(FORTUNE Magazine) – COMPARING themselves with their parents, they think it's going to be harder for them to own a house. Harder to achieve financial security. Harder to provide for a family. Or to have enough leisure time -- not that they can ever really have enough. What about making a lasting marriage? Harder. Paying for a child's college education? Don't even think about it. They are the twentysomethings, and despite the powerful obstacles in the way of their upward mobility, they are a remarkably buoyant bunch. They, too, believe in the American dream -- but in an end-of-the-century version. For all the tough sledding they see ahead, 89% of young working Americans in their 20s are optimistic about their own careers and financial prospects in the next decade. A stunning 43% are very optimistic. Ninety-two percent think they live as well as or better than their parents did at the same age. When they reach middle age, this group expects to live at least as well as mom and dad do in their middle age. These are some of the findings of a nationwide poll of 500 21- to 29-year-olds who have been in the labor force at least a year, conducted for FORTUNE by the opinion research firm Clark Martire & Bartolomeo. Admittedly, their upbeat attitude may stem from the fact that they have already found jobs. Even so, you might be thinking: What are these kids smoking? Sorry, baby- boomers, that was your generation. Drugs are a major threat to the American way of life, say 81% of the twentysomethings. They are pretty downbeat on America too. Only 31% think the U.S. will have a more important role in the world in the next ten years, and 55% are pessimistic about the nation's economic prospects over the decade. So what explains their optimism, their seemingly naive faith in the inevitability of their own progress in a darkening world? The short answer: a different view of the American dream. Only 21% say the most important measure of living the good life is financial success, and a scant 4% believe that the criterion is owning a home. The rest are more concerned with the acquisition of intangibles -- a rich family or spiritual life, a rewarding job, the chance to help others, and the opportunity for leisure and travel or for intellectual and creative enrichment. By these yardsticks, the young people figure they'll come out way ahead of mom and dad. They say it will be easier for them to lead interesting lives, to find enjoyment and accomplishment in their work, and to achieve personal fulfillment. Granted, the overall zeitgeist in the U.S. has been moving in this same direction. In a Roper poll taken three years ago, more Americans said leisure rather than work was the ''important thing'' in their lives, for the first time since 1975. The baby-busters' attitudes are partly a reaction against the workaholism of the preceding generation, but even the aging boomers have been mellowing a bit. Douglas Coupland, 30, author of the 1991 novel Generation X, cynically explains this shift in the national mind-set as the philosophy of lessness, ''whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth.'' But most twentysomethings aren't suffering from diminished expectations. Even though they esteem wa -- the Japanese term for harmony -- over wealth, they confidently expect to garner a fair amount of wealth too. This is the ''but not for me'' generation -- things may be tough all over, but I won't be affected. They don't make any connection between their pessimistic outlook for the overall economy and their optimism about their own well-being. For example, they believe that today a family of four needs $57,000 a year on average to live comfortably -- that's 37% above the national median. Moreover, they confidently predict they will have a family income of, on average, $76,900 (in today's dollars) when they are 40. The reality is that not many will pull it off: Today only 10% of people filing income-tax returns earn $70,000 or more. FORTUNE's poll was conducted in late April and amplified with follow-up interviews of 20 of the survey's 500 participants. What follows are some voices of today's young employees, neighbors, taxpayers, and voters. They are not running the country yet, but they will be -- assuming they are up to the job -- after the baby-boomers get their turn. What is most reassuring about this generation is their appreciation of the fact that they live better now than their parents did at the same age. They recognize the sacrifices their parents made, and they are thankful for them. Twentysomethings know they grew up in relative prosperity if only because they remember the stories of struggle and hard times endlessly retold by parents who started out with much less. Call it the Mario Cuomo my- father's-bleeding-feet phenomenon. Jim Malin, 29, a seventh-grade English teacher in Worland, Wyoming, recalls that his father had to quit medical school during the Depression and ended up working 34 years as a postman. Ronnie Nelson, 27, of Greensboro, North Carolina, enlarges on the theme: ''Both sets of my grandparents were farmers, and my parents had to grow up through the Depression. My father served in World War II. When I was growing up, compared to them it was a piece of cake.'' Adds Robby Patterson, 29, a pipe fitter from Newport, Arkansas: ''I remember my dad telling me about the first time he saw a TV. I grew up with one.'' And unlike her parents, ''at least we don't have an outhouse,'' says Sabre Taylor, 24, an assistant loan officer from Miller, Missouri. Moreover, their parents, whose