Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Behind paywall.

But if I can make an assumption based on the article title, it's someone complaining about life being unfair rather than acknowledging the mistakes of individual decisions.

I borrowed $19k for college.

I have paid back $24k.

I still owe almost $15k.

The only mistake I made was listening to every teacher over the years that drilled into my head that if you didn't go to college, you were a loser who would work at McDonalds for life. And of course, having the unfortunate timing of graduating college in 2008 when the whole god damn economy crashed.

Your comment is total out-of-touch Boomer energy. I wish a case of c.diff upon you.

I also graduated college in 2008. I borrowed $25k. It was paid back ten years later. $19k is not that much. A standard 10 year repayment plan of around $200-$250 a month should have fully paid that off. Your own fault you can’t manage your finances.

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.

Anonymous wrote:

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.

You got to live at home for three years? My parents kicked me out the day after I graduated from high school because they needed my room for their aging parent. And I'm expected to care for them I just a few years, as they haven't been able to save enough for retirement.

--Millennial

Respect is earned. They abandoned you, so they deserve nothing from you.

NP. This so f-ing dramatic. In terms of who can fend for themselves alone in the world, is it the 18 year old son or the 85 year old grandma? They were trying to take care of one of their parents, damn.

Anonymous wrote:As a GenX I love this : One thing Millennials do have that we in GenX do not: enough numbers for people to write articles like this about them. Where the the thought pieces when we turned 40??

Though we did have This is 40

Paul Rudd is better than an article!

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.

You got to live at home for three years? My parents kicked me out the day after I graduated from high school because they needed my room for their aging parent. And I'm expected to care for them I just a few years, as they haven't been able to save enough for retirement.

--Millennial

Respect is earned. They abandoned you, so they deserve nothing from you.

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.

Anonymous wrote:Summary: Life is tough.

Takeaway: Buckle up. You aren't guaranteed anything.

Typical harsh American cop out.

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.

You got to live at home for three years? My parents kicked me out the day after I graduated from high school because they needed my room for their aging parent. And I'm expected to care for them I just a few years, as they haven't been able to save enough for retirement.

--Millennial

Let those aholes rot.

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.

You got to live at home for three years? My parents kicked me out the day after I graduated from high school because they needed my room for their aging parent. And I'm expected to care for them I just a few years, as they haven't been able to save enough for retirement.

--Millennial

My parents house did NOT double in value - rust belt native

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.

This. And the mistake a lot of Boomers and Gen X make is in looking at stories like the one about your parents and saying, using hindsight, "oh your're so stressed about paying for college and retirement but it all works out." They forget that a lot of the wealth they've accumulated was, essentially, an accident. Your parents probably didn't know that their house would double in value, right? At the time, they were likely stressed about college costs and may have been stressed about retirement or not even thinking about it beyond sticking money in a 401k and reassuring themselves that at least they could retire in the home they owned. That massive appreciation in value no doubt changed that equation for the better but it's not like it was their plan all along.

And millennial look at that and (1) they are the ones who are trying to buy your parents house for double what they paid back in the early 90s. And (2) it would be insane for them to expect that house to appreciate in the same way, right? Plus they have college loans your parents didn't have.

Why is it so hard for people to get that the world changes. Do you think your life was identical in every way to your great grandparents? No, obviously not. So of course the lives of peopel born after you may be different than your life, or your parents life. They may need to do things differently. This should not come as news but a lot of Boomers and older Gen X have come to believe that the world they created will be the same forever. THAT is self-centered.

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.

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?

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.

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.