To be fair, I think that they are wanting a job that can get them out of their parents basement. When I was in college in the 1990s, you could get a all bills paid two bedroom apartment for 450 a month. The cheapest place I found when I was looking last week was a studio for 1175 a month, plus trash and water and electric and gas. I was looking for an apartment for my mother in law, she would like to move out of my house. She can’t, her monthly income is only $670 from SS.
I had decent money left over from working in fast food after paying my rent when I was in college. The apartment building I was just checking out last week for my mamma in law, the cheapest studio had a policy that only one person could live in it. No boyfriend or girlfriend or anything. Needles stuck in the barrister on the second floor. My mother in law trying desperately not to notice.
Seems to me that there are going to be a lot of kids with nowhere to move if we as a society don’t get a handle on housing prices. I don’t know how that happens, but if we can’t get it back to how it was even 25 years ago, its going to make things better.
I don’t have kids, and I won’t be able to have kids as the wife and I can’t reproduce. So the closest thing I have to millenials at home is my in laws.
I am a boomer and I remember this exact sort of thing being said about boomers by previous generations. Your statement wouldn’t have been in the least out of place if you’d made it in 1965 or 1975. (Or, I suspect, in 1935. Etcetera, both earlier and later.)
I strongly suspect that every generation says, in effect, ‘how dare kids these days want work that doesn’t feel like it’s destroying them, and/or that pays enough to live on!’
This.
‘Things were awful before but we’re OK now’ is no guarantee that everything will be fine in the future.
And there are a lot of people who aren’t OK now. The fact that there were a lot of people who weren’t OK in the past doesn’t make that perfectly fine, even if there were more of them; nor does the fact that most of the people who aren’t OK now aren’t the ones posting on this board.
Is the person referred to in the OP lacking perspective? Sure. But that doesn’t mean they’re not identifying real problems; or that those problems should be sneered at, rather than worked on.
The reason I mock the post is because the poster seems to think that things are that utterly dire for everyone, when there are plenty of people–even younger ones–still managing to build decent lives for themselves. The second is this:
Which is profoundly ignorant. It isn’t “corporations” trying to kill it, it is billions of individuals wanting to have their affordable Ramen and clean water and warm light bulbs that are killing it. If there was an easy way to make cheap, clean sustainable products and services as good as what is being replaced, the corperations would be all over it, but there are not easy solutions. You want to save the planet? okay, you can have the same number of people with a vastly degraded lifestyle or you can keep the same lifestyle and have vastly fewer humans. Those are the two choices.
The poster seems to share Wesley Clarks’s belief that all the problems in the world are caused by The Rich People and if we could just get rid of them, our side having all their money would lead us back to a lost Golden Age. What would really happen is that businesses would collapse, prices would skyrocket, and the poster would pine for the days when they could afford Ramen and runnung water and electricity while they chased a nice jucy rat with a sharp stick. (The poster would have the sharp stick, not the rat.)
Not picking on you, but what do you think is the ratio of “kids who are making it” vs “kids that aren’t”?
I don’t have an answer for that either. I am not sure what success means really, but if you use what a lot of people feel is success (financial independence, owning a home) I do know roughly what the success rate is of my graduating class in high school. I grew up in a tiny town of 800 or so people. The graduating class (1998) I was in had 29. Of that 29:
-Some of these folks are double counted-
5 are career employed (not working part time) = 17.2%
3 are dead = 10.3%
15 are working part time and living with relatives = 51.7%
2 own their own home = 6.8%
2 have medical insurance (not sure if this is completely accurate today, it was about 6 months ago) = 6.8%
19 of them have children = 65.5%
Looking at where I came from, the future is certainly bleak. I wouldn’t think that my small sample size could compare directly with the larger population, but it would be interesting to see how this newer generation is doing compared to their parents. A common theme around these parts is “your kids won’t have it as good as you do or did”.
To compare two anecdotes and declare one right and one wrong doesn’t seem to be helpful, but it would be helpful to look at real numbers.
If you only considered home ownership as success (which might not be a bad thing to look at, since a lot of people only have the value of their house as their main asset), it would appear that we are backsliding to the 1960s. Here is a chart for that prepared by the Federal Reserve:
I don’t know if these folks or me are millennials or not, but they are around 40. A lot of people owned their house when I was a kid, now the only people I know that own are boomers that have been rolling equity from one place to the next.
