On Monday morning, at 8 a.m., I walked into the office where I work as an entry-level social media coordinator and writer for a PR firm. Half an hour later, I walked out a statistic.

My layoff went perfectly to script. I was asked to come in early to help prepare for a Hootsuite demonstration, in which I would teach employees with five times my work experience how to craft a 140-character sentence. Incidentally, that didn’t happen. Instead, I was prompted to please step into the president’s office; I brought my notes. The director of operations and my manager began reciting their lines: “we really hate to do this;” “we have to downsize;” “this isn’t easy for us;” and the nightmarish “your position will cease to exist.” That montage in Up in the Air came to mind. You know the one. George Clooney, the outsourced perpetrator of letting ’em go gently, does a round of layoffs, and it’s not pretty.

As is culturally demanded of me, I began to blubber. Tissues, already on hand, were passed over. Next, I cleaned out my desk, unpinning from my bulletin board the debris of staring at the same wall for five months. The goodbyes came as I crammed the contents of my cubicle into my bike basket and rode off into the sunset of… unemployment.

Here I am, now, one of the 7.3 per cent of unemployed Canadians. It’s the first time I’ve been directly set back by an ailing economy that, with a juvenile sense of invincibility, the same way cocky smokers must feel towards lung cancer, I was convinced couldn’t touch me. Now I know better. I must be an adult, or something.

With global unemployment such a trending topic (forgive the Twitter-infested vocab; this used to be my job), it’s only noteworthy how brilliantly topical my layoff was. One day after my forced liberation, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty gave the fall economic update, in which he recognized that his plan of balancing the budget by 2014 wasn’t, isn’t, going to happen. The worst thing is how not surprised we are. In October, 54,000 Canadians lost their jobs, the most since the recession’s sharpest downward peak in February 2009. It’s projected that the unemployment rate, having recently climbed to said 7.3 per cent, will further rise to eight per cent by 2012.

So I hereby publicly welcome myself to the club of unemployed twenty-somethings – and looking at things globally, hell, it’s a pretty big club. Let’s call it the IPOD Club, borrowing the UK’s acronym for “Insecure, Pressured, Overtaxed and Debt-ridden,” a term, like many other inadequate terms, used to define the whole generation. Unemployment can hardly be discussed without snidely and obligatorily mentioning that it could always be worse. It could be Europe, with its near-dadaist numbers of youth unemployment. According to a recent Globe article, 48 per cent of my fellow twenty-somethings in Spain are part of the club, in Greece, poor Greece, it’s 43. 5 per cent. In the UK, a study shows that those without work for one year at 22 (hi!) found themselves with an income “penalty” of 13 to 21 per cent 20 years later.

I took a look at the International Labour Association’s report on youth unemployment, which spells out the now-obvious: “young people are the ‘first out’ and ‘last in’ during times of an economic recession.” In a series of line graphs, it also shows the global unemployment rates by region. South Asia and East Asia are hovering around the 10 per cent mark, ranking in the lowest.  North Africa and the Middle East are highest at 25 per cent, Sub-Saharan Africa is floating around 12.5 per cent, while developed countries and the E.U. are fluctuating, currently sitting around 17 per cent. These numbers aren’t (obviously) one-size-fits-all, as they don’t take into consideration work conditions or working poverty. “The majority of young people in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and other low-in- come regions are trying to make a living at whatever job they can find,” intones the report, “most often working long hours under poor conditions in the informal economy.”

So I know that young people have it worse (than they think they should) everywhere, and that they have it far, far worse in, say, Syria. But we don’t compare ourselves to kids in Syria. We compare ourselves to kid prodigies on YouTube. And as we enter workplaces shaped by the way we were brought up, with an emphasis on creativity and individual thinking, we measure our achievements against our expectations. Now I’m realizing that my expectations were borrowed against changing times. The bubble’s burst.

I should have seen this coming when I read last week’s cover story by Noreen Malone in New York. Malone’s piece was ample with fun figures, like ooh, look, the employment rate for Americans aged 16 to 29 is at its lowest since World War II. It also takes a good clean clinical look at a generation infected with economic woe-is-measles. According to Malone (and I agree and will openly identify with all this) we are self-centred, hyperaware of our specialness and unaccustomed to being denied. Photos accompanying the article give a mini-tour of New York’s young, uncertain, down-and-outers. My favourite is a 23-year-old “hot-dog vendor with a B.A.” If you look closely, you can see the hint of a smirk on his face.

It’s as easy as it is futile to blame our parents for this. They did exactly what their parents did by aggressively ensuring that their kids would have it better, even if they had to go into too much debt, too soon, to do so. We were silver spoon-fed all the right sayings, like “the world is your oyster” and “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” We were promised a world of opportunity—and here my generation’s sense of entitlement really shines—but we’re not getting any of it for reasons beyond our control. This time, Toronto the Good in Canada the Relatively Economically Sound didn’t prevent the statistically likely from happening to me. So what to do, for the “first out” and “last in” members of the labour market? Well, if we were five we’d be stamping our feet screaming “BUT I WANNA I WANNA.” Instead, we’re camping/occupying the parks.

Despite the above bitterness, I’m taking this with an extra-strength dose of optimism. My layoff couldn’t have been more amicable, and, full disclosure: I didn’t really like writing press releases anyway. I’ve been out of school for less than a year, I know lots of other grads don’t even have jobs, and I should acknowledge the silver lining, that the termination of this job is the launch of my career, I’m better off, blah blah blah.

One of the almost-adults interviewed by Malone made an admission scarily close to defeat: “Maybe I’ll be okay with just keeping afloat rather than making a splash,” she said. I beg to differ. Blame it on my as-of-yet unwavering optimism, undampened by a whole three days of unemployment, but I still think that—yes, goddamn it!—I will still make something of myself. I’m not sure what, so I’ll just keep doing what this generation was raised to do: overachieve. And maybe start a Tumblr.

Now then. Who’s hiring?