I am 35 years old-the oldest millennial, the first millennial-and for a decade now, I've been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven't had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.
We've all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don't have on things we don't need. We still haven't learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention "millennial" to anyone over 40 and the word "entitlement" will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.
This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.
But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.
- We've taken on at least 300% more student debt than our parents
- We're about 1/2 as likely to own a home as young adults were in 1975
- 1 in 5 of us live in poverty
- Based on current trends, many of us won't be able to retire until we're 75
What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered.
Comment: Because of the complex interaction of over regulation, immigration, and socialist wage policies.
At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence - education, housing and health care - has inflated into the stratosphere.
Comment: Because some idiot decided that Universities should be like cities, with their own police force, 24 hour gym, caffeteria, library and social justice tribunals.
From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding.
Comment: Which is what you were told would happen if you accepted the New Deal and the crypto-fascism of the left. You wanted the free ride, now you get the free ride: right off a cliff.
And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life - the ones that boomers lucked into - are being lifted out of our reach.
Comment: They didn't luck into it. It's just that bleeding heart liberals like you hadn't pissed all the wealth away yet.
Add it all up and it's no surprise that we're the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.
This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. "Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest," says Jimmi Matsinger. "I'm 25 and I'm still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage." Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn't keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans.
Comment: What she wanted, what she thought she "deserved" was a lifestyle she couldn't afford. What she should have done is realize she couldn't "have it all baby" and found herself a good husband.
Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.
It's tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover.
Comment: You mean the one caused by community organizers and social justice warriors that forced banks to demean their underwriting standards coercing them with threats of protest and committee interference with acquisitions and mergers so that they would lend to people who couldn't pay off the loans? That Fuckening?
But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America's.
Comment: So change it? Nut up and do something other than whine in HuffPo about how screwed you are. Because if you don't put down that angry birds and soy decaf latte and get behind someone other than a disheveled and decrepit communist who only pays 13% tax on his wealth, it's never gonna change.
To read the rest of the article along with some very cool graphics go here.
Comment: See also: