When Generation Y went home this November to be with family, to celebrate and give thanks, many of us found less comfort and cheer than the holidays usually provide. After we finished midterms and cleaned cubicles, after trekking home aboard buses and planes, many of us found neighborhoods littered with real estate signs, and favorite hometown restaurants and stores shut for good.

Many returned to see the homes that they and their families had been shut out of by lenders.

Even those less impacted by the financial collapse could feel a weight in the air. The heft of something awry but difficult to describe, the burden of something inherently intangible. A tension built by cover stories about increased burglaries, and the sight of middle-aged couples together at street lights, looking for offerings.

It's the grating of an uncertain future, the guarantee that America will suffer more before she begins to recuperate.

I caught an early screening of the stunning new film "Slumdog Millionaire" in Los Angeles, after which director Danny Boyle fielded questions about the work and its genesis. One thing the animated Boyle couldn't quite verbalize — though his picture captures it with alarming clarity — was the essence of vitality in India.

It's something equally intangible to the chill hovering over America this winter.

The movie tells the story of an orphan from Mumbai who finds himself on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The film cuts between his childhood — spent racing through shantytown alleys, hustling American tourists and facing unimaginable horrors — the telecast of the game show, and an interrogation in which police beat the 18-year-old, insisting that he must have cheated the game. It's one of the best films I've seen in years.

Through the three story lines, Boyle weaves the life of Jamal Malik into an insufferably eloquent fairytale. But he also captures India, the incredible nature of life lived in such close proximity to death, the acceptance of swings of fate, and the mentality instilled living in a world so different from our own.

When Westerners first travel to the Third World, when American and Europeans fully immerse themselves in the chaos and dangers of places like India, Nigeria or Nicaragua, they almost universally walk away with the same dual impression. They're first appalled by the poverty they've seen, but then overwhelmed by the spirit and happiness of those that live in its midst.

It's one of the world's marvelous incongruences, one of God's most carefully managed ironies. The West, filled with its frivolities — cars and iPhones and bottle service clubs — houses some of the most depressed, unfulfilled souls on earth. Nearly 10 percent of American adults are on antidepressants

As Generation Y stares into daunting months ahead, it's worth recognizing some solace in the Slumdog's story. In India, people are proud of the notion that "nobody starves in India." While the idiom is relatively true, it's far truer of America.

We're pitted against difficult times. A survey released this month of 945 employers by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University suggests that hiring for graduates of all degree levels over the next year would decrease by at least 8 percent. "In two short years," the study reads, "we have moved from a zenith of exuberant and aggressive college hiring, through a period of cautious optimism, to a place of quiet desperation."

Few of us expected to have a single career or employer in the fashion of those before us. The little we know of the information age is enough to recognize its dynamism, enough to understand that we, too, will have to be adaptive and innovative to be successful.

The lesson of the Slumdog is not that we should be thankful to live above abject poverty — but rather that there's value in the struggle. That lives spent overcoming and adapting are perhaps the most rewarding, and that those busy navigating obstacles and scraping by lack time for self-indulgence.

Also enshrined in "Millionaire," as well as in our future, is the unyielding truth that the reality before Generation Y is as bleak or as bright as we judge it to be. That destiny is what you will. Let us be thankful that our fate — as both a generation and a nation — is unequivocally our own.

Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research associate for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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