Overworked and underpaid? Drowning in student loans and credit card debt? Considering selling vital organs to pay your rent? Wondering when, if ever, you'll finally get to enjoy the perks of being an adult instead of feeling the pains of becoming one?

The good news: You're not alone. The bad news: You're not alone.

Welcome to our generation.

"Becoming an adult today takes longer, requires taking more risks, and is rife with more stumbling blocks than it was a generation ago," writes Tamara Draut in Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Aren't Making It. Among the problems we face, according to Draut, are the rising costs of higher education paired with dwindling financial aid; a cut-throat economy in which wages haven't kept pace with inflation, benefits are a luxury, and job security is an oxymoron; and the rising housing costs that have priced many young adults out of homeownership and made living on one's own nearly impossible.

These problems should be very familiar to anyone living in Austin.

Although Draut doesn't offer much good news in her book, she does give us some comfort: We aren't just imagining that life is harder for us than for our parents. And we aren’t to blame. “The challenges facing young adults reflect the failure of public policy to address the changing realities of building a life in the twenty-first century. Government no longer has our back,” writes Draut.

Tamara Draut will be appearing at Bookpeople on Tuesday, February 28 at 7p.m.

Austinist got a sneak preview by phone.

The book presents overwhelming evidence of the barriers that young adults face today, but we aren't hearing this story in the media. Instead, the media is full of stories about our generation’s overconsumption and lack of ambition.

That's one of the main reasons that I wrote this book. The dominant dialogue in this country is one of generational stereotyping. The media reflect where we are at in the culture, and right now, we are in this era of personal responsibility. The message is that if you aren't getting ahead, it's your own fault. The agreement between the individual and the government used to be “If you do your part, we'll do ours.” But that's no longer true, and young people, as they try to establish themselves, are getting the fallout of that shift in perspective. It's all about personal responsibility. The finger wagging and simple explanations for why we aren't getting ahead have kept us from questioning the larger system.

Most people will probably be surprised by the facts in your book. What surprised you the most?

The earnings story really surprised me. I knew that people without college degrees had seen a decline in their earnings. But college graduates also typically are no better off than their parents were a generation ago; that was surprising. The other thing that surprised me was the enormous challenge that young people face in paying for college today and how much the financial aid system has drifted from its initial purpose of making sure that everyone who is prepared for college can afford to attend.

In the book, you argue that young adults today are being locked out of the American dream. Is it that we can no longer reach the traditional American dream or that the dream has expanded past reasonable limits? Do we want too much?

I think you have to think about how many things have been expanding beyond the rate of inflation---housing, health care, education---and you begin to understand a little bit better what young adults are up against. What I hoped to say in the book was why this is happening. This wasn't by accident. All along, public policies could have improved upward mobility in this country.

For the majority of young adults, their dream is the same dream that has sustained Americans for the last half century: a decent home in an area with good schools and the ability to give their children the same opportunities that they had. Young adults are dealing with the reality that they can't afford the same things that their parents did a generation ago.

I think what has happened is that as America has experienced rising wealth, there's been a perception that the material wealth bar has gotten higher for everyone because there is a lot more wealth in this country. But that wealth is held by a small percentage of the population. The American dream has been distorted by this perception that we all are benefiting from the rising wealth. But there's not real evidence that we've had a real values shift in how we define the American dream.

When we talk about the economic status of this generation of young adults, we usually think in terms of the technology industry's boom and bust. Was this really the experience of most young adults?

We love the exceptional success story. So the media put the young titans of industry on the covers of their magazines. And there were some remarkable achievements of young people. As I said in the book, we went from a generation of yahoos to the generation that created Yahoo!. Before the boom, we were portrayed as just a generation of slackers and as lacking ambition. So it was good that the media finally had something nice to say about us. The bad thing was that this story really eclipsed the larger story.

My friends and I would talk about this, and a lot of people had the same experience, wondering "When is this boom going to knock on my door?" Most young adults couldn't identify with the hullabaloo about the economic boom.

An important point that you make in the book is that although we didn’t create the fiscal problems we face, we have in a way let them happen by not being active in the political process. With the outcry against the war and growing criticism of the current Administration, do you see any change in young adults’ attitudes toward and participation in public policy?

We can be somewhat optimistic about the voter surge in the 2004 elections, in which we saw a huge increase in the number of young adults who voted as compared to the 2000 elections. It was about an 11 percent increase over 2000. Young people need to realize that as a result of this, they have some new leverage and new power. It won’t be as easy for the next set of presidential candidates to dismiss this generation. But we still face the problem that our generation is tiny compared to others. Getting half of our generation out to the polls is not going to get the job done because half of our population is nowhere near the same number as half of other generations’ votes.

Whether there is a real change in young adults’ attitudes remains to be seen. If I accomplish anything with my book, I hope it is that I plant the seeds of questioning the status quo and hopefully connect the dots for people in a way that they haven’t seen before. The previous generation grew up with and lived by the notion that the personal is the political. In our generation, we tend to personalize our problems. We don’t connect them to the political and economic systems.

You also note in the book that our current economic and social policies are leading to what is really a resegregation of society along economic lines.

I think that one of the great things about the previous generation---and to be clear, there were a lot of problems a generation ago---but it used to be that an accountant and a steel worker could live on the same block. Their kids went to the same school and they both could afford a decent house and safe car.

We are increasingly separated now by the college-degree haves and havenots. The quality of life decline for those without a college degree has been one of the most disconcerting aspects of this society.

How do we address this? How do we help the poor without hurting the middle class?

We need to do things that are more universal in nature. We have to end the debt-for-degree program so that middle-class families don’t have to take out second and third mortgages to provide a college education for their children and so that lower income students have a real chance at achieving their dreams. We need to look at how we can create better jobs and how we can turn lower income jobs into good jobs. A lot of that has to do with really enforcing the right of people to organize as unions in their workplaces. We also need to provide paid parental leave and ensure quality child care. Right now, we’re at a point where the squeeze is being felt in a very real way among the entire bottom 60 percent of the population.

What are the long-term implications of not doing anything to remove the economic barriers or to change the status quo?

One of things I talk about at the end of the book is that we have this young population, the Millennials, that is really swelling. They will rival the size of the Baby Boomers. This is setting us up for some real generational conflict if we don’t move back to a better balance between personal and social responsibility.

Let’s say that we do implement the policies you suggest in the book---better financial aid for higher education, paid parental leave, retirement savings assistance, and so forth. Can those programs survive the coming population boom?

If we start preparing now. We have to get rid of the deficit and restore the tax cuts that have further diminished our ability to provide of the structures in this society. We ignore this problem at our peril. We need to start demanding that our elected officials take some responsibility for the major fiscal problems they’ve gotten us into with the nature of the tax code and the major deficit.

Are you hopeful that we will make real changes?

I’m hopeful because I think that there’s starting to be a growing recognition that shifting all the responsibility onto the individual isn’t working. People are starting to understand that there’s a better way to organize the opportunity structure in this country.

*Images from official website for Strapped.