Depression-inspired thrift enabled them to accumulate considerable savings, have the wherewithal to help the kids financially now -- paying for college, cars, and even condos -- or later, by leaving them money. Tim Ring, 29, an engineer at Pratt & Whitney in West Palm Beach, Florida, tells how his father got out of the service in 1960 and left his native Ohio at age 21 to start from scratch in Florida. Says Ring: ''It was rough for him, not having a steady income. At that age I was still living at home, going to college, had a nice car, could do what I wanted and spend what I wanted.'' Ramon Guerra's father was a house painter and now owns a construction company and a bar-and-grill in Portland, Oregon. ''My parents struggled for a lot of things and did their best to make sure I didn't have to struggle,'' says Guerra, 26, a sales supervisor for a regional bakery. ''They were very helpful financially. When they were my age, their parents didn't have that luxury. Times were much tougher for the whole family.'' Five years ago Guerra's parents co-signed his mortgage on a $48,000 three-bedroom house near the home where he grew up. Twentysomethings say their lives have also been enriched by opportunities to travel that their parents never had. They are the children of the jet age: fare deregulation genus, economy-class species. Rather than succumbing to societal pressure to find a serious job after college, stick with it, and build a career, legions of these young adults guiltlessly view their jobs as interludes between far-off adventures. Later this year Michael Konyk, 23, plans to quit the University Inn in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he is a sous-chef, to explore either the East or the West Coast, before heading off to work in Ukraine, where his parents came from. ''I need change,'' he says. ''I love change. It stimulates me.'' Konyk typifies the enhanced sense of freedom, of possibilities, of control over decisions that will shape their lives that characterizes this generation. The men, many of whom have parents or older brothers who were drafted, are grateful that they haven't been forced to go to war. The women came of age in a time of vastly expanded possibilities for them. ''I have a lot more choices and more opportunities now than my mom had when she was younger,'' says Lynette Harkleroad, 23, who works at a Wal-Mart in Altus, Oklahoma. Her mother was a homemaker in Edmon, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Dan Quayle notwithstanding, young people feel they are no longer as stigmatized for what were once derided as ''alternative lifestyles.'' Bonnie Rucker, 26, is an unmarried mother of a 6-year-old son. Says she: ''Raising a child alone has been hard in every way -- mentally, emotionally, and physically. But it's worth it.'' Rucker clerks at the 7-Eleven in Vinton, Virginia, and her mother, who lives a couple of doors away, watches the boy day or night, depending on Rucker's shift. Even if their view of their situation today vs. that of their parents at a similar age is realistic, the twentysomethings are astoundingly blithe about the future. Why do they assume they will continue to prosper despite a slower- growth economy? It turns out that they are pinning their hopes on two forces: favorable demographics and education. Births in the United States dropped off a cliff after 1964, the last year of the baby boom, producing fewer new entrants for today's labor market. Says Ronnie Nelson, who operates a four-color printing press at L&E Packaging in Greensboro, North Carolina: ''I see plenty of opportunity to move up in the company because of the age of some of the people who are now doing the management jobs and upper-level jobs. They are getting close to retirement age, and there aren't many baby- boomers to replace them. I'll have a pretty good leg up on the people they hire after me.'' In their eyes, education is an even more powerful propellant for upward mobility. Many young people stayed in school longer than their parents did -- 31% of our sample completed some college, typically receiving two-year associate degrees from community colleges. Another 33% hold four-year or graduate degrees. They speak of learning both as the key to economic advancement and as an enriching influence that opened new realms of lasting interest for them. Michael Konyk minored in anthropology at Purdue University while equipping himself to rattle those pots and pans with a degree in consumer food science. ''College really opens your mind,'' he says. ''I was granted an education, and my parents were really supportive. They let my mind grow and wander. It's really rare that I'm bored.'' DESPITE the lackluster economy, youngsters who have carefully eyed the job market and trained themselves for the workplace are taking advantage of what Peter Morrison, a demographer at Rand Corp., calls ''the pervasive shortage of skills.'' Wendy Leonard, 22, made sure to take business and computer courses when she was in high school in Wake Forest, North Carolina. There she mastered Lotus 1-2-3 and several word-processing systems, and learned to program in Cobol. ''I knew that computers were what I needed,'' she says. Leonard recently landed a clerical position at Lambert's Cable Splicing Co. in Henderson, North Carolina, which installs cable for the phone company. ''There are a lot of jobs out here, and we don't have the qualified people to fill them,'' she says. Bill Bommer, 25, who teaches organizational behavior at the Indiana University business school, says, ''I ask my students