So yeah, people are saying by the end of this year we'll have more jobs and money! Obviously that's straight up awesome, on the surface. But down deep we can't deny how The Recession has comforted us during moments of self-doubt, and how we might actually miss it, just a little, once it's gone. So I got some peeps to discuss how we should celebrate, offering us a blinkered light at the end of the tunnel, to the light at the end of the tunnel.

First up: Jozen Cummings is the Articles Editor for VIBE Magazine and VIBE.com. You can check out his blog here.

To many, CNN's news that the Great Recession will likely come to an end in 2009 is good news, but to me, it's bittersweet. Sure it's good to hear that things like the unemployment rate will quit rising like the sun, and things are getting back to "normal," but what people don't understand is "normal" is what got us in this mess in the first place, and I'm not entirely sure everyone has learned their lesson.

You see, I have always been broke and it gave me great comfort knowing the rest of the country was coming over to my side of the financial pool. For the past few months, I've been going to the club and it's been good to see more people hanging out by the bar buying one drink at a time like me, instead of popping bottles at a table in VIP. All of a sudden, my dates were no longer bugging me to take them to nice, expensive places, knowing that times were hard. Instead, they were cool with my offers of Netflix and Papa John's.

If you ask me, these hard times were just what we needed to reassess our values, get back to basics, and recognize that often times, life's simple pleasures really can't be bought. Hopefully, most of us will not forget these past few months but if we do, let us remember the words of the great Notorious B.I.G: "Mo' money, mo problems"

Where the true players at, throw your roleys considered opinions and emotions to the sky? I can get down with that. Next up: Melissa Lafsky, creator of Opinionistas.com, deputy web editor of Discover Magazine, and former editor of the New York Times' Freakonomics blog.

So the National Association for Business Economics is proclaiming that the recession will be over by the end of the year. Before we resume hemorrhaging our savings on panda-skin Jimmy Choos and gem-encrusted nail clippers, it's worth noting that the heavily pro-business NABE (former presidents include Alan Greenspan) didn't actually admit we were in a recession/downturn/Dickensian clusterfuck until the smack end of 2008.

Still, if the Great Recession does hightail it this year, I'll miss it. There's been something comforting about watching everything we've been taught to value liquefy into a river of shit. Plus when else will we get to see so many colossal hypocrites stripped down so publicly, like a daily Albee climax. The haute monde, the scions of capitalism — they were all exposed as liars or morons (or both), while everyone else was a deluded casualty. We got to watch, read, and blog while the system collapsed under its own hubris, flushing the white collars out of Midtown and Wall Street like a burst dam. There was nowhere to go but down. Sure took the pressure off.

(For the record, I haven't been cackling and stirring my cauldron while the six-figure types get the proverbial Prada loafer up the ass. But I'll admit to smiling once or twice while I munch my daily Triscuit rations.)

Of course, no one likes too much bad news (regardless of whether it's true), and this whole vacuum of delusion and incompetence is starting to grate on the nerves. Enter the shouts of redemption: The banks are lending! The consumers are consuming! The end is near! Sure, the stomach of capitalism is still churning out bile — but, as a well-preserved lawyer once informed me before slathering her face with embryonic stem cells, "Perception is reality." If we think the recession is gone, then who's to say it isnt! (Besides the people who may actually know, that is — but no one ever listens to them anyway.)

Word. This recession is over when WE say it is! So let's close this out with Abiola Abrams; TV personality, author of Dare, host of talk-variety show PlanetAbiola.com — and, oh yeah, recent cast member of VH1 reality show "Tough Love".

It's December 09. The recession is over kids. What are we gonna do today? Go to Disney World? Nope! Same thing we do everyday T.A.N., try to take over the world. Let's say a prayer of solace for retailers who won't have to con us into buying cheap crap by saying it will make us "recessionistas" or con us into buying expensive crap by calling $6,300 handbags "an investment."

Phew! Dust off your recessionary malaise, let's go shopping. Oh wait, let me call my immigrant parents first and tell them that maybe they can get their retirement back on with their 401Ks 75% thinner. And let me reassure the old people on my Harlem block as I prance to the new Starbucks on my corner not to worry because the bread line they were standing on before the recession will still be there. And luckily for me, as an author who has hosted shows for BET and is a recent VH1 reality show alum— and shameless promo whore (clearly)— that there's still the free clinic if I fall into a snafu because Simon and Schuster doesn't offer health insurance.

Thank the goddess that I learned how to live on a salary of fifteen bucks a year when I decided at 16 that I wanted to blab on TV for a living like Oprah, write books (kinda) like Jane Austen, and make art films like Spike Lee. It was already challenging to line up my next TV Correspondent gig and get published before the collapse. The main effect that the economy has had on my life is to totally depress everyone around me.

