criticisms no laughing matter

Vancouver should sit up, take notice

Criticisms of the city's downtown core in The Economist are no laughing matter as we approach the 2010 Winter Games

The Vancouver Sun

Monday, July 17, 2006

By Miro Cernetig

Vancouverites never miss reading, or at the very least boasting about, any edition of The Economist designating their city as the best on the planet in which to live.

So maybe we ought to pay equally close attention when the world's most prestigious magazine -- and probably the one that's only truly read on a global basis -- takes pains to offer a wakeup call to Vancouver, now undergoing the biggest population and development boom in its history.

The Economist's latest dispatch about our charmed city by the Pacific has this somewhat sobering title: "A great city more troubled than it's cracked up to be."

It's not an entirely scathing article. We're hardly headed to the bottom of The Economist's livability ratings, occupied by such spots as Tehran and Algiers, unless urban planners do a lot of things wrong in the years to come.

"It regularly tops surveys of the world's most livable cities," the magazine says of the city. "Vancouver's combination of natural beauty and urban sophistication has drawn expatriates from far and wide."

Still, the article isn't anything the boosters at the tourism board are going to be writing home about, either. In fact, the theme is that Vancouver is a city at the crossroads, experiencing the growing pains of its success and quite possibly lacking a coherent plan to save itself from its phenomenal growth.

The big problems aren't in the suburbs, though the magazine wonders whether planners are going to encourage urban sprawl with their current push for $3 billion in bigger highways, rather than more rapid transit, that will bring more cars into the city's core.

What The Economist worries about is the quality of life in Vancouver's very epicentre, usually applauded for those magnificent beaches and architectural triumphs such as Coal Harbour's glass towers and Arthur Erickson's waterfall over Granville Square concrete.

". . . it is the once pleasant downtown that causes most alarm," it warns. "Homeless panhandlers yell at theatre goers, while young addicts deal drugs on street corners. They spill out from the Downtown Eastside, an area of decrepit boarding houses, sleazy bars and boarded up shops infamous for the country's highest rate of poverty and drug addiction. Its ills have resisted decades of government effort."

It might be tempting to call this an overheated exaggeration from a visitor. Vancouver's downtown is hardly a walk through an American ghetto. Yet others, particularly those who have seen the city grow over the last few decades, have noted The Economist's critique and concurred.

"Just Thursday night I drove past the corner of Georgia and Granville -- the very heart of the city -- and saw a couple of homeless people bedding down for the night outside Pacific Centre, the city's ritziest mall," Ian Haysom, a former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun wrote in his column in the Victoria Times Colonist. "It shocked a visitor to Vancouver who was driving with me. Me? I'm not shocked by anything here any more . . . .

"The city, if we continue on this course, will be a haven for the very, very rich and the desperately poor, coexisting in an unlikely metropolis of Guccis and gutter-dwellers."

The Economist also isn't optimistic that the city has yet come up with the solutions to these challenges. It says rookie Mayor Sam Sullivan's "most promising scheme is an attempt to rein in sprawl by increasing housing density in central areas. But on the crucial issues of drugs and crime, he has made little progress."

Should we worry about what The Economist thinks?

Well, yes. As the 2010 Olympics approach, this is just a first glimpse of the unflinching critical eye Vancouver will be getting from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the analysts who rank 127 cities each year for the magazine.

And while no journalism is infallible, The Economist is an institution that often sets the agenda and has an ability to attach labels to people and places that stick. Just ask former Prime Minister Paul Martin, whom the magazine christened Mr. Dithers, a moniker that haunted him all the way to defeat.

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Magazine says council must clean up Downtown Eastside

Vancouver Sun

Thursday, July 13, 2006

by Emily Chung

Vancouver is a troubled city where "homeless panhandlers yell at theatre-goers, while young addicts deal drugs on street corners," says The Economist magazine.

