'Adultescents' - scolded for not taking options that aren't there

This is another instance of the boomer generation imposing its value system on the same young people that it has cornered economically. To add insult to injury, we are also instructed to breed copiously, no doubt to provide more willing taxpayers to fund the aged-care infrastructure required for a greying population.

This is not to say there's no truth in Quantum's data; it's the interpretation that's bogus. If you know you will graduate from university with a sizeable debt, living with your parents may seem a feasible idea. And if you read the figures from the Housing Industry Association in March, you'd know that housing affordability for first-home buyers has reached a record low.

Without the money required to buy property or the security of a "job for life", spending on travel and portable technologies seems like a sane option B.

But the question remains why the common media discourse of generationalism is so skewed. Why are the statistics about education debt, house prices, high rents and job insecurity left out of the picture, while the armchair-theories about profligate hedonists get so much airplay?

Mark Davis, in his excellent book Gangland, argues that generationalism is used to ridicule young people as an act of cultural and economic gatekeeping by those in power. Almost every one of the tactics he notes that was used to denigrate generation X is being recycled.

Instead of the "Me" generation, it's more like the "Not Them" generation; we have been lumped with a financially enforced infantilisation due to our one great mistake. We were not born baby boomers.