The Chasm In The Old Understanding The Young Nowadays

Here is a rather amazing article in The New York Times about the challenges of being a youth (let’s say 20-something) economically today. Let’s just contrast two quotes from this article. First up is a $40,000-per-year social worker in Fort Wayne, Indiana:

“I feel like the older generation is constantly pushing you to do stuff like they did when they were in their 20s, but it’s not even comparable to when they were in their 20s,” Ms. German-Tanner said.

Indeed. Now look further down the article:

Zach Teutsch, a certified financial planner and managing partner at Values Added Financial, suggested that young people focus on big spending choices instead of small luxuries like coffee or a subscription.

“Big decisions matter a whole lot more than small decisions,” Mr. Teutsch said. “Contrary to some of the advice out there, most 20-somethings should worry more about jobs, housing, transportation and less about lattes and Netflix.”

Teutsch graduated from college in 2001, two years prior to me, so he’s probably mid-40s. Not quite a Boomer, no. But do you see how crazy this is? Up top, a lady is saying “Things are hard and others don’t understand.” A few paragraphs later, someone is going collectivist on an entire generation and bringing up lattes. The hell?

Reminds me of the bigger picture of work at some level — the top dogs are often completely out of touch about core things like “how work gets done” and “what customers are asking about” and “why it’s so hard for these peons to make ends meet, I mean we pay them don’t we? Sheesh!”

Now, obviously this has been going on for 100+ years. Old generations always distrust the young (ironically, the young are often their direct children) and think they’re being morons and making poor life decisions. You can probably take this back 28 generations, which is far back as you take inequality. But if you don’t want to go that far back, you can just watch a few episodes of All in the Family and you’ll be right there.

It might be a little bit different right now because of the sheer pace at which the world seems to change. Just since 2000, we’ve had:

• A dot-com boom/bust cycle
• 9/11
• A massive recession
• A bull market post-recession that created free money for 12–13 years
• COVID
• Trump and nationalism
• Hyper-partisan bullshit
• Another recession (or is it the third?)
• Constant boom/bust layoff cycles
• A housing market that went apeshit nuts during COVID and is only now a bit more rational re: interest rates

It is also true that if you born in 1900 and lived to be 100, i.e. died in 2000, you would have lived through two World Wars (probably fought in WW1), Vietnam, social upheaval, would have been early-30s during the Depression, etc. Everyone has it hard in their own way.

It does feel sometimes like Americans lack a collective moment anymore, which COVID could have been but GODDAMN, we went in the other direction. Without a collective moment, what we’ve created is collectivism, where we assign people into broad buckets (“Avocado toast” | “Rapist, profit-seeking Boomer”) and make assumptions and decisions from there.

Also consider: "first generation vs. fourth generation."

All these attitudes and assumptions come back to these core themes:

• Individualism (“Go make it on your own”)
• The supposed value of hard work (“If you grind, it will appear”)
• The older generation living longer and needing to prioritize their own needs, goals, and desires as opposed to lavishing everything on their children now (“Gotta get my nut while I can”)
• Easy-to-comprehend narratives about 100s of millions of people that we’ve somehow just accepted as fact (We’ve become dumber)
• An inability to see the ways in which you benefited from a different housing market and a different employer mindset (Inherent bias)

Our solution set would be:

• Practice empathy
• Realistically look at the challenges current 20-somethings may face
• See where you can help
• Abandon the “avocado toast” narrative
• If they are, in fact, spending all their money on toast — talk to them
• Don’t make this just about “demon Dems” and inflation — try to look at the real problems of greed, employment, fertility rates, looming automation, etc.
• Push them towards in-demand job roles and ways to get some seed money for a cool e-commerce t-shirt shop, or push them into HVAC training or trying to manage a Wendy’s

We spend a lot of time assuming and subsequently bitching these days about how different generations (and ideologies) are going about their life.

What if we just listened and tried to help and acted like human beings and friends?