Last year, Vancouver was ranked the most livable city in the world for the fourth year in a row by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a branch of the same company that owns the weekly magazine.

The influential magazine focuses on international politics and business news and opinion.

In November, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which analyses countries' livability and their business environments, also ranked Vancouver as the top city to do business in out of a list of 100.

But the magazine's July 8 -14 issue says although the city may top surveys, "some ordinary Vancouverites wonder whether their increasingly gritty city is worthy of all the accolades."

The article says Vancouver's high housing costs produce traffic congestion by forcing families to the suburbs.

But most of its attention focuses on the "once-pleasant downtown" and the troubles caused by the Downtown Eastside's high rate of poverty and drug addiction.

"If Vancouver is to continue to live up to its reputation as an urban paradise, it will need a city government with the power, as well as the will, to keep it that way," the article warns.

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can't keep a good man down

Down but not out

When a healthy and active Greg Potter went to sleep one night in January, he never dreamed he'd wake up paralyzed. Now he's determined to walk again.

Vancouver Courier

Friday, June 23, 2006

By Fiona Hughes

At 3:51 a.m. on Tuesday, January 31, Deep Cove Fire Hall No. 4 received a bizarre 911 dispatch call about a man who awoke and found himself unable to move. Like all 911 calls, it came in as an address. The only information the hall received concerned a man who'd awakened around 2 a.m. to use the toilet and discovered he was paralyzed from the chest down.

Lying on his back in the dark bedroom of a North Shore apartment, wedged between the bed and the wall with his legs twisted in the sheets above him on the bed, Greg Potter wondered about the sudden turn his life had taken. The legs that took him on regular hikes along the Baden Powell Trail were out of commission. He had no sensation from the waist down. He couldn't even wiggle his toes.

"Well, this is new," he said quietly to himself.

Other than feeling a little under the weather, Potter had gone to bed after a typical day for a local freelance writer, musician and author who's written for just about every publication in Vancouver, including the Courier. He'd started work on a story about the New York steel-guitar gospel group the Campbell Brothers for the North Shore News, answered emails, made calls and contemplated his next move.

His good friend Les Wiseman, an editor at Canada Wide Communications, had telephoned to offer him work a day or so earlier, but Potter turned it down because he wanted to work on a novel he'd started.

Although he missed his almost daily hike in the trails above Deep Cove, he kept to the Zone diet that had helped him lose a considerable amount of weight off his six-foot, four-inch frame a few years earlier, when he also gave up booze and a more raucous lifestyle.

Potter went to bed at 10 p.m. thinking about giving up his apartment and moving to the Sunshine Coast, where he could easily telecommute for the bulk of his freelancing gigs, travelling into the city when necessary. He didn't pay much attention to the pins and needles sensation in his legs or the minor back pain. He attributed everything to a muscle he'd torn a few days earlier.

Only a week earlier, nearing his 44th birthday, his family physician gave him a clean bill of health. He was happy and had friends. Life was proceeding as normal, and like most healthy people, he was making plans. He didn't know his life was about to change.

"I guess this is my 44th birthday present," he later joked.

Potter knew he had to call someone when his legs refused to move. But because he wasn't yet alarmed about his situation, he called his mother.

"Usually when the phone rings at that time your heart races, but it didn't for some reason," recalls Fran Potter, his 82-year-old mother.

Picking up the phone she heard her son calmly say, "I think I'm paralyzed from the waist down. Do you think I should call an ambulance?'"

"Sounds like a good idea," she replied.

That he was able to call anyone was an accomplishment. The phone was on the other side of his queen size bed and Potter only had one working arm to drag himself along. (He'd wrenched a muscle in his left shoulder, which left that arm useless.) Using his good right arm, Potter clumsily pulled his 210-pound frame across the bed, accidentally knocking over the table in the darkened room and disengaging the phone adaptor from the power bar. Plugging the adaptor back in proved difficult in his physically altered state and he ended up with his back on the floor, shoulder blades pinned to the wall, numb legs on the bed still twisted in bedding. Still, he managed to plug everything back in and punch in his mother's number.

