Every time I watch a confirmation hearing or hear talk of a stimulus plan or find out about yet another inauguration to-do, I can’t help but think about how much work there actually is to do.

This, I’m told, is a very Gen Y impulse, the product of being young, sleep-deprived, and raised on Mr. Rogers, who told us we really could do whatever we liked. But I think it probably has more to do with getting older, and coming to grips with what exactly our future might hold. Sure, we’ve got the Wii, and HDTV, and Google, but those only go so far when you’re unemployed, drowning in debt and lamenting the plight of the polar bear.

It’s a topsy-turvy world out there, and while every generation has experienced some of that, the real grown-ups in my life say that feeling does seem more pervasive than ever, reaching into just about every aspect of life – from foreign policy to the domestic struggles of young vets, from student loans to the greatest economic instability since the Depression, from joblessness at home to the perils (human rights, environmental and otherwise) of globalization abroad. Or maybe we just hear about it more.

Regardless, I know this worldview might appear a tad extreme, so in the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d give you a little insight into what I saw and heard this week to put me in such a lovely frame of mind - a small snapshot of one Y perspective.

5 signs of the apocalypse, and why they made me think of you…

1. Gold might as well be fur. Last night, I told my boyfriend I’m off gold. I’m not that flash to begin with – and I’ve been off diamonds for a while for obvious reasons – but after reading National Geographic’s January cover story, “Gold: The True Cost of a Global Obsession,” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t already known to eschew gold. “For all of its allure, gold’s human and environmental toll has never been so steep,” author Brook Larmer writes. At this rate, I’m going to have to take up an ascetic lifestyle. I already had to stop eating shrimp. My sister’s even done with Coca-Cola. And if anyone ever marries me, it’ll probably be without a ring (and not because I’m easygoing). It’s easy to dismiss as a whole lot of fanatacism, but with the amount and visibility of information that’s out there, we’re going to learn some things we don’t like. Ignoring them won’t make them go away. On the contrary, we should be grateful we do know, and doing our best to act on that knowledge when we can.
2. Everyone owes $50k! According to a financial aid counselor at a well-known Washington, D.C., university who my siblings chatted up last week, $50,000 to $60,000 in educational debt from undergrad is just about expected these days for her institution and schools of its caliber. There’s so much to say about that, and yet, no need to say anything at all. Because, as the College Board says, educational debt is an investment in your future, and a bachelor’s degree is all but essential these days just to be competitive (someone with a B.A. will earn $800,000 more than someone with a high school diploma over a lifetime), so young people hardly have a choice. But that doesn’t make it any less shameful.
3. Kids use Facebook for (not annoying) good. Believe it or not, and whatever you might think of the situation in the Middle East, I found the following rather encouraging: The 14-year-old daughter of close family friends recently updated her Facebook status – which people use to say everything from “Joey is ‘eating spaghetti,’” to, “Sarah is ’so, so, so excited to be engaged!’” – to read, “R. is ‘702 Palestinians murdered by Israel in Gaza (more than 230 children & 100 women) & 3100 injured. Donate your status.’” Now this is a little girl I’ve known since she was a baby, and whose young adulthood I’m so in denial about that I assiduously avoid her Facebook page, lest I find anything I don’t want to know. And Facebook is running out of ways to surprise me. But unlike the 101 groups for this or that cause, or messages from people actively proselytizing, this just had an earnest, honest, youthful sincerity to it that grabbed me. And  how nice to find that on Facebook.
   
4. The government hates animals. New York’s Governor David A. Patterson has proposed “an immediate 55 percent cut and elimination of zoo and botanical garden funds altogether in 2010,” writes Andrew C. Revkin on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog. All right, I get it — the state’s in trouble, and the $5 million it’ll save by slashing the zoo’s funding will no doubt go a long way in stabilizing things. Doom a hedgehog, feed an investment banker, and all that. But really, how sad. It isn’t enough that we’re destroying natural habitats all over the world, now we have to target the artificial ones we’ve created to shelter the few animals who might survive us. What difference does it make if my kids never get to see a red panda or Bengal tiger? (Never mind the American pika, a cute-as-a-button rabbit relative that’s on its way to becoming the second animal to join the endangered species list because of global warming, behind the polar bear. NatGeo can be such a downer.) Sheesh. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s pithy but pointed video response to the budget cuts is perfect. I hope someone listens.
5. And I love my Mom, but what about the elderly? And in what could have been my own personal apocalypse, on New Year’s Eve, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And last week, she had surgery to remove it. It’ll be a few months of recovery ahead, but the way she handled it – bouncing right back better and bossier than ever – reminded me of that Boomer resilience that some say (and I hope) we’ve inherited. But it also underscored how important excellent health care is: While watching doctors dote on my mom was a relief, I couldn’t help but think about all the people who don’t have that, not just all over the world, but right here at home. And while nine million uninsured children is a disgrace, our aging population will be larger than ever in the coming years – because of both the number of Boomers, and their lengthening life span – and adequate health care will be essential for them. Not meeting those needs would be a disgrace, too.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about, guys. What does it all mean? I don’t know yet, except that there’s a long road of recovery and rebuilding ahead for us, too. Have I fallen off the maudlin cliff, or do you feel it, too?

Just when I think the Gen Y conversation’s gone stale, a new theme emerges that proves me wrong, and this year, it was a social one. But perhaps not the one you’d expect: It wasn’t social responsibility, or even social networking, but (our lack of) social connection, and by extension, aptitude. If it seems I’ve been harping on this a bit (witness “Making true connections in a Facebook world”), I have — because this might be the area where we have the most to learn, and the most to lose if we don’t learn it.

