I WAS once asked for the worst advice I had received when entering the professional world. It is a trite phrase, often repeated in books, journal articles and addresses delivered to persons on the verge of finding themselves. It is a refrain that has disabled the progression of many of our generation's highly capable minds:

"Do what you love."

This advice, I believe, is largely responsible for what we call the "boomerang" generation. These are recent graduates — among them, many of my friends — forced to move back to their parents' places and faced with the embarrassment that comes with springing from the seat of privilege only to find yourself unable to sustain the lifestyle you (entirely unreasonably and without examination) expected for yourself after college.

Recession or not, for an upper-middle-class graduate of a top 100 college or university — think Middlebury, Macalester, UCLA — it takes a special lack of effort to wind up unemployed and back in your childhood bedroom. There are plenty of jobs out there — retail, service and entry-level work — with employers who would jump to acquire an employee with this educational background. This is not just idle speculation, but something I've experienced myself, bartending after being laid off from my first job out of school.

The problem is that these graduates have been conditioned to believe that their education and societal background entitles them to a high-level job that is both interesting and high-paying. They grew up being told they could be anything they wanted, and are flabbergasted to find that now, having graduated from their prestigious college, the world has not yet presented itself to them on a silver platter.

Forget what you love. Chances are you love doing the same things as thousands, if not millions, of more-qualified people out there. No one is going to hire you straight out of college to head up strategy for a Fortune 500 company or to be a foreign correspondent on NPR.

But even as I write this, my own statement belies a fundamental disconnect; "do what you love" demands a broader context than we often give it. Developing corporate strategy for GE isn't a field, or even a career, it's a position; a position in the field of business, a field you can't say you love if you're only interested in the top.

Likewise, if you love the idea of being the next Philip Reeves for NPR, but refuse a local radio internship, you've probably also missed the point.

The problem with telling our youth to do what they love is that we tend to omit the fact that getting to the point where you can do what you love involves running photo copies, answering phones and generally attending to a never-ending to-do list of things that you hate. What's more, you may have to take on a second job busing tables or folding jeans at Old Navy — while living in a group house — for the privilege of doing all those things you hate, so that several years down the line you can do what you love.

Forget what you love. Or, perhaps more accurately, don't do what you love. Love what you do. This is not to say that if you find yourself unemployed, you should learn to love that lifestyle. Rather, find a job for which you are realistically qualified — not the one you feel you deserve.

A silver lining can be found virtually anywhere you choose to look for one, particularly when starting with as many advantages as this group has. The trick is to find what aspects of that never-ending to-do list of menial tasks so far below your intellect can actually entertain or — God forbid — teach you something.