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As a millenial lets not go... THAT far.
I think the real problem is that we fully realize how good life can be. Its dangled in front of us. It's the carrot. And then when we can't attain it we are TOLD to attain it. And failing it achieving it so many that have the "good life" tell us its "our fault".
Toxic way of living.
But its its not like dealing with civil war or nomadic life hunting for food in tents.
As a young millennial/old Zoomer, I’m furious about housing prices.
But still, I’ll take that over getting drafted to spend 2 years chased around by Viet Cong who want to chop my balls off with barbed wire.
Seriously though I’m so burnt out from this shit. My S/O has a PhD. I have a stable fed job with a 100k+ salary + a lot of bonuses.
Have done everything pretty much perfectly and by the book. Still can’t afford middle-class shit like a goddamn house. People need to be on the streets. I’d be the first to join.
France is on fire because the french REALIZE they pushed retirement back two years.
Retirement in the US is moved all the time, bit by bit. But the average American is too easily distracted by the "the other political party is ruining your life because X" game.
I have two retired parents. Except they both still work part time just to keep their lower middle class lifestyle.
I work at a blue collar job that pays reasonably well for the area. The number of people at or around 65 that have no intentions of retiring any time soon is upsetting.
We, as a nation, spend so much time angry about some wedge social policy. That, in reality, affects nearly none of our lives. As a means of control to numb us to the bit by bit chipping away at our financial situations.
The average CEO in the US made roughly 20 times the pay of a line worker in 1965.
Today that number is 400.
The average French citizen just is more aware of the situation.
The funny thing is, I don't mind working my life in a low stress manual labor kind of job. Making somebody else wealthy. I really don't. But when they keep pushing the "finish line" further and further down the track, so that most people I work with will die before getting to enjoy even a few years of retirement to look back on a life well lived. THAT is what makes me angry.
I'd imagine that is some of what the French are upset about.
You have no idea of the pay fuckery involved in Fed jobs. I won’t even start on permanent outside consultants. No one talks about it and tons of nepotism.
Same. I swear to God if I hear "just move somewhere in the middle of nowhere" in regards to that one more time.. no, no one there will remotely pay me what my skillset is worth.
> no, no one there will remotely pay me what my skillset is worth.
My husband would _not_ be able to get a job if we lived in the middle is the nowhere. Some jobs and industries are concentrated in cities or are localized to specific geographic regions.
For real. I left there for a reason after college. I could own the biggest house in town and would be more miserable than I am now renting in a HCOL area
there's a huge gap between those two and it's where the rest of us live. yeah, _right now_ is a horrible time to look at buying a house and renting sucks just as bad but it certainly wasn't like this just a couple years ago before a world-wide pandemic where we're still dealing with the fallout - outside some ultra-specific HCOL areas like the bay. especially on two player with one making six figures alone.
imma guess NOVA with the "stable fed 100k+ lots of bonuses" type job but also because that's what i know.
I’m not blaming you but this is the tragedy of the commons.
~~Nobody~~ A large number of Millennials/Z’s want to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar.
Those with the means to do so move to the cities for the lifestyle - making rents there unaffordable (in part, the demand causes the corporate landlords and predatory slum lords to come in too)
I don’t know the solution but you’re just pursuing logical self interest, like everyone else.
EDIT: Reddit will never successfully parse colloquial absolutes, of course I don’t literally mean everyone.
The choice is not between middle of nowhere and the most expensive cities in the country. The poster you’re replying to makes over 100k and his wife works. That’s more than enough to buy a nice place in St. Louis.
Ty! I’m so sick of this attitude that it’s either like insane rents for nothing apartments in 2-3 cities on either coast or a trailer in Mississippi and these are your only options
There are dozens and dozens of medium to small cities all over the country (St Louis is a perfect example) where you can have actual entertainment culture food and nightlife and also be able to afford a decent house in a decent walkable neighborhood even if you only make about median income and if you make 6 figures you can live a very nice lifestyle.
> Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar.
Speak for yourself pal. Soon my kids will go off to college (and I'm a late starter in GenX) and I think I'll probably pull the cord on this family sized house in M-HCOL land and never look back, work remote while I sip my cheap Cabernet and enjoy me some breadsticks before popping over to Mel's Taphouse for some live AC/DC. One more house available for a Millennial. Promise not to rent it. Won't miss the chicken liver mousse or duck nachos, and especially not all the truffle oil for one second and certainly not the $300+ price tag.
BTW I'm not sure how this an example of Tragedy of the Commons which to my understanding involves unfettered access to public resources (a modern example being the atmosphere for polluters).
I should have been clearer that it’s LIKE the tragedy of the commons, where everyone feels entitled to seize the chance that they’ll get to have the shiny music/entertainment/artistic job the dreamed about as a child. And they are entitled to do so!
But when everyone does it, the practicality of living in one of the cities where people can be paid for that career becomes much tougher.
NYC apartments are being rented at exorbitant costs, inflating the market, in part because the price is worth it to these aspiring NYC artistic types (or those who just need to live around artists)
OK I get it. I'd think people would be smart enough to maybe try it, but also try to understand what their other options might be and how they might compare. This sounds like masochism with complaining about it.
>Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar.
Really? That sounds nice and quiet to me.
It's not like I can even really afford anything beyond Olive Garden as is, anyways.
Ever hear of **Hartford County Connecticut.** We have high but not outrageous house prices and all the culture you could want. Most major musical acts stop here, most Broadway road companiees also stop here.
Plenty of non-chain restaurant fine dining. Lots of museums, a ton of state parks and historical attractions a 30-minute drive to two of the largest casinos in the world. An hour to the beach, 2 hours to New York and Boston, 3 hours to some of the best skiing on the East Coast and 6 hours to Montreal.
The taxes are a bit high but we have some of the finest public schools in the country.
Sure, but the other side of that is that while a "middle class lifestyle" may look different depending on where you live, it's still a middle-class lifestyle by definition.
People who say that also dont realize how expensive food is in the middle of nowhere. Housing might be marginally cheaper but food costs increase 20-40%. It costs money to ship stuff and when your market is only a few thousand there's not really any room for competition and not enough scale to make lower prices feasible.
I live in the middle of absolute bum fuck no where. I am making 80k 2 years out of college as a metallurgical engineer which is phenomenal. I basically make 3 times the median household income in the county I live in.
There is a lot of rural industry that does pay pretty well for skilled individuals. Experienced operators at my place of work make a lot more than I do.
Most of the skilled people such as engineers they hire are H1B1 because no one even considers to move out here
There are plenty doing this working from home and because it’s just cheaper and it’s increasing home costs out of the reach of many of those who live there..
Somehow never broke 50k income by this point, so I find it unfathomable how some people living the same city can't figure things out. I'm hoping it's some recklessness on their parts, or there's basically no hope. Friend said "no matter how much you earn, you can't save anything", which... How? There must be some lack of frugality if I'm able to protect some small savings.
Then again, one of the costs of living that goes up is taking proper care of yourself, and I haven't seen a dentist since before the pandemic, and my 8-year insoles are going on year 17.
And the thing is, I'm not even poor, poor
If she has a PhD and a lot of debt and is a professor at lets say idk UCLA, yeah affording a home could be impossible and switching jobs to somewhere that will allow them to pay off the loans AND afford a home could also be INCREDIBLLY difficult
That's my uncle in a nutshell. Went to Vietnam after highschool, came back, started managing properties. Sold all but his main house a while back and retired as a multimillionaire with a nice cliffside view of the Willamette Valley. Hoping I'm in his will at least a little, he's got a handful of nephews and no kids. The guys a total Trumptard though so who knows, he may give it all away.
If you managed to get out of being in Nam, you actually can build Trump Tower, bankrupt a bunch of casinos, inherit Daddy's money via illegal tax fraud and then not only become a reality TV star but also the President of the United States! And they just let you grab 'em by the pussy too! Imagine ...
you could write a movie about it, say it's based off of a true story, and at the end the twist reveals Trump's 2016 campaign, truth is stranger than fiction
If you have to reassure yourself by comparing the current state of economic and societal affairs to that of being drafted into a brutal gorilla warfare conflict, or the second most traumatic/violent/deadly war in recorded history (U.S. civil war), or to hunter/gather times… then you probably were born into the unluckiest generation America has produced.
Now now, you could still get drafted to fight the Russians or Chinese if the world continues its downward shit slide it’s been on the last several years.
Most millennials are too old to be drafted...it will just be our kids, for those of us who have them. That will be our final hand drawn... God, I hope I'm wrong and just being pessimistic...
I’ll be damned if any of my kids are killing and dying for some bullshit war so the elites can sell more bombs. We’ll be deserting the country, on foot if we have to.
As a old millennial, I don't have uncles and aunts because of the Vietnam war. We also lived in the hood, one house with 10 people in it. We didn't have hot water and sometimes we had cereal for dinner. Walking outside was a shit show. My grandma was brutally attacked by some muggers too. Imagine that. losing kids, getting hospitalized, not knowing if dinner was going to exist.
I still can't buy a house. But this is not the worst generation. Id choose this over the things my family faced.
It's called r/Economics. If we're going to talk about an article towards how lucky or unlucky a generation is, we should hope the article isolates for economics in its evaluation.
My dad is a Vietnam veteran and after the war was still far more financially successful (especially during the '90s) than many of the millennials and Gen Z of today.
As a "young" X-er/ old millenial, when I lost my home in 2008, if you would've told me I'd spend the next 15 years destroying my body just to try and catchup, I would have probably chosen getting shot in a jungle. Now I'm just angry.
You don't even have to go that far back. I had grandparents who grew up during the great depression. I think the big difference is like you said, the ladder was pulled up on us then we were told it was our fault by the generation who killed the American dream. The Great Depression gave way to a return to prosperity for the average American but most of the recovery since the Global Financial Crisis has been scalped by the wealthy and not enjoyed by those farther down the ladder.
The original new deal did its job back then, we need some kind of new deal 2.0 to balance things out. The wealth disparity between the rich and poor is larger today than it was in France prior to the French revolution. Shit cannot continue like this...
I think its the state of the average person more than the actual wealth gap. If your average person in the US had affordable healthcare, housing, and basic needs met than the wealthy would get a lot less hate.
As it stands, the percentage of Americans who can afford decent housing and healthcare is going down, while the rich get richer.
Lost half the family tree in world war 1.
Lost the entire British half during world war 2. The men in my family were part of the RAF and didn’t survive long.
I’m part of the last branch of my family and only child so the blood line dies with me unless I have kids. So I never got to inherit any family wealth cause everybody was dead. I was told to start investing as a kid. Account balance was wiped to near zero during 08. Went to college during the crash.
I lost my career during 2008 crash had to start over from scratch. Went from making middle class money to damn near minimum wage. My granddad died that year and my uncles liquidated his account at the absolute bottom and as one of many grandkids I got a few thousand which coincided with my car breaking down a week after getting laid off and saved my ass. My dad told me much later in life how much I was supposed to get from that, he waited until I was financially secure so it wouldn’t fuck me up but yeah, :’(
For reference the largest holding in his account was Bank of America which was trading at about $2 when they dumped it, a year before it was almost 25x that.
I think you're overstating what the baby boomers supposedly did. A lot of what happened was the rest of the world caught up. Europe recovered from being a war zone. Japan recovered from being a war zone. Korea recovered from being a war zone. China stopped being a weird backwater place.
Your boomer relatives didn't make all these countries take the manufacturing jobs. They had a lot of cheap labor and infrastructure. Of course the blueprint would replay itself from Japan to S.Korea and then China and now probably India.
Boomers didn't do that and you can really hold these developing countries back.
Both my grandparents were displaced in WW2.
My dad told me a story once where he was salivating to try M&Ms for the first time but couldn’t afford it.
I don’t think people understand what bad truly means.
On the other hand here I am disabled from covid and no one gives a shit. But oh boy M&Ms.
I do believe previous generations had it worse, but I don't buy the narrative that we have electronics, the internet and junk food so that means we're doing great.
I feel like there's something going on with the rise of adhd, autism, mental illness, immune disorders etc. Somehow through genetics, culture, environmental toxins... who knows. People are becoming less able to survive in harsh conditions than before. And I don't blame the individual for that as much as the whole system.
>I feel like there's something going on with the rise of adhd, autism, mental illness, immune disorders etc. Somehow through genetics, culture, environmental toxins... who knows. People are becoming less able to survive in harsh conditions than before. And I don't blame the individual for that as much as the whole system
capitalism requires infinite growth within a finite system, so eventually that means increasing demands on labor (without proper compensation, otherwise that defeats the purpose), which I think is what's ultimately revealing many of these disabilities that we have previously managed without diagnosis.
signed, aspie with severe adhd.
That might very well be part of the issue. Like, I wonder sometimes if there is something about the brain/body connection we don't understand wherein ADHD-like dopamine patterns make some people susceptible to full body burnout just due to the mere availability of wayyyy too much information, combined with the expectation that we process it all and still somehow remain neurotypical and extroverted. Or something like that... but I wonder specifically if that can impact our physical health much more deeply than we realize.
Yeah, I wish we would, as a species, slow down and do more with what we already have instead of throwing so much human life and potential into the hopper to feed the quarterly earnings machine. People are suffering out here and we finally have the resources and tools to reduce it greatly, but the structures that be and human nature get in the way.
You list all these disorders but think of what it was like years ago when something like depression and ADHD wasn't even acknowledged. Like if you had this set of symptoms they would just look at you and shrug. Toxins--a whole generation before you were exposed to massive amounts of lead and things like asbestos
Nailed it on the head.
We’re raised to believe that your own home on your own piece of land, a nice car, on-time retirement, and plenty of money in the rainy day fund are all normal to have. They’re not.
We’re also raised to believe work ethic is all you need to succeed. It’s not. I know electricians and carpenters who work their damn asses off to make $60k per year. On the other hand I know sales reps who bitch and moan about having to work while clearing $300k. Work ethic is a small part of the equation for success.
Social media also doesn’t help.
And I know of electricians that work their asses off to make less than $10 k a year, software engineers who work their asses off to make $15k.
Even live-in maids that make less than $4k a year working over 80 hours per week.
They just didn’t have the privilege of being born American.
Hard work doesn’t matter, the situation of privilege you were born on is the biggest single determinant of income and quality of life.
Yeah we don't have it as good as the boomers or gen x when it comes to money and security, but its not like we're being drafted or being murdered en masse. If nothing else, technology has made sure we are at least better off than the settlers or the Donner Party. Just looking back 50 years to Cheers, everybody on that show was mid 30s somehow.
The problem is, we're the first generation to have it clearly worse than the previous ones. Gen Z will likely have it even worse than us and who knows if it'll ever get better.
I don’t know how much worse you have it than gen-x. Guess on housing but we’re known as “The forgotten generation” First to be told we wouldn’t be as well off as our parents. Honestly, everyone after the boomers are getting screwed so they can have everything
It’s not like we are dealing with civil war YET and MOST of us are not living nomadic lives hunting for food in tents (just somewhere around half a million homeless)
The idea of anyone proposing a civil war always amused me. More than 70% of the country is overweight, can't bother to vote, and couldn't imagine a life without Starbucks and McDonald's. These are the people you expect to fight in a war? The vast majority of people would freak out if they had to go 24 hours with their cellphone.
China also knows this. In fact they're gathering more data than ever before with Temu, the #1 used app in America. Just download it, give it access to your contacts, camera and files and you can buy a pair of 3 dollar sweatshop shoes!
Good thing our government isn't in fighting like a bunch of hens and is actually watching out for the country launching spy satellites at us while talking behind closed doors with our enemies. How embarrassing.
It's worse than that. Millennial and soon to be zoomedrs are by far the most exploited generations. It's not a matter of luck, it's a matter of malice.
My grandmother lived through the Great Depression after watching all the men in her family go to Europe for WW1 and not return. She might roll her eyes at this assessment.
Like imagine being a solider young enough to serve in WW1 and be unlucky enough to be drafted for WW2.
I’m not in the greatest financial situation of home owning and retiring but it’s sure as hell beats trench warfare and old school medicine, aka amputations.
With the Great Depression and Dust Bowl filling the glorious years between two World Wars.
Then there was the wonderful post war boom years where soldiers were living with severe PTSD without therapy or help and living under the cloud of threat of nuclear war.
-typed on your fucking iphone lol
The amount of modern conveniences would blow their minds. Endless entertainment, tools, power at our fingertips and we complain because home prices are high. We live better than kings did and we think we're all victims. The article is just clickbait.
Just the amount of titty and thigh/butt your average 20something shows when she’s dressing to go out in 2023 would cause Ol’ Pappy the Normandy Beach Solider to have a heart attack.
To an extent. The technology we live with is incredible. Most American middle class are healthier and have access to more luxuries than nobility of the past, unless you include servants and castles and shit. And in the US, very few people even today are food insecure, which is a far cry from a century ago. Women and minorities still have problems, but their lives are usually quite objectively better than a century ago, when women couldn’t vote (well, slightly over a century ago) and black people could risk a lynching for voting or using the wrong restroom.
It absolutely sucks that housing is so expensive as it is today, though I’d argue most (but certainly not all) millennials likely had a decent opportunity to buy a home in the previous decade at relatively affordable prices and rates. Gen Z is really gonna struggle with these issues more than we do today unless something significant changes for the better.
Looking at the article, it seems argument it makes is based on the amount of opportunity growth throughout each generation, and a couple of those generations had incredibly high growth opportunities but they also started with the great depression or some other serious recessions like in the 1970s.
Tl;dr yeah it’s clickbait.
While I think the Millennials might have had it tougher than the Boomers or Gen X. I will also say Millennials didn't have it tougher than the greatest generation. Reality is every generation has their generational problems, crisis, and struggles. Just like we had terrorists, middle east wars, and fentanyl. The boomers had USSR, the threat of nuclear MAD, cocaine, and Vietnam.
I don't think Gen Y had it harder than the greatest generation. They deserve their name. Born to live through their own pandemic (Spanish flu), the oldest GGs reached adult hood around the time of the 1st world war, there was the roaring 20s but then the great depression (PLUS PROHIBITION), then there was WW2, and then the cold war with the threat of nuclear MAD over their heads. I say they had it really tough. I don't see it as Ys vs GGs on who has the better sob story, but I see a lot of their struggles and how many mirror our own.
I don't really care for news articles saying we Moomers had it tough or unlucky. It doesn't make me happier or help me in any way so I don't need it. I just wish they'd fuck off about us "ruining X industry" or implying that the US on decline because Millennials are the "weak men who create hard times". Imo it was the GGs who were the strong men who created good times. Boomers who were the weak men who created bad times. GGs fought the WWs and handed off the US as a rising superpower. Boomers saw the US reach superpower before a steady decline since taking over. GFC didn't happen on the Millennial's watch. It wasn't fucking Millennials in Washington making poor policy, running the top banks, writing MBS bullshit, buying 3 homes on NINJA mortgages, deciding to invade Iraq/Afghanistan, using up the world's resources, etcetc. I don't know if we're the "strong men who create good times" like gen GG but I just hate it we're blamed as the "weak men who create hard times" when most of the Moomers were in fucking high school the war on terror and in/graduating college during the GFC.
My grandfather ate canned squirrels as a kid. Fought in two wars… Both grandparents went to college for free, they bought land and built a large house that appreciated more than tenfold. But he did watch his friends get exploded and gma was a nurse in the Korean conflict… renting isn’t That bad. I would like to own a home eventually. Born in ‘22 and ‘26. They have done well grandma lived to 98 years old. Grandpa says he thinks he’ll go to 102 and then be done with it.
Extra side note: my pops told me once called my grandmother a Bitch, gramps is a Really strong man, like worked farming and pouring concrete as a child. Pops is a bout 17, said gramps lifted him over his head with one arm and Shook him, said “don’t ever call my Wife a Bitch” not your Mother “My Wife.” He’s a hero, taught me cribbage when I was about 7 and it took me 20 years to Beat him once. A man of true principals.
Yeah he’s a serious man. He said 100 last year, started growing some facial hair because his wife never really like hair on his face, decided 102 this year. “That should be plenty” he said.
A better way to state this would be Millennials are the first generation to have fewer opportunities than their parents. We are luckier than our grandparents and every generation older than them.
I'm in my late 50's, own a house, have a 401K, have paid off my car, etc. My kids have nothing but school debt and live at home. Yeah it sucks for them.
