'Smug', and soon in debt and despair

Over drinks in Soho last week, a couple of friends and I fell into an argument. "Apparently, we're all horribly smug," I announced. One of them, Harry, had organised this morose drinking session to allay fears about losing his City job after Christmas. He raised his eyebrows at me from behind a half-empty pint glass. "It's a survey, you see," I persisted, before making those naff little quote marks with my forefingers. "Young adults like us believe we're more capable than we actually are. Mostly our parents' fault, it turns out."

I filled them in on the details. A recent survey says modern parents and the education system have been too generous in ladling out praise on their young wards. The upshot is that we, the offspring, are brimming over with self-confidence and so are destined for depression when things subsequently go wrong in life.

Well, the pub erupted in a storm, or at least into two camps. Mindful of my own childhood, I ventured that indeed perhaps we were all fairly smug. A middle-class bunch, we were spoon-fed our lessons at good schools and universities before setting our self-satisfied caps at professional jobs without worrying as to whether this was achievable.

In fact, it's shameful to admit but the first time I encountered one of life's hard knocks was being turned down by Oxford for an undergraduate place. It had been an excruciating interview process where I had resorted to coughing up Philippa Gregory's latest bodice-ripper as my most informative foray into Elizabethan England. The history don seemed unimpressed; the letter denying me a place arrived shortly afterwards. My smugness was momentarily tempered. "So if that's the worst," I concluded, "we've had it pretty good."

But my almost jobless friend Harry erupted. "I'm sick of this argument! We're always being told that we're smug, yet look at the mess we're in."

In a way, he's right. Twenty-somethings might indeed have been too smug for too long but we're hardly congratulating ourselves now. Increasingly unemployed and still facing unrealistic property prices, we're the ones who will be taxed to cover government borrowing and never be able to retire affordably. Little point in surveys pointing out our defects.

"Anyway," Harry piped up again, "chances are we're going to need all this over-confidence in the years to come." Sermon delivered, he slumped in his seat and drained his pint. "Until then I'm ruined and we're doomed. So who's going to buy me a drink?"