But some people do prosper during any downturn so without sarcasm. I ask, why not us? Now that I've racked up $100G in student loans and declared bankruptcy I can be introspective enough to say that wealth and abundance are states of mind. I continue to have real prosperity because I have solid friends and family, shopped at TJ Maxx before it was hip (um, it is hip, right?) and don't give a damn if my bag has someone else's name on it. So TAN, to celebrate the end of the recession, I think that I'll pimp myself out on a non-union reality show gig and allow them to edit out my tantrums and general spoiled bitchiness as the syrupy sweet "Miss Picky" in the name of empowerment and social experiments … Oh good-done? Rock on!

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Dear Disgruntled White Journalism Industry Intern Who Works For Free,

What inspired you to get into journalism, kid? I'll tell you what got me into it: journalism. It is a shitty, vicious cycle I'm always meaning to break out the minute I quit abusing alcohol. But anyway: I was writing really bad music reviews for my college paper when it dawned on me that the dorks who listened to the police scanners and checked the logbooks for the "crime" beat were the ones with the actually glamorous jobs. Because there was all this crime on our campus! See, my school was an oasis of obscene mostly-white binge-drinking privilege smack in the middle of an impoverished swath of one of those dirt poor second cities that got abandoned by its economy sometime during the seventies and embarked on a ruinous adventure trying to smoke it all out through a crackpipe in the eighties. (Back then they used to solve problems by bombing them.) In any case, at some point — maybe like the very first weekend of freshman year — it occurred to me that there was no way "here" from "there." The nicest sweetest hardest-working most well-meaning person could be born ten blocks west of my campus and it was just never going to happen for her; worse, she wouldn't even think to aspire to it, though she might think to aspire to some of its shoe collections. I thought this was totally fucked up, and I am one of those people who when I think something is totally fucked up copes by writing about how fucked up it is — yeah, if I were one of those people who enjoyed actually helping I would not have this drinking problem — and anyway, that is what I chose to do, and the more I wrote about it the more I learned and the more I learned the more totally fucked up it became.

Just like yourself I had to make some "sacrifices" to keep on this awesome career path. I didn't have money so I worked at Starbucks and took odd jobs the whole time I was working for free till eventually got a job that actually paid me to keep writing about it. It'll happen to you too, if you're masochistic enough! Money was not easy to come by because there were too many people who wanted to write for a living than there were readers to support them; and I'll tell ya, the past ten years haven't made things any easier on this side of that ratio! But hey, I was a white middle-class kid born in America; I actually did have a modicum of free will, and over and over again that will was to remind other people with free will of all the persistent little factors fucking up that sort of freedom for others, and guess what? Slavery is a still a big one. Racism is totally up there. Poverty = totally huge!

Look I don't tell you this to be a scold; I am also here for the jokes and the glamorous lifestyle and because I'm a total hater and I don't pretend to think these heavy subjects are hitting you over the head if your internship consists of calling in resort wear for spreads in Harper's Bazaar. But think creatively for a second: why the fuck can't Harper's Bazaar pay you? It's really the same reason they have to give fashion editors "wardrobe allowances" instead of just paying them more money; we're all employed perpetuating the same myth about how life is lived, just in varying degrees of outlandish. If there were enough rich people buying the fancy shit they read about in magazines you'd be rich too; that would be how you found out about those magazines in the first place. But no, I'm guessing you're not. I mean, you are rich enough to accept an unpaid magazine internship in one of the world's most expensive cities, so you actually are pretty rich, but whatever, it's not enough for all the things you'd like to buy. Why is everything so expensive? How come bankers start at six figures and you'd be lucky to start at sixteen grand? Why do you even bother promoting $800 belts to readers who are like, nurses in the Midwest or whatever?

Look, I don't know, I would never personally do that, but maybe you like fashion and glamour and "aspirationalism", because maybe you liked playing dress-up as a child or whatever. Maybe you're a dreamer. Don't abandon those dreams after one little glimpse inside the dream sausage factory! Because I have another inspiring affirmative action publishing story for you. Once upon a time a writer landed a job at Entertainment Weekly only to be informed by a co-worker that the editor who'd hired her got a $10,000 bonus because she was a minority. And Entertainment Weekly is not exactly Goldman Sachs! She was distraught when it happened, but she stayed in the business, and went on to become one of the most dedicated, hardest-working media members I have ever met. Because the thing is that as you grow up in the media the dysfunctional relationship between the fantasy world that made you want to go into the business and the ugly realities lurking beneath the surface of everything is pretty much the only thing that keeps you going. And if you really think a bunch of minorities getting a poverty level paycheck when the white kids work for free qualifies as an "ugly reality" you should quit right the fuck now.

Because the thing is, no, affirmative action isn't fair, but I'd almost advocate keeping it around in its current flawed race-based state solely on the basis that "neither is fucking anything."

*Who COULDN'T TAKE THE INTERNSHIPS if they didn't pay, according to my sources.

