I think the author may be looking at his own childhood through some rose tinted glasses due to not being his parents and not fully understanding or grasping their particular struggles and...
I think the author may be looking at his own childhood through some rose tinted glasses due to not being his parents and not fully understanding or grasping their particular struggles and stresses.
Yes, housing costs have risen, but Pakistani refugees living paycheck to paycheck driving taxis and waiting tables were almost certainly struggling more than the author, and things likely only "felt fine" because he was 10 years old, and if they have decent parents, 10 year olds are largely shielded from day to day financial stresses and worries.
There are objectively measurable ways that certain segments of the population are worse off comparatively than they were 30 years ago, but there's a certain tendency when talking about this sort of stuff to pretend that things were great back in the day, and this is some sort of unprecedented time for the struggle of the middle class.
That's really not the case. Most people have struggled to survive throughout all of history. This isn't anything unique or new. My parents were worried about losing their house 30 years ago despite being boomers. Jobs were hard to find back then too.
Yes, maybe in certain sectors they're harder to find now, but it's not like that's a new phenomenon. We can do better, but it's weird to pretend it's never been bad before. It's been way worse.
Honestly, it's irritating to read as an outsider too, this whole "US millenials are the generation to have it the worst!" message. I'm not a US citizen, but I lived and worked in US for a short...
Exemplary
Honestly, it's irritating to read as an outsider too, this whole "US millenials are the generation to have it the worst!" message.
I'm not a US citizen, but I lived and worked in US for a short period of time. I'm not from a "third world" country, but I'm from the developing world. Despite that, and me making minimum wage in one of the poorest states, US was infinitely better than my own country. You have no idea. First time in my life I thought "Wow I can eat meat every day if I wanted to."
Don't get me wrong. There are legitimate reasons for US citizens and especially the younger crowd to be upset at their governments and such. The healthcare costs, for example, are really awful. And I'm not saying that you need to be experiencing the worst to be upset by, annoyed at, or depressed by something.
The thing I'm saying is, there is a need for perspective. I used to think my country was "literally the worst", until I befriended someone from a much worse off place. That led me to question my own place in the world, learn more about the world, and I realized a lot of the rhetoric I parroted was me hyperexaggerating due to politics and news cycle. I and people who live here still have extremely legitimate difficulties, as do US citizens, and there is a lot of suffering. But I don't anymore go around talking as if I'm the ultimate victim.
That is what irritates me. This whole extreme "Woe is me, the worst generation!" rhetoric coming from US millenials is devoid of perspective, and it's very self-centric. Economic boom US and some European countries experienced after WW2 was an anomaly. That is not how it went usually, and most of the world didn't experience that. Most of the world still doesn't have a shred of the life quality of the median US millenial. People who go on and on about stuff like this have no idea how privileged US citizens are.
I want to make it clearer that this isn't an endorsement of the status quo. Every country has a lot of problems that create suffering, and therefore they need to be worked on. However, this kind of rhetoric comes off as exceedingly oblivious and privileged.
This is all true, but something to keep in mind is that the US is a large country with an extreme amount of variation on the local level. The standard of life in most of urban, suburban, and small...
This is all true, but something to keep in mind is that the US is a large country with an extreme amount of variation on the local level.
The standard of life in most of urban, suburban, and small towns, relative to the rest of the world, is as you say quite good even for those sitting at the lower end of the income scale. That said, there are some corners of the US like in the forgotten crevices of Appalachia and the southeast that are unbelievably poor to the point that visitors would have a hard time believing that they’re still in the US. We’re talking lack of electricity and indoor plumbing. Somehow these people are never given as much as a thought by the politicians who hold the power to dramatically improve their quality of life.
By and large these people aren’t blogging or writing “woe is me” think pieces. I think what’s really happened is we’ve seen a collapse in a lot of formerly high prestige professions that used to...
That said, there are some corners of the US like in the forgotten crevices of Appalachia and the southeast that are unbelievably poor to the point that visitors would have a hard time believing that they’re still in the US.
By and large these people aren’t blogging or writing “woe is me” think pieces.
I think what’s really happened is we’ve seen a collapse in a lot of formerly high prestige professions that used to be reasonably compensated, like in journalism or academia. These people worked very hard to get into the positions they’re in, but they’re having trouble actually making enough money to meet the expectations they had going in because of secular changes in the economy and vulture capitalism.
I read a bit and looked at the graphs but I didn't see inflation taken into account. 56k in 1980 is over 200k in 2024. It looks like younger people are making way less when you compare it after...
I read a bit and looked at the graphs but I didn't see inflation taken into account. 56k in 1980 is over 200k in 2024. It looks like younger people are making way less when you compare it after taking inflation into account.
Edit: inflation is taken into account, wages are still down in comparison unfortunately.
I agree, but that is also kind of the point of inflation from an economic standpoint. On the other hand, housing costs seem to have come completely decoupled from inflation, which is really...
I agree, but that is also kind of the point of inflation from an economic standpoint. On the other hand, housing costs seem to have come completely decoupled from inflation, which is really devaluing our incomes much faster than the current inflationary numbers would lead us to believe.