Yeah, that’s pretty close to the top end of the millennial bracket which is around 38.
I don’t know that things are as dire as the reddit post suggests but even if things aren’t ‘really’ that bad, if they feel bad, that stress can be a strong de-motivator.
Translucent, you certainly sound like you are struggling. I won’t teach grandma to suck eggs, but I’m thinking about you and hoping you see some metaphorical sunshine.
I appreciate it. Things are kinda looking up, and as far as I know, I will be employed through at least December. Our current landlord is having the house painted and reroofed, so that means he is getting ready to sell on us. We will see if I have a job and or house come January 1st. But the hopes are up
My experience is totally different; my friends generally range from about 50 to about 40-ish, and plenty of them own their own homes- generally speaking, the only ones who don’t tend to be single and male, and that’s not even a hard and fast rule.
I wonder if there’s a big divide that would follow educational attainment and/or income; our crowd of friends is overwhelmingly well educated- lots of architects, IT people, and a few lawyers. There’s one guy who didn’t finish college, but he’s a successful small business owner (and homeowner).
If it makes a difference, 8 of my class of 29 have a bachelor’s degree or better. I was in graduate school, but it was tied to a special cohort of students that was tied to my employer (junior college). When I got laid off, I got removed from the program. But the 28k in debt, yeah, that stayed with me. I was on the Dean’s list for the first time in my collegiate career in grad school.
Part of the issue is income inequality. When a small % of people are multi multi millionaires and billionaires, they buy up housing as investment property (and to protect their money from domestic attempts to confiscate it), driving up home prices in major metro areas all over the west.
Vladimir Putin is worth over $200 billion. He obviously isn’t going to invest all of that in housing, but even if homes are a million dollars each, he can afford to buy 200,000 of them. Thats almost as many households that exist in the entire city of Vancouver (which has seen their prices skyrocket due to foreign investors). A handful of very wealthy people can cause housing bubbles all over metro areas in the west, and they have.
Even people who are doing ok financially still have other fears. Like health care or child care.
Child care costs more than a mortgage for a lot of younger people. And even if you scrimp and save for years and years, one week in a hospital can destroy everything you worked for for years. Even if you have insurance, insurance may screw you over or refuse to pay. People paying tens of thousands in premiums, then insurance refusing to pay the bills once you get sick is sadly an issue that happens.
Again, the issue is that all these issues can be solved. Its just that due to corruption they won’t be. That is pissing a lot of people off. This isn’t like cancer (where we don’t know how to solve it). We just don’t ‘want’ to solve the economic and environmental problems facing the generation coming of age. Some members of the older generation gloating and gleeing at how they’ve helped create these problems for their children and grandchildren (which are legislative at root) doesn’t help either. Lots of people are just as, if not more pissed off, about the fact that these problems are solvable, they just won’t be solved. Older people creating these problems then bragging and feeling glee at their kids and grandkids suffering, or the despondency that comes from realizing you can’t solve these issues via legislation is pissing people off.
I predict a surge in things like ballot initiatives, ranked choice voting, etc. as people look for solutions for these problems.
I don’t know… me and my friends were always fed a pretty steady diet of being told that we were going to have to “put our time in” when we were young, and were regaled with tales of our parents having no money when they were young and newly married.
There wasn’t a lot of expectation that we’d graduate, have jobs that changed the world, and that we were happy with. Or that we’d be treated well in. We were more or less expecting jobs that were going to be sucky entry level ones for a few years, and then either we’d get promoted out of the entry level stuff, or we’d go elsewhere. And that money would come eventually, but not initially. This was a legacy of our parents’ long-tenure employment way of thinking.
If there was job griping when I was just out of school, it was more around the idea that tech types were making crazy money, while non-tech types weren’t. Which only lasted about 4 years or so, and then a lot of those tech guys were out of jobs come 2001-2002.
I don’t know if today’s Millennials and Gen-Z types got that same sort of admonition that we did; it sounds to me like that’s not the case.
This could be a large part of it. I work in an agricultural laboratory in an industrial mall. There are 4 boomers that work here in this strip mall, then me, late 30s, and my wife, early 30s. There are two younger women that work here as well in their early to mid 20s.
