The Young and The Feckless

According to a study by the London School of Economics, British women with degrees are 86 percent more likely to drink frequently and to report having a drinking problem than those women without post-secondary education. The more education a woman has, the more likely she is to hit the bottle. As a graduate school educated young woman who had to do some quick mental math to remember when she last imbibed (spiked eggnog at Christmas?), I couldn't help but find find this story fascinating.
Photo by jawcey

I hate to break it to you, but we have a sell-by date. We're perishable, dude. Highly perishable.

I spoke these words to a friend as we meandered down the street engaged in another one of our snarky, rapid-fire dialogues about how we ended up here. Here being the waning years of our twenties without being firmly established on solid career paths and without appropriate grown-up milestones (marriage, kids, home ownership) in our cross-hairs. We've known each other forever, so it felt almost as if we were 17 again (but we're both so much cooler now) and wondering what we were actually going to do with our whole lives in front of us. Except we're not 17 and our grace period for a To Be Determined future is rapidly running out. Comforting, non?

Hey Bitch readers,

Welcome to The Young and The Feckless! I thought I would take this inaugural post to do a little table-setting, namely to introduce myself and to give you an idea of what the next eight weeks will have in store. My name is J. Maureen Henderson (ask what the J stands for at your own peril) and I write extensively about Generation Y/Millennial issues and youth culture more broadly, both on my own site and for True/Slant, with an emphasis on personal development (the former) and current affairs (the latter) for those of us in our twenties and thirties (or the quarter-life crisis set). I want to use this column to dig a little deeper into issues at the heart of the intersection between young adulthood and cultural, political and economic influences.