After taking her advice, he dialed 911 then called her back. She stayed on the phone with him until the firefighters and paramedics arrived.

Lying on his bedroom floor in the dark, with books and CDs digging into his back and shoulders, he thought, "I'm at the bottom of the Marianas Trench--there's nowhere to go but up."

It had been a rough couple of years for the Potter family. His older brother Glenn died of a heart attack. Doug, Glenn's twin, faced serious health problems that put him in a coma for a week.

When Wiseman heard the news about his friend, who he met about 20 years ago while writing about his band Lost Durangos for Vancouver Magazine, he was stunned. His heart went out to Potter's mother.

"I was gobsmacked--hearing what happened to him was like a hammer in the forehead," says Wiseman. "Greg had been through a long run of bad luck and hard times and this was just unbelievable. I especially felt for his mother, who had recently lost another of her sons."

Fran Potter, recovering from throat surgery, remembers her youngest of four sons being calm when he called her to tell her about his sudden paralysis.

"He didn't seem to be upset. Maybe he was stunned," she recalls, her voice low and gravelly due to the recent surgery. "It's such a weird thing to wake up paralyzed. Good grief."

Potter says he found his situation oddly humourous. He attributed the paralysis to the pulled muscle or the flu-like feelings he'd been having and thought it would right itself in a day or two.

"Surprisingly, I didn't freak out, even though I didn't feel a thing--literally not a thing--from the chest down," he says. "In retrospect, I don't think it was having to use the can that woke me up--and, no, I didn't make it [to the toilet]--my nerves would have been toasted in that area and I wouldn't have felt a thing."

Although the firefighters arrived within seven minutes of receiving the call, it took them another 20 minutes to get inside Potter's apartment, where they found him jammed between the bed and the bedroom wall. Since Potter couldn't unlock the door, the firefighters had hoisted a ladder up to the second floor to find his balcony. The windows were locked and they didn't want to bust through in case it wasn't his balcony. By this point the RCMP had arrived, allowing the firefighters the legal right to break in through the front door.

Potter greeted one of the first firefighters on the scene.

"Oh, hi Dave," he said

"Hi Greg," said a stunned Capt. David Franco, who knows Potter through his older twin brothers, both of whom were firefighters on the North Shore. He recalls that Potter was apologetic about the call.

"They're all pretty affable guys who don't want to be a problem," he says. "He had that apologetic attitude, which is ridiculous. There were a lot of sorries in there, which the Potters are famous for... but when you realize it's someone you know, and no firefighter waits for that call, it's harder to detach yourself from the job and do what you have to do. It becomes personal all of a sudden."

Getting Potter out of the apartment and into the ambulance took almost an hour. Franco and his crew had to take the bed and a bookshelf apart, disrobe Potter to assess his condition and place him carefully on a stretcher, which took three men. Potter, now almost naked, remained calm--even helpful.

"You usually don't see people this calm and relaxed when they can't feel their legs--they're usually quite agitated," says Franco. "Greg kept his sense of humour throughout the whole thing."

Nobody knew it at the time, but the wiring in Potter's legs--not to mention his groin, bladder and bowels--had been short-circuited due to a spinal cord injury.

Although it was five in the morning and there was no traffic on the roads, the ambulance driver turned on the siren to race to the hospital. The paramedics wanted to avoid any sudden stops to prevent jarring of the spine. It was Potter's second trip in an ambulance--the first he can't recall because he was unconscious after a barroom brawl.

"This time it was kind of fun, in a submoronic little-kid kind of way," he says.

Luckily for Potter the Lions Gate Hospital ER was empty and he was seen immediately--none too soon. While undergoing a barrage of questions about his health, lifestyle, dental work, recent cuts, bruises, bites and MRIs, and more questioning from an infectious disease specialist, Potter developed a high fever. The time he spent awaiting test results in the ER doped up on drugs is a blank except for a neurologist's comment: "This is significant."