to imagine if they didn't go to college, what they'd be doing -- and nobody can even imagine it.'' But the reality is that even with only a high school education, twentysomethings believe they can reach positions of considerable independence and responsibility by dint of conscientious effort. While she was in high school, Lynette Harkleroad worked part time at the McDonald's in Leechburg, Pennsylvania. When the Air Force stationed her husband, Jeffery, in Altus, her letter of recommendation from the fast-food chain got her a job at Wal-Mart, where she has worked for the past four years. She started out as a checker, then became a Universal Product Code clerk -- scanning items, making sure the prices on the labels were right. Two years ago she was promoted to department manager in charge of greeting cards. As they push to exceed their parents' attainments, Americans are more likely to return to school later in life. During the 1980s, U.S. colleges and universities saw an influx of so-called nontraditional students older than the usual 18- to 24-year-olds. Harkleroad will likely be one of this crowd. She plans to use her Wal-Mart profit sharing -- which could be worth about $10,000 when it fully vests in three years -- to pay for an 18-month or two-year degree, then to become a medical secretary. Similarly, Bonnie Rucker is thinking about going back to school to study to be a paramedic: ''I like the business field, but there's only so far you can go with it,'' she says. ''I want to get into a worthwhile position -- something that makes me feel good about myself.'' She hopes to attend a community college in Virginia for the training she needs. IF MORE EDUCATION and better demographics don't fully explain the under-30s' sanguine view of the long run, then perhaps the explanation is heredity. As Alexis de Tocqueville discovered a century and a half ago, a mania for self- improvement is an integral part of the collective American psyche. ''Without optimism, you don't have anything,'' says Bonnie Rucker, who currently earns $6.05 an hour. That optimism is reinforced by their experience in the labor force. The under-30 set is surprisingly content with their work: 80% are satisfied with the progress of their careers so far, 81% consider themselves very or extremely productive, and 62% have already discovered what they want to do for a career. An impressive 85% say their attitude toward their jobs has stayed the same or become more positive since they began working full time. When asked how they feel on a typical day at work, the No. 1 answer was ''respected'' (cited by 86% of those polled). Other top responses: ''happy'' (85%) and ''accomplished'' (82%). Only 19% felt ''exploited'' or ''depressed.''

The most important aspect of a job is ''a company or supervisor who treats you with respect as an individual,'' followed by job security. Security probably ranks so high because the young people entered the work force during a time of redundancy, recession, and restructuring. Some of Tim Ring's acquaintances at Pratt & Whitney, which has a lot of defense business, were laid off as a result of Pentagon cutbacks. Ring is well aware that he was spared largely because he works on the space shuttle rather than a military contract. ''It's hard to get a full-time job here,'' says Lisa Guagliano, 22, who works two night shifts a week as a nurse trainee at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo. ''They've cut a lot of positions and have lots of part-timers. It's really hard to get into the department you want.'' Positions are filled based on experience and seniority, and Guagliano must compete with legions of nurses in their 30s and 40s. She wants to specialize in cardiology and hopes to get the training and experience she needs from a stint in the Army as soon as she passes her licensing exams early next year: ''I'm young -- what's four to six years?'' Typical of many baby-busters, Guagliano wants a career where she can make a contribution to society. She decided to become a nurse because she was ! hospitalized at age 3 for kidney problems caused by exposure to toxic waste when her family lived near Love Canal. She was in and out of hospitals until she was a teenager, and she says, ''Medicine looked like it would be really rewarding. Nurses saved my life on several occasions.'' Layoffs at big companies are encouraging more and more young workers to gravitate to smaller outfits. A recent survey of college students by Right Associates, a Philadelphia consulting firm, found that 32% prefer to work for companies with 100 or fewer employees, vs. 23% in 1990. Consider the case of Ronnie Nelson, the printing press operator at L&E Packaging, which makes tags and labels for clothes such as Levi's jeans and Lacoste shirts. He worked for seven years in the same job at a division of giant Avery Dennison, the office products manufacturer that went through a big restructuring last year. Four months ago he followed his former boss to L&E. ''It's been a pretty bad situation in the printing industry,'' he says. ''A lot of companies have folded -- and a lot have so much overhead they can't make the profit they need.'' He says his positive attitude toward work ''has 100% to do with'' being at a smaller, more competitive concern. On average these folks work a 45-hour week, and they'd like to cut that back to 39. Only 18% say they work harder than their parents did. But if they are really so upbeat about their work, why do they shrink from putting in long hours? Isn't work supposed to be the ''hedonism of