Constantly, we hear about “entitled millennials” who want to own homes and “won’t work hard enough” to meet their goals. Goals of home ownership, starting a family, and other basic milestones most so-called “boomers” accomplished while working entry-level jobs. Now, they turn around and tell us that jobs that are far more advanced than the entry-level work they supported entire households on with single incomes are “for young people” and if we just worked harder and waited until we were 45-years-old to move out of a filthy apartment with four roommates, we’d succeed, too.
I could go on at length about the way housing prices have inflated many multiples beyond what they were when the boomer generation bought homes. I could talk about the way shareholders are reaping the rewards of a job market that no longer gives pensions (to anyone but government workers), fails to honor commitment and loyalty, and fires people on a dime for no reason other than the way the wind blows. I could talk about stagnant wages. All of these things are true, and they’re highly impactful. But there’s another side to this, which we don’t mention much. The fact that these boomers that claim to be oh so successful usually aren’t that successful, at all. Most Americans, including boomers, are in debt. Lots of it. I read only a few years back that most Americans don’t have $200 saved for an emergency. Not millennials. Americans at large.
I could talk about the way half the people I know are taking care of their aging parents, or the way parents and children are taking care of each other. It’s no longer millennials living in mom’s basement. It’s now parents and children splitting the mortgage and the house. It’s their children taking on their parent’s cost of retirement despite not being able to afford their own home. This isn’t what boomers did for their parents, where they owned a home they could afford easily on a single income while they had four kids and took the family on annual vacations. No. Millennials are working multiple jobs to take care of their aging relatives while they can’t even manage to establish themselves, because capitalism in the US is failing and half the country has decided that they would rather die in poverty than admit that this is the case. The irony of this being that most of the truly successful people I know of both the “boomer” and “gen x” generations openly admit that things are way harder for millennials now than they were for them when they were at our stages in life, and they have no idea what we should do to succeed as they did given these new challenges.
I don’t know what the solutions are to all of these problems. I can think of some things that could help: basic worker protections that make it just slightly more difficult to fire an employee than literally being able to let one go without cause after decades of loyalty, for example. Why shouldn’t an employer require some reason to strip a hard-working employee of their livelihood and their healthcare? Why is this seen as some communist trope, to expect employers to actually require a reason to fire employees? Only managers that want to fire people unscrupulously fear such protections. And such protections would provide the tiniest layer of security that would allow people to do things like bargain harder for raises or look for other jobs when they aren’t being rewarded, without constant fear of retribution.
The insanity of it all is the reality of the lives of these people we call “boomers,” the ones constantly telling us to just “work harder” and magically, the stagnant wages and overpriced housing and all the other financial woes we face will just disappear, and we’ll suddenly make salaries commensurate with our experience, find homes that are affordably priced, and live the life they lived decades ago. The crazy part is the difference between the way they claim they live and the way they actually live. Yes, they bought suburban starter homes for a teeny-tiny fraction of what we would now be forced to pay for a literal shack in an undesirable rural area filled with drug violence. Yes, they were paid wages that, given the cost of living at the time, allowed one parent to support an entire family comfortably, without putting in multiple decades of experience first. They were making salaries we beg for at age 40 at age 22, and they now tell us at age 22 that we’re “young and entitled” and undeserving of such salaries, regardless of merit. Just because we’re “young.”
But now, many of these people are actually in debt. They’ve also faced the last few decades, and many were no longer working. They overplayed their hand. They lived it large decades ago, and many are now living check-to-check on social security. Many are supported by their “entitled millennial” children or grandchildren who are working three jobs and don’t own their own home, just to pay to support them. All while they deride us for being “lazy.” The average person over 65 isn’t debt-free and living the high-life. They’re not successful, by their own definitions of “success.” They keep up this façade because it makes them feel better about the fact that they “did everything right” and are now going to die in poverty. That’s the reality of it all. That’s what’s really going on.
It’s sad. So-called “boomers” could admit that massive inflation and increased cost of living are making it harder for everybody to survive, let alone live a comfortable life. They could admit that it’s making a comfortable retirement difficult for some and impossible for many. They were sold a bill of goods: work hard, do the right thing, and you’ll live the American dream. It turned out to be a lie, and now, they don’t want to face it. Rather than admit that what is happening is happening to all of us and work towards fixing this mess, they’d rather continue believing their own lies. Not doing so would mean that an entire generation that has now spent years investing themselves in the lie that “millennials are just lazy” would have to admit that they were wrong. And they’re not ready to do that.
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Sarah Semnyetzky of Ember 