"I'm sure I asked a lot of dopey questions, but that is the one response I clearly recall. 'This is significant.' I didn't say anything but thought to myself, 'What the fuck does that mean?'"

By noon, a neurosurgeon, Dr. Ramesh Sahjpaul, dashed into the room, tore off his tie and told Potter, "We're going to the OR right now."

They had discovered what was causing Potter's paralysis--an abscess pressing against his spine. It had to be removed.

"Time is of the essence in these kinds of situations," says Dr. Sahjpaul, in a phone interview months after treating Potter that morning. "It can be minutes to hours before the damage can become irreversible. If he hadn't woken up, the damage could have been permanent."

To relieve the pressure on the spine, Sahjpaul cut an incision in Potter's upper right back, then removed some bone and spinal cord lining to drain the abscess and wash out the infection. "What happened to [Greg] is very uncommon," says Sahjpaul.

Less than two hours after going under the knife, Potter was recovering in the neurological intensive care unit.

The bacteria that caused the abscess alongside Potter's spine is called strep milleri, a common bacteria found in most people's mouths. A port of entry for the microbe can be anything from a cracked tooth, routine brushing or flossing or dental work. In Potter's case, the best theory doctors have is a tooth Potter cracked over Christmas. He bit into something, which dislodged a metal band left over from braces he wore as a teenager and lost a chunk of tooth. Being self-employed with no health or dental plan, Potter suffered through the pain. But he is pondering looking up the orthodontist who failed to remove the metal band.

According to Dr. Bill Bowie, an infectious disease specialist at UBC and VGH, strep milleri can cause abscesses quickly and rapidly. Bowie, who was not involved in Potter's care, says this particular bacteria typically causes an abscess in or outside the lining of the brain or in the liver. In Potter's case, it travelled through the blood stream to the spine. "It can cause an abscess anywhere in the body and is good at it--the spine is an uncommon location but not unheard of," Bowie says.

Abscesses due to a bacteria like strep milleri are not uncommon among injection drug users, people with weakened or suppressed immune systems, alcoholics, people with poor oral hygiene and diabetics.

"I personally only see two or three cases like this a year, but among the patient population at St. Paul's Hospital, there's probably a weekly occurrence [of cases like Potter's]," Sahjpaul says.

Potter didn't know it then, but he had developed diabetes and was given insulin at the hospital for three weeks. He now controls the diabetes through diet. But Sahjpaul surmises the diabetes wasn't necessarily the major factor in Potter's case.

"I think that link is very minor," he says. "You can't really prevent this if you're a normal, healthy individual. You're more likely to be hit by a car or be struck by lightning."

Once the abscess was drained, Potter's physicians pumped him with massive amounts of antibiotics to blast the infection out of his body. He remained on the drugs for seven weeks.

At 2 p.m., 12 hours after she first got her son's early morning call, Fran Potter received news from the hospital telling her that her son's surgery had gone well and that he was resting. She'd returned home from the hospital after her son was admitted, refusing to believe doctors who said he might be a permanent paraplegic.

"'That's not right--he'll get it all back,' I told them. He was not going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life and I told Greg the exact same thing. It was a mother's feeling I guess. I just knew he wasn't going to be paralyzed."

Within a few weeks of arriving at the hospital, Potter accepted he wouldn't be returning to his old apartment, which meant putting his belongings into storage indefinitely. His health was improving, albeit slowly, and sensation was returning to his lower body. Around the seven week mark, the muscle groups in his legs were coming to life.

"Before the surgery, doctors thought I'd never walk again, but they only told that to my mother, then me later," says Potter, who compared his hospital stay to being somewhere between Stalag 17 and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Despite it all, Potter maintains the highest regard for the nursing and physiotherapy staff on LGH's rehab ward.