For the completely anecdotal sake of argument, I am 37 years old and surrounded by people who are hitting 40 and the start of their "mid-life crises". Only one of them is making the high cost impulse purchases that you would typically associate with it. None of them have purchased a sports car or motorcycle. The most common mid-life crises purchase I am seeing is a house (mortgage). My own appears to be increasing my 401k and ROTH IRA contributions to approach 20% of my income. I do have one friend who has no kids and is single who has started to collect pinball machines, so that kind of looks like a "standard" mid-life crises to me. Is this person an outlier, or do we look at him as a data point and ask what the difference from the average middle-aged American is for a healthy, single, white male with no kids, who has owned a home for over a decade?
We are seeing different results, so what has happened? Are we more rational than previous generations? Are we for some reason not having a mid-life crisis? Or do we lack the financial security of previous generations? If we try to decouple security from the word financial, and instead look at it as food, water, shelter, clothing, and medically necessary health care, then do we paint a different picture of our current society? What if we include free time, privacy, and open spaces into the calculations? Then are things still better than they've ever been? Is it all really just the constant inundation of negative news making us all sadder than our parents were at our age?
56k is a very arbitrary number to be using? The median household income in 1980 was $21,020. Adjusted for inflation, this is $72,290 by the end of 2022. I used this site for calculating that. The...
56k is a very arbitrary number to be using? The median household income in 1980 was $21,020. Adjusted for inflation, this is $72,290 by the end of 2022. I used this site for calculating that. The median household income in 2022 was $74,580. I would use 2023 numbers, but looks like the Census Bureau publishes their full report Q3 of the year after.
From the article above, the "Average Real Wealth by Generation Age" graph is a pretty good one that accounts for inflation. There's also this paragraph that helps explain discrepancies:
Even the wealth gap that exists today may mean less than it first appears to. Because more Millennials went to college and graduate school, they started their careers later, on average, than Boomers and Gen Xers did. On those grounds alone, one would expect a lag in wealth building. But more education typically means higher lifetime earnings—and thus stronger savings potential as the years go by. Many Millennials are just entering their peak earning years and have more earning power than the generations before them.
EDIT: I think I see where the 56k comes from. Either the graphs in The Atlantic or some other source, but the ones in The Atlantic are already normalized to 2024 dollars, so you can't normalize it again.
You may find this analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on "The puzzle of real median household income" interesting/relevant. (Or just at this graph of "Real Median Household Income...
That was very interesting, and I hope I'm not misreading the article. Should I have read that to mean that the picture for individuals is rosier than I would have thought?
That was very interesting, and I hope I'm not misreading the article. Should I have read that to mean that the picture for individuals is rosier than I would have thought?
My read of it is that things aren't as bad as it's often discussed on social media… Even though it's still not great. But I made this comparison between "Median Household Income in the United...
My read of it is that things aren't as bad as it's often discussed on social media… Even though it's still not great.
But I made this comparison between "Median Household Income in the United States" and "Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States" and I think the divergence between the two is pretty telling. Housing is a lot more expensive for Millennials than it was for prior generations.
I have recently been wondering something about this issue. When we compare the costs of living between now and another age, why don't we ever discuss the difference in total expenses and the...
I have recently been wondering something about this issue. When we compare the costs of living between now and another age, why don't we ever discuss the difference in total expenses and the intentional design of products to fail? These two issues alone can account for thousands of extra dollars in your yearly cost of living. Cars are more expensive and made with more plastic parts, furniture is made cheaply, electronics are made cheaply and there is a legitimate necessity to own more of them than in previous generations. We have more costly electric bills, because we need to use more power for daily life, water is more expensive, houses are made shoddily and require more maintenance and repair, it feels like the list is long.
Maybe some of you have answers for these things that I haven't been able to find, but when I discussed it with my mother (a boomer) and she felt it was true when contrasting the two eras.
I don’t have the time to dig numbers up for each of these points, but I do have some thoughts I’d like to share… Are cars that much more expensive? I found an old ad which has a price for a modest...
I don’t have the time to dig numbers up for each of these points, but I do have some thoughts I’d like to share…
Cars are more expensive and made with more plastic parts
Are cars that much more expensive? I found an old ad which has a price for a modest 2-door sedan for $4526 before taxes etc, which online inflation calculators suggest would be almost $24k today. While there’s basically zero marketing for cheap cars today, I feel like getting a basic car with no bells and whistles for under $30k is still doable today, and with a lot more features and safety built in by default.
furniture is made cheaply
I can’t answer this one way or the other, because my whole adult life I’ve chosen IKEA or second hand, but that’s a choice I’ve made. In my experience (even from watching ads on TV in primary school), good quality furniture has always been super expensive, so I don’t know if it’s increased in price significantly more than inflation over the decades
houses are made shoddily and require more maintenance and repair
I wonder if that’s explicitly true or if there’s just survivor bias from the old houses that are still standing.
