Arrested Development: The Millennial Story

We have yet another article on the near disaster that is the Millennial economy, written adroitly by Derek Thompson. You can read it here, and I suggest that you do:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-unluckiest-generation-what-will-become-of-millennials/275336/

We’re putting it all off, folks. Marriage, kids, mortgages. All the things that were supposedly ‘The American Dream’ before now makes our skin crawl. Or, to be more egalitarian, it’s makes us nervous. Not because we hate these things, but because we are absolutely not ready for them. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have any satisfaction in our careers, should we be lucky enough to have one. (As you can likely tell from this blog and this post, I don’t have much of either.)

A lot of us live with our parents. To quote Mr. Thompson, we are looked at as “Perma-Children,” and he makes the case for prolonged pessimism. He is correct that entertainment and other commodities have been greatly cheapened by the internet, but truthfully, who cares? It’s nice, but a good, independent, quality of life is nicer.

We are the unluckiest generation, economically speaking. We came into a workforce after the burst of the economic bubble that, in hindsight, was amazing in the sense that so few people saw it coming. Everything was either artificially too low or too high, and one day, it wouldn’t be able to maintain itself. The day has come and gone, and here we are.  

It’s the same narrative everywhere we go. Millennials are: The most educated generation. The least paid generation. We whine. We complain. We had great childhoods and our expectations were too high.

Valid points all. But no comfort is to be found. We are in the midst of a recovery, but it’s slow and anemic and one can’t help but feel as though the bottom could fall out from it at any moment. It’s tiresome.

We aren’t going to have as good as the Baby Boomers and Generation X. We know. We get. We won’t be able to make up the ratio of wealth. Perhaps it’s because the world is changing so rapidly that even we’re running to catch up.

There is, of course, optimism, but realism tends to get in the way.