What better time to start those lessons, then, than right now, as many of us head home to family and holiday parties galore this December, situations that often traditionally elicit at least as much dread and drinking as goodwill? So this December, I vote we actually (gasp) talk to people, and (double–gasp) mean it. As New Year’s resolutions go, it’s a basic one, I know. But after all my cheerleading and translating for our cohort, I’ve also learned a few things about where we fall down. And making substantive connections, whether they’re on or off the web, is increasingly becoming one of those places, especially if what I’ve been hearing from you all is any indication.

Consider Hannah Seligson’s November New York Times story, “For Help Finding a Job, Friends in Low Places.” Hannah, a Gen Y author I met when I wrote about her book last year, told me I might be the “contrarian” voice in her piece, which explored Yers’ efforts to utilize their peer network — instead of, say, their parents’ friends — to find job opportunities. Hardly in a rush to read my curmudgeonly comments, I waited a while to read the story.

And then an odd thing happened: I started to get e-mails and calls from people (my own younger sister included) thanking me for being honest and realistic about what one Yer might have to offer another, especially over something like Facebook. “It’s very easy to just send out a friend request,” I’d told Hannah, “but when you are looking for jobs, you want to make sure your peer network is comprised of people who can speak to your qualities, not just vouch for you as a friend on Facebook.” It certainly wasn’t revolutionary, but it resonated, likely because — like me — many of you are finding yourselves drawing that new distinction between Facebook friends and real ones, too. And let’s just say Facebook friends don’t always make great references, mentors, or, well, friends.

So in the interest of having real relationships, let’s treat every connection we make from now on as sincerely as possible. And let’s keep the connections we already have from going generic. That friend you only see on IM? Drag him or her out to lunch. If you’re home this break, take the time to catch up with old friends in person, rather than updating them via Facebook status (or relying on that most formidable of networks, the Former PTA Moms Phone Tree).

Or if you run into someone you haven’t seen in a while on Facebook, take the time to write a quick note instead of sending a blank friend request. This makes you a person, instead of a profile your would-be friend has to poke around in till s/he remembers who you are and confirms that you aren’t insane. (And this goes double for people you don’t know, but would like to; they’ll be much more likely to respond to an “I love your work!” than nothing at all.)

Even when it comes to folks who’ve made themselves available as part of your university alumni network or company mentoring program, reach out to them first as an individual and second as an opportunity. And always do it with some humility and gratitude. After all, there’s a huge difference between an e-mail that says, “You’re in a field I love, and I’d really appreciate a bit of advice,” and one that says, “Here are the three jobs I’d like at your company, and my resume’s attached.” (Both of which I’ve gotten, by the way.)

The moral of the story: Use all the tools available to you, but use them to build relationships, not just networks, social or otherwise. A Boomer parent/executive stopped to chat with me recently about the seeming contradiction between Gen Yers’ affinity for technology and our need for interpersonal connection, and as we wrestled with it, he said something that stuck with me: “The technology is actually getting us back to where we used to be.” A few generations ago, one’s hometown alone offered a lifetime’s worth of deep connections. In today’s sprawling, mobile, hyperactive world, not so much. And while technology’s helping us to (re)create some of that community online, we’re still a long way from replicating the lasting bonds that used to form naturally in our neighborhoods and help shape us into the people we were supposed to become.

Good news is, those bonds still do exist in the real world. So, as a present to ourselves and everyone who’ll ever have to know us, let’s go get them back.

Today, a question from one of you. Gig reader Kurt writes:

“I’ve been thinking about switching jobs and finding something that will provide better benefits and salary for me and my new wife. But I was typing up a new resume and realized that — at 28 — I have five jobs that are one year apiece. How can I spin that in an interview as a positive? Can I just tell the truth and say that I’m not finding what I need, or do you think that might be a kiss of death?”

Well, Kurt, you’re definitely not alone. And while the job hunt is always stressful — no matter who you are and how great your resume might be — don’t let this particular issue keep you up at night. Because if the recruiters I talk to are any indication, your job-hopping isn’t as unusual as you might think. With more and more of us waiting to settle down and choosing “non-traditional” career paths — such as hostel-hopping through Europe or heading back to Mom and Dad’s while we write the great American novel — we’re less and less likely to stay in a bad job just because we need the money or don’t have other options.

Which is why you’ll hear some HR people say that they can’t get young employees to stay. But that’s actually a good thing for you. Because as more qualified, professional candidates come in with resumes that look like yours, those doing the hiring have been forced to focus less on job tenure and more on real skills and relevant experience.

But what does this actually mean? As discussed in a recent post, “Job-hopping Gen Yers aren’t disloyal, they’re smart,” many twentysomethings are simply opting for opportunities over loyalty. That was certainly the case for me: I came to Fortune at the age of 24, and it was already my fourth job out of school. Did that mean that I was a giant flake without any sense of purpose or commitment? Not really. Instead, it played as evidence of my risk-taking nature and willingness to follow the best gigs, managers, and experiences (or so my bosses tell me). And, ultimately, that made me a more attractive hire for companies that were looking for a person with a specific skillset and perspective, rather than someone they could develop all the way to retirement.

To be fair, I should point out that, while HR folks often say that we’re harder to keep than ever, the numbers don’t necessarily bear out our fickleness: In 2006, the median tenure for workers ages 25 to 34 was 2.9 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And more than 20 years ago, in 1983, it was…3 years. Not exactly a dramatic drop. (And the same is generally true of younger workers: For those ages 20 to 24, the median tenure was 1.3 years in 2006, and 1.5 years in 1983.)

While there are economic fluctuations from decade to decade that caused some peaks and valleys, it’s possible that this relatively constant tenure number doesn’t yet capture the changing attitudes of young professionals. And one BLS survey found that the youngest Boomers — those born between 1957 and 1964 — held an average of 10.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38, a number that will probably just keep going up. Regardless, the fact is that recruiters definitely think we’re more fickle — and they’re starting to forgive us for it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should bounce around just for fun. After all, the postscript to my four-jobs-by-24 story is that I’ve now been at Fortune almost four years. And as Gig reader Dan pointed out in his response to the job-hopping post, “those who stay with the same employer for longer tend to get good at what they do,” among other things.