Having said all that…
In general, I feel like modern engineering has made it much cheaper and easier to be “just good enough” whereas 40 years ago it was much cheaper and easier to over-engineer something, so things were much more sturdy and reliable than what’s made today.
Yeah, I've been concerned for a long time that things have been "optimized" into the ground. Good enough to get sold but not good enough to last at all. (Because "durable goods" are not terribly...
Yeah, I've been concerned for a long time that things have been "optimized" into the ground. Good enough to get sold but not good enough to last at all. (Because "durable goods" are not terribly profitable for a company.) Particularly with things like appliances.
But as far as cars go, although they are a lot more expensive, they are also a lot more reliable than they once were. Cars in the '50s and '60s were, adjusted for inflation, much cheaper. But they were also unreliable death traps, for the most part. Part of the reason why new car prices have become so outrageously high—I want to say that the median purchase price for a new car in the United States is over $50,000—is because the vast majority of people are more than happy to buy a used car. There's not much of a market for $10,000 new cars in part because you can just get a $30,000 car that has depreciated instead. Why would I want a brand-new Nissan Versa when I can get a used Toyota Camry? (I say this from experience — I bought a 2012 Toyota Camry in 2019 and never, ever considered garbage like a Nissan Versa. I don't know why anyone buys them.) Making it to 100,000 miles now is no longer as much of an accomplishment as it once was in decades past.
I just wish the same could be said for other consumer products. I would be willing to pay more if I knew that the extra cost I was paying went to reliability. But as it is, paying more, for a lot of products, does nothing to improve reliability and may, in fact, be a detriment to it (i.e., because there are more features to have break).
As long as cheap junk is an option on the table, it will have a distorting effect upon the market. If we want to have more durable things and stop throwing plastic garbage into landfills, I just don't see any way to curb that than finding some way to regulate it out of existence. 10-year warranties on everything might help for large appliances. But you can't do that to a… I don't know, plastic spatula. And if a $15 T-shirt (made in a sweatshop) that will disintegrate in under a year is on the rack next to a durable $50 T-shirt (made of sustainable materials by an ethical work force), that $50 T-shirt is just not going to get sold. And the company that makes it will either have to switch to making cheap garbage or go out of business.
I guessed at the lowest household income in the 25-34 line in the first graph around 1980 from the link I responded to. I just googled and got those numbers I didn't see the side of the graph...
I guessed at the lowest household income in the 25-34 line in the first graph around 1980 from the link I responded to. I just googled and got those numbers
I didn't see the side of the graph saying it was taken into account, thanks.
I feel like the underlying miscommunication on the current economy vs the old is simply "it's much much harder to own anything". IF you got over a certain breakpoint in decades past, you were...
I feel like the underlying miscommunication on the current economy vs the old is simply "it's much much harder to own anything".
IF you got over a certain breakpoint in decades past, you were likely to be able to afford a house/car/etc, possibly on a single income for a family(assuming 1 or 2 kids).
While many things have gotten better, the thing that makes it all feel so awful is that it's become much harder to actually OWN your home and maybe even your car, let alone on a single income for a family.
Renting for the rest of your life appears to be becoming the new norm, and I believe that's why you always get these articles saying everything is great while people don't really feel that way. When a huge chunk of your income goes into the rental hole and you get kicked in the teeth by inflation, yeah it doesn't feel like things are better.
Edit:
Oh and student loans plays a HUGE part in this due to their completely absurd escalation.
Is the US still objectively a good country to live in (mostly, with disclaimers)? For sure. Was it a better/easier country to live in, economically, in previous decades (again, mostly, with...
Is the US still objectively a good country to live in (mostly, with disclaimers)? For sure. Was it a better/easier country to live in, economically, in previous decades (again, mostly, with disclaimers)? Definitely. There is a vague but perhaps coalescing feeling of having the ladder kicked out from underneath us, societally—or perhaps rolled up from above: my dad recently was adamant that it would be a crime to forgive student loan debt, when he worked his way through college. I asked incredulously, “You paid for college while you were in college? With a part-time job?” “Absolutely I did, I wasn’t about to take out a loan—and I only made a couple dollars an hour, too.”
So yeah if people today could do the menial jobs, even for menial pay, but afford to make it past that point, I think there would be less of this feeling. But unfortunately several factors in that haven’t held up.
I really don't think that's true, you'd have to ignore many of the actual important steps forward we've had, alongside including "white" and "male" in those disclaimers.
Was it a better/easier country to live in, economically, in previous decades (again, mostly, with disclaimers)?
I really don't think that's true, you'd have to ignore many of the actual important steps forward we've had, alongside including "white" and "male" in those disclaimers.
Though I have been fortunate in having been able to achieve relative stability with a good job and more recently home ownership and a bit of financial padding, there are still bits of this article...
Though I have been fortunate in having been able to achieve relative stability with a good job and more recently home ownership and a bit of financial padding, there are still bits of this article I relate to.