the middle class,'' as essayist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling? Not necessarily. Twentysomethings want the job to be satisfying but not to dominate their existence. ''I'm not going to work my life away,'' says Lynette Harkleroad. ''My family and I come before work does. I'll be at work when they need me, but I'm not going to die there.'' Sure, work can be fun, but so is softball. A lot of young people sound like Ronnie Nelson. In one breath he says, ''The easiest way to have an interesting life is to be happy with what you do.'' Then in the next, ''I play a lot of golf and softball. I don't have to have the extra money to make my life interesting.'' To the younger generation, ''having a good time'' is a legitimate goal. Four nights a week Lisa Guagliano hangs out at the Pleasure Dome, a huge bar and mecca for the younger crowd in Niagara Falls. There she competes in bikini contests or dons a Velcro-covered suit and hurls herself at a Velcro wall where, miraculously, she sticks. She peels herself off and hops into a translucent spaceball, a plastic sphere that spins and simulates the giddy feeling of space flight. Sometimes, before she heads to the Dome, she goes bungee jumping, bouncing on an elastic cord while hanging over a cliff near Niagara Falls. ''It's the world's biggest thrill,'' she says. The biggest? ''Well, pretty close.'' WHEN THIS GROUP is asked which is more important to them, their personal lives or their careers, the former wins hands down -- 64% to 36%. Not surprisingly, one-third consider a rich family life as defining the good life. They herald a back-to-basics movement: Once again, marriage is for keeps. Although they acknowledge that it's gotten harder to make a union endure in a high-pressure, two-paycheck world, 94% expect to get married (or already are) and 87% plan to be married only once. And they want to spend plenty of time with their kids. Many saw their parents break up when the divorce boom began in the 1970s. Work was all to a generation that knew what it was like to be out of work. Family is all to a generation that knows what divorce is. They see marriage more as a source of companionship and support and less as a response to economic necessity or societal pressure. ''My parents didn't have a lot of common interests,'' says Beth Nielsen, 29, who lives with her husband, Todd, a lawyer, in Creston, Iowa. ''My dad was a sportswriter for the Creston News Advertiser, gone four or five nights a week. He worked so much that when I was younger, I don't remember taking family vacations together.'' Beth would like to have three children and thinks that the holidays and three- month summer vacations she enjoys as a substitute grade-school teacher will make it easy for her to spend time with them. In contrast to her mother, who married at 19, Beth was 27 when she wed, and she and Todd share a number of interests. Both are laid back and enjoy golf, tennis, and jazz. ''We're very much alike,'' she says. ''When my parents married, I don't think people thought about finding someone who was like themselves. In the long run our relationship will be much richer.'' Buying a home has always been the natural next step for married couples starting a family. It still is. Jim and Kim Malin, who are both English teachers, together earn about $49,000 annually. They have two daughters, Maggie, 6, and Katie, 2, and in 1990 they bought a $70,000 house in Worland, $ Wyoming. This year Ronnie Nelson and his wife, Kelly, plan to break ground on a three-bedroom ranch-style house on an acre of land in Greensboro, North Carolina. Total cost: $84,000. Because Americans are getting married later and later -- 45% of men and 31% of women are still single at 29 -- some are tempted to buy a house before tying the knot. Tim Ring, who is single, is trying to buy a house and needs to come up with a $10,000 down payment to qualify for a $100,000 mortgage. He has money put by but figures he'll have to tap into the company savings plan, which is really meant for retirement. Like 57% of his age cohort, Ring thinks it will be harder for him to own a single-family home than it was for his parents. After all, they bought their first house with $250 down. But owning a home is no longer the cornerstone of the American dream. House lust smacks of the sort of conspicuous materialism that baby-busters dislike. Though renters Beth and Todd Nielsen plan to buy a house once Beth gets a full-time position, ''no matter what we buy or whatever we do, we won't be any happier than we are now,'' she says. ''If we're not happy now, buying those things isn't going to make us happy.'' On balance, the twentysomethings sometimes appear to represent a sort of existential cocooning or failure to engage the real world. They have never been up against a big challenge, like a war. The Persian Gulf conflict is already fading from memory: Only 31% of this generation say that global political and military unrest is a big threat to the American way of life. ''People my own age kind of make me nervous,'' says Jim Malin. ''We haven't had our moral fiber tested as much as the people who came before us. We never lived through a draft. What would we do? Would we turn and run?'' His father served with the Navy in Manila during World War II; his mother fled the Netherlands when her hometown was destroyed by the Nazis; one of his brothers fought in Vietnam. Unlike the Sixties youth movement, which cohered around an us vs. them view of adults, today's young people have an odd and disturbing disdain for their