Of course, there are perfectly good reasons to move on, especially if you find yourself an expert at stapling and copying, but not much else. So, Kurt, if you can demonstrate some logic to your career moves, you’ll be in good shape. And in your case, with a new spouse — and the new priorities that (I hope!) come with that — you’re often even more desirable than you would be otherwise because recruiters know that you’re looking for stability.

So when you head into that next big interview, think about how you can show you’re a high performer who’s both learned and contributed in each job — and it won’t matter much whether you stay for one year or 10. (Though it’s probably a good idea to try to stay at least a year, as it’s kind of hard to argue you made a real mark in a job you had for six months.) I’m all for being honest about your struggles to find the right fit, but be sure to make the interview about how you made the best of each role, not how bad they all were. And since you’ll want to reassure the new company that you won’t be headed out the door fast, come with some examples of what makes their organization such a good one for you.

Think of the interview as a chance to tell your story. For so many of us Yers, that’s what work is — an enormous, seamlessly-integrated part of our personal stories that’s even more central because we often don’t have the things that take precedence over work in older people’s lives, like families. So figure out how to frame your career story in terms of trajectory and lessons and goals, and don’t get hung up on the numbers.

If you believe it, they just might, too.

What about you guys? Are your resumes similar to Kurt’s, or are you through with job-hopping?

Hello, everybody! Hope your 2008 is off to an amazing start, and despite all appearances to the contrary, I have not in fact fled to a foreign country in an effort to shirk my Gig duties. Actually, I got a nasty flu and decided to spare you guys the NyQuil-induced ramblings. (And hey, I did say I’d be back in January, and technically, it is still January, right? )

But it was lovely to come back to your sweet letters, and Gig reader Juan gets a special shout-out for threatening to seek therapy if I didn’t get back to work. So in the interest of Juan’s mental health — and let’s be honest, my own; I missed you guys! — let’s get to it. We’ve got some new stuff in store that I’ll be excited to get your thoughts on, but in the New Year’s tradition, I thought we’d start with a bit of reflection. By that I mean, it’s been a few weeks since last we spoke, and in my acetaminophen haze, I had a lot of time to think. So today, friends, I’m going to torture you with…

WHAT I LEARNED OVER THE BREAK

(or “5 maudlin semi-epiphanies that are sure to infuriate Yadgyu, which only further motivates me to share them”)

Be forewarned, I really have missed you guys, and it shows in the treatise that follows. So apologies in advance. And in case you don’t make it to the end, we’d love to hear about your recent semi-epiphanies, so comment away.

1. We’re too old to spend two straight weeks at Mom’s.

Remember when you used to come home on a break and, as annoyed as you might’ve been at your parents, you kind of loved vegging at home? Well, I think those days might need to be over, at least for me and all of the other should-be independent twentysomething people we know and love.

Regular readers have probably by now ascertained that my family’s pretty tight (i.e. if we were any closer, we’d be sardines). And yet, when the kids decided that this holiday, we’d kick it old school and spend all our time off at Mom’s, we didn’t really know what we were in for.

Our hearts were in the right place; this was her first Christmas in a new house and we wanted to give her as many opportunities to cook ginormous meals as possible. But seriously, by about Dec. 28, we’d each gained 10 pounds and reverted to our worst, whiniest, most awfully teenage incarnation.

So while it’s true what we’ve often said here — that while for many Yers, there’s often nothing our moms would like better than to have us home — it’s time to have our own homes! And maybe even host our own holiday parties! The kind our parents can come to, with, like, real wine and no passing out. Sheesh.

2. We’re not too old to play Wii till 4 a.m.

The preceding tirade notwithstanding, it turns out that one good thing about regressing to childhood at home is remembering that there are some seemingly childish things that are pretty darn awesome — including, but not limited to, the Wii, hot chocolate, Legos and Animal Planet.

And incredibly, when you indulge (a bit) in these extravagances, you often come to the realization that this stuff is at least as cool as standing around at a cocktail party trying to sound smart and wishing you were home watching Adult Swim. Which is what I for one often found myself doing when I got my first real gig and suddenly started worrying about being taken seriously by my legitimately grown-up colleagues.

But as I get legitimately older myself (officially identified a wrinkle, FYI) and vaguely more secure, I’m finding that my favorite Gen Y “characteristics,” to the extent that those exist, are all our little paradoxes. Love the environment/drive an SUV. Most educated people ever/obsessed with MTV. Grew up too fast/can’t get out of our parents’ houses to save our lives. (And before you letter-writers get going, I am speaking very generally here, folks.)

So yes, sure we want to be — and should want to be — adults, but a little Wii never hurt anyone. At least not if you keep your Wii jacket on, take breaks, and clear all the furniture out of your living room. And more importantly, it does keep you from turning into into Holden Caulfield’s long-lost angstier twin, even if you do spend an eternity at your Mom’s.

3. We’re finally just old enough to learn the good stuff.

There was an upside to the aforementioned eternity, though. When we were small, our mom worked a full day; cooked dinner every evening; sewed, papier-mâché’d, and otherwise “project”ed with us every night; and still found time to be best friends with our teachers and know all our business.

As a kid, you take that good stuff for granted and ask yourself why, oh, why, you’ve been cursed with a mom who won’t just take you to McDonald’s. By the time you go away to school, you appreciate it enough to miss the nourishment, but not quite enough to understand the labor. But once you’re out in the world with a real job and bills to pay, well, then you start to get it. (Forget kids; my fish would file a petition of neglect if they could.)