That sense of precariousness mentioned still looms. Padding will help soften the landing but if I were to lose my job and had trouble getting hired for an extended period I’d probably be staring down selling my house and moving back into my parents’ house, which is in a rural part of the US with far poorer job prospects and opportunity than where I live now, which could easily become a trap of sorts if I’m not careful. Expensive medical issues could also burn through that padding in a flash.
Additionally, it took trading off some things to get that stability. Through the latter half of my 20s and some of my early 30s things like socializing outside of work, finding a partner, and building a strong relationship took a back seat to career, and almost exactly when I began to move to change this the pandemic hit, putting things on ice for several more years. Now I’m 35 and feeling ridiculously far behind most people my age in those aspects of life, and though I’ve started working on those things again I can’t help but feel like something else is going to blow up and foil my plans again, which can be demoralizing if I don’t make efforts to put it out of my mind.
I like to refer to my early 80s self as a Xennial. There's a few year span in there that just feels different from the surrounding groups - growing up with the internet, but with it being young...
I like to refer to my early 80s self as a Xennial. There's a few year span in there that just feels different from the surrounding groups - growing up with the internet, but with it being young enough in general use that we still remember The Before Times.
We’re the only generational cohort that actually understands how computers work across the board. It’s weird, I assumed our level of proficiency would become the new normal, but we’re more like...
We’re the only generational cohort that actually understands how computers work across the board.
It’s weird, I assumed our level of proficiency would become the new normal, but we’re more like that one random generation of American housewives in the ‘50s who all knew how to rivet aircraft together or sew uniforms because of the war.
Even though I was born in the late 80s, I find myself a bit more aligned with Xennials as a result of having grown up in the middle of nowhere. First exposure to computers was in 96, but that...
Even though I was born in the late 80s, I find myself a bit more aligned with Xennials as a result of having grown up in the middle of nowhere. First exposure to computers was in 96, but that computer was tied up by my parents most of the time so I didn’t get to use it much until it became a hand me down several years later. Didn’t even have a game console around until my younger brother was gifted a PS1 in the early 00s.
Paired with not having cable or satellite TV and only a couple of channels coming in over the air, this made for a lot of slow time for me through the 90s. I can’t even count the number of afternoons spent quietly doodling in a notebook, goofing around outside, or even just laying on the couch or my bed pondering something or another.
A similar thing is true for a lot of immigrants. Nowadays technologies tend to spread a lot quicker, but older technologies used to take a while to become commonplace everywhere. So one person's...
Even though I was born in the late 80s, I find myself a bit more aligned with Xennials as a result of having grown up in the middle of nowhere.
A similar thing is true for a lot of immigrants. Nowadays technologies tend to spread a lot quicker, but older technologies used to take a while to become commonplace everywhere. So one person's 1980s might be another's 2000s.
I remember my grandpa telling me jokes and stories about telegraphs and view cameras and the first automobile in town..... and he was born in the 1930s!
I immigrated to rural Australia a decade ago to live with my partner. His family were traditionally poor farmers, and it's a lot like that here. They got a gas stove (upgraded from a cast iron...
I immigrated to rural Australia a decade ago to live with my partner. His family were traditionally poor farmers, and it's a lot like that here. They got a gas stove (upgraded from a cast iron wood stove) in the 1980s, and my partner's mother was the first person in her family who could drive a car when she got her driver's license around 1960.
Born in 95. My friends and I jokingly refer to ourselves as MillenialZ because we remember 9/11, dial-up, and T9 texting, but also had our high school experience ruined by the first wave of true...
Born in 95. My friends and I jokingly refer to ourselves as MillenialZ because we remember 9/11, dial-up, and T9 texting, but also had our high school experience ruined by the first wave of true social media.
I'm on the other end of the spectrum, I was born in the late 90s and I consider myself a Zillennial with differences from both Millennials and Gen Z -- I remember dial-up and landlines but was too...
I'm on the other end of the spectrum, I was born in the late 90s and I consider myself a Zillennial with differences from both Millennials and Gen Z -- I remember dial-up and landlines but was too young to really remember 9/11. I think that's true of anyone born on the "cusp" of two generations -- since generations are ultimately pretty arbitrary, after all. There's gonna be different experiences at a more granular level than just "every 20 years or so".
tbh, I think the concept of generations is becoming less relevant with the acceleration of technology and societal changes. We've reached the point where we have generation defining events and...
tbh, I think the concept of generations is becoming less relevant with the acceleration of technology and societal changes. We've reached the point where we have generation defining events and technological shifts happening 3-4 times in the duration of a traditional generation, where in the past they were often defined by some single event or even lack of major event.
Yeah I've used Xennial too, I'm a touch socially away from it as I was the oldest child so I didn't have older siblings into NKOTB or the like but I absolutely sat waiting for The Facebook to roll...
Yeah I've used Xennial too, I'm a touch socially away from it as I was the oldest child so I didn't have older siblings into NKOTB or the like but I absolutely sat waiting for The Facebook to roll out to my university.
I realize this may not be the right place to discuss this but how much of what the writer talked about is truly midlife crisis and how much is it just that their father finally had the courage to...
