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

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm reading all the comments and it's been interesting because I can understand where everyone is coming from.

Case point: I'm 42 and all my peers are married/homeowners/advancing in careers/raising children, pretty much where we expected to be. Some have divorced but everyone is getting on with life and not in a dramatically different way as our peers 40 years ago. And as for the next rung, the new homeowners in my neighborhood are in their early 30s, following our footsteps.

Case point: certain things have become very expensive, namely education. Housing is probably more mixed, a lot of it is driven by individual cities, not nationally. But education costs is national and there's no questioning that costs have soared. But not everyone takes out loans and many people's loans are manageable. It's not a case of everyone taking out 250k for a third rate degree that is often the plights featured in these types of articles.

The thing is, there are winners and losers with every generation. We can't control for that. We have entire industries now that didn't exist 50 years ago, like tech, and made winners out of many people who otherwise might have had quite different lives. And of course, for women and minorities, it's a far better time in terms of employment opportunities and cultural place. On the other hand, it does seem like the innovations making this possible (see tech!) has made the working life much more intensive and demanding with excessively long hours for professional and senior management jobs. Our world is much more competitive. Everyone feels obliged to be on call all the time. And that can leave many people feeling stressed out in ways our parents didn't necessarily experience, even if they were hard working. And the advancements made by women means that the typical professional family is now two professional parents meaning higher incomes chasing after the same basket of goods, making housing more expensive.

I will also say that there's probably another whole dimension involved with the lack of contentment in modern life and it does have to do with that our relationships with culture and the institutions of our society have greatly changed. I've noticed, for example, few of my peers have a faith institution in their life, unlike when I was growing up where most people I knew were members of a church or synagogue, even if they weren't particularly devout. We have far less confidence in cultural and political institutions, and this comes from both political directions, not just one. Many more people now live far away from family so fewer people have strong local network of family or friendship support. There's a lot more single people who will never marry and have children.

I do think while we've made great advancements as a society, we've also created new challenges and societal and cultural dynamics that have made losers out of many people and leaving others frustrated and they don't fully understand why because they like the benefits of the advancements and can't contemplate connecting the dots explaining why they may still feel frustrated and unhappy. [/quote]

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