Talk about your self-esteem killers. My poor sister and I will so never be as anything as our mom. Which is why this break, what with the eternity we spent at home, we actually got the chance to ask some questions and learn some things. And not the encyclopedia factoids and oft-repeated lectures we groaned at in our argumentative youth, either. But some things that are actually worth knowing, like recipes for the West Indian dishes we grew up eating, the patterns for our favorite sundresses, and the full-length versions of family ghost stories we’ve been hearing in snippets for years.

It shouldn’t be all that long before we (gasp) have our own children, and if we want to be even decent approximations of the good older people in our lives, we’d better start asking the right questions now. There isn’t much of a precedent for that in our country, and goodness knows we Yers are sometimes considered the worst offenders when it comes to valuing our elders, but I do know that we value expertise, and more often than not, the people who raised us have some that’s worth sharing.

4. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Look how amazing I am.”

As little as we know, there is something to be said for a little self-affirmation in spite of it all. Consider my brother Kamran, the RIT freshman. We’re all sitting at the dinner table over the holiday, chatting away, and our mom gets a call from one of the engineers at her office, who was dealing with a problem. She hangs up, shares some (general and totally over my head) details with us, and Kam says, “Oh, so he has to replace the filament.” Mom says something along the lines of, “Yes, precisely, exactly, quite right,” our collective eyes glaze over, and somewhere in the ensuing self-absorbed silence, Kam says to himself, and I kid you not: “Look at how amazing I am.”

Laughter, of course, erupts. But he’s so far off in his own world that he seems a tad confused about the reaction, still smiling to himself over his little triumph. Obviously, he suffered merciless derision the rest of the holiday (for this and his sheepish admission that, until this Christmas, he thought Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” was in fact called “Hullabaloo Christmas” — classic).

But my mom rightly pointed out that for a kid who, after getting his first 80-something on an elementary school spelling test, spent the entire afternoon with a sheet over his face, emerging only to cry, “I’m the only one who gets B’s in the family,” some quiet self-regard was a big deal, as it should be. So regard yourself quietly, and remember how amazing you are. Just don’t tell your siblings, if they’re the sort that, you know, live to mock you.

5. A good job is like a good boyfriend.

And that, dear readers, is why I’ve been gone so long. Because, if I’m being honest, I’d tried to open my apartment door with my office key just one too many times. And had even answered my cell phone, “Fortune,” on more than one occasion. Never mind the sad realization that, as far as my brain was concerned, I’d used and abused every word I had to give, and might in fact have had nothing left to say. My work boundaries were so fluid that I was drowning on and off the job, and that does not a good life — or good Gig writing — make.

But as the proverbial “they” say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And with a few weeks away from you and the real-life boyfriend, I’ve returned excited to see you both, with new and (I hope) interesting things to talk about, and a fair amount of starry-eyed optimism about what this year might hold. If you’ve read this far, you’re feeling pretty optimistic, too (certainly about the outside possibility that this’ll end up being worthwhile reading ). And you can probably also tell that, whatever I might say, as monstrously long as this post has been, I obviously missed writing to and for you. And that’s just the kind of re-discovery I’m hoping is in store for all of us. So here’s to making our work work for us in 2008. It’s going to be fun.

Allrighty then. Guess I did miss pontificating with you guys. But now that we’re done with that, on to the 56 million new posts I’ve been planning. And in the meantime, if my musings got you to thinking, let us know what you learned — or un-learned — since last we blogged…

Hello, everybody! Hope your 2008 is off to an amazing start, and despite all appearances to the contrary, I have not in fact fled to a foreign country in an effort to shirk my Gig duties. Actually, I got a nasty flu and decided to spare you guys the NyQuil-induced ramblings. (And hey, I did say I’d be back in January, and technically, it is still January, right? )

But it was lovely to come back to your sweet letters, and Gig reader Juan gets a special shout-out for threatening to seek therapy if I didn’t get back to work. So in the interest of Juan’s mental health — and let’s be honest, my own; I missed you guys! — let’s get to it. We’ve got some new stuff in store that I’ll be excited to get your thoughts on, but in the New Year’s tradition, I thought we’d start with a bit of reflection. By that I mean, it’s been a few weeks since last we spoke, and in my acetaminophen haze, I had a lot of time to think. So today, friends, I’m going to torture you with…

WHAT I LEARNED OVER THE BREAK

(or “5 maudlin semi-epiphanies that are sure to infuriate Yadgyu, which only further motivates me to share them”)

Be forewarned, I really have missed you guys, and it shows in the treatise that follows. So apologies in advance. And in case you don’t make it to the end, we’d love to hear about your recent semi-epiphanies, so comment away.

1. We’re too old to spend two straight weeks at Mom’s.

Remember when you used to come home on a break and, as annoyed as you might’ve been at your parents, you kind of loved vegging at home? Well, I think those days might need to be over, at least for me and all of the other should-be independent twentysomething people we know and love.

Regular readers have probably by now ascertained that my family’s pretty tight (i.e. if we were any closer, we’d be sardines). And yet, when the kids decided that this holiday, we’d kick it old school and spend all our time off at Mom’s, we didn’t really know what we were in for.

Our hearts were in the right place; this was her first Christmas in a new house and we wanted to give her as many opportunities to cook ginormous meals as possible. But seriously, by about Dec. 28, we’d each gained 10 pounds and reverted to our worst, whiniest, most awfully teenage incarnation.

So while it’s true what we’ve often said here — that while for many Yers, there’s often nothing our moms would like better than to have us home — it’s time to have our own homes! And maybe even host our own holiday parties! The kind our parents can come to, with, like, real wine and no passing out. Sheesh.