I realize this may not be the right place to discuss this but how much of what the writer talked about is truly midlife crisis and how much is it just that their father finally had the courage to get a perm and a green leather jacket?
People are often quick to call any change someone makes a midlife crisis, but is it really?
Maybe the writer's father always liked green leather jackets but was too afraid of wearing one? Maybe the writer's father always wanted a perm but was too shy to get one? Eventually, the father got old enough where he thought "I don't give a flying crap about what others think of my jacket, I'm going to get myself that green leather jacket I've wanted for the past 19 years!" That's not a midlife crisis, is it?
I bring this up because within the past ten years or so, I finally was able to buy a car I've always wanted when I was younger. It wasn't because something in my life happened that caused me to make this rash decision but instead I had been saving for this car since the day I got my driver's license. And when I finally got it at 29, some people called it a midlife or a quarter life crisis, but in reality, it was just the fact that I had finally saved enough money to buy an Acura Legend without touching my retirement account or without going on a 100% peanut butter and jelly sandwiches diet.
I think the "family cannot afford it" part along with the impulsive decision and not discussing it with the person who likely manages the household budget aka his wife is key to the difference...
I think the "family cannot afford it" part along with the impulsive decision and not discussing it with the person who likely manages the household budget aka his wife is key to the difference between the two. Like that's usually the issue with a crisis is the "fuck the consequences", not the social ones but the financial or family ones.
People should absolutely do the hairdo they want or the style they want. The rest of it though is the questionable part.
I'm reminded of the hip-hop classic, "Classic", by DJ Premier, Nas et al. "It's one life to live, so live it the best you can The world could use one less man Not enough air, not enough car...
I'm reminded of the hip-hop classic, "Classic", by DJ Premier, Nas et al.
"It's one life to live, so live it the best you can
The world could use one less man
Not enough air, not enough car factories
To manufacture new vehicles, sedans and vans When they do make the whip you like, your chips ain't right
By the time you could afford it, the car ain't important"
I'm not saying you were wrong, but I think most people change their priorities as they age. However, if it made you happy and it didn't hurt anyone, then congratulations on the whip :)
I think the author may be looking at his own childhood through some rose tinted glasses due to not being his parents and not fully understanding or grasping their particular struggles and stresses.
Yes, housing costs have risen, but Pakistani refugees living paycheck to paycheck driving taxis and waiting tables were almost certainly struggling more than the author, and things likely only "felt fine" because he was 10 years old, and if they have decent parents, 10 year olds are largely shielded from day to day financial stresses and worries.
There are objectively measurable ways that certain segments of the population are worse off comparatively than they were 30 years ago, but there's a certain tendency when talking about this sort of stuff to pretend that things were great back in the day, and this is some sort of unprecedented time for the struggle of the middle class.
That's really not the case. Most people have struggled to survive throughout all of history. This isn't anything unique or new. My parents were worried about losing their house 30 years ago despite being boomers. Jobs were hard to find back then too.
Yes, maybe in certain sectors they're harder to find now, but it's not like that's a new phenomenon. We can do better, but it's weird to pretend it's never been bad before. It's been way worse.
Honestly, it's irritating to read as an outsider too, this whole "US millenials are the generation to have it the worst!" message.
I'm not a US citizen, but I lived and worked in US for a short period of time. I'm not from a "third world" country, but I'm from the developing world. Despite that, and me making minimum wage in one of the poorest states, US was infinitely better than my own country. You have no idea. First time in my life I thought "Wow I can eat meat every day if I wanted to."
Don't get me wrong. There are legitimate reasons for US citizens and especially the younger crowd to be upset at their governments and such. The healthcare costs, for example, are really awful. And I'm not saying that you need to be experiencing the worst to be upset by, annoyed at, or depressed by something.
The thing I'm saying is, there is a need for perspective. I used to think my country was "literally the worst", until I befriended someone from a much worse off place. That led me to question my own place in the world, learn more about the world, and I realized a lot of the rhetoric I parroted was me hyperexaggerating due to politics and news cycle. I and people who live here still have extremely legitimate difficulties, as do US citizens, and there is a lot of suffering. But I don't anymore go around talking as if I'm the ultimate victim.
That is what irritates me. This whole extreme "Woe is me, the worst generation!" rhetoric coming from US millenials is devoid of perspective, and it's very self-centric. Economic boom US and some European countries experienced after WW2 was an anomaly. That is not how it went usually, and most of the world didn't experience that. Most of the world still doesn't have a shred of the life quality of the median US millenial. People who go on and on about stuff like this have no idea how privileged US citizens are.
I want to make it clearer that this isn't an endorsement of the status quo. Every country has a lot of problems that create suffering, and therefore they need to be worked on. However, this kind of rhetoric comes off as exceedingly oblivious and privileged.
This is all true, but something to keep in mind is that the US is a large country with an extreme amount of variation on the local level.
