WE ALL confessed last weekend. It was over lunch in Camden when the conversation turned towards the credit crunch. Suddenly my friend Lou turned to me looking stricken. "Should I feel guilty that it isn't affecting me?" she whispered, looking genuinely as if she'd murdered her own grandmother. "No, no, me too," piped up another, and I agreed with both.

Because for all this headline-screaming about the world imploding, plenty of my peers mostly sprightly mid-twenty-somethings are feeling not one extra jot of financial hardship. There. I've said it. For months I've been nodding my head sagely sharing tales of adopted thriftiness, but it's fraudulent because really how troubled can you be when you don't have anything to lose?

Few among us can afford our own flats, we're on low salaries because we're first jobbers and eat sad little packed lunches not because a salad from Pret seems a sudden extravagance but because it's always been an extravagance to us. We were insulated from the storm before it began.

This nonchalance was on cheerful display last week at the Kensington Roof Gardens. It was a fancy dress party; scores of cowboys and Red Indians ran about drinking merrily and making weekend plans. It was like a scene from F Scott Fitzgerald where all the talk was of hedonism, despite the tumbling markets. For the first time that week, I was in a Robert Peston-free zone.

In fact most of my friends are buoyantly optimistic about the current crisis. Decimated house prices are a dream come true. "I intend to wait for house prices to hit rock bottom, laugh a bit and then pick up a flat for a fiver," said one the other day. Another, once gazumped and made miserable by a scheming Foxton's agent, now has them begging on the phone like a cheating boyfriend. They promise flats with more space for less money but she spurns their advances, knowing she's better off waiting.

There are, of course, those among us who work in the City and are less immune. But as one young banker told me last week: "We're the cheapest labour in the Square Mile and we don't own many assets. It's middle management, with big wages and cascading stock options, who need to watch out."

It's liberating. I no longer need pretend I'm afflicted with recession depression. Perhaps the most perilous asset of the moment is age.

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