So, yeah, 2008 happened. We watched, read, and blogged as the biggest international clusterfuck in our lifetimes (with apologies to any Great Depression survivors who read blogs) leeched the blood from our stocks, home prices, and 401Ks like Bela Lugosi on a 5-month bender. Cable newscaster speeches started sounding like the pre-climax villain soliloquies in action blockbusters (”All these people walking around, going about their daily lives — they have no idea how easily their little world could be destroyed at the touch of a button, etc. etc.”). And, in perhaps the biggest sign of the impending apocalypse, the cable newscasters were right.

Still, there’s something comforting about watching everything we’ve been taught to value liquefy into a river of shit. Granted, the comfort’s not in the suffering of those losing homes, jobs, and financial well-being — nor the poverty of empathy they encounter when they look for help.

No, it’s the sudden solidarity of shared experience — that’s something new for my generation. For once in our lives, no matter how lofty our SAT scores or how big our last bonuses we’re all pretty equally fucked. No matter how many APs you aced in 11th grade or how many hours you billed last year, how much you annihilated that asshole from Princeton with the Armani pocket square, you aren’t going to make partner, or managing director, or EVP. And to clamp the final nail in that dream, the firm you worked for no longer exists! Or maybe you were downsized, or the “need for your post was eliminated.”

In other words, a fat helping of reality was dumped in our laps. All those promises our boomer parents made about “hard work paying off” and “finding a company that takes care of you” have been trampled. Is that fair? Hell no. There is no “fair.” Couples that lived on soda bread and ramen for 30 years to put away for retirement have watched their bank balances vaporize. There is no certainty or control. And the more we attempt to wrap ourselves in their warm fuzzy layers, the more nebulous they become.

Like it? Yeah, me neither. But the universe, unfortunately, doesn’t give a shit about our personal preferences.

Still, for those of us lucky enough to be a couple decades from retirement, there’s a sort of freedom that comes with all this — at least now we can stop worrying so much about whether we measure up to all those bastions of capitalist perfection who grace the alumni magazine back pages. Now, a great equalizer has swept in — their jobs aren’t safe, and neither is yours.

And who knows, maybe some good will emerge from the mess. We’ll all have to adapt, get a bit more leathery and quick on our feet, and possibly even put down the Blackberries and iPhones for half a second to ask questions like “Where do I really fit into this mass of humanity that, collectively, has no clue what it’s doing here or where it’s going?”

And perhaps instead of spending the hours anguishing over whether our bags/shoes/watches/addresses/job titles/salaries are “good enough” (aka equal to or better than everyone else’s), we’ll focus on what we really want to accomplish during our 90-or-so-year-lease on this planet.

Which may not pack the character-building punch of oh, say, a Civil Rights Movement — but we may as well get used to taking what we can get.