Of these people, here is the housing ownership of these folks (all in my town of 60k):
Boomer 1 - Owns 4 houses and is in the process of buying another. Will have a total of 4 rental houses and 1 residence
Boomer 2 - Owns 11 houses, 10 rental and 1 residence
Boomer 3 - Owns 3 houses, 1 residence. The others are “investment property”
Boomer 4 - Married to boomer 3
Me and Wife - Rent
Millennial 1 - Rent
Millennial 2 - Couch Surfs / Not sure if that qualifies as homeless?
The boomers around here are dead set against paying any taxes, so they keep rolling their profits from their businesses into real estate around here to park their money in so when they want to retire they can cash out and pay taxes once.
As another fun note, I just found out that we will have to move in the spring, the land lord is going to sell he house out from under us after all. He appreciates us putting up with the 3 months of exterior renovations and how we always paid our rent on time. ULGH. It cost us 10k, our buy a house savings, just to move into this place in November when I took the job out here. I won’t get any of that back until after I move into our new place if we can find one, and pony up the 8 - 10k they are going to need from us for the new place. Christmas is canceled again this year.
Huh, the first thing I’ve ever posted that didn’t just immediately go quiet into that good night… and I didn’t notice.
I found it powerful because it was a view into somebody else’s head. Rather than just dismiss him/her as a whiny kid, I thought about it.
I was born in 1980. While there were problems, as there always are, there just seemed to be at the time a general hopefulness in society that things were improving. Cheesy things like Hands Across America had a huge cultural impact. The Berlin Wall fell, and there was much rejoicing as East and West Germany were reunified.
The 90s started off with the US being pulled into conflict. The first Gulf War was a big deal… and it only lasted six months, if you count both Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Then a decade of economic growth and technological innovation. The internet hit mainstream, changing the world forever.
These whiny “Holden Caulfields” whose opinion we should just ignore? They’ve been bombarded with bad shit since day one. There hasn’t been a time in my kids’ lives that we haven’t been bogged down in a neverending war. The internet has become a malicious tool used to sell out their future from underneath them. They now get to watch, in real time, as glacial and sea ice disappears, while half of the folks in charge deny what they can see right in front of them.
I can see why they are frustrated. I really feel this is starting to mirror the 1970s, with youth growing weary of a constant quagmire, the news for their present and future looking more and more grim… I mean, I can at least hold onto those feelings of hopefulness where I got to actually SEE things getting better, but they don’t really have that option.
Of course, the delicious irony of it is that the disaffected rebel youth of the 70s are basically the ones telling them to shut up and stop whining.
A war that has a tiny fraction of the impact of past wars. No draft. No rationing. No air raid drills. No Duck And Cover. No 50,000 or 400,000 dead Americans. For people who don’t have friends/relatives in the 100% volunteer military the war is practically invisible. Which is nothing like the wars of the 20th century. Ask someone who was around during the world wars and Korea and Vietnam what the homefront impact of a war can be.
If your kids didn’t see it on TV/read about it on-line, would there be any sign whatsoever to them that a war is happening? Because it hasn’t once actually intruded into my a life at all.
Where are you from or live right now, though? Each family I know someone in has someone in at least the Coast Guard. Maybe its because I’m from the poorer area of the South.
I live in a city right now though, and I don’t think that any of my neighbors have any relatives that are serving or have served. Maybe its more of a regional experience since the current military ops are volunteer, and people are much more likely to volunteer if there is little other opportunity.
It might as well be 1965 where I am from. A couple people have high speed internet though.
Why is the reasonable position “Shut up and quit whining, because things were once worse”?
Should I never feel discontent because unlike those before me, I was born in the year smallpox was declared eradicated from the entire human population? Or because I didn’t have to work in a coal mine as a preteen?
It seems to me the whole concept of “shut up and enjoy what you’ve got” is really the core behind the lack of concern at the top for the future of those of the younger generation. I mean, those whiny little bastards have it so good compared to what we did, right? They should just shut up and be grateful.
And even when you DO have friends in the military, the number of casualties is dramatically lower than in past wars- even the number of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan over 18 years is like 1/3 the number from Vietnam over a much shorter period.
So it’s not really a good comparison; most youngsters hear about the war in passing on the news/news sites, and that’s about it. There aren’t classmates getting drafted, and then having their names published in the paper six months later as being KIA. And a relatively small percentage of teenagers/young adults even enlist in the first place.
I still think it’s a certain amount of not being able to see the forest for the trees in that set- they’re convinced that everything is going/has gone to shit because that’s what they’re perceiving. They’re not looking at the good stuff that’s happened- better fuel economy/pollution standards, LGBT rights, better race relations, more police accountability/awareness of officer-involved shootings, HIV as a chronic disease rather than a death sentence. Medical advances of all sorts. The amazing things we can do with technology these days.
But all they see is the negative, because for whatever reason(youth?) they don’t have perspective on things.
Do you think that improving the situation for these young people would somehow make your situation worse?
Not picking on you, bump, lets just play a little devils advocate. I do a lot of mediating at work between the 20 somethings and the boomer management. Its one of the reasons I still have my job here and haven’t been laid off yet.
Better Fuel Economy - we have a president that most of this youth cohort didn’t vote for that is actively undermining this. That same youth cohort will have to live through the effects of the current administration. Above ground pollution has improved though in my living memory.
LGBT Rights - May have improved, but are under attack currently by the same administration. Me, a rando straight white guy, probably thinks that these issues are way better. I am not living the life that has to go through those issues. Why are they just “better” and not fixed already? Why is LGBT rights still a thing? Thats kinda stupid.
Better Race Relations - that is somewhat improved, but we aren’t there yet. You can’t base your longer view of it being “less bad or better than it was” to the desire to improve it more. “Race Relations are better now than they used to be” reeks of something a white person would say. Trust me, I know. I am white but I have black relatives and what they go through on the daily would make your skin peel off. Me telling them, “Hey at least its better now than it was” doesn’t go too far and makes me look like a patronizing jackass. I am not implying that you are a jackass, though, Bump.
More police accountability - possibly, but Texas can’t seem to go two months between shooting some random person of color in their house for no reason. The police have never been more afraid of people of color, and since they are “afraid” they seem to be able to walk out of a grand jury in a hurry. That’s almost worse and more demoralizing IMHO than having it swept from public view in the first place.
Medical advances / HIV - Medical advances are great if you have insurance. Most people I know, myself included, don’t have insurance. Of those folks that I know that have insurance, some of them can’t afford to use it (deductibles/co-pays). I have a family member that contracted HIV in the mid 1980s from a medical procedure. He is doing okay and it is still in the HIV stage. Thats great, but he always had insurance. He looses sleep at night wondering if his drug will still be covered, as he has fought the insurance company several times to keep his medication covered, the last time took a lawyer.
Medical tech is great if you have insurance. If you are one of the unwashed like me, we don’t get that. I get to watch my wife die slowly and painfully for the next 3 - 5 years because we don’t have insurance. Think of the failure you would feel as a person to know that if you only had a better job or came from a family of money, your wife wouldn’t have to suffer and die. Thats my life. If we magically got insurance tomorrow, it most likely wouldn’t cover her condition now since its pre-existing. It would have to be through the government. Yay for that. So, yeah it is pretty damn hard to turn on the tube and see advertisements for medications for rich people. Don’t even get me started on dental. I have missing teeth now because since I didn’t have dental coverage, I couldn’t get a filling. When you only have 50 bucks, the dentist sits on your chest and yanks the tooth out with only a little Novocaine topical on there. I think it hurt less to have the filling done. Its a shame that its so much more expensive. Don’t even get me started on the 1200 a tooth they want for a crown.
You can pick any point in time almost and say, “Well at least they had it worse before me.” Or “It was worse in the past, so I should be happy.” But at the same time, our incremental progress on these issues is slow by our own doing. If you were on the ass end of any of these problems, its very little consolation that it was worse before you were born. Its our choice that it still sucks for these people (and me too, I guess.)
Sorry if it seems like I was picking on you, Bump. I really wasn’t trying to, I just think that people on your side of things are remembering a different reality than exists today. Your parents probably had a hard time coming to grips with what you were going through as well, though, because they have a different past than you do. My parents had no idea how tough the real world was for me, but they do now since I am paying for health care for them when I can as well. Its not as much as I would like to help them with since I am strapped as well. Another reason to feel like a failure.
When I mediate for the 20 somethings here at work, the overarching theme from them I pick up on is a sense of failure that they can’t get to where they have expected to be at this point, and where people are expecting them to be. Does that make sense? The boomer people up here are really big on telling the homeless 20 something up here that they had already bought their first house by her age. Why is she homeless? They know damn well what they pay this poor person. She already has another job as well, how does that money add up to rent these days? She makes what I made at Wal-Mart almost 20 years ago when I was in college. Man that money doesn’t nearly go that far with the way that rent has skyrocketed.
