di Umair Haque
I read a truly shocking statistic today. Boomers held 21% of American wealth at age 35. Gen X, 8%. Millennials? Just 3%. Think about that for a second. 3%. They’re 25% of the total population. Maybe you’re not surprised. But aren’t you alarmed? You should be. Those are the numbers of social collapse. They’re Soviet numbers. What do they say?
Millennials have borne the brunt of America’s imploded economy and failing society. It’s true that it’s bad for everyone who’s not a Bezos or a Gates — but it’s also true that it’s especially, surreally, unbelievably bad for millennials. America’s failed in three key ways.
First, incomes haven’t risen in half a century. But costs have been skyrocketing since about the late 1980s. Millennials are caught in the pincers of that trap hardest. They earn less, in real terms, than their grandparents did — but somehow, they are asked to pay for education, healthcare, housing, and bills that cost somewhere between 5, 10, or maybe 100 times as much.
The truth is that nobody — nobody can afford to live a decent life on an average American income anymore. $60K doesn’t buy you healthcare, housing, childcare, elderly care, education, bills — it barely even buys you maybe two or three of those things. But millennials aren’t even earning that much. Their average income is $30K, maybe $35K. How are they to afford all those things? Any of them? It’s laughable, isn’t it?
Hence, millennial culture is one of a kind of cynical, ironic fatalism. I don’t mean that in a mean or judgmental way. I mean it only in an explanatory one. You’d be bitter and fatalistic, too, if your society paid you $35K per year — if you were lucky — but only by indebting you to the point that you’d spend much of your life paying it off to begin with. That’s something more like indentured servitude with a polite name than it is freedom. Yes, really. What else does it mean when you spend most of your life paying back debt you incurred just to…live? You’d have to make everything a kind of joke about powerlessness, too.
Second, the economy offers people no upward mobility anymore — no real shot at a better life. The average American will live a worse life than his or her grandparents — no matter what they do, how hard they work, whatever they try. That is because upward mobility has all but vanished. That, in turn, is because the middle class imploded. America is now something very much like a caste society of a tiny number of ultra rich, a very large number of new poor, and a smaller number of old poor. The average person lives right at the edge, paycheck to paycheck. What social position or stratum you were born into largely determines your chances and outcomes in life. Born rich? You might become super rich. Born middle class? Welcome to the new poor. Born poor? Welcome to the very bottom.
The disappearance of upward mobility hits millennials hardest. Because there is almost nothing they can do, whatsoever, period, to improve their situations. They are the ones who have had to work “unpaid internships” and take “entry level jobs” that never turn into anything else — just to get a foothold on the ladder. Only there is no ladder anymore. There’s just a foothold, that you cling to, in the desperate hope of not falling off entirely. Maybe it’s no surprise then that millennials are so depressed. Their potential, squandered, sent up in smoke, has been the real price of a society in which snakes have replaced ladders.
Second, real living standards get worse every day. Life expectancy falls. Real income falls. Savings fall — past the zero point. Happiness falls. Anxiety rises. Depression soars. Suicide surges. I could go on, but that’s already a horrifying list — which, though we’ve grown accustomed to, we shouldn’t accept as normal. It’s not. It reflects vast multitudes of lives simply withering away and declining.
The rapid, stunning decline of living standards hits millennials hardest. They’re the ones without anything to cushion them. They don’t have savings or accomplishments or careers yet. They haven’t even forged their relationships yet. Hence, they have no real professional, social. or personal safety nets. Maybe it’s no surprise that so many of them are living in their parents’ homes. Maybe it’s no surprise they’re having less sex, fewer relationships, and putting off getting married and having kids.
If your life seems to be falling apart — no matter what you do, how hard you try — how are you going to have a marriage? Won’t you end up taking some of that despair and rage out on your partner? And who can even think of having kids when nothing you do ever seems to earn you a decent life anyways? Maybe you’d hate to take three anti-depressants, too. Maybe you’d be addicted to your phone, too, if “real” life was that bleak.
Third, the middle class careers and industries of the past have been utterly destroyed, and there’s no real way to make an honest living anymore. What there is is a casino economy — where you either join the house, or take your chances playing the game. Let me explain what I mean. What career options does a millennial really have? One, do a simple, humble, everyday job — be a teacher, farmer, small-town lawyer, accountant, plumber…and watch your life slowly implode, never make ends meet. Two, join the tiny number of massive winners of this economy — angle for a job at a Google, Amazon, or Facebook. But that’s joining the house, because the third choice is the weird panoply of non-careers open to millennials.
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