2. We’re not too old to play Wii till 4 a.m.

The preceding tirade notwithstanding, it turns out that one good thing about regressing to childhood at home is remembering that there are some seemingly childish things that are pretty darn awesome — including, but not limited to, the Wii, hot chocolate, Legos and Animal Planet.

And incredibly, when you indulge (a bit) in these extravagances, you often come to the realization that this stuff is at least as cool as standing around at a cocktail party trying to sound smart and wishing you were home watching Adult Swim. Which is what I for one often found myself doing when I got my first real gig and suddenly started worrying about being taken seriously by my legitimately grown-up colleagues.

But as I get legitimately older myself (officially identified a wrinkle, FYI) and vaguely more secure, I’m finding that my favorite Gen Y “characteristics,” to the extent that those exist, are all our little paradoxes. Love the environment/drive an SUV. Most educated people ever/obsessed with MTV. Grew up too fast/can’t get out of our parents’ houses to save our lives. (And before you letter-writers get going, I am speaking very generally here, folks.)

So yes, sure we want to be — and should want to be — adults, but a little Wii never hurt anyone. At least not if you keep your Wii jacket on, take breaks, and clear all the furniture out of your living room. And more importantly, it does keep you from turning into into Holden Caulfield’s long-lost angstier twin, even if you do spend an eternity at your Mom’s.

3. We’re finally just old enough to learn the good stuff.

There was an upside to the aforementioned eternity, though. When we were small, our mom worked a full day; cooked dinner every evening; sewed, papier-mâché’d, and otherwise “project”ed with us every night; and still found time to be best friends with our teachers and know all our business.

As a kid, you take that good stuff for granted and ask yourself why, oh, why, you’ve been cursed with a mom who won’t just take you to McDonald’s. By the time you go away to school, you appreciate it enough to miss the nourishment, but not quite enough to understand the labor. But once you’re out in the world with a real job and bills to pay, well, then you start to get it. (Forget kids; my fish would file a petition of neglect if they could.)

Talk about your self-esteem killers. My poor sister and I will so never be as anything as our mom. Which is why this break, what with the eternity we spent at home, we actually got the chance to ask some questions and learn some things. And not the encyclopedia factoids and oft-repeated lectures we groaned at in our argumentative youth, either. But some things that are actually worth knowing, like recipes for the West Indian dishes we grew up eating, the patterns for our favorite sundresses, and the full-length versions of family ghost stories we’ve been hearing in snippets for years.

It shouldn’t be all that long before we (gasp) have our own children, and if we want to be even decent approximations of the good older people in our lives, we’d better start asking the right questions now. There isn’t much of a precedent for that in our country, and goodness knows we Yers are sometimes considered the worst offenders when it comes to valuing our elders, but I do know that we value expertise, and more often than not, the people who raised us have some that’s worth sharing.

4. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Look how amazing I am.”

As little as we know, there is something to be said for a little self-affirmation in spite of it all. Consider my brother Kamran, the RIT freshman. We’re all sitting at the dinner table over the holiday, chatting away, and our mom gets a call from one of the engineers at her office, who was dealing with a problem. She hangs up, shares some (general and totally over my head) details with us, and Kam says, “Oh, so he has to replace the filament.” Mom says something along the lines of, “Yes, precisely, exactly, quite right,” our collective eyes glaze over, and somewhere in the ensuing self-absorbed silence, Kam says to himself, and I kid you not: “Look at how amazing I am.”

Laughter, of course, erupts. But he’s so far off in his own world that he seems a tad confused about the reaction, still smiling to himself over his little triumph. Obviously, he suffered merciless derision the rest of the holiday (for this and his sheepish admission that, until this Christmas, he thought Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” was in fact called “Hullabaloo Christmas” — classic).

But my mom rightly pointed out that for a kid who, after getting his first 80-something on an elementary school spelling test, spent the entire afternoon with a sheet over his face, emerging only to cry, “I’m the only one who gets B’s in the family,” some quiet self-regard was a big deal, as it should be. So regard yourself quietly, and remember how amazing you are. Just don’t tell your siblings, if they’re the sort that, you know, live to mock you.

5. A good job is like a good boyfriend.

And that, dear readers, is why I’ve been gone so long. Because, if I’m being honest, I’d tried to open my apartment door with my office key just one too many times. And had even answered my cell phone, “Fortune,” on more than one occasion. Never mind the sad realization that, as far as my brain was concerned, I’d used and abused every word I had to give, and might in fact have had nothing left to say. My work boundaries were so fluid that I was drowning on and off the job, and that does not a good life — or good Gig writing — make.

But as the proverbial “they” say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And with a few weeks away from you and the real-life boyfriend, I’ve returned excited to see you both, with new and (I hope) interesting things to talk about, and a fair amount of starry-eyed optimism about what this year might hold. If you’ve read this far, you’re feeling pretty optimistic, too (certainly about the outside possibility that this’ll end up being worthwhile reading ). And you can probably also tell that, whatever I might say, as monstrously long as this post has been, I obviously missed writing to and for you. And that’s just the kind of re-discovery I’m hoping is in store for all of us. So here’s to making our work work for us in 2008. It’s going to be fun.

Allrighty then. Guess I did miss pontificating with you guys. But now that we’re done with that, on to the 56 million new posts I’ve been planning. And in the meantime, if my musings got you to thinking, let us know what you learned — or un-learned — since last we blogged…

On the way back from a biz trip to Miami last week, I picked up a copy of Details, enticed by the “Ultimate Guide to Office Etiquette” coverline. Leaving aside for the moment how much of a dork this makes me — after all, I do it for you guys — turns out I probably should have paid more attention to the ones that asked, “Are You Dating a ‘Tweenager’?” and “Are Your Parents Squandering Your Inheritance?”

Before you click off in disgust, a bit of explanation: I’ve been struck recently not so much by how Yers have been acting, but how parents are behaving.