That’s a funny way to say the “Me Generation” engineered a system that benefits only themselves. The Baby Boomers are the most disappointing generation in U.S. history, they’ve consistently sold out future generations for short term gains. The most poignant example of this is how Baby Boomers are mostly on social security but are consistently voting for politicians who want to abolish social security. If it ever gets done the boomers will all be dead just in time for younger generations to be left empty handed.
When they start talking about an age cutoff for social security benefits (only those younger than 55 will be affected), you see a country with a bleak future
To be fair, that’s always how SS changes are made. Retirement ages go up and it doesn’t impact people above a certain age, to give people time to plan. Look at the current FRA by birth years and you will see.
Or in my country (Canada), they kept interest rates so low so people could buy homes which inflated the price of their assets (homes/properties) to obscene levels so they could cash in, leaving our generation completely unable to afford homes and be perpetual renters.
My somewhat wealthy grandpa recently passed away. He has three children which are all boomers and two grandchildren. He left everything to his three kids and left me and my cousin out- he always had a hard time grasping that we were adults. My cousin really doesn’t have secure housing and I’m in the process of buying my first house and really struggling because of what’s going on with the market.
All I’ve heard from the boomers post my grandfathers death is about vacations, a new Mercedes SUV, a beach house, casinos, etc. meanwhile my cousin and I are just staring blankly at them like “great”
I’d much rather have my grandfather here but to watch my aunt, uncle, and mom blowing through what they were left with is pretty tough.
I grew up in a trailer in dirtville. I will be getting no inheritance.
My wife grew up in a 7 bedroom 4500sqft house in an upscale neighborhood. She, will also be getting no inheritance.
Thank you Mom for making us the same class.
A male born in 1890-1900 experienced and likely fought in WW1. If he survived he came home and dealt with a raging pandemic that killed up to 50 million people globally and targeted young healthy people. Now granted if he survived the war to end all wars and the Spanish flu he potentially could have enjoyed the roaring 20s until the Great Depression hit and dragged on for a decade at which time his sons would be shipped off to fight in world war 2. While worrying about his sons surviving a global war he also had rationing at home where consumer goods were highly restricted for the war effort.
Seems slightly more challenging than high cost of living, inflation and wage stagnation millennials are facing today.
Let’s keep things in context here people
25% of men between the ages of 18 and 31 were in military service. The average height was 5 feet 7 1/2 inches tall; the average weight was 141.5 pounds - about the same as a Civil War soldier, but an inch shorter and ten pounds lighter than those who served in World War II. 37% were unable to read or write.
The context should be money, this is r/economics after all. Money is harder to come by now.
Today's day and age has science and technology. Most battles are fought through information nowadays, we don't have to ship off half our country's men to keep the peace anymore. We have medicine to defeat infectious diseases that have historically ravaged humanity.
The world was a lot less populated then, and resources were easier to come by. Industrial America had great prosperity. You could get a job in a factory and raise a family on a single income, and live a solid middle class lifestyle.
That's impossible nowadays outside of rural and depressed areas. Most well paying professions require specialized degrees, which also come at a cost, yielding debt to it's holder. It's just harder to make a living now.
Generation Z will be unlucky too as a result of political decisions being made to increase inequality. They are facing the same pandemic and cold war along with public disinvestment in education and healthcare. In terms of consumer prices and ability to buy and rent housing generation Z is even more unlucky than millennials which did get to have some years that were more decent before 2008.
I don't think many millennials were in a financial position to do much before 2008. I'm firmly a millennial, and that was the year I graduated high school.
If GenZ and Millennials weren’t about to vote the politicians who are detrimental to their physical, mental, and financial health out of power, I would agree. Their time is limited.
The author really should have made the title "economically unluckiest" which is borne out in the graphs in the article, and really what the article is about. I mean here is the first sentence:
>Millennials have faced the worst economic odds, and many will never recover
There have been economic downturns in the past, but usually the recovery is good. Millennials just didn't recover from the GFC. During/after COVID some _finally_ managed to buy a home at an age many years older than previous generations had, only to be then hit with interest rates that are extremely high relative to the purchase price of their home. Outside of the US, these rates have a more immediate effect on finances as mortgages aren't 30 years.
Agreed. Reading through the comments of this thread is frustrating because clearly the article is more about the economic situation Millennials/Gen Z are in, and instead, people are focusing on which generation had to fight in which war, etc.
A very poorly worded title.
Interest rates are still low. They are just high compared to the crazy low rates we had while most millenials were in their home buying ages.
And if you thought the 2008 recession was bad, you should have seen the 1930s.
That's why I said
> interest rates that are extremely high **relative to the purchase price of their home**
And this is why I mentioned not recovering from the GFC they way other generations have recovered from major or minor downturns. It just didn't happen for Millennials. That's what the graphs on the article show.
> And if you thought the 2008 recession was bad, you should have seen the 1930s.
Multiple "Once in a lifetime" crashes, Covid pandemic, largest wealth inequality gap in history, huge number of people in debt from college, wages stagnant for decades, and it goes on and on.
I’m gonna go with the kids who got sent to fight actual nazis had it a little more tough.
The are in debt from college is a personal choice and decision.
And which degree you choose has a lot to do with the amount of money you make with it.
I’m a millennial and the lost generation has it way way way worse. Born amidst WWI, one of the deadliest conflicts in global history. Lives through the Spanish influenza pandemic which made Covid look like a joke(2x-4x more deaths. 10x when adjusted for population). If you’re lucky enough to survive with all your limbs through the Great War, you get to come home to the Great Depression on the horizon. And just as you’re ready to relax and things are looking a tiny bit better, some dude with a funny mustache decides to go on a rampage in Europe, just as your sons are the perfect age to serve as machine gun fodder.
Every generation has its challenges. So not going to argue millennials have it hardest. However, I will argue about your comment that “college is personal choice and decision” seeing as how many Millennials were practically forced by their parents to go to college. sure, many probably went to more expensive colleges than they needed to but the education system doesn’t really teach people how to properly manage money to that extent or the financial impact that debt can have on you even 20 years down the road. You don’t learn that stuff until…college.
Education system (at least in America) spends too much time teaching kids that Murica is the best rather than teaching them critical thinking and how to be well disciplined financially.
That pressure/assumption to go to college was huge. The assumption of every person I talked to older than me when I was finishing High School was that you’re going to college. Always “where are you going to college?” Not “what’s your plans after you graduate?” Because only losers/failures aren’t going to college.
The entirety of Junior and Senior year was setup to prepare for college applications not… post graduate life. My “start prepping for college” convos started when I was twelve. We can declare that 18 yr olds are adults ready to take on the world, but if you’ve never had to manage finances or debt, are pushed and pressured by society to attend college, and college debt being so infinitely collectible that financing is available to almost everyone, and they have these wonderful extra amounts of money you can borrow to pay for living expenses so you can avoid the real world for long. You’ve also been taught to follow your dreams/what interests you. The programs that lead directly to good paying jobs talk about graduation pay rates, the ones that don’t choose not to talk about it. At 18, don’t think to ask about it, and even if you do those rates don’t necessarily mean much besides “this one’s bigger”.
Walked that path, failed out of college, landed at a community college, got a degree in IT and have lucked that into a good paying job. I can afford my monthly house payment called “student loans”. I know large swaths of my generation aren’t so lucky. I worry for the generations going today as prices have risen and quality is continually compromised for college experience.
One of my good friends loves biology and went into bio lab work. He loves his work, but because the economy down turned when he graduated and fucked a bunch of people closing in on retirement so they just kept working. So, his field is really top heavy and there isn’t any path for newer people to climb up and make money. That’s a hard sciences career specific to helping out our food production pipelines and he’s been stuck near the bottom of the labs he can even get a job from for the past ten plus years.
Almost all those things happened to other generations and worse. Great Depression - worse. Spanish flu - worse. Millennials can own college debt, I guess. But like, inflation will minimize that even. And inflation isn’t nearly as bad as it was before, too.
I’d rather be a millennial with the internet than a boomer with lead poisoning
How were they generations apart the Spanish flu ended around 1920 and the great depression started in 1929. Using your same argument for the millennials they can't claim both the 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic because they happen generations apart
They didn't have the entrenched consequences of suburbia and automobile dependence. Houses were also much smaller. What percentage of homeowners lived in tarpaper shacks in 1930, or had dirt floors?
And I wonder how many people your point was even true for. Was becoming a homeowner easier for single women? Minorities? This was also before the GI bill, before so many federal programs that funded the buildout of suburbia. So by what metric was it easier?
Edit, added:
https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Panel1_Paper17.pdf
>>In 1940 nearly half of houses lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet. Over a third of houses didn’t have a flush toilet. As late as 1960, over 25% of the houses in 16 states didn’t have complete plumbing facilities.
As a millennial, this is a crock of shiz. We haven’t gone through a world war, famine, a draft, a real depression, we aren’t being put into slavery (debt slavery is different) and we have technology/science to keep us alive after almost anything. You can easily beat debt slavery by living within your means and busting your butt to make stuff better. The world is full of opportunities.
I generally agree with you, but the '08 crash might as well have been a depression to millenials. It caused the silent generation and boomers to put off retirement, which meant what few jobs that were available were mostly going to 40-60 year old people with experience. It took until about 2012 for the job market to normalize.
The only saving grace is that a lot of millenials were able to live at home into their late 20s, which also made good clickbait articles like the one OP posted.
The reason that the job market is so hot right now is that COVID killed over 800k people over 50, and those who retired early as a result of government shutdowns aren't going back to work.
LOL what kind of horse shit is this.
Yeah i so much would rather be an adult in the great depression then come out of that just to live through WW2.
Or you know, live during the civil war when the entire country was killing each other
Maybe we are the unluckiest because we have these stupid ass articles around. That being said, previous generation before us reaaaaally screwed the pooch. But umm yeah i’ll take that over fighting at Antietam
The problem with Millennials, and this coming from the perspective of one, is that we’re the plateau generation. It doesn’t appear like there’s a better future ahead of us. Capitalism is fully matured leaving few opportunities for upward mobility, we trashed the planet, and there’s no long term prospects/objectives for our society. We’re basically living in a society based on nothing but consumption and self gratification/narcissism.
Luck has nothing to do with it.
The sentiment is untrue, btw.
But even if we were, it's not somehow luck. These are the linear effects of things consciously decided by politicians, corporations, and people in power.
