Just Gen Z? I’m an elder Millennial and I feel like I’m doing this right now.
Hell Yeah 36 years old, still no kids, because life was a fucking survival
Meanwhile the Epstein class is wondering why the emaciated cow won’t produce any milk.
Yes, Gen Z “is doing that”… It’s them actively doing that… That’s how we are writing the headline, inferring choice or preference… Not, “Gen Z can’t have milestones” not “The Epstein class ate all of Gen Z’s deserved, basic, human milestones” no… Gen Z is delaying.
I know I’ll probably never not live with family.
Life milestone should be violent revolution. Otherwise nothing will change.
It seems more and more likely that the violent revolution we are gonna get is a Night of broken glass. Just targeting trans people and other queers instead of Jews.
Last hired, first fired. Another illustration would be the First They Came poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller.
The Nazis did that too btw
These are seeds of fascism, right there. Numbers like these are mutually exclusive with democracy.
The essential struggle is a class struggle, not a generational one. The billionaires love it when we blame boomers, Zoomers, Xers, etc., instead of blaming billionaires.
My cousin and his wife want kids but they’re both almost thirty and there’s no way they can afford children any time soon. I feel so bad for them because with how life is going for them, it’s not looking like they’ll be able to be parents. I’m not parent.aterial and the thought of being a parent disgusts me, but it is heartbreaking to the people I care about not being able to achieve their dream of starting a family
It’s the end of civilisation in the first world, in slow motion, and you’ve got front row seats
It was hard enough as a millennial getting to the point I’m at and it’s still not easy. I feel very bad for Gen Z. They’re getting fucked over
They gonna have to rethink what a life milestone even is, just like many of the millenials are finally, really accepting.
Not surprised. My wife and I make more money than we ever have and I feel like everything is out of reach. Inflation is through the roof. And wages haven’t come close to keeping up. We’re fortunate both of us make mid $20 an hour.
For someone starting out I have no idea how they could manage. If I was starting out today straight from highschool I’d most likely be homeless
You know you read things like this and you don’t have to spend much time working out what’s wrong
I was earning mid twenties in warehouses in the 1990s
This is why everything is fucked. Wage stagnation and extreme price hikes is leading us back to indentured servitude and slavery via arresting poor people for the crime of being poor (homeless).
Meanwhile food is 3x and housing is 10x
eyup. feel I got to some milestones about 10 years after it should be and now unemployed about 15 years before retirement just hemoraging savings.
I’ll never know retirement.
im pretty sure you will like me. it will be retirement but what it will really be is poverty.
I’m exactly on the same page. Huge leaps in wage, but my life is moving backwards.
Or maybe just questioning if there’s any point in achieving them at all.
I’m Gen x. I don’t have kids, a home, or any of these so-called milestones. Probably never will. We’re all fucked.
It certainly feels like it. I try to stay positive but then I read the onion, wait I mean the news. And yeah this last year has felt so long.
I feel this so often these days. Too many older people I’ve known over the years have gotten fucked over even after putting in all the work to make it… why even try when you’ll fail anyway.
Tell me about it. It’s like I learned so many skills and I can’t keep up with the curve. Programming, web design, animation, 3D design, audio, video, photography, pretty much every physical art like painting, electrical engineering, the list goes on. I think I’m stuck repairing things and being a career college student for the rest of my life since by the time I finish a degree, some wanker ruins the job market. Someone always needs to have something fixed but I’m tired, my hands and back are toast and I haven’t even gotten to 40.
It was funny when one of my professors told me if you’re going to want to be a news journalist photographer, I shadowed him a bit in college, you better learn how to use a video camera and edit as well. He had a pretty good point, that’s basically a prediction of what more or less streamers and content creators are, well except the content is usually not very good.
I’m questioning my life choices so hard rn. I miraculously got to buy a house, but now the foundation and bottom floor is fucked from a tornado that spawned essentially on top of me and it’ll cost half the cost of the whole house to fix. If my home insurance won’t cover it, I won’t be able to fix it
Wow that’s quite a shitty situation. I hope it works out for you. Houses shouldn’t be that expensive sigh
fingers crossed, I hope that the insurance will cover it
Are they actually surprised?
Even the previous generation were delaying and skipping milestones.
Pikachu face: late stage capitalism.I’m firmly in the millennial camp in my mid thirties and I have two pairs of couple friends who’ve had kids. It could absolutely be my friends circle, but most of us are in the trades or have advanced degrees (most of the people who went the college route also have more than a bachelor’s, because that alone wasn’t enough to get a job) and we just can’t make it work. Many of them want kids, but they want to be able to provide for them first, so they’re just waiting
I was in the waiting camp so long I expired. Technically I could still have a kid(?) - but don’t want to be 60+ at a graduation party.
