Generation Techs! Not content with being the first kids to grow up with PCs and videos, PlayStations and the Internet, into a job market that provides more highly-paid and worker-friendly jobs than ever before, they now want to annex the territory of the life crisis.

Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner are two young authors who have written a cri de coeur for their generation. Dubbed Quarter-life Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties, their book delineates a world rocked by "instability, constant change and too many choices". Robbins explains: "Public perception means that twentysomethings feel that they should be having a wonderful, free-wheeling time. When they're not, they think something is wrong with them. That's why we wrote this book: to spread the word that everybody goes through this."

In Robbins and Wilner's book, "everybody" is somebody who works too hard, earns too much and plays too fast. Young single mothers, low earners or blue-collar workers don't exist within their framework. According to the authors, their focus on high achievers is because those who appear most successful are in fact those who are least satisfied with their lives.

They have been through the syndrome themselves. Robbins, at 24, is a summa cum laude Yale graduate who writes for the New Yorker and is a contributing editor at Mademoiselle magazine. Wilner (25) is a mega-earning website administrator. But it's not what it sounds, they insist. "I took the first job I was offered out of college at a corporate publishers," says Robbins. "The pay was great, the commute was short, I loved the people and had an office with a door. And when I came home I was miserable. I did not find the work meaningful. I questioned whether accepting that fact was part of adulthood, and I began to identify myself by my job. Since my job did not mean anything to me, my self-esteem fell."

At one level, it's hard to take the contentions of this book too seriously. The tone of its interviews often grates, running as they do along the lines of: "I earn lots of money but I'm not happy! It's not fair!" Just you wait, is the reaction of somebody with a little more life experience: if you think manoeuvring your stellar career is trying, just wait until you get round to the kids-and-mortgage stage. Twentysomething isn't always blissful, but neither is adolescence, mid-life, toddlerhood ... And those end-life years are hardly a bucket of laughs either. Fact is, kids, it's not quarter-life that's tough - it's life.

Yet the authors provide ample evidence that an increasing number of privileged twentysomethings are suffering a variety of worrying symptoms: apathy and depression, anxiety and burnout, anger and self-hatred, even suicide. Which is why this book is resonating beyond the narrow constituency of the indulged over-achievers it addresses: such depression among the young is a growing concern.

Some time ago, the support group AWARE ran a campaign entitled "Too Young to be Depressed?", highlighting the significant escalation of depression in young Irish men and women. Things have not improved since then, says Seβn Murphy, who runs the organisation's Beat The Blues campaign.

"Young people can and do experience depression," he says, drawing attention to the link between depression and suicide. Suicide is now the second most common cause of death among 15- to 24-year-old males. For both sexes, suicide tends to peak between the ages of 15 to 24, with 25- to 34-year-olds accounting for the next-largest group of deaths. More people aged between 15 and 35 are now taking their own lives than dying in road accidents.

Yet these figures do not even reflect the reality, says Murphy. "We know that many more suicide deaths are still being registered to other causes," he says. "The pressures young people feel are very real."

Quarter-life Crisis is distinctly short on solutions, seeming content just to document the existence of these feelings in young achievers. Another shortfall is that it focuses, like other books of its genre, on individual self-improvement while largely ignoring the societal and cultural factors that underpin individual experience.

Since the 1950s, when mass capitalism created the Teenager, Western culture has been bombarded with images of youth. Seen by a variety of big businesses - fashion, film, music, beauty, pornography - as both a source of disposable income and a metaphor for desirability, young people have since been fed a big lie: that youth = beauty = sex = happiness = youth.

The same businesses literally trade on the shortfall between the expectations they create and the reality that only a few of us are beautiful and all of us are getting older. And it's not just the young who - again literally - buy into these myths. These days, thirty, forty and even fiftysomethings cling to habits of dress and entertainment that were once the provenance of teens. Such "kidults", who fail to accept their own ageing, are only an extreme manifestation of a culture that obsessively adulates youth.

Ironically, this cultural privileging of youthfulness does real-life young people no favours. They are taught that ageing is only about degeneration. That qualities like wisdom and serenity are as nothing when compared with youthful considerations such as sexiness or ambition. That now is the best time of their lives, and once they hit 30, it will be downhill all the way.

From this perspective, the best they can hope for is to keep looking and acting as young as possible for as long as possible, with nothing to look forward to but becoming wrinkled, washed-up versions of their current selves. No wonder they feel depressed.

The truth our infantilised society never admits is that ageing is a mixed bag, with joys and satisfactions that greatly outweigh wrinkles and middle-aged spread.

Many, many people are happier in later life than earlier. Even those who thought they were having a great time in their 20s would hesitate to back there. The calmer, more secure life that older people tend to live may look "sad" to a young onlooker, but feels great to those enjoying it. And once you're beyond a certain age, what counts is how you feel, not how others think you look.

It's called growing up, and ultimately it's the only solution to the quarter-life crisis. The pity is that our troubled young are never told they have it to look forward to.