Although he was initially calm about his paralysis, Potter, who would never be accused by anyone who knows him of being a Pollyanna, admits he had some poisonous days at the hospital. But he insists he was never afraid the paralysis would be permanent.

"I never thought that way, nor was I given any reason to think that way by the doctors, nurses and therapists," he says. "Instead, I would have deep and unexpected funks that would come out of nowhere. I'd just think, 'What the fuck did I do to deserve this?' And after taking stock of the countless heinous trespasses against certain individuals that would warrant such karmic justification, I usually broke down and sobbed for a while. A psychotherapist friend of mine says it's one of the best ways of cleansing your mind and soul. Works, too."

To help him urinate, nurses had to insert a catheter. One nurse told him he'd have to learn the procedure himself, because this was as good as it would get for the rest of his life. Potter confided to Wiseman that he cried himself to sleep that night.

When Wiseman first went to visit Potter soon after he was hospitalized, he anticipated finding his friend feeling dejected.

"I thought he'd be in a slough of despond, but he was just accepting it all," he says. "Perhaps he was punch drunk, just going, 'What the fuck else is life going to throw at me to top this one.' I was extremely impressed with his strength of character."

Potter got a phone in his shared hospital room, and Wiseman recalls with humour the first call he received from the unwilling patient. "The first time he called he seemed quite pleased that a nurse told him he had an erection, which he didn't know about because of the lack of sensation," says Wiseman.

Potter took it as a sign of progress, even if there were times he was ready to put a gun to his head. Drugs and music helped with the mood swings.

"You ask for a couple of Ativan, a bit of morphine and put Neil Young's Tonight's the Night on the CD Walkman. Before long, everything is once again right in the world."

When feeling returned to his legs, he had to relearn how to stand and walk. Occupational and physiotherapists scheduled rigorous twice-daily training sessions. He learned to sit up ("Not too easy when you ain't got no hip muscles"), stand, transfer himself from a wheelchair to a table bed, walk along parallel bars and use a stationary bicycle.

"Finding your legs again, so to speak, is quite difficult because it takes time not only for the muscle to regenerate and recognize the signal from the brain, but for the brain to remember what the hell it's supposed to do to the nerve ending to make the muscle do its thing," says Potter. "Not the most scholarly description of the process, but retraining your brain to make sure that, for example, your knee is overtop your toes when you go to stand--or else you'll fall backwards or topple over--is a pretty trippy thing to try and wrap your skull around after walking for 44 years."

Potter spent the bulk of his time reading, consuming a dozen books in 18 weeks, including James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross, James Ellroy's Hollywood Nocturne, Native Tongue and Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen, Andy Gill's Bob Dylan: The Making of Blood on the Tracks, Marley & Me by John Grogan, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche and Bill Bryson's Made in America.

He didn't order TV. He said watching reports on the hundred of millions of dollars the government is pouring into the 2010 Winter Olympics, when he was stuck in a hospital with cat scans held together with Scotch tape, would only have made him apoplectic.

Potter also went through a colourful collection of "roommates" during his four and a half month hospital stay, including one old guy "whose wife was on another floor recovering from surgery, but they couldn't leave him home alone or else he'd gobble all the meds in the house like Tic-Tacs."

"There was a screamer who woke at least four times each night howling, 'I can't breathe! I can't fuckin breathe!'" He could breathe, Potter notes with trademark sharpness, "or else he wouldn't have been able to make such an ungodly din."

Potter said adieu to his roomies June 8 when he was finally released from hospital. After struggling to find a wheelchair accessible apartment building, which he says was almost as challenging as recovering from a spinal chord injury, he's back on his own, getting around in a motorized wheelchair and enjoying the solitude after four long months surrounded by people 24 hours a day. He's even cooking, washing and cleaning on his own.