own generation, perhaps revealing an insidious sense of discomfort or uncertainty about their own beliefs. For instance, consider their views on their own work ethic. They admit, a little self-righteously, that their career success takes a back seat to their personal fulfillment, but now listen to their voices as angst-filled generational self-criticism sets in. ''I'm not $ really sure about the work ethic of people my age,'' says Jim Malin. ''Today, if you ask someone to take out the garbage, it's like asking them to swim across the Atlantic.'' Adds Ramon Guerra: ''Everyone wants to be there on payday but doesn't want to work all week.'' Wayne's World, the popular film based on a series of TV sketches, may speak for some of these folks. Wayne and Garth are 20-ish and still live with their parents, amusing themselves while failing to ''get a life.'' Wayne collects hairnets and name tags from his various short-lived factory jobs. Now switch from Wayne's World back to the real world and listen to Ramon Guerra: ''Most of my buddies from high school haven't changed a lot -- they go from job to job and wait to party on the weekend. Just making enough money to pay the rent and get by, not too worried about the future. I'm pretty much the only one in my circle who's married with children.'' Nor is the under-30 set particularly interested in keeping up with the news. A 1990 Times Mirror study, The Age of Indifference, found that this generation ''knows less, cares less, and reads newspapers less'' than any generation in the past five decades. Only 30% of 21- to 34-year-olds said they ''read a newspaper yesterday'' and 41% said they ''watched TV news yesterday.'' Says Malin: ''I'm afraid that people my age and younger seem real apathetic about what's going on in the world. A lot of them don't ever look at the front page of the newspaper and kind of forget what's going on outside of their lives.'' Their attitudes toward national and world affairs spring from personal experience and direct observation. ''I have a hard time understanding spending billions and billions on defense and then having education cutbacks,'' says Ronnie Nelson, whose wife, Kelly, teaches disabled children. Tim Ring belongs to the 8% sliver who are very optimistic about the U.S. economy, and his attitude springs directly from his experiences at work. He earns around $30,000 a year at the Pratt & Whitney plant in West Palm Beach testing and developing high pressure oxygen turbopumps for the space shuttle's main engine. ''I see the latest in American technology in my job. I deal with engineers who have graduated from the top universities across the nation. I just see how brilliant and knowledgeable Americans can be when they want to be. I don't see the Japanese sending astronauts up into space.'' But certain laments came up again and again in the interviews: America is going downhill. We spend too much on defense, not enough on education; too much on foreign aid, not enough on domestic problems like homelessness and hunger. ''Bush hasn't done a very good job -- he's more interested in foreign affairs than here where we're at,'' says Bonnie Rucker. ''People are going hungry in our own country.'' Echoes Lynette Harkleroad: ''We give a lot of money to foreign countries for stupid reasons, and we don't take care of those problems in our own country.'' These people can see homeless families and drug sales in their own towns, but abstract issues such as foreign trade are hard to grasp. Twentysomethings' disdain for their own generation is exceeded only by their antipathy toward the baby-boomers, whom they see as over-the-top materialists and remiss parents. For the most part, busters are not afflicted by what novelist Coupland called ''boomer envy.'' Only 24% say that status or prestige is a ''very important'' aspect of a job. More attribute high importance to ''working with people you like'' (70%) than to salary (58%). Ronnie Nelson, like 78% of his age cohort, says he wouldn't want to be like the baby-boomers: ''The only thing the people I know in that generation -- like my brother, Mike, who's 39 -- seem to be concerned with is having money. Not so much with being happy with what you do -- just making the money. I really don't want to wake up in the morning and say, 'I don't want to go to work today, but the money's really good.' I want to say, 'I'm ready to go to work, and the money's decent.' '' This is a generation that values solid family lives, recognizes they are the beneficiaries of parents who had it tough, and feels they are treated with respect on a typical workday. Their heads are a little mixed up maybe, but their hearts are sure in the right place.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: Q: Do you think you live better than your parents did at your age? Q: When you are middle-aged, do you expect to live better than your parents did at middle age? Q: Compared with your parents, how easy will it be for you to . . . Q: The most important measure of living the good life is. . . Q: How optimistic are you about your career and financial prospects in the next ten years? Q: How optimistic are you about the nation's economic prospects in the next ten years? Q: Have you discovered what you want your career to be? ! Q: How satisfied are you with the progress of your career so far? Q: How likely are you to be working for your present company in five years? Q: How likely are you to be laid off in the next five years? Q: What is a big threat to the American way of life? Q: How do you feel about the baby-boomers?