The post-ownership society: how the "sharing economy" allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer.

• Author: Potts, Monica

Five and a half years ago, when I first moved to Washington, D.C., for a magazine job, I rented a basement apartment in a neighborhood called Bloomingdale. The area was full of Victorian-era homes that had once been occupied by mostly middle-class black families, right on the border where the Northwest quadrant of the city becomes the Northeast. But throughout the 2000s, affordable D.C. neighborhoods with trendy-sounding names like Bloomingdale drew gentrifiers who needed low rents--journalists, creative types, entry-level do-gooders, and shift-working bartenders and baristas who occasionally had Mom and Dad's help--and so the neighborhoods changed.

Some days, I worked from home instead of going into the office, and I'd head down the block to the Big Bear Cafe, a hipster outpost where you could find everyone from the neighborhood, the old and the new, together in one place. There, we'd all spend more than $2 on a cup of over-roasted French press coffee or $5 on a breakfast bagel with ham, egg, and cheese sourced straight from farms within a 500-mile radius of the city. I was as likely to see a Generation X professional working on his or her new laptop as I was to overhear lithe young men and women in a conversation about reinventing yoga. Sitting among this particular slice of the tattooed elite--the people who are outside the center of power but at a good distance for judging it--typing away on my own computer, I could feel like I'd made it. Somewhere, anyway.

Last summer, I was laid off when my magazine dramatically and suddenly shrank to half its size. It was the first time I'd been unemployed in my adult life, though I'd watched waves of layoffs hit coworkers in nearly every job I'd had. I had an army of friends, many slightly younger Millennials who'd graduated in the height of the Great Recession, who showed me the unemployment ropes. Deciding to save money on rent, which had grown in five years from $995 a month to $1,275, I sublet my apartment. I stayed for a few weeks off U Street at a friend's group house. There was an unoccupied spare bedroom that had been used as a crash pad for unemployed friends many times before, and they hosted a huge dinner party nearly every Sunday at which I had already been a regular, so it felt like home.

Through the summer, my friends and I, all in our late twenties to mid-thirties, would go out at night for $10 Negronis or bourbons, or went to places where we had cultivated friendships with bartenders so we got some drinks for free. We'd have $8 drip coffee in the mornings with a rosemary or lavender scone, or something else ridiculously fancy, rubbing shoulders with the people our age and older who actually made money. Some of us would go off to work while the rest of us navigated our new self-employment, since the freelance life was the only one available.

I saved up enough money over the summer to afford my rent again, for awhile, and I moved back into my apartment and continued piecing together work as a freelancer. I felt like I hadn't missed a beat. Most important, I was doing the work I wanted to do, as were my friends--we were doing good work, in the fields we'd intended to enter. We were making a difference, not just clocking in somewhere during the day and having extended-adolescence fun at night. We felt we were building toward something, an actual career and a life.

Millennials are loosely defined as the generation that came of age in the decades around the turn of the century. Demographers put the earliest birth years at either 1980 or 1982, with an end point of 2000 or 2002, which means that Millennials' working lives will always be shaped by the Great Recession and its aftermath. Even for the oldest among us, the time before video games and computers is lost in the hazy memories of early childhood. We're a generation in which children were empowered by promises that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be. Born in October 1979, I'm technically part of Generation X, but socially I fit best with the Millennials. I graduated from high school with 1980s babies, and the phone number on my first resume in college was a cell phone rather than a landline. My friends, classmates, colleagues, and I are all used to mobility, Google searches, and texting. The cynicism and slactivism that characterized, or stereotyped, Gen X is something we've observed only when we watch clips of Jon Stewart's Daily Show on YouTube or Hulu, or shared on Facebook.

The oldest of us are now reaching our mid-thirties. A couple of years ago, it seemed as if I woke up one day and suddenly felt like an adult. Nothing had changed materially about my life, but my experiences and responsibilities totaled up in a way that equaled grownup. And yet, I still lived in a tiny apartment with an Ikea dining table, a bookshelf I scored from my curb, and a couch I carted home when it was discarded from my office. I never expected to be rich, but I did expect to someday have real furniture and maybe even a house. Achieving those things was always in the future, at some relatively well-moneyed point that I was expecting would roll around--until I realized the future had dawned and the financial stability hadn't appeared.

My friends and I are a recognizable class in D.C. and other cities like it (New York, Los Angeles, Boston), the creatives, the professors, the people who work in nonprofits or think tanks because they want to use their talents to make the world a better place. In decades past, people like us never made much money, and money is not the main way our tribe keeps score. But I see lots of people in the same fields who are...