Consider the aforementioned Details stories. “Tweenager” decries the 35-going-on-12 woman, the center of a “Big Girl Epidemic” that has grown women wearing babydolls, “OMG”ing all over the place, and shrieking over The Hills. And the inheritance story sports the somewhat alarming headline, “It’s Time To Cut Your Parents Off: Mom and Dad are living it up well into their sixties. Guess who’ll pay for it?” According to the story, a Fidelity Investments survey in March not only found that the average Boomer has saved “a paltry $45,000,” but also that “one in five households led by 25-to-42-year-olds has either begun providing financial support to their parents or expect to soon.”

And if you weren’t frightened enough, just flip a few more pages to “Totally Blonde,” where the Girls Next Door are joined by 40-something Real Housewives of Orange County Lauri Waring and Tamra Barney in an, um, swimsuit photo essay the cover calls, “The California Blondes Taking Over Your Sexual Fantasies.” (Notably absent were either of the housewives’ grown children. I’ll let you Google this one on your own.)

Yikes. Admittedly, on the right day, I too might be called a Big Girl. I love The Hills, have long favored the empire waist, and abbreviate with the best of them — and you know my feelings about emoticons. But that sort of thing is generally reserved for indulgent conversations with my girlfriends, not the general public, and I think many of my peers would say the same. And even then, at 27 — despite a melding of pop culture and youth culture that to some extent legitimizes this hair-twirling act — I can actually feel myself aging out of this demo.

Why, then, are people our moms’ age trying so hard to be twentysomethings again? And if they were, was it judgmental to begrudge them that? It’s not as if it hurts us. If Housewife Waring wants to look her kids’ age — as she told Details, “I will never look a day older than 32″ — and she can, well, good for her. Maybe.

Even as I was pondering these pressing questions, what should come on but Keeping Up With the Kardashians, featuring another mom gone wild, Kris Jenner, whose necklines, hemlines, naughty mouth, inability to tell the truth, and, oh, everything else often drive even her less than demure daughters to comment. As my friend Jon Caramanica wrote in the LA Times this weekend, “This is a family with severe boundary issues — it is Kris who encourages Kim to pose for Playboy and who cheerily does crisis management about Kim’s sex tape. She seems more interested in the cameras than Kim is.”

And therein lies the problem, right? It does hurt us. Sure, Kim might not have been destined for a Nobel, but with her mom’s expert parenting, she bypassed all the other options and went straight to reality TV caricature and sex object. And the saddest part is, whatever Kim’s feelings about her “career,” she’s obviously living out her mom’s dream. It takes stage-mothering to a whole different place, moving it from behind the scenes to an embarrassing front-and-center.

It isn’t so much that I want our moms to become decrepit hags, rocking away their twilight years over embroidery and weak tea. I appreciate the desire to stay youthful, and the need to build friendships with one’s children — based in part on shared interests and tastes — but surely succumbing to these pressures at the expense of good parenting isn’t the answer. Rather, it’d be awesome if our parents would both take care of themselves and act like adults, so as to, you know, set an example. (Maybe forgo that tanning session for an episode of What Not to Wear; Stacy London would set ‘em straight.) And it’s not to suggest that these parents don’t love their children; in fact, I’d bet that if they really knew how their actions would affect their children in the long-term, they’d be horrified and repentant.

But obviously, they don’t know. And the children (we) do end up paying for it. It’s something we first mentioned on The Gig in our “Gen Y on ‘60 Minutes’” post — the idea that if we’re not acting our age, it might just be because our parents aren’t either. Perhaps our helicoptering parents put too much of their own lives on hold for us, and now, finally able to do their own thing, they’re overdoing it. Clearly, I’m not sure exactly how I feel yet, but I bet some of you are. What do you think? Is this a case of out-of-control parents, or uptight kids? Or is it just a matter of our parents trying to live their best — albeit somewhat irresponsible — lives, which in the end, is exactly what we want, too?

*****

Friend of The Gig Christine Hassler is looking for a few good stories:

The co-authors of “Chicken Soup for the Twenty-Something Soul” are putting together a collection of inspiring, moving, and funny stories to warm the hearts and soothe the souls of twenty-somethings. And they want YOUR story! This is your shot to inspire others AND be published. (And, we pay!) Deadline to submit your Twenty-Something Story is January 1st. For more details, click here.

It seems hardly a day goes by anymore where Facebook isn’t the topic of conversation in business circles – as a mild annoyance or the mother of all marketing tools. We’ve even discussed it here on The Gig, where the Facebook stragglers among us had to ask how, in the name of goodness, to avoid undesirable associates trying to “friend” us.

But this weekend, in the wake of Thanksgiving, that most American of family holidays, the Facebook drama finally hit home for me with a distressed call from my sister, Lisa: “Kamran won’t be my friend,” she all but wailed. Turns out our 18-year-old brother, Kamran, who’s a freshman at RIT this year, had officially ignored her friendship request. When I intervened, reassuring him that, unlike Mom, we’d ignore any teenage Facebook indiscretions — his pic was a shot of him smoking a cigar in some nondescript club — he promptly informed me that 1) he was at a perfectly respectable cigar bar watching Bloomberg in that photo, and 2) “Facebook and family don’t mix.”

Now that’s not exactly news; lots of parents have written about their quests to friend their children, with varying degree of success — especially when it comes to naughty gifts, at least according to the New York Times. (As for our own mother, briefed on the family Facebook imbroglio, she squawked, “Facebook?! Isn’t that where the child rapers are?” Lucky we’re such trustworthy kids.) But we’re siblings; we’re supposed to be friends. According to Kam, evidently, not so much.