His legs are much stronger, but the road to complete recovery remains a long one. Some days are better than others. There are days when the pain from the muscles and nerves regenerating in his lower back, legs and groin area is so excruciating he's not up to going to his daily physio appointment at the hospital, which is across the street from his apartment. But Potter is hopeful that within six months he'll be able to walk with the help of a cane. Dr. Sahjpaul predicts it could take much longer before Potter returns to daily hikes on the Baden Powell Trail, however. "Recovery from spinal chord injuries takes years, not months," he says. "We'll have to wait and see about that."

Potter remains undecided about the move to the Sunshine Coast he was contemplating before his life became unglued. Coping with his new reality in a wheelchair is enough for now. Healing, however, has shed new light on his life. He's had ample hours to dwell on old mistakes, frustrations, misgivings and "pissed-away opportunities and the people who pissed them away for you."

"The trick," he says, "is to try and put some distance between your head and the latter. And quite a trick it is."

In a strange twist, Potter's currently wrapping up that story on the Campbell Brothers, who are playing at the Vancouver jazz festival.

"Picking up right where I left off. Jesus, that's a scary thought."

Odder, still, is how Potter now views the world. Known by friends as a cynical realist, Potter has developed an unshakeable belief in karma--even if he comes across more as a "shit happens" kind of guy.

"That Warren Zevon song, 'Bad Karma,' keeps playing through my head like a tape loop," he says. "'Bad Karma comin' after me/ Bad Karma killing me by degrees.'"



Lions Gate Hospital physiotherapist Marega Medlicott helps Potter regain his balance and coordination. (Photo Dan Toulgoet)

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Greg Potter (left) and Red Robinson sign books at their December 8, 2004 book launch at the Vancouver Museum

Backstage Vancouver: A Century of Entertainment Legends

by Greg Potter & Red Robinson
Harbour Publishing, November 2004

Review by John T.D. Keyes

You don't have to be a Vancouverite to get a kick out of Backstage Vancouver, although certainly most of the book's buyers will be from the Lower Mainland, or else they'll be homesick ex-pat Vancouverites desperate to savour a slice of local history. Looking for an anecdote about the genital warts discovered by the medical examiners of Errol Flynn's corpse? Wonder which local musician to this day thinks of Rosemary Clooney as a "mean bitch?" Thanks to exhaustive research and a nose for the telling anecdote, from the reverential to the truly tacky, Greg Potter and Red Robinson have delivered a whack of pop-culture junk food sure to satisfy all but the most voracious appetites.

For those who aren’t Vancouverites, the authors may need some introduction. Robinson cut his entertainment teeth as a teenage deejay; he's famous hereabouts for emceeing stadium shows by the likes of Elvis and the Beatles, and he has been a minor celebrity in his own right ever since.

Potter is a seasoned journalist with a string of newspaper and magazine credits; a few years ago, he also wrote Hand Me Down World, an entertaining local best-seller on Canadian rock music.

Backstage Vancouver is basically a chatty picture book. The early chapters, not surprisingly, cover off the city's youthful decades as a wide-open frontier town that was soon a fixture on the burlesque circuit. Some of the anecdotes trotted out here have the ring of familiarity, and the vintage pictures enliven things considerably. (Conversely the latter chapters serve up a fair number of ho-hum shots of contemporary pop stars, but the anecdotes save the day.) At 240 large-format pages, a lot of material must have hit the cutting-room floor. Perhaps if it sells well, the publisher would consider some sort of sequel, or better still an expanded edition.

Not that this edition isn’t fun stuff. It is. The text hinges greatly on what appear to have been interviews with a handful of key figures -- notably promoter Hugh Pickett, manager Bruce Allen, band leader Dal Richards, journalists Denny Boyd and Les Wiseman -- and, of course, with Robinson himself. The decision was made somewhere along the line to treat Robinson, one of the authors, in the same fashion textually as the other sources, and it is initially off-putting to see him quoted -- and referred to in the third person -- in an anecdote about Louis Armstrong on page 55.

