NYT Opinion Piece: This Isn’t What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed To Look Like

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an older millennial or younger Generation X depending on how you divide them and haven't read the article. Also, I took out student loans for law school and have paid them off.

But I do think people now entering middle age with student loans got kind of screwed and it's one of the reasons I support loan forgiveness coupled with totally overhauling how we pay for higher ed, even though it won't benefit me personally.

It just seems crazy that we as a society decided it was okay for 18 year olds to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no underlying transferable asset (you can't sell someone your degree) and we think that's normal. I think my loans were different -- I took them out for a graduate degree with more value on the market, I was older when I took them out and I better understood what it would mean to repay them. But student loans for undergraduates, or for these schools with dicy cost-benefit promises (like community college or these for-profit colleges) just seems usurious to me.

I get why someone approaching 40 now who is still paying off those loans while also trying to buy a home and save for their own kids college would be really frustrated by that. People who let their kids take out loans like that without sitting them down and coming up with a plan for repayment first, were bad parents. It's just a really irresponsible thing to let a 17/18 yr old make that choice. It will haunt them for decades. And then schools and lenders profited off it -- the availability of student loans drove up the cost of higher education, and there are a bunch of very unethical businesses that have made a killing off servicing these loans and making it as hard as possible for people to pay them off or discharge them. It's really disturbing. I think people should be mad. They were taken advantage of.

That might explain the interest rate on these loans. They are an extremely risky proposition for banks since there are no assets.

On the other hand, they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and if they are federal they are guaranteed.

Banks are in a position to evaluate that risk and decide if it's worth it to lend. 17/18 year olds are not. It's a clearly imbalanced dynamic that benefits the bank and not the borrower. In most countries on earth, that type of lending would never be legal because it's so obviously designed to incite a young person to sign a contract that will keep them indebted for most of their adult life while enriching the bank, and only in the US do we look at that and think "this is fine!"

You make choices at all ages of young adulthood and old adulthood, I made a decision at 17 that I could not afford the student loan debt I would have to incur to attend a four year college and my parents made it clear (and I knew) they would never be in a position to help, and I don't fault them for this. Instead I worked and attended three years of community college and saved while living at home. Luckily I received some grants to help offset when I transferred to a four year college but I still paid as I went along and worked two, sometimes three pretty crappy jobs (with lots of all nighters) and I made it through, thereby affording me the opportunity late in life to sit at my computer and type with you lovely people in the middle of the day. Accountability has to come into play and it does not matter if you think you're entitled to go to college or to that car or that house, if you can't afford it, make an alternate plan. There are ways, some of them not great and not so fair, but that's life. I am so sick of the whining and bitterness from the millineall generation, GTFU and own your decisions.

Have you considered that some of the millennials who took out loans for college did so at their parents' behest? Because their parents wanted them to go to a certain kind of school and get a certain kind of degree, and the attitude was "this will all be worth it in the end?"

Your parents taught you that debt was dangerous and made it clear they couldn't help. A lot of millennials' parents said things to them like "eh, everyone finances everything these days, why not college" and "I'm sure you'll get a good job to pay for this but if you have a hard time, we'll help" and then renegged on that problem.

A lot of the complaining isn't really about being unhappy with their choices. They are unhappy with the way they were parented. Their parents convinced them that an expensive education from the fanciest possible college was the ticket to approval and success, their parents helped them finance it by cosigning all those loans, and then those people got older and realized they should have done what you did. But unlike you, they did not have practical parents who would have embraced a child who lived at home and attended community college as a cost-effective way to get an education. They would have been ashamed of it and made that known.

+a million. This is the answer right here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The complete narcissism and lack of self awareness is stunning. They just discovered that life is difficult and are carrying on as if they are the first.

That's not the point of the piece at all.

The point is that middle age looks different for people now but there is a presumption that it looks the same. There are longterm trends that are changing the course of people's lives. More people going o college but this is coupled with higher costs, lots of student loans, and the fact that many more jobs require college degrees than they used to. As more people have degrees, this has also pushed more people to pursue graduate degrees to remain competitive on the market, leading to more loans. All this education pushes back the age when people used to get married, buy homes, and have kids.

As a result, we have this mental picture of what middle age (or life at 35+) looks like, but it's based on a world that doesn't exist anymore. The essay is about that. It's not that it's harder or that no one else has ever dealt with stuff like debt before. It's that the course of life is different and the old paradigms don't apply. What does mid-life marriage look like when you didn't get married until 34, or if you are still renting while you both pay down student loans? If you both work? What does raising kids in mid-life look like if you don't have children until your mid-30s? And then what does retirement look like?

What is happening to a lot of millennials and even young Gen X is that as they are hitting 40 or so, they are realizing that the advice or model for this stage of life from their parents doesn't apply. Their lives are too different. I do actually think boomers went through this (I think older Gen X did not, actually, and that their lives really do resemble the family they grew up in to a far greater degree) because they were raised by people coming out of the Great Depression and the war.