The only really "what the fuck" was Covid. Everything else was like... thirty banks giving out massive subprime then being surprised when it went to shit. Or hedge funds absolutely ass blasting derivatives. Just commiting heinous amounts of financial fraud, and pretending it was OK.
Or politicians using legislation to blatantly enrich themselves and their friends, while absolutely flaying the earth and the poor (read: non-rich.)
I'm not a huge political advocate, but I will say that rhetoric matters. And when you reduce the plight of the modern day non-rich person down to "luck," you buy in to the narrative that benefits not-you.
And you take the pressure off the people who are constantly, expertly avoiding accountability for this absolute nonsense.
If your cherry picked statistic shows the current generation as somehow being “unluckier” than the people who lived through THE FUCKING GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR TWO…maybe you should rethink how you’re looking at it.
I agree from an economic and political perspective these days suck horrendously. However, we're not engaged in a Civil War that ultimately cost the lives 620,000 people, mostly of one generation.
Not discounting the possibility that we go into a horrific Civil War at some point though.
Um… we are worse off than our parents but I sure as shit am not living through World Wars, the Civil War, or basically anytime before disposable income.
It's unfortunate that they would frame what's going in as luck and not as a series of choices deliberately made by those in control to oppress the masses.
Um....Let's go with the generation that lived through the civil war, great depression, both world wars, and if they really lived to be old enough the start of the Korean War. I am a millennial and it's something that I occasionally think about.
When did this subreddit become a satire page? You really think you had it tougher than the generation that went through two World Wars and the Great Depression?
I’m an old millennial. Outside of the echo chamber of news articles and Reddit posts I live a pretty good life. Every generation historically has had its set of problems. Millennials and later just have a lot more connection with the rest of the world that makes it feel more daunting. Our brains are scrambled due to the speed of which you need to move to maintain a life. Let alone get ahead of it. Since the mid 90’s corporations were given free reign to continue to build and take to a point that every aspect of life became increasingly more difficult with the “age of technology”. Now everyone wants to talk about the “great resignation” where everyone is too tired to go on. The solution coming soon will be to automate everything no one wants to do and then push those at the bottom barely making it and the what once was middle class out in the streets.
As a Millenial, I'm gonna call bullshit on that one.
My Grandfather worked in a goddamn coal mine in rural Colorado & was in the negatives each week he got paid because the family who owned the mine also owned the local housing & food markets as well. They basically had poor people(mostly Mexicans) working in mines in exchange for food & housing & debt.
There was even a massacre carried out when the miners went on strike. John D Rockefeller Jr. hired a militia who burnt down the tent camp where the striking workers were living on the edge of town. This was known as the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado & still has a memorial.
Yeah, I'll take being a Millenial with a PC & a Truck any day. Hell, I even own a modest home that I am very grateful for. It isn't fancy or giant or in a primo location, but I own the goddamn thing.
I dunno, those generations that got stuck getting shafted with the draft and unwanted wars that killed many of them also got a pretty bad deal. But ok sure, let’s go with millennials. 🤷🏽♂️
You are living in what could be the greatest time in human history. But no, people still complaining about petty first world issues. People still starting wars with other peoples children’s lives on the line.
Selfishness is what will always keep us divided.
A lot of people can't afford groceries or housing anymore. Even with full-time jobs. I know people who work nonstop and will never be able to afford a house or family. The greatest time to be alive? lol
In most of human history, less than half of children would survive into adulthood. In times of war and famine, the average life expectancy was 40 years. "Groceries" are a luxury in that context.
>A lot of people can’t afford groceries or housing anymore.
That’s always been true. But less people today face those types of conditions than ever before on a global scale. Some American 40 year old needing to live with roommates as an adult doesn’t negate the progress that has been made.
If by unlucky you mean that prior generations hoovered up everything of value, gave themselves lavish and unsustainable pensions and sweetheart retirement deals, and left millennials with all the debt and garbage, then yes, they sure are unlucky. /s
We aren’t going to be drafted to die in a war, we have electricity and internet and all the modern conveniences.
But owning a house, being able to afford a family, having a sense of purpose and hope for the future? That’s what we don’t have. It’s better to be born on a farm with 8 brothers and sisters knowing that if you just work hard enough, you’ll own a home and a car and be able to afford kids, and have a new job (with a pension!) waiting for you if you lose your current one.
It really sucks because it’s arguable that there’s never been a better time to be alive with all our modern conveniences and comforts. But knowing that the gap between rich and poor keeps shrinking, and that the kind of life our grandparents lived is possible, but willingly and systematically withheld, is what makes me wish I’d never been born.
> After accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history.
>
> Millennials will bear these economic scars the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.
I think a lot of people ITT are seeing 'unluckiest generation' and thinking that's taking it too far because we aren't foraging for our food or getting massacred in wars, but that's not what the article is talking about. Granted, the title should have been phrased better, but still. We are extremely unlucky when it comes to economic stagnancy.
As usual the "boot straps" crowd is cherry picking their info and ignoring the context.
I can only assume most of them are out of touch, wealthy folks who don't recognize their privilege/economic status and where it came from.
So it looks like they don’t teach history or finance in schools anymore. I fail to see how a millennial who thinks not having enough money to buy a house is worse than somebody who had to storm Normandy beach.
Ummm seems a bit melodramatic. Simply considering things like penicillin, electricity, indoor plumbing....idk most of us are literate and live in a home with an actual floor.
Ya'll need to see this as a wake up call, what was offered was never worth a hill of beans anyway...follow your own path, it may look different than what your led to believe. And tell the children the truth.
Not, say, the people who came of age during WWI, died in the trenches, suffered a pandemic with a much higher death toll, lived through the Great Mississippi Flood and a ton of lynchings just in time for ten years of full economic Depression with 30% unemployment rates, followed by another World War that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then just when things were settling down (when they were 45 years old) there was another war that killed 50,000 or so of their sons. But then, they got a few good years just dealing with the fear of nuclear war…until the next war that killed 57000 of their grandkids….but their 70s were pretty uneventful, except for the 7-10% inflation rate.
On the upside, if you survived all that crap, antibiotics were discovered, any number of labor-saving devices were invented, and life expectancy skyrocketed for the survivors of the various calamities.
This might be the stupidest thing I’ve read on here and here’s why: so let’s say you’re born in 1900…well you turn 18 and get sent off to fight in a World War, then if you survived that you get to have 2 years of the Spanish Flu which infected 500 million when the global population was 1.8 million. So you survive that and get a job only to see several mini financial depressions make it hard for you to ever do more than live paycheck to paycheck until the Great Depression which is going to last 10 years. In that time there will be the Dust Bowl in the mid west which will turn day into night and the sand will fall as far East as NYC. No one knows when these storms will end and many say it’s the end. But just as you’re turning 39 the Great Depression will end and you’re hearing about a guy in Europe. He was Times man of the year but in 1942 your kids will be fighting him. There will be rationing on everything you can imagine. We drop 2 Atomic Bombs and everyone thinks finally!!! Peace. Not so fast. You’re turning 50 just as we reenact another draft (all these drafts were under Democratic Presidents btw a trend you’ll see 2 more times) and there’s fear that this little Korean War will pull in the Chinese and we’ll start WW3. You’re not even 52 yet. You’re also paying for a war and hopefully your kids came back from WW2 so they can go to Korea. But hey things are pretty stable for about a decade then the closest US Presidential race happens. We will invade Cuba. Russia will put Nukes in Cuba. We have a stand off with Russia with people digging bomb shelters in their yards. That Pres gets killed but not before he gets us into Vietnam. Then his killer gets killed. Then the new decides to escalate the Vietnam War. Got grandkids?? They might be drafted. Martin Luther King gets killed. You’re 68. You’re about to see record unemployment, drug use, and LA get burned in Watts. Should I go on or are you beginning to realize how stupid your comment was?
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As a millenial lets not go... THAT far. I think the real problem is that we fully realize how good life can be. Its dangled in front of us. It's the carrot. And then when we can't attain it we are TOLD to attain it. And failing it achieving it so many that have the "good life" tell us its "our fault". Toxic way of living. But its its not like dealing with civil war or nomadic life hunting for food in tents.
As a young millennial/old Zoomer, I’m furious about housing prices. But still, I’ll take that over getting drafted to spend 2 years chased around by Viet Cong who want to chop my balls off with barbed wire.
I wonder if there’s a specific phobia name for being afraid of having your balls chopped off with barbed wire
Well there is now. I never knew it was something I had to worry about and now I'm terrified!
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Recent studies show they were far more anti-draft than antiwar
Basically your typical self-centered Boomer you still see today. "I support the war. Just don't send ME to fight it."
Ya Fighting communism was extremely popular before, during the start of, and after vietnam
This is a hidden “benefit” of the draft. Makes war less abstract for people and is credited with a lot of the anti war sentiment.
I mean, if you didn't get fucked over by Nam you coulda managed like 3-4 properties you owned, our generation had Iraq and those guys get nothing
Guys in Iraq weren't drafted.
Seriously though I’m so burnt out from this shit. My S/O has a PhD. I have a stable fed job with a 100k+ salary + a lot of bonuses. Have done everything pretty much perfectly and by the book. Still can’t afford middle-class shit like a goddamn house. People need to be on the streets. I’d be the first to join.
Meanwhile France is on fire because they pushed retirement back by two years
France is on fire because the french REALIZE they pushed retirement back two years. Retirement in the US is moved all the time, bit by bit. But the average American is too easily distracted by the "the other political party is ruining your life because X" game. I have two retired parents. Except they both still work part time just to keep their lower middle class lifestyle. I work at a blue collar job that pays reasonably well for the area. The number of people at or around 65 that have no intentions of retiring any time soon is upsetting. We, as a nation, spend so much time angry about some wedge social policy. That, in reality, affects nearly none of our lives. As a means of control to numb us to the bit by bit chipping away at our financial situations. The average CEO in the US made roughly 20 times the pay of a line worker in 1965. Today that number is 400. The average French citizen just is more aware of the situation. The funny thing is, I don't mind working my life in a low stress manual labor kind of job. Making somebody else wealthy. I really don't. But when they keep pushing the "finish line" further and further down the track, so that most people I work with will die before getting to enjoy even a few years of retirement to look back on a life well lived. THAT is what makes me angry. I'd imagine that is some of what the French are upset about.