The standard of life in most of urban, suburban, and small towns, relative to the rest of the world, is as you say quite good even for those sitting at the lower end of the income scale. That said, there are some corners of the US like in the forgotten crevices of Appalachia and the southeast that are unbelievably poor to the point that visitors would have a hard time believing that they’re still in the US. We’re talking lack of electricity and indoor plumbing. Somehow these people are never given as much as a thought by the politicians who hold the power to dramatically improve their quality of life.
By and large these people aren’t blogging or writing “woe is me” think pieces.
I think what’s really happened is we’ve seen a collapse in a lot of formerly high prestige professions that used to be reasonably compensated, like in journalism or academia. These people worked very hard to get into the positions they’re in, but they’re having trouble actually making enough money to meet the expectations they had going in because of secular changes in the economy and vulture capitalism.
That’s fair, and you’re probably right.
Yeah, I agree. I thought that went without saying.
I would hope so, but it seems like something that has little presence in the greater public consciousness which is why I brought it up.
The Atlantic did a breakdown of American Millennials with this exact question attached - are things really that much worse? Not entirely.
https://www.smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fmagazine%2Farchive%2F2023%2F05%2Fmillennial-generation-financial-issues-income-homeowners%2F673485%2F
I read a bit and looked at the graphs but I didn't see inflation taken into account. 56k in 1980 is over 200k in 2024. It looks like younger people are making way less when you compare it after taking inflation into account.
Edit: inflation is taken into account, wages are still down in comparison unfortunately.
I agree, but that is also kind of the point of inflation from an economic standpoint. On the other hand, housing costs seem to have come completely decoupled from inflation, which is really devaluing our incomes much faster than the current inflationary numbers would lead us to believe.
For the completely anecdotal sake of argument, I am 37 years old and surrounded by people who are hitting 40 and the start of their "mid-life crises". Only one of them is making the high cost impulse purchases that you would typically associate with it. None of them have purchased a sports car or motorcycle. The most common mid-life crises purchase I am seeing is a house (mortgage). My own appears to be increasing my 401k and ROTH IRA contributions to approach 20% of my income. I do have one friend who has no kids and is single who has started to collect pinball machines, so that kind of looks like a "standard" mid-life crises to me. Is this person an outlier, or do we look at him as a data point and ask what the difference from the average middle-aged American is for a healthy, single, white male with no kids, who has owned a home for over a decade?
We are seeing different results, so what has happened? Are we more rational than previous generations? Are we for some reason not having a mid-life crisis? Or do we lack the financial security of previous generations? If we try to decouple security from the word financial, and instead look at it as food, water, shelter, clothing, and medically necessary health care, then do we paint a different picture of our current society? What if we include free time, privacy, and open spaces into the calculations? Then are things still better than they've ever been? Is it all really just the constant inundation of negative news making us all sadder than our parents were at our age?
hell if I was a healthy single white male with a decent income I’d be collecting pinball machines too.
56k is a very arbitrary number to be using? The median household income in 1980 was $21,020. Adjusted for inflation, this is $72,290 by the end of 2022. I used this site for calculating that. The median household income in 2022 was $74,580. I would use 2023 numbers, but looks like the Census Bureau publishes their full report Q3 of the year after.
From the article above, the "Average Real Wealth by Generation Age" graph is a pretty good one that accounts for inflation. There's also this paragraph that helps explain discrepancies:
EDIT: I think I see where the 56k comes from. Either the graphs in The Atlantic or some other source, but the ones in The Atlantic are already normalized to 2024 dollars, so you can't normalize it again.
You may find this analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on "The puzzle of real median household income" interesting/relevant. (Or just at this graph of "Real Median Household Income in the United States.")
That was very interesting, and I hope I'm not misreading the article. Should I have read that to mean that the picture for individuals is rosier than I would have thought?
My read of it is that things aren't as bad as it's often discussed on social media… Even though it's still not great.
But I made this comparison between "Median Household Income in the United States" and "Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States" and I think the divergence between the two is pretty telling. Housing is a lot more expensive for Millennials than it was for prior generations.
I have recently been wondering something about this issue. When we compare the costs of living between now and another age, why don't we ever discuss the difference in total expenses and the intentional design of products to fail? These two issues alone can account for thousands of extra dollars in your yearly cost of living. Cars are more expensive and made with more plastic parts, furniture is made cheaply, electronics are made cheaply and there is a legitimate necessity to own more of them than in previous generations. We have more costly electric bills, because we need to use more power for daily life, water is more expensive, houses are made shoddily and require more maintenance and repair, it feels like the list is long.
Maybe some of you have answers for these things that I haven't been able to find, but when I discussed it with my mother (a boomer) and she felt it was true when contrasting the two eras.
I don’t have the time to dig numbers up for each of these points, but I do have some thoughts I’d like to share…
Are cars that much more expensive? I found an old ad which has a price for a modest 2-door sedan for $4526 before taxes etc, which online inflation calculators suggest would be almost $24k today. While there’s basically zero marketing for cheap cars today, I feel like getting a basic car with no bells and whistles for under $30k is still doable today, and with a lot more features and safety built in by default.
