed between older and younger Australians, things like work, wealth and wellbeing are widening out quite significantly,” Jennifer told Hack.

“I’m not talking here about all the sort of ‘feelpinions’ out there that are about Gen Y being lazy, or baby boomers ripping us off, I’m talking about a clear-eyed look at the data and what’s actually going on.”

Underemployment is up

Jennifer says there’s a bunch of factors that are weighing young Australians down. The average house doesn’t cost three times the average salary anymore; and even though more of us are getting a university education, we’re also strapped with more debt.

“Back when my parents were entering the workforce and leaving school, less than one in thirty young people said they were underemployed [not getting enough work].”

“Today that number is up to about 1 in 6.”

There’s older people working for longer

Jennifer says younger workers are often getting stuck in "entry level" positions in the workforce - because older employees are working for longer in the top jobs.

She calls it the ‘Grey Ceiling’.

“There are a lot of people in the workforce who rose through the ranks, got to the top jobs, and now they’re staying on much longer than people have in previous generations.”

Beyond that, young workers are still feeling the effects of the Global Financial Crisis. Research from the University of Tasmania, released today, says while Australia was one of the countries least affected by the Global Financial Crisis, unemployment for our young people was similar to countries that copped the worst of the GFC. After the crisis, employment favoured older people and migrants, the researchers found.

Once again, the figures prove that finding a job is no simple task.

Chopping and changing jobs only works for the privileged

Jennifer’s book paints a pretty grim picture of what we’ve got to look forward to. But if young people have more career mobility, prefer the flexibility of renting (rather than carrying a mortgage) and are more educated than before, is it really that bad?

“I think that [chopping and changing jobs] in some ways is people making the best of a situation that’s been forced upon them.

“When you talk to people - particularly as they’re getting past their mid-twenties and heading into their thirties - people actually want a bit of stability. They want to know that they’ll have jobs that will allow them to buy a home and start a family and do those kind of things.

The idea that everyone chops and changes jobs because they want to, is perhaps a bit of a post-facto rationalisation of a situation that we can’t change at the moment.”

And Jennifer says that workplace ‘flexibility’ tends to work best for people who are already privileged in life.

“The people that sometimes say that all of this is ‘opportunity ‘are the people who have the best skills and advantages to take advantage of that. It’s people that have the privilege to make these things opportunities that go on about how great things are now.”

“When we talk about how things have got better, they’ve got better for people that they were already pretty good for. And there are a huge number of people being left behind.”

Why youth unemployment is worse now than during the GFC A majority of young graduates are concerned about their ability to crack the job market.

Instability trickles down to mental health

Struggling to find work and get into the housing market isn’t just a concern for your wallet, Jennifer says. She argues that the lack of stability in young people's lives could contribute to a rise in mental health problems like anxiety.

“There is something important being lost because of the lack of stability in our lives. And when you look at things like wellbeing, indicators of mental health and anxiety are also getting worse for younger Australians.”

“[In my book] I argue that a big part of that is the fact that things are so uncertain and so unstable in our lives throughout our twenties.”

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The spark has faded - 70’s feminism, environmentalism and idealism was limitless

On the Belvoir Theatre’s stage in Sydney, a play called The Great Fire acts out the kind of intergenerational woes that Jennifer's talking about.

Written by young playwright Kit Brookman, The Great Fire looks at middle Australia through the three generations of a family at Christmas. It puts intergenerational strains in the spotlight.

“Young people face a future that is poorer, sicker, less equal than that of their parents, for the first time in a very very long time,” Kit told Hack.

Kit says the play also looks at how our parents - particularly in the 70’s - were more idealistic than young people are today.

“[In the 70’s there was] new ways of feminism, of gay liberation, of environmentalism, you know, all of those things coalescing and cresting a bit like a wave, that absolutely swept over society at the time and changed a great deal of things. And there was a huge amount of idealism at that time.”

Director of The Great Fire, Eamon Flack, says the kind of idealism that fired up our parents has been lost.

“This theatre was made by baby boomers, they stole it back from developers, and they bought it amongst themselves. And it was the product of an idealism that my generation struggles to imagine.”

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It’s a crisis of imagination, and a looming climate ‘catastrophe’

Kit says his generation has lost that idealistic spark - partly driven by the burden of a potential climate ‘catastrophe’ happening in our lifetime.

“Our society is in a crisis of imagination really. We sort of seem to feel like a lot of big ideas have been exhausted.

“It seems to me that finding ways forward, or finding ways to stave off the looming climate catastrophe, finding ways to actually imagine things that could actually be done about that, feels very hard for people at the moment.”

“A lot of the time Generation Y is accused of being apathetic or lazy by older generations but I think there’s that kind of sense of almost powerlessness in the face of enormous problems.”

Do you think young people are worse off than their parents were? Let us know in the comments.