But the mistake Boomers make is in thinking that the paradigms they created back in the 60s/70s/80s, which were a massive departure from the lives lived by their parents and grandparents, were permanent. They weren't. The world has changed again, we need new paradigms. But I think because Boomers are experiencing more longevity and better quality of life in old age than their parents did, and because of the way media can make nostalgia look like reality, it's been harder to make that shift. There is a refusal to accept the fact that things have changed.

That's what the essay is about. It's not about being surprised to discover life is hard.

Yes this is the TL;DR of this article for all of you who don't want to read it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The complete narcissism and lack of self awareness is stunning. They just discovered that life is difficult and are carrying on as if they are the first.

That's not the point of the piece at all.

The point is that middle age looks different for people now but there is a presumption that it looks the same. There are longterm trends that are changing the course of people's lives. More people going o college but this is coupled with higher costs, lots of student loans, and the fact that many more jobs require college degrees than they used to. As more people have degrees, this has also pushed more people to pursue graduate degrees to remain competitive on the market, leading to more loans. All this education pushes back the age when people used to get married, buy homes, and have kids.

As a result, we have this mental picture of what middle age (or life at 35+) looks like, but it's based on a world that doesn't exist anymore. The essay is about that. It's not that it's harder or that no one else has ever dealt with stuff like debt before. It's that the course of life is different and the old paradigms don't apply. What does mid-life marriage look like when you didn't get married until 34, or if you are still renting while you both pay down student loans? If you both work? What does raising kids in mid-life look like if you don't have children until your mid-30s? And then what does retirement look like?

What is happening to a lot of millennials and even young Gen X is that as they are hitting 40 or so, they are realizing that the advice or model for this stage of life from their parents doesn't apply. Their lives are too different. I do actually think boomers went through this (I think older Gen X did not, actually, and that their lives really do resemble the family they grew up in to a far greater degree) because they were raised by people coming out of the Great Depression and the war.

But the mistake Boomers make is in thinking that the paradigms they created back in the 60s/70s/80s, which were a massive departure from the lives lived by their parents and grandparents, were permanent. They weren't. The world has changed again, we need new paradigms. But I think because Boomers are experiencing more longevity and better quality of life in old age than their parents did, and because of the way media can make nostalgia look like reality, it's been harder to make that shift. There is a refusal to accept the fact that things have changed.

That's what the essay is about. It's not about being surprised to discover life is hard.

These are choices. Why are millennials waiting so long to get married? It’s not expensive to go to a courthouse and marry. Millennial women want to have careers and do not want to be SAHMs like many boomers were (including POC women). Which is fine, but it means living in HCOL cities. Why are millennials obsessed with living in coastal urban areas? Why did millennials go to fancy expensive colleges?

People have always gravitated to large cities because that's where most jobs are.

Millennial women did not spontaneously decide to have careers. They were RAISED to have careers, they were groomed to believe that if they did not have careers and were not their spouse's equal financially, that they had failed. This is not some choice that millennial women made in spite of what culture or their families wanted them to do. This is what everyone told them to do -- their parents, teachers, media, etc. In 1970 a woman who decided to pursue a career instead of becoming a SAHM (if being a SAHM was an option available to her) was considered a weird outlier. By 2000, it was the SAHM who was considered the weird outlier.

Anyone who attended a fancy expensive college made that choice when they were still living in their parents' home. Which means that 9x out of 10, that decision was made WITH their parents, perhaps because of their parents. Lots of Boomers wanted their kids to go to fancy colleges to prove that THEY had made it. They raised kids to want a certain kind of education and to believe that education was the ticket to a good life.

The idea that an entire generation just decided to suddenly make choices that fly in the face of prior generations' goals for them is ludicrous. THESE ARE YOUR CHILDREN. They largely did what they were told and now they are the ones living with the consequences of of that, not you.

These are some very good points. I will also add that for all the stupid jokes about how millennials all got trophies just for participating, it was the boomers who were giving out those trophies.
1972 X-er with no dog in this fight

[Anonymous]

Random thoughts:

1. Why wouldn't people pay for online news, which is the equivalent of a newspaper (which I hope I don't have to point out was never free)

2. Agree with posters talking about how it's actually a parenting fail/anger and how it was the boomers giving out trophies.

3.. WTH someone wishing C.diff on boomer. I find that a new low on here.

[Anonymous]

The NYT panders to a particular subscriber base.
The older ones wise up to its biases and propaganda. They move over to the Financial Times or WSJ. Money and markets aren't biased.
The NYT relies on newer readership year after year to maintain eyeballs on its pages. So it promotes stories that resonate with that group.

Remember that when you barely see any stories about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX in that paper (meanwhile the other papers were ALL over it for weeks).

[Anonymous]

Wow, there are some really outdated talking points on this thread. The only thing I'm missing on my bingo card is "avocado toast."

