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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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. [b]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?[/b]

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.[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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