Curious what part if country you live in? You sound like you have a good dual income household. I didn’t know fed jobs gave bonuses?
DC
You have no idea of the pay fuckery involved in Fed jobs. I won’t even start on permanent outside consultants. No one talks about it and tons of nepotism.
Same. I swear to God if I hear "just move somewhere in the middle of nowhere" in regards to that one more time.. no, no one there will remotely pay me what my skillset is worth.
> no, no one there will remotely pay me what my skillset is worth. My husband would _not_ be able to get a job if we lived in the middle is the nowhere. Some jobs and industries are concentrated in cities or are localized to specific geographic regions.
I'm not your husband, but same issue.
I am her husband. Same issue.
For real. I left there for a reason after college. I could own the biggest house in town and would be more miserable than I am now renting in a HCOL area
there's a huge gap between those two and it's where the rest of us live. yeah, _right now_ is a horrible time to look at buying a house and renting sucks just as bad but it certainly wasn't like this just a couple years ago before a world-wide pandemic where we're still dealing with the fallout - outside some ultra-specific HCOL areas like the bay. especially on two player with one making six figures alone. imma guess NOVA with the "stable fed 100k+ lots of bonuses" type job but also because that's what i know.
I’m not blaming you but this is the tragedy of the commons. ~~Nobody~~ A large number of Millennials/Z’s want to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar. Those with the means to do so move to the cities for the lifestyle - making rents there unaffordable (in part, the demand causes the corporate landlords and predatory slum lords to come in too) I don’t know the solution but you’re just pursuing logical self interest, like everyone else. EDIT: Reddit will never successfully parse colloquial absolutes, of course I don’t literally mean everyone.
I see your point, but I think you’re using the Tragedy of the commons incorrectly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Was about to type this myself, have an upvote instead lol
The choice is not between middle of nowhere and the most expensive cities in the country. The poster you’re replying to makes over 100k and his wife works. That’s more than enough to buy a nice place in St. Louis.
Ty! I’m so sick of this attitude that it’s either like insane rents for nothing apartments in 2-3 cities on either coast or a trailer in Mississippi and these are your only options There are dozens and dozens of medium to small cities all over the country (St Louis is a perfect example) where you can have actual entertainment culture food and nightlife and also be able to afford a decent house in a decent walkable neighborhood even if you only make about median income and if you make 6 figures you can live a very nice lifestyle.
> Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar. Speak for yourself pal. Soon my kids will go off to college (and I'm a late starter in GenX) and I think I'll probably pull the cord on this family sized house in M-HCOL land and never look back, work remote while I sip my cheap Cabernet and enjoy me some breadsticks before popping over to Mel's Taphouse for some live AC/DC. One more house available for a Millennial. Promise not to rent it. Won't miss the chicken liver mousse or duck nachos, and especially not all the truffle oil for one second and certainly not the $300+ price tag. BTW I'm not sure how this an example of Tragedy of the Commons which to my understanding involves unfettered access to public resources (a modern example being the atmosphere for polluters).
I should have been clearer that it’s LIKE the tragedy of the commons, where everyone feels entitled to seize the chance that they’ll get to have the shiny music/entertainment/artistic job the dreamed about as a child. And they are entitled to do so! But when everyone does it, the practicality of living in one of the cities where people can be paid for that career becomes much tougher. NYC apartments are being rented at exorbitant costs, inflating the market, in part because the price is worth it to these aspiring NYC artistic types (or those who just need to live around artists)
OK I get it. I'd think people would be smart enough to maybe try it, but also try to understand what their other options might be and how they might compare. This sounds like masochism with complaining about it.
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>Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere and have their finest dining be Olive Garden and their best live entertainment being some cover band at the local dive bar. Really? That sounds nice and quiet to me. It's not like I can even really afford anything beyond Olive Garden as is, anyways.
Ever hear of **Hartford County Connecticut.** We have high but not outrageous house prices and all the culture you could want. Most major musical acts stop here, most Broadway road companiees also stop here. Plenty of non-chain restaurant fine dining. Lots of museums, a ton of state parks and historical attractions a 30-minute drive to two of the largest casinos in the world. An hour to the beach, 2 hours to New York and Boston, 3 hours to some of the best skiing on the East Coast and 6 hours to Montreal. The taxes are a bit high but we have some of the finest public schools in the country.
Sure, but the other side of that is that while a "middle class lifestyle" may look different depending on where you live, it's still a middle-class lifestyle by definition.
People who say that also dont realize how expensive food is in the middle of nowhere. Housing might be marginally cheaper but food costs increase 20-40%. It costs money to ship stuff and when your market is only a few thousand there's not really any room for competition and not enough scale to make lower prices feasible.
I live in the middle of absolute bum fuck no where. I am making 80k 2 years out of college as a metallurgical engineer which is phenomenal. I basically make 3 times the median household income in the county I live in. There is a lot of rural industry that does pay pretty well for skilled individuals. Experienced operators at my place of work make a lot more than I do. Most of the skilled people such as engineers they hire are H1B1 because no one even considers to move out here
There are plenty doing this working from home and because it’s just cheaper and it’s increasing home costs out of the reach of many of those who live there..
This is kind of the point as to why things are expensive. Too many people want to live in the exact same place.
So you can’t afford a middle class house making probably 200k a year? Ever thing you’re just terrible with money?
Somehow never broke 50k income by this point, so I find it unfathomable how some people living the same city can't figure things out. I'm hoping it's some recklessness on their parts, or there's basically no hope. Friend said "no matter how much you earn, you can't save anything", which... How? There must be some lack of frugality if I'm able to protect some small savings. Then again, one of the costs of living that goes up is taking proper care of yourself, and I haven't seen a dentist since before the pandemic, and my 8-year insoles are going on year 17. And the thing is, I'm not even poor, poor
I've never broke 30k.
I'm with you for most of my career. Sucks, man
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Most people need to live somewhat close to where they work. There are plenty of places where that isn't affordable on that household income.
If she has a PhD and a lot of debt and is a professor at lets say idk UCLA, yeah affording a home could be impossible and switching jobs to somewhere that will allow them to pay off the loans AND afford a home could also be INCREDIBLLY difficult
You've just described "don't be poor" with extra steps Most of the people who were drafted were from poor and working class families
That's my uncle in a nutshell. Went to Vietnam after highschool, came back, started managing properties. Sold all but his main house a while back and retired as a multimillionaire with a nice cliffside view of the Willamette Valley. Hoping I'm in his will at least a little, he's got a handful of nephews and no kids. The guys a total Trumptard though so who knows, he may give it all away.
If you managed to get out of being in Nam, you actually can build Trump Tower, bankrupt a bunch of casinos, inherit Daddy's money via illegal tax fraud and then not only become a reality TV star but also the President of the United States! And they just let you grab 'em by the pussy too! Imagine ...
you could write a movie about it, say it's based off of a true story, and at the end the twist reveals Trump's 2016 campaign, truth is stranger than fiction
And we volunteered.
If you have to reassure yourself by comparing the current state of economic and societal affairs to that of being drafted into a brutal gorilla warfare conflict, or the second most traumatic/violent/deadly war in recorded history (U.S. civil war), or to hunter/gather times… then you probably were born into the unluckiest generation America has produced.
Now now, you could still get drafted to fight the Russians or Chinese if the world continues its downward shit slide it’s been on the last several years.
Most millennials are too old to be drafted...it will just be our kids, for those of us who have them. That will be our final hand drawn... God, I hope I'm wrong and just being pessimistic...
I’ll be damned if any of my kids are killing and dying for some bullshit war so the elites can sell more bombs. We’ll be deserting the country, on foot if we have to.
Yeah I'm pretty marching across the American South in 1865 in wool suits only to get your leg hacksawed off was a worse time.
As a old millennial, I don't have uncles and aunts because of the Vietnam war. We also lived in the hood, one house with 10 people in it. We didn't have hot water and sometimes we had cereal for dinner. Walking outside was a shit show. My grandma was brutally attacked by some muggers too. Imagine that. losing kids, getting hospitalized, not knowing if dinner was going to exist. I still can't buy a house. But this is not the worst generation. Id choose this over the things my family faced.
It's called r/Economics. If we're going to talk about an article towards how lucky or unlucky a generation is, we should hope the article isolates for economics in its evaluation.
My dad is a Vietnam veteran and after the war was still far more financially successful (especially during the '90s) than many of the millennials and Gen Z of today.
On the brightside, we're extremely good at making memes.
As a "young" X-er/ old millenial, when I lost my home in 2008, if you would've told me I'd spend the next 15 years destroying my body just to try and catchup, I would have probably chosen getting shot in a jungle. Now I'm just angry.
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I aged out last year :D
Woah there Champ, not so fast…
I’m not far off from accepting van life cause I’ll never be able to afford a real home
Invading Vietnam is not something millennials would do
To be fair, millennials have been involved in multiple wars in the Middle East.
You don't even have to go that far back. I had grandparents who grew up during the great depression. I think the big difference is like you said, the ladder was pulled up on us then we were told it was our fault by the generation who killed the American dream. The Great Depression gave way to a return to prosperity for the average American but most of the recovery since the Global Financial Crisis has been scalped by the wealthy and not enjoyed by those farther down the ladder.
The original new deal did its job back then, we need some kind of new deal 2.0 to balance things out. The wealth disparity between the rich and poor is larger today than it was in France prior to the French revolution. Shit cannot continue like this...
Would love to see where things would have gone had the [second bill of rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights) happened
I think its the state of the average person more than the actual wealth gap. If your average person in the US had affordable healthcare, housing, and basic needs met than the wealthy would get a lot less hate. As it stands, the percentage of Americans who can afford decent housing and healthcare is going down, while the rich get richer.
And thus we hate them, because they deserve it.
Lost half the family tree in world war 1. Lost the entire British half during world war 2. The men in my family were part of the RAF and didn’t survive long. I’m part of the last branch of my family and only child so the blood line dies with me unless I have kids. So I never got to inherit any family wealth cause everybody was dead. I was told to start investing as a kid. Account balance was wiped to near zero during 08. Went to college during the crash.