Just make sure you won’t regret of the decision / indecision and you will be okay.That’s the thing: if you really want kids, you’ll regret not having them. If you really want kids and have them without being able to afford feeding and clothing them, you’ll regret that even more.
I see so many people with kids - if they can make it work…
The point is for children you will sacrifice your current lifestyle. No leisure time, double shifts, insane expenses.We all want the ideal: you work 8 hours go home and be with the family, while the other parental unit took care of everything - then you go to a move; every weekend you watch a ball game - go out to dinner every once a while, get new clothes once a while, take vacations every year.
But it won’t happen.There is a reason why most romantic fiction shows one party as independently wealthy. No one wants to see the overtime shifts and gig economy - and being one paycheck away from being homeless, doesn’t create romantic feelings.
We’re already working double shifts without leisure time, so there’s no slack to cut. That’s the problem. People who really want kids know that kids require sacrifice, that’s the one thing everyone talks about with kids. If you don’t have any more holes in the belt, trying to tighten it won’t help.
Do those people with kids make it work, or are they doing their children a disservice by being emotionally and literally unavailable to them because they’re trying to make sure they don’t starve? I hope most of them make it work, but I know it’s not all of them. Unfortunately, crossing your fingers and hoping you’ll make it work doesn’t seem like a responsible choice to many of us when failure would so greatly impact an innocent person.
Just rhyming verses in the same song of decay.
As a kid I heard people talk about how Japanese culture was being destroyed because they’re overworked, and how they didn’t really have a way out of it politically. I always thought that would be us eventually. I didn’t know how true that was until now. The only way out of this mess is through it, and people with money completely understand this.
The only way out is revolution, which begins with the people, mass class consciousness, and organized leadership that can help steer the movement in a positive direction. This is why grassroots organizations of disciplined workers are so critical, they can help us accomplish the tasks of educating, agitating, and organizing.
It’s not just labor organizing, although that’s super important. Minorities, small communities, friend circles are all forming with the understanding we’re stronger in numbers. I run a gay men’s group that meets at least weekly, we’ve had about 200 guys join, gotten media coverage, gotten the attention of civil rights leaders and lawmakers already. I’m just a guy with some crude leadership skills, little time, and no money. But there are lots of people like me out there, pulling people together. Faith communities are leaning in so we can organize their people.
You don’t have to sit on the sidelines doomscrolling your life away. You can act, even if that’s finding a community and joining it.
Trump was a grass roots movement, of idiots sure, but they pulled it off while people were still mad about Obama. I’d love to see it pulled off In the other direction, and we’re all trying. However, I’m not convinced Americans are going to turn blue once we cut back on all the niceties we take for granted.
I know too many blue voters that would turn tail the moment Starbucks and Bread Co become too expensive to have almost every day. The overall amount of infantilism that’s been baked in only seems to benefit the party that promises to maintain it at any cost.
i think it was more a manufactured movement by corporate America than grassroots, that stoked discontent by feeding exceptionalism and institutionalised racism (among other things).
Wherever it came from it worked. The invisible hand of capital definitely played it’s part.
The use of the term “milestone” or “goal” when the article talks about how these are neither for a growing percentage of the population is interesting.
I mean, an unachievable goal is still a goal.
A goal is something you seek to achieve. Looks like a lot of people are no longer seeking to achieve the things previous generations have attempted to convince them to chase.
They’re not seeking to achieve them* in the same way a homeless person who’s been homeless for years might give up on not being homeless. They’re not attaining enlightenment and abandoning their mortal coil here; they’re being priced out of things they want to do.
*Says you, at least. That’s not what the article says; that’s what you seem to want it to say.
Correct, says me. I am combining concepts in novel ways and reasoning through the implications.
Ya know, thinking.
It can be very hard to disentangle the cause and effect of ‘not wanted so it doesn’t count as a failure to not get it,’ vs ‘can’t do it, so won’t say I want it,’ vs ‘might want to do it but everyone and everything is getting fucked so hard these days and I don’t want to watch my kid get fucked, so not going to bother having one.’
Why assume everyone wants a house, a marriage, and children to begin with?
Because by and large most people do? People are essentially hardwired for the second and third, and almost nobody rents because they want to rent.
Sounds like you haven’t met much variety in people, tbh.
Also sounds like you have a pretty set idea of what life should look like. I wonder who set it?
Clearly you’ve never taken a management class.
Gen Z, ripping off millenials again.
