At age 26, Angela Trilli doesn’t think she’s one of those so-called materialistic Millennials she has heard about – young people who are absorbed with themselves and their consumption.
She says she’s a saver, not a spender, but unlike many of her peers who didn’t have much to lose in this struggling economy, she says she lost $15,000 – about half of the savings she built up since childhood.
“It’s a very insecure world out there,” says Trilli, of Kendall Park, N.J., who works in marketing for a non-profit. “It was a little shocking to the system. You think things are going in a certain way, but you can’t expect that things are always going to be the same.”
The Millennial generation, or Gen Y, ranges from people in their 20s to those still in grade school. But what they all have in common is the knowledge that the recession has in some way shattered the world they thought they knew.
And, depending upon how long the downturn lasts, historians, economists and psychologists say it could shape Millennials’ values and attitudes in much the same way the Depression shaped the attitudes of those growing up in the 1930s.
“I call it the end of Disney World,” says Michael Bradley, an adolescent psychologist in suburban Philadelphia. But now, young people are reordering their values.
Continue Reading: “Recession Generation?”
Photo by USA TODAY.