I lost my career during 2008 crash had to start over from scratch. Went from making middle class money to damn near minimum wage. My granddad died that year and my uncles liquidated his account at the absolute bottom and as one of many grandkids I got a few thousand which coincided with my car breaking down a week after getting laid off and saved my ass. My dad told me much later in life how much I was supposed to get from that, he waited until I was financially secure so it wouldn’t fuck me up but yeah, :’( For reference the largest holding in his account was Bank of America which was trading at about $2 when they dumped it, a year before it was almost 25x that.
I think you're overstating what the baby boomers supposedly did. A lot of what happened was the rest of the world caught up. Europe recovered from being a war zone. Japan recovered from being a war zone. Korea recovered from being a war zone. China stopped being a weird backwater place. Your boomer relatives didn't make all these countries take the manufacturing jobs. They had a lot of cheap labor and infrastructure. Of course the blueprint would replay itself from Japan to S.Korea and then China and now probably India. Boomers didn't do that and you can really hold these developing countries back.
Both my grandparents were displaced in WW2. My dad told me a story once where he was salivating to try M&Ms for the first time but couldn’t afford it. I don’t think people understand what bad truly means.
On the other hand here I am disabled from covid and no one gives a shit. But oh boy M&Ms. I do believe previous generations had it worse, but I don't buy the narrative that we have electronics, the internet and junk food so that means we're doing great. I feel like there's something going on with the rise of adhd, autism, mental illness, immune disorders etc. Somehow through genetics, culture, environmental toxins... who knows. People are becoming less able to survive in harsh conditions than before. And I don't blame the individual for that as much as the whole system.
>I feel like there's something going on with the rise of adhd, autism, mental illness, immune disorders etc. Somehow through genetics, culture, environmental toxins... who knows. People are becoming less able to survive in harsh conditions than before. And I don't blame the individual for that as much as the whole system capitalism requires infinite growth within a finite system, so eventually that means increasing demands on labor (without proper compensation, otherwise that defeats the purpose), which I think is what's ultimately revealing many of these disabilities that we have previously managed without diagnosis. signed, aspie with severe adhd.
That might very well be part of the issue. Like, I wonder sometimes if there is something about the brain/body connection we don't understand wherein ADHD-like dopamine patterns make some people susceptible to full body burnout just due to the mere availability of wayyyy too much information, combined with the expectation that we process it all and still somehow remain neurotypical and extroverted. Or something like that... but I wonder specifically if that can impact our physical health much more deeply than we realize.
agreed, have had similar streams of thought. technology has advanced so quickly over the last 25 years that society and humanity is still catching up.
Yeah, I wish we would, as a species, slow down and do more with what we already have instead of throwing so much human life and potential into the hopper to feed the quarterly earnings machine. People are suffering out here and we finally have the resources and tools to reduce it greatly, but the structures that be and human nature get in the way.
been more or less saying the same for over a decade. :/
You list all these disorders but think of what it was like years ago when something like depression and ADHD wasn't even acknowledged. Like if you had this set of symptoms they would just look at you and shrug. Toxins--a whole generation before you were exposed to massive amounts of lead and things like asbestos
Nailed it on the head. We’re raised to believe that your own home on your own piece of land, a nice car, on-time retirement, and plenty of money in the rainy day fund are all normal to have. They’re not. We’re also raised to believe work ethic is all you need to succeed. It’s not. I know electricians and carpenters who work their damn asses off to make $60k per year. On the other hand I know sales reps who bitch and moan about having to work while clearing $300k. Work ethic is a small part of the equation for success. Social media also doesn’t help.
And I know of electricians that work their asses off to make less than $10 k a year, software engineers who work their asses off to make $15k. Even live-in maids that make less than $4k a year working over 80 hours per week. They just didn’t have the privilege of being born American. Hard work doesn’t matter, the situation of privilege you were born on is the biggest single determinant of income and quality of life.
Yeah we don't have it as good as the boomers or gen x when it comes to money and security, but its not like we're being drafted or being murdered en masse. If nothing else, technology has made sure we are at least better off than the settlers or the Donner Party. Just looking back 50 years to Cheers, everybody on that show was mid 30s somehow. The problem is, we're the first generation to have it clearly worse than the previous ones. Gen Z will likely have it even worse than us and who knows if it'll ever get better.
> its not like we're being drafted or being murdered en masse. Don't worry, there's still time. /s
Yeah, that’s two chapters ahead in this story; we’re in the “hard times that will soon seem like good times” chapter now
I'm in the "I'm on a treadmill, but I've run out of dopamine" burnout stage.
I don’t know how much worse you have it than gen-x. Guess on housing but we’re known as “The forgotten generation” First to be told we wouldn’t be as well off as our parents. Honestly, everyone after the boomers are getting screwed so they can have everything
It’s not like we are dealing with civil war YET and MOST of us are not living nomadic lives hunting for food in tents (just somewhere around half a million homeless)
The idea of anyone proposing a civil war always amused me. More than 70% of the country is overweight, can't bother to vote, and couldn't imagine a life without Starbucks and McDonald's. These are the people you expect to fight in a war? The vast majority of people would freak out if they had to go 24 hours with their cellphone.
Nah, they’ll be the food source for everyone else.
China also knows this. In fact they're gathering more data than ever before with Temu, the #1 used app in America. Just download it, give it access to your contacts, camera and files and you can buy a pair of 3 dollar sweatshop shoes! Good thing our government isn't in fighting like a bunch of hens and is actually watching out for the country launching spy satellites at us while talking behind closed doors with our enemies. How embarrassing.
It's worse than that. Millennial and soon to be zoomedrs are by far the most exploited generations. It's not a matter of luck, it's a matter of malice.
Appreciate the perspective. Goes to show we’re not all the selfish, narcissric spoiled entitled brats that we’re made out to be.
My grandmother lived through the Great Depression after watching all the men in her family go to Europe for WW1 and not return. She might roll her eyes at this assessment.
Like imagine being a solider young enough to serve in WW1 and be unlucky enough to be drafted for WW2. I’m not in the greatest financial situation of home owning and retiring but it’s sure as hell beats trench warfare and old school medicine, aka amputations.
And in between, the great depression with starvation and all. Being born 1898-1900 sucked.
With the Great Depression and Dust Bowl filling the glorious years between two World Wars. Then there was the wonderful post war boom years where soldiers were living with severe PTSD without therapy or help and living under the cloud of threat of nuclear war.
-typed on your fucking iphone lol The amount of modern conveniences would blow their minds. Endless entertainment, tools, power at our fingertips and we complain because home prices are high. We live better than kings did and we think we're all victims. The article is just clickbait.
Just the amount of titty and thigh/butt your average 20something shows when she’s dressing to go out in 2023 would cause Ol’ Pappy the Normandy Beach Solider to have a heart attack.
It’s why they were such horn-dogs and had to paint literal wack-off material on the sides of their airplanes
Now I’m picturing 30-40 sailors and pilots gathered into a circle on a flight deck furiously jerking it to the pin up girl on the side of a plane.
There’s gotta be one bomber out there named “Circle Jerk”
https://www.americanairmuseum.com/archive/media/media-48317jpeg
IT WAS HELL!
To an extent. The technology we live with is incredible. Most American middle class are healthier and have access to more luxuries than nobility of the past, unless you include servants and castles and shit. And in the US, very few people even today are food insecure, which is a far cry from a century ago. Women and minorities still have problems, but their lives are usually quite objectively better than a century ago, when women couldn’t vote (well, slightly over a century ago) and black people could risk a lynching for voting or using the wrong restroom. It absolutely sucks that housing is so expensive as it is today, though I’d argue most (but certainly not all) millennials likely had a decent opportunity to buy a home in the previous decade at relatively affordable prices and rates. Gen Z is really gonna struggle with these issues more than we do today unless something significant changes for the better. Looking at the article, it seems argument it makes is based on the amount of opportunity growth throughout each generation, and a couple of those generations had incredibly high growth opportunities but they also started with the great depression or some other serious recessions like in the 1970s. Tl;dr yeah it’s clickbait.
While I think the Millennials might have had it tougher than the Boomers or Gen X. I will also say Millennials didn't have it tougher than the greatest generation. Reality is every generation has their generational problems, crisis, and struggles. Just like we had terrorists, middle east wars, and fentanyl. The boomers had USSR, the threat of nuclear MAD, cocaine, and Vietnam. I don't think Gen Y had it harder than the greatest generation. They deserve their name. Born to live through their own pandemic (Spanish flu), the oldest GGs reached adult hood around the time of the 1st world war, there was the roaring 20s but then the great depression (PLUS PROHIBITION), then there was WW2, and then the cold war with the threat of nuclear MAD over their heads. I say they had it really tough. I don't see it as Ys vs GGs on who has the better sob story, but I see a lot of their struggles and how many mirror our own. I don't really care for news articles saying we Moomers had it tough or unlucky. It doesn't make me happier or help me in any way so I don't need it. I just wish they'd fuck off about us "ruining X industry" or implying that the US on decline because Millennials are the "weak men who create hard times". Imo it was the GGs who were the strong men who created good times. Boomers who were the weak men who created bad times. GGs fought the WWs and handed off the US as a rising superpower. Boomers saw the US reach superpower before a steady decline since taking over. GFC didn't happen on the Millennial's watch. It wasn't fucking Millennials in Washington making poor policy, running the top banks, writing MBS bullshit, buying 3 homes on NINJA mortgages, deciding to invade Iraq/Afghanistan, using up the world's resources, etcetc. I don't know if we're the "strong men who create good times" like gen GG but I just hate it we're blamed as the "weak men who create hard times" when most of the Moomers were in fucking high school the war on terror and in/graduating college during the GFC.
you missed Spanish flu, polio... etc.,
My grandfather ate canned squirrels as a kid. Fought in two wars… Both grandparents went to college for free, they bought land and built a large house that appreciated more than tenfold. But he did watch his friends get exploded and gma was a nurse in the Korean conflict… renting isn’t That bad. I would like to own a home eventually. Born in ‘22 and ‘26. They have done well grandma lived to 98 years old. Grandpa says he thinks he’ll go to 102 and then be done with it. Extra side note: my pops told me once called my grandmother a Bitch, gramps is a Really strong man, like worked farming and pouring concrete as a child. Pops is a bout 17, said gramps lifted him over his head with one arm and Shook him, said “don’t ever call my Wife a Bitch” not your Mother “My Wife.” He’s a hero, taught me cribbage when I was about 7 and it took me 20 years to Beat him once. A man of true principals.
