In five years, I see myself either still working towards a degree in art conservation or working in the field at an entry-level position at a museum or private conservator. I see myself still renting an apartment either here in Boston or abroad, and I don’t realistically see any kids in my future at this point.

This vision is fairly different than it was five years ago, midway through my undergraduate career, and very different from my vision when I was much younger.

The reality of the situation is that Generation Stuck is getting a delayed and therefore stunted start.

We are putting our plans on hold until the economy improves and we are able to get stable and fulfilling jobs. But once these jobs become more available, it’s going to take many years to reverse the damage that debt and underemployment has done to our wallets and psyches.

Even as the economy turns around and things get better (hopefully), we are going to be feeling the effects of this downturn for many years into the future. At this point, I feel as though the damage has already been done for so many people. We have been forced to change our outlook on the future and our perception of what we are realistically capable of in the next five, ten, and fifteen years given the amount of debt we are in.

I am disappointed that I haven’t achieved more in the past five years. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I don’t blame the economy entirely. However, the time, effort, and hard work I’ve put in to getting to the place where I am now could have been spent in more artistically productive ways if I wasn’t fairly constantly worried about if my next paycheck would be enough to pay rent, bills, and loans.

My hope for the immediate future is just for a small amount of stability, which is something I see echoed in many of my peers. The stress of an uncertain future is weighing heavily on our generation and I think we are ready to get out from under this cloud and really get started on our lives.

For me, the economic downturn has mostly affected my romantic relationships.

In 2008, I moved to Baltimore with my boyfriend to start our lives. We both got good jobs in the arts and things were going really well. We were making friends, saving money, and living normal lives. A few months later, I was laid off. My boyfriend’s hours were cut and cut until he too was finally laid off.

I was unable to get unemployment because I hadn’t worked at my job long enough. My boyfriend, however, did receive assistance and we were able to scrape by while I found jobs waitressing and stuffing envelopes.

I began to resent him because he had the luxury of staying home and looking for a job he actually wanted, while I was taking anything I could get just to pay rent. I would come home from a long day at work and be jealous that he had been freelancing from home or playing video games all day.

It didn’t seem fair to me that he had only worked a few months longer than I had, and the government found him more worthy of it’s assistance.

After about a year, we moved to a smaller place to save money, but this turned out to be a terrible idea.

During the massive storm that President Obama deemed “Snowpocalypse”, our ceiling collapsed from the weight of the snow. Our landlord was off on a ski vacation and didn’t pick up the phone for three days. To make a long story short, we stopped paying rent until it was fixed, she sued us, we ran out of money defending ourselves and had to move back home.

This stress, on top of the secret resentment that I felt about our differences in working situations, eventually led to us going our separate ways.

I sometimes wonder if we had both been gainfully employed, would we have been able to better deal with the challenging situations that arose in Baltimore? Would we still have argued and bickered about tiny purchases or felt guilty about going out for a beer once a week?

If these underlying economic stresses weren’t there, would we still be together?

I know that every generation graduates from college poor and in debt and that everyone has to suffer a little bit in the beginning. However, I think that trying time and again to get a job you know you’re qualified for is incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. This kind of frustration and self-doubt can be a serious burden on a relationship.

Stability has become a much more important factor in whether I date someone than I ever thought it would.

Recently, I’ve been reading psychology magazines that say the key to happiness is to “lower your expectations.” I think I first came across this concept in the Dalai Lama’s “The Art of Happiness,” but it seems to be becoming a trend these days. It sounds like giving up, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.

I have interpreted it to mean that in order to achieve true contentment for myself, I should set more realistic goals.

I do feel that my goals were realistic early on, when I first graduated in 2008. However, I have continued to cling to the same expectations despite the overriding factors of economy, job loss, and looming debt. I am beginning to wonder if it would be better to set myself the goal of “happy” rather than “successful” or even “debt free.”

I bring this up because I feel that I’m about 60 percent responsible for my own unhappiness. Meaning, if I didn’t want so much more for myself, I would be content where I am — and therefore happy. The other 40 percent is the economic factors stopping me from reaching my goal. The question then becomes: Are you crumbling under pressure and giving up your dreams or just adjusting your outlook and reassessing what’s truly important in life?

