There has been a lot of talk in recent days about the emergence of “Generation Crunch”. This is not, despite its sound, some hotly anticipated World Wrestling Federation travesty available only on pay-per-view (featuring Blobzilla and The Incredible Bulk versus Queen Kong and Tyrannosaurus Pecs), but a name newly given to the impending avalanche of 2009 graduates that will be unleashed this summer on to a job market which has nothing to offer but voluntary work stacking the tumbleweed.

They will suffer trauma, apparently. They will feel unvalued. They are questioning why they borrowed all that money, took those loans, hell, they wonder why they bothered to get educated at all.

“Even if you do worm your way on to a graduate recruitment scheme,” one G-Cruncher ranted in the press this week, “there's no guarantee that the job will be there in June - you're signing up to an army that's being disbanded... the class of 2009 deserve a bailout every bit as much as the banks.”

No you don't, pal. A bailout is the last thing you need. If truly there are no jobs, if the banks don't want you and the law firms have closed their doors, if the promised internships with big-shot management consultants have failed to materialise, then all you need from us taxpayers is... our congratulations.

Do not curse your fortune, but rather thank your lucky stars. You have been saved! You're an arts graduate, for heaven's sake. You didn't want to be a banker anyway. You wanted to read books and write poetry and kiss girls. Or perhaps you're an engineer, and were going to build bridges. It is terrifying to contemplate how easily you might have been lured off that noble track by some grovelling flunkey from Accenture or Goldman Sachs coming up to Oxford or Edinburgh or Bristol and waving cash under your nose. Your venality would have been tested, and you might have been found wanting.

For the past 15 years or so, graduates have emerged blinking into the white light of a witless and capricious boom time. The “milk round” was in full flood at the major universities, allowing corporate raiders to rape the best and the brightest of each new generation. Men and women who might have made great academics, teachers, writers, doctors and scientists sold themselves, like a thousand Fausts, to the corporate Mephistopheles with his shiny brochures and six-figure starting salaries.

And they are the lost generation, believe me, not you. They work now for monstrous institutions that came to get them when they were 19 or 20, before they were able to make any sort of informed choice, fed them money with which to have fun at college, and then threatened to withdraw the supply - like drug dealers - unless they gave them two, five, ten years of their lives afterwards. And so the very best of the best, for the first time in history, became salarymen - dull, acquisitive, witless, bloated. And a light went out in the world.

It was not always this way. I graduated slap into the middle of the last recession in 1991. When I was at university there were not enough jobs to fuel a milk round proper, and only the truly committed bread-heads were able to find it and climb aboard.

In those days, at Oxford anyway, it was middling 2:1 historians, Hooray Henrys with an expensive lifestyle but very little brain, who sold out to Linklaters and McKinsey and Deutsche Bank. The top-class candidates, the real quality, simply wouldn't have stooped.

But things got hard for us. Straight out of university, I went to work in what I assumed would be a temporary job in a grotty chain café in North London. And was working there when my (frankly dazzling) finals results came through.

“I'm outta here, suckers!” I said to my fellow barmen and waiters, tearing open the envelope and waving at them the piece of paper I found inside. “You see this? This is my licence to print money!” For I genuinely believed that when news of my (embarrassingly stupendous) exam results leaked out, the big companies, recession or no recession, would come begging, and I would have only to choose between them.

Eighteen months later, still pulling pints for £2.25/hour plus tips, I had begun almost to take pleasure from serving stale beer, wiping down the bar top and holding up highball glasses to the sunlight to polish off the smears with a napkin. I even managed a smile every time a colleague came past with an order for three decaf cappuccinos and a bottle of Sol for table five and said: “So, Giles, still got your money- printing licence safely tucked away?”

When I was done with the bar, I worked as a hospital porter, a market research cold-caller, an elf in Santa's Grotto in Harrods and a runner in a porno post-production company. And then I went to Paris and spent a year hawking designer shirts in the Place de la Madeleine.

I was cold and hungry some of the time. But I did finally grasp that under capitalism employment is a privilege, not a right. I grasped that the notion of intellectual or spiritual fulfilment in the workplace is a middle-class chimera. And I came to understand that my (put plainly, astonishing) degree meant nothing at all in a practical sense. Oh, the managers I had to indulge as, one after another, they sneered the familiar sneer: “All that education and you can't fold a shirt/clean a loo/sell a stuffed rabbit to a weeping child...”

When I got back from France - 23 and still apparently good for nothing but menial labour - I wrote more than 200 letters to advertisers in the Guardian jobs pages, and got nothing. Not a sniff. So my father sent me to see his friends - smug men who ran publishing firms or newspapers - and they stroked their bellies and chortled, and told me that in their business my (let's be honest, eye-wateringly impressive) degree counted for nothing, and it didn't matter what I knew, or even whom, and that I must start at the bottom, but was probably too old now anyway.

And so I did. And muddled along as best I could, and earned maybe £15k a year, and gradually, gradually, things began to work out OK. And it was like that for most of my friends (some died, penniless and gaunt, along the way, but it was best like that, for them). And we are grateful now, in the end, that recession deprived us of the chance to be bankers and brokers and consultants, parasites and catamites. Because we probably would have taken it.

And the class of 2009 will be grateful too, one day, that they were never asked to make that choice between greed and dignity. Because whichever way you had gone, you would have regretted it. And you will never know, now, what you would have chosen. And it is best that way.

Because, believe me, the only man more benighted than the First Class Honours grad teaching ungrateful little toffs in a cabbage-smelling boarding school, with holes in his socks and dry rolls again for supper, knowing that he once turned down a job at Credit Suisse, is the money-rich banker with three Bentleys, six chins and two divorces who's forgotten how to read.

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