At this point, there's a ton of data showing broader circumstances are different for millennials, especially Black millennials. We're not talking about participation trophies and individual-level factors. Here's a write-up for anyone truly interested in understanding the problem. Although, there have been tons of such write-ups about macro effects in recent years, so I imagine anyone who wanted to be informed would be by now.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/27/990770599/there-is-growing-segregation-in-millennial-wealth

[And before someone calls this whining, I say this as a successful elder millennial, who understands that for many people in my generation, external circumstances look very different than mine.]

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m 38, married 11 years, have 3 kids, own my home, have a healthy retirement savings.

I’m absolutely dumbfounded by how few of my peers have progressed down the “normal” path of adulthood with me. I kept thinking they’d catch up to me at some point, but the door is closing.

I am 35 and nobody in my orbit was talking marriage at 27. It feels like it took my circle (myself included) until 30 to start "growing up" - I was married at 31 and that was the first of my friend group.

You were not in the right orbit. God 27 is late to be married if you want to be somewhat responsible.

We graduated in 07, married 09, had 3 kids by 31. Have owned 2 homes. I still dont feel like an adult and often feel like I'm playacting. I think its because of stuck culture. (Lindy man shoutout)

[Anonymous]

Our society is such a rat race. The percentage of people living in poverty has ballooned.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our society is such a rat race. The percentage of people living in poverty has ballooned.

Wrong. https://usafacts.org/articles/american-poverty-in-three-charts/

[Anonymous]

Well, at least Millennials didn't have to deal with the kind of violent crime that GenX dealt with as young adults. It's like 50% of what it used to be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well, at least Millennials didn't have to deal with the kind of violent crime that GenX dealt with as young adults. It's like 50% of what it used to be.

Well now we just live in fear that some madman with a gun will shoot up our grocery store, or elementary school, or concert, or or or…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m 38, married 11 years, have 3 kids, own my home, have a healthy retirement savings.

I’m absolutely dumbfounded by how few of my peers have progressed down the “normal” path of adulthood with me. I kept thinking they’d catch up to me at some point, but the door is closing.

Um, maybe they don’t want to “catch up with” you. Stop being such an arrogant, smug tool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m 38, married 11 years, have 3 kids, own my home, have a healthy retirement savings.

I’m absolutely dumbfounded by how few of my peers have progressed down the “normal” path of adulthood with me. I kept thinking they’d catch up to me at some point, but the door is closing.

Yawn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a Gen Xer who graduated into the recession of the early 90s and then endured the financial crisis I find the millennial attitude/ignorance that they are apparently the first generation ever to face economic hardship laughable. This generation has been feeding at their boomer parents trough all their lives is on track to receive the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history.

No one is arguing that they are the first ones to face economic hardship. If you can't see how things in the mid-90s were different from things 10 and 20 years later, in terms of housing and college costs, I can't help you.

Also, the people complaining are not the ones with boomer parents about to transfer a bunch of wealth to them. It's the people whose boomer parents don't have wealth to pass on for whatever reason. The assumption that everyone is going to inherit a bunch of money from boomers is myopic. Some will and some won't. Wealth has become more concentrated so there are plenty of millennial who are not benefitting from what you think "everyone" is experiencing.

Stop being so myopic.

-- Fellow Gen Xer

Another Gen Xer here as well. Agree. While a lot of the drama from Milennials that I see online is annoying, life is different than it was "in our day". The cost of living has gone up, the costs of college have gone up, etc. I graduated college in 1994 (born in 76) and remember paying right about $1/gallon for gas for instance. My parents purchased a house when I was in HS that doubled in value by the time they retired...great for them when they sold, awful for the next person who wants to buy it.

Yeah and the minimum wage was much, much less than. I saw a sign the other day paying $15 - $17per hour at target with benefits, that goes a long way in the cost differences between that time and this time. Stop making excuses, if you only want to work fifteen hour weeks and take three day weekends then you'll reap what you sow. Maybe someone should find that article from last weeks papers that talked about young people rejecting having to punch in at work at 9, or having to work five days a week, from home or in the office. I was always dreaming of the house I wanted and would never have, still do, so I settled for something most on this forum would never settle for, but I have a roof over my families heads and we are employed and enjoying our simple lives.

You do realize that these dramatic increases in retail wages have only started since the pandemic, right? And that $15/hr in DCUM land goes a lot less far than $5/hr did back then, right? You do understand that housing, medical care, and education costs have wildly outpaced wage gains in most places, correct? $15/hr PT is barely enough money for a teenager to cover extra curriculars and gas, let alone rent and food for a family.

I don’t think you understand just how badly younger generations have to “settle”. Some people are in a position where they are settling for not having a family so they can pay back their loans before they die. It’s not about whether they are getting 3 bedrooms or 4, it’s whether they are ever going to rent a 1 bedroom without roommates.

When the system has burned people as bad as it has, it’s no surprise that many are giving up the hussle and working the hours they are paid to work and no more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am 34 and I am NOT middle aged. F off.

If you go by the median age of death in US you most certainly are