I can’t answer this one way or the other, because my whole adult life I’ve chosen IKEA or second hand, but that’s a choice I’ve made. In my experience (even from watching ads on TV in primary school), good quality furniture has always been super expensive, so I don’t know if it’s increased in price significantly more than inflation over the decades
I wonder if that’s explicitly true or if there’s just survivor bias from the old houses that are still standing.
Having said all that…
In general, I feel like modern engineering has made it much cheaper and easier to be “just good enough” whereas 40 years ago it was much cheaper and easier to over-engineer something, so things were much more sturdy and reliable than what’s made today.
Yeah, I've been concerned for a long time that things have been "optimized" into the ground. Good enough to get sold but not good enough to last at all. (Because "durable goods" are not terribly profitable for a company.) Particularly with things like appliances.
But as far as cars go, although they are a lot more expensive, they are also a lot more reliable than they once were. Cars in the '50s and '60s were, adjusted for inflation, much cheaper. But they were also unreliable death traps, for the most part. Part of the reason why new car prices have become so outrageously high—I want to say that the median purchase price for a new car in the United States is over $50,000—is because the vast majority of people are more than happy to buy a used car. There's not much of a market for $10,000 new cars in part because you can just get a $30,000 car that has depreciated instead. Why would I want a brand-new Nissan Versa when I can get a used Toyota Camry? (I say this from experience — I bought a 2012 Toyota Camry in 2019 and never, ever considered garbage like a Nissan Versa. I don't know why anyone buys them.) Making it to 100,000 miles now is no longer as much of an accomplishment as it once was in decades past.
I just wish the same could be said for other consumer products. I would be willing to pay more if I knew that the extra cost I was paying went to reliability. But as it is, paying more, for a lot of products, does nothing to improve reliability and may, in fact, be a detriment to it (i.e., because there are more features to have break).
As long as cheap junk is an option on the table, it will have a distorting effect upon the market. If we want to have more durable things and stop throwing plastic garbage into landfills, I just don't see any way to curb that than finding some way to regulate it out of existence. 10-year warranties on everything might help for large appliances. But you can't do that to a… I don't know, plastic spatula. And if a $15 T-shirt (made in a sweatshop) that will disintegrate in under a year is on the rack next to a durable $50 T-shirt (made of sustainable materials by an ethical work force), that $50 T-shirt is just not going to get sold. And the company that makes it will either have to switch to making cheap garbage or go out of business.
I guessed at the lowest household income in the 25-34 line in the first graph around 1980 from the link I responded to. I just googled and got those numbers
I didn't see the side of the graph saying it was taken into account, thanks.
I feel like the underlying miscommunication on the current economy vs the old is simply "it's much much harder to own anything".
IF you got over a certain breakpoint in decades past, you were likely to be able to afford a house/car/etc, possibly on a single income for a family(assuming 1 or 2 kids).
While many things have gotten better, the thing that makes it all feel so awful is that it's become much harder to actually OWN your home and maybe even your car, let alone on a single income for a family.
Renting for the rest of your life appears to be becoming the new norm, and I believe that's why you always get these articles saying everything is great while people don't really feel that way. When a huge chunk of your income goes into the rental hole and you get kicked in the teeth by inflation, yeah it doesn't feel like things are better.
Edit:
Oh and student loans plays a HUGE part in this due to their completely absurd escalation.
Is the US still objectively a good country to live in (mostly, with disclaimers)? For sure. Was it a better/easier country to live in, economically, in previous decades (again, mostly, with disclaimers)? Definitely. There is a vague but perhaps coalescing feeling of having the ladder kicked out from underneath us, societally—or perhaps rolled up from above: my dad recently was adamant that it would be a crime to forgive student loan debt, when he worked his way through college. I asked incredulously, “You paid for college while you were in college? With a part-time job?” “Absolutely I did, I wasn’t about to take out a loan—and I only made a couple dollars an hour, too.”
So yeah if people today could do the menial jobs, even for menial pay, but afford to make it past that point, I think there would be less of this feeling. But unfortunately several factors in that haven’t held up.
I really don't think that's true, you'd have to ignore many of the actual important steps forward we've had, alongside including "white" and "male" in those disclaimers.
Though I have been fortunate in having been able to achieve relative stability with a good job and more recently home ownership and a bit of financial padding, there are still bits of this article I relate to.
That sense of precariousness mentioned still looms. Padding will help soften the landing but if I were to lose my job and had trouble getting hired for an extended period I’d probably be staring down selling my house and moving back into my parents’ house, which is in a rural part of the US with far poorer job prospects and opportunity than where I live now, which could easily become a trap of sorts if I’m not careful. Expensive medical issues could also burn through that padding in a flash.
Additionally, it took trading off some things to get that stability. Through the latter half of my 20s and some of my early 30s things like socializing outside of work, finding a partner, and building a strong relationship took a back seat to career, and almost exactly when I began to move to change this the pandemic hit, putting things on ice for several more years. Now I’m 35 and feeling ridiculously far behind most people my age in those aspects of life, and though I’ve started working on those things again I can’t help but feel like something else is going to blow up and foil my plans again, which can be demoralizing if I don’t make efforts to put it out of my mind.