The decision is seen as the correct one once we get knee-deep into Robinson's extensive reminiscences about the Elvis and Beatles days, and his material is woven seamlessly throughout the book thereafter.

I'm just guessing here, but I credit Potter with having the ear for the great quote, and there are some terrific ones. (The Wiseman stuff is particularly hilarious.) Quite a few of the sources aren’t afraid to use the f-word -- whether it's the gentlemanly Pickett or the once-gonzo Wiseman -- and boomer grandparents who intend to leave this book out on the coffee-table have been forewarned. The connecting narrative is snappily written as well: "The 1950s were the 20th century's mid-life crisis," begins one chapter, and a later reference to "John Woo's stinkeroo thriller Payback" has Potter's fingerprints all over it. While we're at it, he might as well take the blame for the dubious claim, on page 164, that Pamela Anderson is "arguably the world's most recognizable person."

I read this book in one straight sitting for the sake of this review, and it took part of one evening. I don’t imagine a typical reader will want to ingest so many empty calories in one fell swoop. Much more fun, I imagine, would be to dip into the book periodically, drawn in by the vintage photographs and then persuaded to stick around by the anecdotes. At almost $40, it might be a tad expensive for bathtub reading, but if you're not afraid of dropping it, sink into a tub for a long satisfying trip down memory lane. It's that kind of book. A martini and a joint would make it perfect.


Les Wiseman models a classic Iggy Pop tee at the Backstage Vancouver book launch, December 2004

the quarter-life crisis

The quarter-life crisis

At 25, university grads can look forward to five decades of boring jobs

The Gazette (Montreal)

Monday, July 3, 2006

By Iain Hollingshead

London Daily Telegraph -- Catholics believe life begins at conception; glossy magazines say we have to wait until 40 (or 60, or 74, or whatever they've made up this month). But the latest market research suggests that 29-year-olds are having all the fun and are unable to resist the "urge to splurge."

According to the survey commissioned by the online auction site eBay, 29 is the "age of true materialism,'' the point at which you command the highest spending power to fritter away on life's luxuries before worries about mortgages, pensions and school fees kick in.

But as a wizened 25-year-old, let me propose an alternative argument: Life really begins when you leave university with a degree you'll never use, owe thousands of dollars in student loans you can't afford, join a graduate scheme you loathe and live in an expensive apartment in some godforsaken neighbourhood, hoping you won't get mugged on the way home from the bus.

Life, in fact, begins with a quarter-life crisis - which is much like a midlife crisis, only worse: It's 20 years premature, no one gives you any sympathy and you're too young, poor and insignificant to buy a sports car and run off with your secretary.

Not that we deserve any sympathy. We're a mollycoddled, self-indulgent, selfish generation. According to another report published last week, young professionals are one of the groups most likely to waste doctors' time by not showing up to appointments. We've never had it so good, and we've never treated everyone else so badly - so here are a few thoughts on what has got us whining 20-somethings behaving so badly.

The root of the problem is that university has become such a poor preparation for life beyond. No wonder graduate employers keep on complaining that students lack the requisite skills for the workplace (as The Daily Telegraph reported last week in yet another survey). One of the hardest decisions a student has to take on an average day is whether to have chicken or minestrone Cup-a-Soup. The skills you develop - socializing, drinking, writing amusing e-mails - are hardly transferable to the marketplace. Learning how to copy other people's essays is only really useful if you want a career writing dodgy dossiers in the security services.

Leaving university therefore feels like falling off a conveyor belt of non-stop academic landmarks and launching in one fell swoop into the rest of your life. Farewell to brunches and dancing midweek to Abba in sweaty student clubs. Hello taxes, daily commutes and pension schemes. On the bright side, it's only 50 years (or is it 60 now - it keeps on going up?) until we can retire. Oh, good.