It’s a hard issue to tackle because I can argue both sides. I started out expecting that I would go to college and have a career immediately afterwards. That hasn’t happened, in part because of my decisions and in part because of the job market for artists.

I wonder if there are many other ambitious people out there who are struggling with the same question. I also wonder if I would be even be considering this if the economy was stronger.

In a way, I’m thankful for the chance to deal with this now, instead of in ten years when I’ve missed a good chunk of my life because I was too busy with a career.

If nothing else, this recession is teaching a generation of people to pare down their lives to the absolute most important parts, and that may not be such a bad thing …

I consider myself pretty lucky to have graduated from college with only about $20,000 in student-loan debt.

On my current salary, I will be able to pay back this sum in about eight and a half years. It seems a little crazy to me to have this much debt from such a small section of my life. It seems even crazier that some people have triple and quadruple that, with similar job prospects to mine coming out of four years of school.

I definitely feel that the higher-education system is flawed. I hear stories on the news about people who sue their alma mater for the cost of tuition when they don’t get jobs right out of school.

While I don’t necessarily think this is the correct way of going about it, I do think we have to hold schools accountable for their spending.

As consumers, we contribute directly to the reputation of the schools we choose to attend. In the past, this was a symbiotic relationship where the school would make sure the student got the training and skills needed for post-graduate job placement, and the student in turn would donate to and speak highly of the school. This would cause more students to attend the school and the cycle would continue, the same as any reputable business.

Enrollment in U.S. colleges has increased since the economic downturn, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the same organization, tuition rates continue to increase, despite the falling rates of job placement after graduation. So, although more of us are attending college and paying more to do so, our chances of landing a job after graduation are only declining.

In my opinion, if we are going to spend such exorbitant amounts of money, there should be more of a guarantee at the end of four years. We should be choosing to attend colleges that are able to demonstrate that they teach the required skills for today’s workplace. Unfortunately, that data is not always made available to us and we are sometimes unable to make an informed decision.

My hope is that the educational system can be reformed to be more transparent, not only about job placement numbers, but also about where the thousands of dollars each students spends ultimately ends up going.

At 17, there’s no way you can know what you want to do with the rest of your life. There’s just no way. In most cases, you haven’t known the monotony of a full-time job, you haven’t lived alone or with roommates, you haven’t lived anywhere of your own choosing, chances are you have no lasting relationship to consider — there are just so many variables in life that you haven’t even encountered yet.

I often hear people say that the mind is not fully developed until the age of 23. How can you possibly be asked to do more than take a shot-in-the-dark guess about what you want to do for the next 40 years?

For me, taking at least one gap year would have made all the difference.

I enjoyed my time at Rhode Island School of Design, but if I had taken a year off to work, travel, and experience some of what life has to offer, I may have chosen a path based more upon what I wanted than what others expected of me. I may not have. But it makes sense to take some time to think about such a momentous, far-reaching decision.

Once I took the plunge and matriculated at RISD, I was glad that I did. It was difficult, rigorous, and awe-inspiring to see the work of my peers and teachers. I felt incredibly lucky to be part of that community, and at times I didn’t feel worthy. I feel that I was prepared for the real world in that I was given real life assignments. However, school doesn’t teach you the humility and patience to work with a difficult client. In school, you get a critique of your assignment and you can either take the advice of your peers or not.

After about two years out of school, I realized I didn’t want to be forced to make those changes to my work, I just wanted to make work for me. This sounds like a cop out, and it may well be, but I’ve now had the time and space to really consider it and I feel very strongly about it.

I often wonder if I had worked with a few clients right out of school, maybe I would have figured this out before my parents and I spent $40,000 a year for four years. So, if I don’t know what I want to do at 26, I really had no hope of knowing at 17. This is why I push the importance of a gap year.

Now that I have made this decision not to do freelance illustration as a full-time job, I feel my only choice to further my career is to get a graduate degree. I’ve decided on art conservation, but this time I’m going to try to work in the field before I attempt another degree. I sincerely hope that a graduate degree is still worth it’s salt in today’s economy, but I honestly have no idea.