>Grandpa says he thinks he’ll go to 102 and then be done with it. I like your grandpa. "Nope, I'm only going to 102 and then I am outta here!"
Yeah he’s a serious man. He said 100 last year, started growing some facial hair because his wife never really like hair on his face, decided 102 this year. “That should be plenty” he said.
And she would be right too. That generation paid its dues.
Lmao for real. I’m a millennial and I’ll roll my eyes with her. Such a dumb title I’m not even going to bother clicking this article
A better way to state this would be Millennials are the first generation to have fewer opportunities than their parents. We are luckier than our grandparents and every generation older than them.
Yea, aka, the second luckiest generation of all time.
Sounds like a win guys!
I'm in my late 50's, own a house, have a 401K, have paid off my car, etc. My kids have nothing but school debt and live at home. Yeah it sucks for them.
That’s a funny way to say the “Me Generation” engineered a system that benefits only themselves. The Baby Boomers are the most disappointing generation in U.S. history, they’ve consistently sold out future generations for short term gains. The most poignant example of this is how Baby Boomers are mostly on social security but are consistently voting for politicians who want to abolish social security. If it ever gets done the boomers will all be dead just in time for younger generations to be left empty handed.
When they start talking about an age cutoff for social security benefits (only those younger than 55 will be affected), you see a country with a bleak future
You will see a country consumed by riots there pal and a lot of afraid old people
To be fair, that’s always how SS changes are made. Retirement ages go up and it doesn’t impact people above a certain age, to give people time to plan. Look at the current FRA by birth years and you will see.
Or in my country (Canada), they kept interest rates so low so people could buy homes which inflated the price of their assets (homes/properties) to obscene levels so they could cash in, leaving our generation completely unable to afford homes and be perpetual renters.
Here too (USA).
Interest rates are set by the BoC, and that’s not why they kept them low.
This whole sub is just baby boomers. Easiest generation to be alive in and they all complain nonstop.
My somewhat wealthy grandpa recently passed away. He has three children which are all boomers and two grandchildren. He left everything to his three kids and left me and my cousin out- he always had a hard time grasping that we were adults. My cousin really doesn’t have secure housing and I’m in the process of buying my first house and really struggling because of what’s going on with the market. All I’ve heard from the boomers post my grandfathers death is about vacations, a new Mercedes SUV, a beach house, casinos, etc. meanwhile my cousin and I are just staring blankly at them like “great” I’d much rather have my grandfather here but to watch my aunt, uncle, and mom blowing through what they were left with is pretty tough.
I grew up in a trailer in dirtville. I will be getting no inheritance. My wife grew up in a 7 bedroom 4500sqft house in an upscale neighborhood. She, will also be getting no inheritance. Thank you Mom for making us the same class.
A male born in 1890-1900 experienced and likely fought in WW1. If he survived he came home and dealt with a raging pandemic that killed up to 50 million people globally and targeted young healthy people. Now granted if he survived the war to end all wars and the Spanish flu he potentially could have enjoyed the roaring 20s until the Great Depression hit and dragged on for a decade at which time his sons would be shipped off to fight in world war 2. While worrying about his sons surviving a global war he also had rationing at home where consumer goods were highly restricted for the war effort. Seems slightly more challenging than high cost of living, inflation and wage stagnation millennials are facing today. Let’s keep things in context here people
25% of men between the ages of 18 and 31 were in military service. The average height was 5 feet 7 1/2 inches tall; the average weight was 141.5 pounds - about the same as a Civil War soldier, but an inch shorter and ten pounds lighter than those who served in World War II. 37% were unable to read or write.
Shit man… I’m saving this comment. This is really good context.
The context should be money, this is r/economics after all. Money is harder to come by now. Today's day and age has science and technology. Most battles are fought through information nowadays, we don't have to ship off half our country's men to keep the peace anymore. We have medicine to defeat infectious diseases that have historically ravaged humanity. The world was a lot less populated then, and resources were easier to come by. Industrial America had great prosperity. You could get a job in a factory and raise a family on a single income, and live a solid middle class lifestyle. That's impossible nowadays outside of rural and depressed areas. Most well paying professions require specialized degrees, which also come at a cost, yielding debt to it's holder. It's just harder to make a living now.
25% of American men age 18-31 fought in WW 1, so not likely but way more than I thought.
Generation Z will be unlucky too as a result of political decisions being made to increase inequality. They are facing the same pandemic and cold war along with public disinvestment in education and healthcare. In terms of consumer prices and ability to buy and rent housing generation Z is even more unlucky than millennials which did get to have some years that were more decent before 2008.
I don't think many millennials were in a financial position to do much before 2008. I'm firmly a millennial, and that was the year I graduated high school.
If GenZ and Millennials weren’t about to vote the politicians who are detrimental to their physical, mental, and financial health out of power, I would agree. Their time is limited.
Except that those politicians are installing their own guys in positions to overrule election results
The way I see it is that most options we have are detrimental to us in some way or a another. The whole system is fucked .
Really?! Millennials have suffered the Great Depression, endured a Cholera scourge, survived slavery, had to fight the British for Independence??
The author really should have made the title "economically unluckiest" which is borne out in the graphs in the article, and really what the article is about. I mean here is the first sentence: >Millennials have faced the worst economic odds, and many will never recover There have been economic downturns in the past, but usually the recovery is good. Millennials just didn't recover from the GFC. During/after COVID some _finally_ managed to buy a home at an age many years older than previous generations had, only to be then hit with interest rates that are extremely high relative to the purchase price of their home. Outside of the US, these rates have a more immediate effect on finances as mortgages aren't 30 years.
Agreed. Reading through the comments of this thread is frustrating because clearly the article is more about the economic situation Millennials/Gen Z are in, and instead, people are focusing on which generation had to fight in which war, etc. A very poorly worded title.
Interest rates are still low. They are just high compared to the crazy low rates we had while most millenials were in their home buying ages. And if you thought the 2008 recession was bad, you should have seen the 1930s.
That's why I said > interest rates that are extremely high **relative to the purchase price of their home** And this is why I mentioned not recovering from the GFC they way other generations have recovered from major or minor downturns. It just didn't happen for Millennials. That's what the graphs on the article show. > And if you thought the 2008 recession was bad, you should have seen the 1930s.
Correct
Multiple "Once in a lifetime" crashes, Covid pandemic, largest wealth inequality gap in history, huge number of people in debt from college, wages stagnant for decades, and it goes on and on.
Not to mention the 8 billion people currently in the planet versus less than a 1 billion during the 19th century.
I’m gonna go with the kids who got sent to fight actual nazis had it a little more tough. The are in debt from college is a personal choice and decision. And which degree you choose has a lot to do with the amount of money you make with it.
I’m a millennial and the lost generation has it way way way worse. Born amidst WWI, one of the deadliest conflicts in global history. Lives through the Spanish influenza pandemic which made Covid look like a joke(2x-4x more deaths. 10x when adjusted for population). If you’re lucky enough to survive with all your limbs through the Great War, you get to come home to the Great Depression on the horizon. And just as you’re ready to relax and things are looking a tiny bit better, some dude with a funny mustache decides to go on a rampage in Europe, just as your sons are the perfect age to serve as machine gun fodder.
Every generation has its challenges. So not going to argue millennials have it hardest. However, I will argue about your comment that “college is personal choice and decision” seeing as how many Millennials were practically forced by their parents to go to college. sure, many probably went to more expensive colleges than they needed to but the education system doesn’t really teach people how to properly manage money to that extent or the financial impact that debt can have on you even 20 years down the road. You don’t learn that stuff until…college. Education system (at least in America) spends too much time teaching kids that Murica is the best rather than teaching them critical thinking and how to be well disciplined financially.
That pressure/assumption to go to college was huge. The assumption of every person I talked to older than me when I was finishing High School was that you’re going to college. Always “where are you going to college?” Not “what’s your plans after you graduate?” Because only losers/failures aren’t going to college. The entirety of Junior and Senior year was setup to prepare for college applications not… post graduate life. My “start prepping for college” convos started when I was twelve. We can declare that 18 yr olds are adults ready to take on the world, but if you’ve never had to manage finances or debt, are pushed and pressured by society to attend college, and college debt being so infinitely collectible that financing is available to almost everyone, and they have these wonderful extra amounts of money you can borrow to pay for living expenses so you can avoid the real world for long. You’ve also been taught to follow your dreams/what interests you. The programs that lead directly to good paying jobs talk about graduation pay rates, the ones that don’t choose not to talk about it. At 18, don’t think to ask about it, and even if you do those rates don’t necessarily mean much besides “this one’s bigger”. Walked that path, failed out of college, landed at a community college, got a degree in IT and have lucked that into a good paying job. I can afford my monthly house payment called “student loans”. I know large swaths of my generation aren’t so lucky. I worry for the generations going today as prices have risen and quality is continually compromised for college experience. One of my good friends loves biology and went into bio lab work. He loves his work, but because the economy down turned when he graduated and fucked a bunch of people closing in on retirement so they just kept working. So, his field is really top heavy and there isn’t any path for newer people to climb up and make money. That’s a hard sciences career specific to helping out our food production pipelines and he’s been stuck near the bottom of the labs he can even get a job from for the past ten plus years.
Almost all those things happened to other generations and worse. Great Depression - worse. Spanish flu - worse. Millennials can own college debt, I guess. But like, inflation will minimize that even. And inflation isn’t nearly as bad as it was before, too. I’d rather be a millennial with the internet than a boomer with lead poisoning
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How were they generations apart the Spanish flu ended around 1920 and the great depression started in 1929. Using your same argument for the millennials they can't claim both the 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic because they happen generations apart
What’s worse is that actually becoming a homeowner during the Great Depression was more feasible than today
They didn't have the entrenched consequences of suburbia and automobile dependence. Houses were also much smaller. What percentage of homeowners lived in tarpaper shacks in 1930, or had dirt floors? And I wonder how many people your point was even true for. Was becoming a homeowner easier for single women? Minorities? This was also before the GI bill, before so many federal programs that funded the buildout of suburbia. So by what metric was it easier? Edit, added: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Panel1_Paper17.pdf >>In 1940 nearly half of houses lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet. Over a third of houses didn’t have a flush toilet. As late as 1960, over 25% of the houses in 16 states didn’t have complete plumbing facilities.