Before I became too indignant, though, he reminded me of my own slow introduction to Facebook. Having graduated from school in 2002, I just missed the explosion of Facebook on campus, so I didn’t find my way to the wonders of Scrabulous until — gasp — some senior Fortune folk forced the issue. And as a result, Facebook for me isn’t so much about poking, spanking, and gifting as it is about keeping up with colleagues.

Am I missing out? Maybe. As Kam seems to know instinctively, some relationships are best lived outside the realm of status updates and party pics. And great as it is to build extra-office relationships with co-workers, I live in fear of the day that some publicist-cum-stalker tries to friend me. (Or worse yet, that a person I idolize in the office engineers his own fall from grace via The Wall or something like.) That may be a small price to pay for the increased connectivity, but I’m not sure yet.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of creating an internal version for our offices so that we can have all the functionality of Facebook without the potentially uncomfortable colliding of worlds. Or, as in the case of my little brother, we’ll just be dragged along whether we like it or not: Lisa, the family’s true Facebooker, took matters into her own hands and started recruiting every Tom, Joe, and Stanley to her new group, “Can my brother please be friends with me on Facebook?” (Apparently, when she hits 200 members, Mr. Too Cool For School will relent. Make your voice heard here. Comedy.)

Predictably, I cringed — why involve perfect strangers in this disgraceful bit of familial strife? — but maybe, once again, I’m just a big curmudgeon. Of course, it’s only with this little fracas that Kamran and Lisa have become really engaged with and excited about Facebook; it’s the randomness that’s attractive, the prospect of sharing an inside joke with untold numbers of outsiders. And perhaps that’s the crux of the problem: For them, it’s meeting random people that keeps them at their keyboards. For me and many other sometime-cynics, it’s the threat of random people that keeps us locked in our offices.

And while knowing everything there is to know about one’s “friends” might be attractive, there is such a thing as knowing way too much. At a certain point, if it isn’t about Scrabulous and party pics — i.e., the young person’s footloose and fancy-free life — doesn’t Facebook become just another bit of work we have to do? (Or, in Kam’s case, another thing to protect our parents and big sisters from?) You tell me: Can family, be it at home or in the office, mix? And even if they can, should they?

Being in India over the last week at the Fortune Global Forum has been as amazing as one might expect — full of big names and high-level talk. What I didn’t expect, though, is the degree to which our Gen Y discussions resonated, even here. Usually, at events like this, people our age are a tiny minority, often serving as support staff (or mistaken as such even if they are attending for “real” reasons). But for at least one hour at this year’s Fortune Global Forum, the issues facing Gen Yers took center stage.

It was during a session called “Our India: Reflections of Rising Stars,” which included a conversation with three young Indians navigating many of the same career issues we discuss here on The Gig. It shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how often we get comments from the Subcontinent here. But there is a perception, however wrong, that young Indians are all taking their parents’ advice or following their example and dutifully forging ahead in the tech fields (in addition to our “traditional” chosen occupation of doctoring, of course) without a second thought.

Not so, at least based on these panelists’ experience. Akshay Mahajan, 21, dropped out of college to be at freelance photographer. And Nikila Srinivasan, 19, is pursuing what she calls a dual career path, as an engineering student and aspiring writer. “One is my profession, and one is my passion,” she says. She isn’t willing to give the writing up, particularly since, as she pointed out, with one company often recruiting 200 people from one campus for the same entry-level posts, there isn’t much incentive to be the top graduate or opportunity to distinguish yourself.

But it was this that I found most interesting: “In a small town,” says Abhishek Nayak, a student at the prestigious BITS, Pilani, engineering college and already an entrepreneur himself, “there’s a lot of pressure to succeed from parents and peers.” Fellow young people, it seems, play a comparable role in pressuring Yers here to choose what Mahajan calls “careers perceived as ones that will get you set.” Is this the case in the U.S. and elsewhere, too, or is it a function of India’s more recent shift to tolerating all this free-spiritedness in its youth?

Regardless, the peer point was driven home to me at our closing dinner, when I sat with a general from the Indian army, his wife, and his daughter. She’s a 21-year-old product design student who, at his encouragement, studied in Italy for six months. And now that she’s about to graduate, he told me, he’d like her to take a year or two to travel the world before settling down to work. “Talk to her,” he told me, smiling but plaintive, as though my good example as a follow-your-heart writer might knock some sense into her.

I’m not ashamed to admit that the whole thing had me a little disoriented. While he was explaining how he wanted her to stay with friends around the world and rough it a bit, I was still marveling at a seemingly traditional Indian dad sending his young daughter off to Italy by herself. I don’t think my own mom would’ve gone for that, and we were growing up in liberal New England.

It was all pretty amazing. And I think it speaks to something pretty amazing going on in India, as it takes center stage. After all, as moderator and editor JAM Magazine Rashmi Bansal mentioned in her introduction, much is made of the fact that 54% of India’s population is under the age of 35. (Read Rashmi’s “Youth Curry” blog for more on Indian youth here.) So it shouldn’t be a shock at all that young people there are struggling with many of the same things we are here.

In fact, maybe there are some bigger lessons to be learned from the emerging Indian example, though I probably need to recover from the jet-lag a bit before I can say with any certainty what they might be. (I’m back writing at Frankfurt Airport, by the way, so let me ask forgiveness in advance if it’s visibly affected my thought processes…) In the meantime, what do you all — Indians and non — think?

Well, we hit a nerve with “Money v. meaningful work,” and there is more still to say. But it’ll have to wait till next week, because I’m writing this from a gate at JFK, heading to India for this year’s Fortune Global Forum.

This week, I found myself rushing around Manhattan in search of a new suit and cocktail dress for the event. And somewhere around the tenth conservative black Hillary-esque pantsuit, it dawned on me that — despite all my bluster about us (Yers) being quirky and bold — here I was driving myself crazy trying to dress myself in legitimacy.