I look forward to seeing the opinions of other members of Generation Stuck about the graduate degree question and would love to see a lively discussion on the subject.

When I accepted my current job at a big box retailer in February 2011, I didn’t think I would have to be there for more than a few months. I thought, “Okay, this will pay the bills until I can find a non-profit or small, local design company to work for. “

I graduated in 2008 with an Illustration degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Although I wasn’t naïve about the number of jobs out there for traditional illustrators on the market, I really wasn’t prepared for what the next few years had in store. After being laid off from three different art-related jobs, I floated from waiting tables to stuffing envelopes to booking events — waiting for the next illustration job to pop up. It seldom did, and when something surfaced there was a massive amount of competition. I was lost in the shuffle.

Years passed and eventually I was offered my current job as a visual merchandiser, laying out the store’s floor plan and creating displays. Unfortunately for the many other qualified people who applied for the job, I knew someone working for the company. I honestly believe this is the No. 1 reason why anyone gets a job in this economy. I had no experience in this particular role, but enough design sense to be qualified for the job.

While I certainly don’t feel overqualified for the position — nor do I feel that it’s a “bad job” — I do feel that it’s a far cry from what I set out to do. Perhaps more importantly, I’m not interested in advancing with the company. My ideals don’t align with those of mega-corporations, and I would like to work for a group that makes a positive difference in people’s lives.

While I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do when I graduated, I had an enormous amount of ambition and expected to be more advanced in my career than I am today. I don’t blame the economy entirely for this. I know I shoulder some of the blame for not picking a specific, or more direct, path for myself. However, I know so many people who had made a career in the arts for themselves before 2008 that I thought it would be easier than it has been.

I am no longer optimistic about my prospects as a freelance illustrator, despite some small successes along the way. The thought of having no safety net if the work trickles to a halt is just too much pressure for me at this point in my life. It could be that I was never cut out for that kind of work or it could be that my experiences during and after college made me crave stability. I wonder about that a lot. I have decided to go to graduate school for art conservation and restoration, and I’m much more optimistic about that.

The future is incredibly uncertain, but I still believe that if you’re smart, hard-working, confident, and a little bit lucky, you will eventually find success in your career and life — for now.

I have been struggling with this feeling of being stuck almost since I graduated in 2008. I worked hard my entire life and was rewarded for it with good grades and the opportunity to go to a great college — Rhode Island School of Design.

I began hearing about the depression in the months leading up to graduation, but assumed that all of my hard work in college would ensure that I would get a good job, as it had in high school.

When I graduated, I’ll admit that I didn’t have a clear career path in mind. I moved to Baltimore and got a minimum-wage job in my field, which I was promptly laid off from four months later. My boyfriend at the time was laid off shortly after. For the next two years, I took whatever job I could find so that I could pay my student loans. None were in my chosen field. I took little comfort when people told me, “Don’t worry … it’s not you, it’s happening to everyone.”

I wondered if it really was the economy or if I was just using that as an excuse for not finding better work. I think this has taken a pretty heavy psychological toll on me, as I am much less confident in my abilities than I used to be.

Since moving back to Boston, I was extremely lucky to find employment at a large retail store as a visual merchandiser after living with my parents for six months. It’s a good job with good benefits, but it’s not what I want to be doing and it feels like I am once again treading water, hoping for the economy to get better.

In the meantime, I’m also dealing with the guilt of having a good job and wanting more in a time when so many people have so little. I know that I’m one of the luckier ones, and that there are so many people that are much worse off than I am. Despite this, I am still so pessimistic when I think about the future — it makes me wonder how those people feel about it.

I think the psychological toll of this downturn is going to be huge on my generation. It’s going to shape everything from how we spend our money and our time, to our willingness to take risks, our self-confidence, our political leanings and voting patterns, and our outlook for future generations. I’m very interested to see if we will pull ourselves up by the bootstraps like the Great Depression generation or give up and just blame the government for all our problems. From what I’ve seen so far, it will be the latter.

It’s been something that I’ve been discussing with my peers, and with people from older generations, for quite some time. There’s a very diverse set of mentalities about the whole thing, but the general consensus tends to be one of pessimism and injustice from my generation and guilt and pity from older people.