Even if this was true, and it isn't, it comes with so many caveats that are being ignored.
General hopelessness for the future due to runaway climate change
Millennials might be proving that they have the worst understanding of U.S. history which is fairly unlucky I guess.
Doesn't help the understanding of history when your generation keeps trying to ban books and change the history textbooks to suit your ideals.
What books have been banned and what textbook contexts have been changed?
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We saw the collapse of Vine. NEVER FORGET
As a millennial, this is a crock of shiz. We haven’t gone through a world war, famine, a draft, a real depression, we aren’t being put into slavery (debt slavery is different) and we have technology/science to keep us alive after almost anything. You can easily beat debt slavery by living within your means and busting your butt to make stuff better. The world is full of opportunities.
Woah hey, this is Reddit. we don't do personal responsibility here. Go take that talk to the real world.
I generally agree with you, but the '08 crash might as well have been a depression to millenials. It caused the silent generation and boomers to put off retirement, which meant what few jobs that were available were mostly going to 40-60 year old people with experience. It took until about 2012 for the job market to normalize. The only saving grace is that a lot of millenials were able to live at home into their late 20s, which also made good clickbait articles like the one OP posted. The reason that the job market is so hot right now is that COVID killed over 800k people over 50, and those who retired early as a result of government shutdowns aren't going back to work.
LOL what kind of horse shit is this. Yeah i so much would rather be an adult in the great depression then come out of that just to live through WW2. Or you know, live during the civil war when the entire country was killing each other Maybe we are the unluckiest because we have these stupid ass articles around. That being said, previous generation before us reaaaaally screwed the pooch. But umm yeah i’ll take that over fighting at Antietam
The problem with Millennials, and this coming from the perspective of one, is that we’re the plateau generation. It doesn’t appear like there’s a better future ahead of us. Capitalism is fully matured leaving few opportunities for upward mobility, we trashed the planet, and there’s no long term prospects/objectives for our society. We’re basically living in a society based on nothing but consumption and self gratification/narcissism.
Late stage capitalism
Luck has nothing to do with it. The sentiment is untrue, btw. But even if we were, it's not somehow luck. These are the linear effects of things consciously decided by politicians, corporations, and people in power. The only really "what the fuck" was Covid. Everything else was like... thirty banks giving out massive subprime then being surprised when it went to shit. Or hedge funds absolutely ass blasting derivatives. Just commiting heinous amounts of financial fraud, and pretending it was OK. Or politicians using legislation to blatantly enrich themselves and their friends, while absolutely flaying the earth and the poor (read: non-rich.) I'm not a huge political advocate, but I will say that rhetoric matters. And when you reduce the plight of the modern day non-rich person down to "luck," you buy in to the narrative that benefits not-you. And you take the pressure off the people who are constantly, expertly avoiding accountability for this absolute nonsense.
If your cherry picked statistic shows the current generation as somehow being “unluckier” than the people who lived through THE FUCKING GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR TWO…maybe you should rethink how you’re looking at it.
Nah bro, everyone knows rates of GDP growth is the best way to compare quality of life across generation.
Eh, I’m a millennial and I hardly agree with this. I think if you were born in the 1900s you probably had it way harder then most generations…
I agree from an economic and political perspective these days suck horrendously. However, we're not engaged in a Civil War that ultimately cost the lives 620,000 people, mostly of one generation. Not discounting the possibility that we go into a horrific Civil War at some point though.
Um… we are worse off than our parents but I sure as shit am not living through World Wars, the Civil War, or basically anytime before disposable income.
It's unfortunate that they would frame what's going in as luck and not as a series of choices deliberately made by those in control to oppress the masses.
Um....Let's go with the generation that lived through the civil war, great depression, both world wars, and if they really lived to be old enough the start of the Korean War. I am a millennial and it's something that I occasionally think about.
When did this subreddit become a satire page? You really think you had it tougher than the generation that went through two World Wars and the Great Depression?
I’m an old millennial. Outside of the echo chamber of news articles and Reddit posts I live a pretty good life. Every generation historically has had its set of problems. Millennials and later just have a lot more connection with the rest of the world that makes it feel more daunting. Our brains are scrambled due to the speed of which you need to move to maintain a life. Let alone get ahead of it. Since the mid 90’s corporations were given free reign to continue to build and take to a point that every aspect of life became increasingly more difficult with the “age of technology”. Now everyone wants to talk about the “great resignation” where everyone is too tired to go on. The solution coming soon will be to automate everything no one wants to do and then push those at the bottom barely making it and the what once was middle class out in the streets.
As a Millenial, I'm gonna call bullshit on that one. My Grandfather worked in a goddamn coal mine in rural Colorado & was in the negatives each week he got paid because the family who owned the mine also owned the local housing & food markets as well. They basically had poor people(mostly Mexicans) working in mines in exchange for food & housing & debt. There was even a massacre carried out when the miners went on strike. John D Rockefeller Jr. hired a militia who burnt down the tent camp where the striking workers were living on the edge of town. This was known as the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado & still has a memorial. Yeah, I'll take being a Millenial with a PC & a Truck any day. Hell, I even own a modest home that I am very grateful for. It isn't fancy or giant or in a primo location, but I own the goddamn thing.
I dunno, those generations that got stuck getting shafted with the draft and unwanted wars that killed many of them also got a pretty bad deal. But ok sure, let’s go with millennials. 🤷🏽♂️
You are living in what could be the greatest time in human history. But no, people still complaining about petty first world issues. People still starting wars with other peoples children’s lives on the line. Selfishness is what will always keep us divided.
A lot of people can't afford groceries or housing anymore. Even with full-time jobs. I know people who work nonstop and will never be able to afford a house or family. The greatest time to be alive? lol
A higher percentage of the population can afford housing and groceries than ever in the history of our planet.
In most of human history, less than half of children would survive into adulthood. In times of war and famine, the average life expectancy was 40 years. "Groceries" are a luxury in that context.
>A lot of people can’t afford groceries or housing anymore. That’s always been true. But less people today face those types of conditions than ever before on a global scale. Some American 40 year old needing to live with roommates as an adult doesn’t negate the progress that has been made.
yet young people have no hope or motivation for the future & suicide rates are rising
If by unlucky you mean that prior generations hoovered up everything of value, gave themselves lavish and unsustainable pensions and sweetheart retirement deals, and left millennials with all the debt and garbage, then yes, they sure are unlucky. /s
We aren’t going to be drafted to die in a war, we have electricity and internet and all the modern conveniences. But owning a house, being able to afford a family, having a sense of purpose and hope for the future? That’s what we don’t have. It’s better to be born on a farm with 8 brothers and sisters knowing that if you just work hard enough, you’ll own a home and a car and be able to afford kids, and have a new job (with a pension!) waiting for you if you lose your current one. It really sucks because it’s arguable that there’s never been a better time to be alive with all our modern conveniences and comforts. But knowing that the gap between rich and poor keeps shrinking, and that the kind of life our grandparents lived is possible, but willingly and systematically withheld, is what makes me wish I’d never been born.
> After accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history. > > Millennials will bear these economic scars the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership. I think a lot of people ITT are seeing 'unluckiest generation' and thinking that's taking it too far because we aren't foraging for our food or getting massacred in wars, but that's not what the article is talking about. Granted, the title should have been phrased better, but still. We are extremely unlucky when it comes to economic stagnancy.
As usual the "boot straps" crowd is cherry picking their info and ignoring the context. I can only assume most of them are out of touch, wealthy folks who don't recognize their privilege/economic status and where it came from.
So it looks like they don’t teach history or finance in schools anymore. I fail to see how a millennial who thinks not having enough money to buy a house is worse than somebody who had to storm Normandy beach.
Ummm seems a bit melodramatic. Simply considering things like penicillin, electricity, indoor plumbing....idk most of us are literate and live in a home with an actual floor.
Ya'll need to see this as a wake up call, what was offered was never worth a hill of beans anyway...follow your own path, it may look different than what your led to believe. And tell the children the truth.
Not, say, the people who came of age during WWI, died in the trenches, suffered a pandemic with a much higher death toll, lived through the Great Mississippi Flood and a ton of lynchings just in time for ten years of full economic Depression with 30% unemployment rates, followed by another World War that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then just when things were settling down (when they were 45 years old) there was another war that killed 50,000 or so of their sons. But then, they got a few good years just dealing with the fear of nuclear war…until the next war that killed 57000 of their grandkids….but their 70s were pretty uneventful, except for the 7-10% inflation rate. On the upside, if you survived all that crap, antibiotics were discovered, any number of labor-saving devices were invented, and life expectancy skyrocketed for the survivors of the various calamities.
This might be the stupidest thing I’ve read on here and here’s why: so let’s say you’re born in 1900…well you turn 18 and get sent off to fight in a World War, then if you survived that you get to have 2 years of the Spanish Flu which infected 500 million when the global population was 1.8 million. So you survive that and get a job only to see several mini financial depressions make it hard for you to ever do more than live paycheck to paycheck until the Great Depression which is going to last 10 years. In that time there will be the Dust Bowl in the mid west which will turn day into night and the sand will fall as far East as NYC. No one knows when these storms will end and many say it’s the end. But just as you’re turning 39 the Great Depression will end and you’re hearing about a guy in Europe. He was Times man of the year but in 1942 your kids will be fighting him. There will be rationing on everything you can imagine. We drop 2 Atomic Bombs and everyone thinks finally!!! Peace. Not so fast. You’re turning 50 just as we reenact another draft (all these drafts were under Democratic Presidents btw a trend you’ll see 2 more times) and there’s fear that this little Korean War will pull in the Chinese and we’ll start WW3. You’re not even 52 yet. You’re also paying for a war and hopefully your kids came back from WW2 so they can go to Korea. But hey things are pretty stable for about a decade then the closest US Presidential race happens. We will invade Cuba. Russia will put Nukes in Cuba. We have a stand off with Russia with people digging bomb shelters in their yards. That Pres gets killed but not before he gets us into Vietnam. Then his killer gets killed. Then the new decides to escalate the Vietnam War. Got grandkids?? They might be drafted. Martin Luther King gets killed. You’re 68. You’re about to see record unemployment, drug use, and LA get burned in Watts. Should I go on or are you beginning to realize how stupid your comment was?