Midlife being 30, hah, at least according to how my bones feel.
We're pushing 40, so yes.
Pushing? I'm already there.
Elder millennial/Oregon trail generation reporting for duty
I got about a month, so there's time still!
Number Munchers for life!
I like to refer to my early 80s self as a Xennial. There's a few year span in there that just feels different from the surrounding groups - growing up with the internet, but with it being young enough in general use that we still remember The Before Times.
We’re the only generational cohort that actually understands how computers work across the board.
It’s weird, I assumed our level of proficiency would become the new normal, but we’re more like that one random generation of American housewives in the ‘50s who all knew how to rivet aircraft together or sew uniforms because of the war.
Even though I was born in the late 80s, I find myself a bit more aligned with Xennials as a result of having grown up in the middle of nowhere. First exposure to computers was in 96, but that computer was tied up by my parents most of the time so I didn’t get to use it much until it became a hand me down several years later. Didn’t even have a game console around until my younger brother was gifted a PS1 in the early 00s.
Paired with not having cable or satellite TV and only a couple of channels coming in over the air, this made for a lot of slow time for me through the 90s. I can’t even count the number of afternoons spent quietly doodling in a notebook, goofing around outside, or even just laying on the couch or my bed pondering something or another.
The contrast between then and now is insane.
A similar thing is true for a lot of immigrants. Nowadays technologies tend to spread a lot quicker, but older technologies used to take a while to become commonplace everywhere. So one person's 1980s might be another's 2000s.
I remember my grandpa telling me jokes and stories about telegraphs and view cameras and the first automobile in town..... and he was born in the 1930s!
I immigrated to rural Australia a decade ago to live with my partner. His family were traditionally poor farmers, and it's a lot like that here. They got a gas stove (upgraded from a cast iron wood stove) in the 1980s, and my partner's mother was the first person in her family who could drive a car when she got her driver's license around 1960.
Since we Xennials were born between 1977 (Star Wars) and 1983 (Return of the Jedi), I prefer the term Millennial Falcon.
Born in 95. My friends and I jokingly refer to ourselves as MillenialZ because we remember 9/11, dial-up, and T9 texting, but also had our high school experience ruined by the first wave of true social media.
I'm on the other end of the spectrum, I was born in the late 90s and I consider myself a Zillennial with differences from both Millennials and Gen Z -- I remember dial-up and landlines but was too young to really remember 9/11. I think that's true of anyone born on the "cusp" of two generations -- since generations are ultimately pretty arbitrary, after all. There's gonna be different experiences at a more granular level than just "every 20 years or so".
tbh, I think the concept of generations is becoming less relevant with the acceleration of technology and societal changes. We've reached the point where we have generation defining events and technological shifts happening 3-4 times in the duration of a traditional generation, where in the past they were often defined by some single event or even lack of major event.
Yeah I've used Xennial too, I'm a touch socially away from it as I was the oldest child so I didn't have older siblings into NKOTB or the like but I absolutely sat waiting for The Facebook to roll out to my university.
I realize this may not be the right place to discuss this but how much of what the writer talked about is truly midlife crisis and how much is it just that their father finally had the courage to get a perm and a green leather jacket?
People are often quick to call any change someone makes a midlife crisis, but is it really?
Maybe the writer's father always liked green leather jackets but was too afraid of wearing one? Maybe the writer's father always wanted a perm but was too shy to get one? Eventually, the father got old enough where he thought "I don't give a flying crap about what others think of my jacket, I'm going to get myself that green leather jacket I've wanted for the past 19 years!" That's not a midlife crisis, is it?
I bring this up because within the past ten years or so, I finally was able to buy a car I've always wanted when I was younger. It wasn't because something in my life happened that caused me to make this rash decision but instead I had been saving for this car since the day I got my driver's license. And when I finally got it at 29, some people called it a midlife or a quarter life crisis, but in reality, it was just the fact that I had finally saved enough money to buy an Acura Legend without touching my retirement account or without going on a 100% peanut butter and jelly sandwiches diet.
I think the "family cannot afford it" part along with the impulsive decision and not discussing it with the person who likely manages the household budget aka his wife is key to the difference between the two. Like that's usually the issue with a crisis is the "fuck the consequences", not the social ones but the financial or family ones.
People should absolutely do the hairdo they want or the style they want. The rest of it though is the questionable part.
I'm reminded of the hip-hop classic, "Classic", by DJ Premier, Nas et al.
"It's one life to live, so live it the best you can
The world could use one less man
Not enough air, not enough car factories
To manufacture new vehicles, sedans and vans
When they do make the whip you like, your chips ain't right
By the time you could afford it, the car ain't important"
I'm not saying you were wrong, but I think most people change their priorities as they age. However, if it made you happy and it didn't hurt anyone, then congratulations on the whip :)
This has to be the slowest news website I've seen in a long time. All for just some text and images, sigh.