Yesterday some kid named "Stephany" born in the nineties wrote a Facebook message to fellow members of Princeton Class of 2012, and now we have her picture. (There's another after the jump!) Inspired by its imagery (ripped condoms! bloody lips!) but also by its flawed underlying assumption that anyone gives a shit where you went to college, we crafted our own letter, to all the young people who ever went to college, as part of what we plan to make a regular feature, Tough Love.

Dear Young Folks, you know that saying "We don't care about the young folks?" Of course you do, you're young! But it's not really true. I care deeply about Kids Today, especially since it has started to come to my realization that everyone in Generation X hates you! I mean, even if we actually love you, we hate your blog, that you pretend you know everything even as it so rarely seems to occur to you that there is stuff you can't learn on Google, that you have so much misplaced self-confidence, and that when something makes you insecure we get the sense it is the first time you ever felt insecure about that thing and that makes us feel old.

To that end, there's a few things you should know, starting with how we feel about college, and where you attended. There are numerous other things you should know, and you can even feel free to ask questions if the inspiration strikes you, but don't worry, I'm not expecting you to pretend you don't know it all for a second. I'm basically writing this for the sake of my demographic anyway, because, Jesus Christ, sometimes your generation makes mine want to start a MySpace suicide pact. Only that would just be so you of us.

You know what I could give a shit about? Where you went to college! I might ask you where you went so I can fine-tune my expectations about the magnitude of the "sense of entitlement" I expect you to embody, but I don't really want to know, so don't let the conversation come around to that. It's not like I'm actually curious about you. Look, curiosity is one of the 10 great endangered virtues in this town, and having toiled to cultivate a small crop of it despite the terrible handicap that is living here, I've learned to be reflexively incurious about most people who hang out in the places I drink, but I have earned the right to not be curious about you. You should think on that for a second, because in saying it I am also advising you to harbor intense — though wholly unexpressed, know your place — suspicions about anyone older than you who professes to be curious about you (i.e. if you don't end up having sex with them within a couple of hours they are probably too nice/pathetic to ever be particularly powerful.) But anyway, say we've gotten past that point. Say I already asked you, and you tell me where you went. Perhaps it might help you to know what my assumption is.

College in the news angle
Say your college is in the news. Then we don't have to talk about what I am supposed to think you think this says about you. Oh, you went to Brandeis, so did that crazy terrorist lady who tried to shoot up those intelligence officers in Afghanistan, what about that? Duke: so you sorta regret reporting your date rape too? Etc. etc.

College In New York Angle
Oh lord, you went to NYU/Columbia/New School/Pratt/one of those colleges I always forget is actually in town because it's not like I walk the streets thinking, "Ooooh, how much you wanna bet those kids went to Hunter?" I am expecting you to have years of subsidized experience living and drinking and interning and amassing anecdotal evidence that "Gentrification: It's not a figment of your imagination!" about which you are eager to converse, so be a dear, pretend you are planning on leaving town for a few months so you can find out what it's like to be a real person a la Jessica Roy, and just straight-up give me an honest answer to the matter of can you get me drugs.

Lesser Ivy Angle
Oh, thank the deities, a lesser Ivy Leaguer. So you have spent four years and $160,000 tethering your identity, reputation and sense of self-worth to an institution with no hope of ever fostering any sort of genuine intellectual or otherwise culture because it is too preoccupied with all the relentless comparisons to Harvard. Yay, another absurdist.

Harvard/Yale Angle
Yikes! I think the only way to really handle this one is to never lose your sense of bafflement that there are places so simultaneously insular and inculcated in their own sense of self-regard that some of the most intelligent people in the country can go there to teach and wind up like this guy. (Who not only doesn't have anything worth saying to his plumber, he doesn't realize that he doesn't have anything worth saying — at all!) But don't talk about said bafflement! Just say something like, "Yale, but don't be intimidated, my SAT score was only 1340*and that was untimed."

One of those colleges where there are no grades or whatever Angle
See "College in New York" angle, last sentence.

State school Angle
I will expect you want to partake in all sorts of cultural offerings of which you have been so unjustly deprived the past twentyodd years at least until March Madness comes around, and as long as you don't live in Bushwick I will find this charming. For about two more years!

Canadian angle
The problem with Canada is that you have all these flawed assumptions about how Americans perceive you, as in you think we feel guilty about not knowing anything about the customs and inner workings of a foreign country one fifth as populous as Bangladesh, or that the fact that you assume your travails getting a work visa will inspire our sympathy — ummmm like, hey read this! — and you never see it from our perspective, as in "Yeah, I have about as much sympathy for you as I do for someone who grew up in Portland, but with universal health care and never having to say you're American."

Historically black Angle
Look, I'm not going to act like I meet a lot of you in the Manhattan media scene, but on the occasion that I have it has always been a pleasant experience and if you are looking for extra credit see what it would take to arrange Stephany as your next commencement speaker.

*Yeah, fuck you, I'm old, that was the point.