Last month, the Chicago Tribune came out with a story titled “Millennials living with their parents: How’s that working out?” My response: it’s working out. More importantly, living with my parents after college is not indicative of a personal defect on my part but rather a sign of the times.

I’ll spare you the math, but in order to afford my own place while paying off my loans on the regular 10-year schedule, I’d have to make about $40,000 a year before taxes. I’m not going to say how much I currently make, but I will say that it is not $40,000 a year. A lot of fresh college graduates don’t have as much debt as I did, but most don’t make millions out of the gate, either. Not everyone can be an engineer, nor should they, and a lot of the high-paying jobs require even more school and thus more debt.

I got two job offers last summer, this one and one closer to where I went to school. Put another way, my choice was working 40 hours a week and living at home versus working upwards of 60 hours a week and having my own place. I had literally just turned down the other job when I got the call to interview for this one, so it’s not like I had to compare them side-by-side, but I think it’s fair to say that living at home is better than doing nothing but sleeping and working for the next 10-plus years.

I’m not alone on this. According to the National Association of Home Builders’ 2016 “Missing Young Adult Households” study, 20 percent of people age 25-34 still live at home. Pew Research found that 31 percent of people age 18-34 lived with their parents in 2014, making it the most common living arrangement for people in that bracket for the first time on record. Even if I had moved out, there’s a decent chance that I’d wind up back at home anyway; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Surveys program, 55 percent of millennials who move out move back in at some point.

There are bad eggs in every bunch. I get that. Every generation has their people who want everything and do nothing. But for many people in my age bracket, living at home is not a “I’m too lazy to work and pay my bills” thing. It’s also not a “I’m too lazy to get good grades so I can get merit aid” thing. It’s a vicious cycle of “I need to go to school to get a good job, but I need a good job to be able to afford school.”

So for now I live at home. It’s a good gig, and I try to make myself useful in return. I help with laundry. I wash dishes. I do some cooking. I drive my sister to archery lessons, and I stay home with her when my parents want a date night. I started the plants for our garden this year. I clean the two bathrooms and three fish tanks in our house. I go on the emergency grocery store runs when Mom realizes at 9 p.m. that we don’t have any mayonnaise for sandwiches or milk for cereal. And I’d mow the lawn if she’d let me (she enjoys it too much and doesn’t let anyone else do it).

Do I want to live at home for the next 10 years? No, of course not. (Sorry, Mom.) I lived in an apartment junior and senior years of college, so I got used to living on my own. I enjoyed picking my own menus and staying up later on the weekends. At some point, I’d like to have my own place, one where I can make muffins at 10 p.m. and not get yelled at. But for right now, it’s working out.

Amanda Hutchinson is a 2015 graduate of Ithaca College, a resident of Ledyard, and the assistant community editor for The Times. Read more of her work at amandalhutchinson.wordpress.com.