Why all the fuss? Simple, though it took me a while to realize. It’s because this conference is in India. And from the days of my babyhood in Guyana, where almost half the population is of Indian descent, I — like so many others in the Indian diaspora — have felt the overwhelming need to defend and represent and sometimes exalt all things Indian.

I didn’t get to be this way on my own. When we were small, my siblings and I used to joke that when we were bad, we were American, and when we were good, we were Indian. At least to our mom. This wasn’t so much about any bias against the U.S. — after all, she’d chosen to bring us here because it meant something better to her — as it was about an implicit belief that our Indian “culture” offered something deeper: a sense of history and obligation and decorum.

And everyday, it was under attack — from our friends, and McDonald’s (MCD), and Britney Spears (or whoever was hot back then — Debbie Gibson?). Of course, to the four of us, India wasn’t any of that; mostly, it was something we watched every Sunday on “Namaste America.”

And yet, as I attempt to be-suit myself, it’s obvious that Mom did her job better than I realized. In a lot of ways, it’s not unlike what’s being done to India herself now. Not long ago, during the celebrations of India’s 60th birthday a few weeks ago, I chatted with Jehangir Pocha, the editor of Businessworld, an Indian business magazine.

And as we got to talking, I told him how amazing it was to see all the fanfare over this anniversary — the events and speakers and visibility and, to be frank, the Western-ness of it all. Because I remembered the 50th party, and that had been about what India was to Indians, not — as this one seemed to be — about what India meant to everyone else. Ten years ago, though, India hadn’t yet been hailed by everyone and his brother as the next big thing, and one was as likely to see a story about Mother Teresa battling poverty in India’s slums as one about a gazillionaire Indian changing the face of e-something.

Not so much the case anymore. In some ways, this shift is inevitable. As I said to Pocha, it’s much more important to a 16-year-old to demonstrate his adulthood than it is for a 60-year-old. And with the relatively recent warp-speed development that has transformed a country whose image was for too long all poverty and Bollywood, India has become that 16-year-old. So it makes sense that she wants to put on a suit, metaphorically speaking. (Let’s be honest, for a long time, our most visible representatives were Apu and Ms. Universe).

But there is such a thing as being too packaged. And when I listen to conversations about India that are all glow and no light — as in, shed on the myriad other issues that face a country still facing rampant illiteracy, poverty and discrimination — I can’t help but be concerned. It’s wonderful to represent ourselves well, but it’s also important to remember that representing oneself well is not synonymous with representing oneself as “good.”

We represent ourselves well when we support great art — art that shows every Indian’s reality, good or not-so-good — and when we speak out about the disparities that persist in our communities, whether they’re in India, the U.S., the U.K., or the Caribbean. And while I’m all for celebrating milestones, I hope that excitement doesn’t keep us from recognizing how far we have to go.

Or maybe I’m just getting old, and these things just bother me more now than when I was small and didn’t even really understand concepts so abstract as race and ethnicity. I can’t say for sure, and maybe I’ll feel differently once I’m back in the motherland (or not running on 10 minutes worth of sleep). I’ll let you know, and in the meantime, tell us what you think…

For July’s “Burning Question,” I thought we’d take a look at something that countless among you — from the 16’s to the 26’s, the artists to the accountants — have brought up: parents. You’ve read the stories, pieces with such encouraging titles as, “‘Helicopter’ parents hover when kids job hunt,” and, “Do ‘helicopter moms’ do more harm than good?” There’s even a Wikipedia entry for this new phenomenon.

But jokes aside, as anyone who read this recent New York Times story — about parents extending and overextending themselves to fund their adult children’s lives — can attest, they do it because they love. And that makes it a bit difficult for anyone — child, recruiter, or reporter — to dismiss them altogether. So if you can’t just say, “Mom and Dad, get a life,” what exactly can you do to keep your parents happy and your dignity intact?

To get some perspective, I turned to Dan Black, Ernst & Young’s Americas director of campus recruiting. Why Black? Aside from working with hundreds of Gen Yers and having young children himself, he’s also dealt with his fair share of parents. So with his expertise and my own first-hand experience, we put together a little five-step plan to recovering from that widespread Gen Y affliction, excessive parental involvement. (And before we go any further, let me just say that, obviously, this doesn’t apply to every parent or even to every Gen Yer, as many of us didn’t have parents who could be this involved. But we’re talking about the other set here, the ones who get maligned by the Wall Street Journal and whatnot.)

Step 1. Acknowledge the problem.
Some people will tell you that parents have always loved their kids, and while that’s true, there’s some pretty good anecdotal evidence that it’s gone a bit beyond that. Take the story Black told me when we first met while I was reporting our Gen Y story, which had a long section on parents, too.

Last summer, at E&Y’s intern conference, which brings about 2,000 interns together, someone called looking for the person in charge. “I pick up the phone and it’s an older gentleman who says, ‘Yes, I’m so-and-so’s dad. Who’s this’?” Black says, laughing as he pantomimes looking at a phone in confusion.

Turns out it was a concerned father whose daughter had failed to call the night before. Mom entered the fray, too, and though Black gave them every assurance that the company tracked all the interns — this was only day two of the four-day conference, and little so-and-so was probably in a seminar or team-building event somewhere — he eventually set out to find the girl. “You can only imagine the face on this poor young woman when I pulled her out of her activity and said, ‘Your parents called and they need you to call them back. They’re just worried about you.’ She was mortified.”

That might sound extreme, but I bet in a similar situation, it probably wouldn’t have taken my own mom long to give Black a ring. And even in circumstances less dire, Black says he hears from lots of parents who want to know what their recent grads should be doing to apply to E&Y — and even what colleges their high-schoolers should be considering so that they’ll one day be considered by E&Y.

It may be loving, but it’s not normal — or okay.