And what exactly are we meant to get up to in the meantime? The intricacies of Latin and Shakespeare are all very interesting, but they don't lead you down a career path in the same way as studying economics or medicine. You can do anything or nothing with an arts degree. It opens every door and no door. So you choose the worst door of all and go and take a financial-services or an accountancy course like everyone else.

And once you've opened this door it becomes increasingly hard to close it again. Graduate trainees swear they'll make the Faustian pact for "just one more year,' and end up trapped into a spiralling cycle of expensive partners, school fees and cocaine habits. Friends become split between those who work 90-hour weeks in the hope that one day they'll get a desk a little bit closer to the window, and those with interesting jobs who can never afford to go out and enjoy themselves.

The sad truth, then, is that to make money you have to work with money. And money per se is indescribably boring. One set of graduates is overpaid, overworked and unfulfilled. The other is underpaid, overworked and cranky. Both groups are jealous of the other. And sitting on top of them all, layer after layer, are two generations of more senior workers, determined that their juniors will have to jump through exactly the same hoops to get to where they are.

Few people, of course, genuinely love their jobs, but work for the vast majority of 20-somethings has become a labour of loathing. After a couple of months drafting PowerPoint presentations on recent trends in shampoo retailing, many find themselves longing for the chance to engage their brain again. Youth might be wasted on the young but university is definitely wasted on students.

These concerns aren't helped by a government that is desperate to ram-rod as many gullible teenagers into tertiary education as possible. Get a degree, they imply, and the world is your oyster. But graduates now have their expectations raised to such ridiculous levels that they are bound to be disappointed. Even the rubbish jobs are horribly oversubscribed.

No wonder, then, that we seek escapism within ourselves - blogs, Big Brother, wasted days at work entering obscure opinions under aliases in the "Have your say'' section of the BBC website. No one is content just to do something any more; everyone wants to be someone. Everyone wants a short-cut to success. But there are more wannabe performers than there are spectators. More people seeking fame than there are 15-minute slots.

It's not all gloom, of course. Working out what you don't want to do can be a valuable roundabout way of finding your vocation. Cambridge graduate Jimmy Carr worked at Shell before having a quarter-life crisis (his words) and becoming a successful comedian. A disastrous internship convinced me that I'd be better at writing a light-hearted novel about 20somethings than continuing to put numbers in Excel boxes. If you can't join them, beat them.

We are an entertainingly ridiculous demographic in many ways, simultaneously cynical and passionate, directionless and idealistic, self-absorbed and generous, puerile and romantic, naive and worldly. We're too old for teenage angst; too young to start worrying about house prices.

We also enjoy complex sexual and platonic relationships. Our grandparents courted. Our parents dated. Goodness knows what you'd call our shenanigans. Lines become blurred between friends and lovers - often with few consequences. Friendship groups are large and fluid. Best friends can be of either sex.

Relationships themselves have largely become a question of timing. You might hold an excellent hand but still decide to twist once more on 20 in the hope of being dealt an ace. We end up with so many choices that we're putting off marriage later and later. The issues facing many 30-somethings are now the same for those a decade younger.

It is this question of choice that sets our generation aside. Of course, every generation thinks that it is unique in some way. Every generation thinks it invented sex. And every older generation shakes its head and declares it has seen it all before. They're right to an extent. But the way in which we're now bumbling into a paralysis of indecision is without precedent. Endless freedom to choose can trap as well as liberate as we career-hop, bed-hop and flip-flop into stalemate.

Ultimately, however, we're really quite upbeat about it all in a way. True, we might be saddled with debts, sadistic bosses and undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases. We might have no causes, no beliefs and nothing worth fighting for. But we also have one of the best, navel-gazing decades of our lives ahead in which to experiment before things get serious. If not now, then when? And if it all goes wrong, we can always take out another loan and go travelling again.

It is not until we turn 40 that the anguished words of American comedian Tom Lehrer will start to ring true: "It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for five years.''

Iain Hollingshead is the author of Twentysomething, published in Britain by Duckworth.