Millennials Aren’t Just Broke. We Feel Abandoned, Financially and Otherwise.
By: Jessica Wildfire
Tags: Poltics, Money, Society, Culture, Millennials

Every Christmas, my family celebrates a different kind of tradition. We kick ourselves for stuffing stockings instead of our stock portfolios. We pout over the surprise comeback of cryptocurrencies. We make jokes about inventing our own one day.

We play scratch-off lotteries ironically.

One Christmas I bought a small fraction of a Bitcoin after my brother-in-law worked everyone up into a drunken frenzy. Then I spent the next three days quelling anxiety attacks in the bathroom with my phone in my lap, watching the price fall before deciding to sell. Yes, it was amateurish. But that’s how much a few bucks matters to millennials. We’ve learned to cut our losses before we lose it all. It’s an instinct.

This is a painfully familiar episode to most people my age. We’ve endured much more than the three worst recessions in recent history. We watched our parents go bankrupt and lose their 401Ks back in 2008. Since then, we’ve watched the value of our college degrees evaporate, along with any hope of making ends meet with a single, full-time job.

We’re gig workers and side hustlers. We’re aspiring entrepreneurs and underpaid, overworked freelancers.

My dad worked ten and twelve hours a day for most of his life. As a manager, he spent Saturdays on call and barely took a week of vacation a year. He never called in sick, even when he was. It’s a touching story. Our parents worked hard, but at least they made good money. Now that we’re adults, we feel like we work 24 hours a day, and we make squat. Some of us earn more cash off our side hustles than our “real jobs,” which we keep simply because it’s the only way we can afford health insurance.

That’s not all, of course. Most of us are drowning in debt, because we listened to our parents and everyone else who told us to earn a college degree at all cost. They shamed us into pursuing higher education, even when we didn’t want to. We sat through class after class that wasn’t preparing us for the real world, even when we signed up for supposedly practical courses like computer engineering and software design.

Unbeknownst to us, we weren’t being taught by experts in the industry. We placed our futures in the hands of adjuncts who were also just trying to make a few bucks, and they were so overworked they didn’t have time or energy to actually teach us anything. They showed us videos and droned through PowerPoint slides based on a textbook that cost us a week’s worth of wages. (Yes, we paid our tuition with loans, and we worked part-time jobs to pay for all the hidden costs like “athletic fees” and mandatory meal plans.) Some of our teachers weren’t even qualified. They were just the only warm bodies willing to do such low-paying work.

We graduated into a recession. There were no jobs for most of us. When there were, we were told to shut up and be grateful. We were hazed with busywork that didn’t appear to have any point but to break us down into obedient little office bots. We accepted unpaid internships in exchange for lines on our resumes with Fortune 500 Companies, praying it would be worth all the sacrifice. We moved to big cities and paid astronomical rent prices for apartments the size of closets. It didn’t work out so well. We went broke inside of a year. Some of us had to move back home.

We were suffering. Our smiling selfies weren’t displays of affluence and carefree lifestyles. They were cries for help. We were modeling the positive thinking we’d been spoon-fed our entire lives, trying our best to show the world we were happy even when we were dying inside.

We were desperate.

We looked happy because we were faking it. We thought that’s what you were supposed to do to eventually become successful.

Instead of helping, the world turned on us. The internet filled up with essays and memes about “entitled millennials.” We were blamed for everything that was wrong with the world. If a restaurant chain closed, it was our fault. Everyone over the age of 40 started taunting us over “participation trophies,” even though most of us had never even seen one. We didn’t want a medal or a plaque. We just wanted to be acknowledged.

Older generations talked about self-love and self-respect, but they showed us no love and no respect.

Somehow we survived. We worked all day, and became influencers in our spare time. We went to graduate school to get the education we should’ve gotten in college. We took on even more debt, but this time at least it was worth it. We learned how to teach ourselves. We learned how to read books and process information at lightning speeds. We sought advice anywhere we could. We found mentors, or hired them.

Knowledge became our salvation, and we used it to create our own jobs. We were the ones who built the economy back.

Older generations still didn’t show us any respect. They patted themselves on the back, dumping even more work and responsibilities on us. As we matured, they devolved into toddlers. They mocked us for our emerging sense of compassion, and our desire to become better stewards of the world. They ridiculed us for recycling and fishing trash out of creeks on the weekends. They started callings us snowflakes.

We endured. We kept doing whatever we had to in order to get by. We stopped asking for help. Anytime we did, we were reminded that we were solely responsible for solving our own problems. We were told we were culpable for the mess we were in.

There was a time when we thought showing our parents charts and graphs would convince them to vote differently or support policies that didn’t dehumanize us further. We thought they understood economics, then we found out they’ve really just been pretending to in order to make excuses. We tried to sound warnings that everything was about to get much worse than it already was. We tried to talk about climate change and impending economic collapse, the kind of which the world doesn’t recover from.

We begged our parents not to elect a reality television star for president, and they did it anyway. Many of them did it purely out of spite, determined to punish us for being disobedient. It was their way of saying this argument is over, now go upstairs to your room.

When we cried, they laughed at us.

They didn’t get it. We weren’t crying for ourselves. We were crying for the entire planet. We were crying for them. We were crying for the children we still planned to bring into this world.

And look, we were right.

The world is currently in ruins, thanks largely to one man who wielded the overwhelming powers of his office like a 14-year-old with a dirt bike. He wasn’t just cruel. He was reckless. He was hostile and abusive. Of course, this man only represented the ill will of a fading generation. Although he is obsessed with destroying anything he can’t have, he embodies a broader intent of his demographic to burn everything down on their way out. It’s about making everyone else start from less than scratch.

The pandemic is just the latest in a long line of hardships. This one’s going to leave its mark, like the others.

If we’re parents, we deal with crushing disadvantages. We’ve lost our schools and daycares. We’ve either lost our jobs, or at least one income stream. We’ve lost our old sources of comfort. We’re working harder and longer than ever, and we’re doing it under extreme circumstances.

And yet, we’re told these circumstances are a choice we’ve somehow made, as if we prefer to be isolated and miserable. If we had the energy, we’d express outrage. But we don’t. We’re too busy working and taking care of the kids we were pressured to have.

We’re tired of it, all of it. We’re tired of the self-help articles that conflate mindset with privilege. We don’t want to hear any more platitudes from our parents about individualism, when they enjoyed safety nets and head-starts that they don’t even begin to acknowledge or appreciate now. We aren’t interested in advice that might’ve worked ten years ago, but which has become hopelessly obsolete now.

Our leaders have waged systematic warfare on every possible component of social mobility. They’ve slowly defunded education. They’ve cut social programs and healthcare. They’ve deregulated everything in sight, allowing everyone with wealth and power to build it up further by taking advantage of us, and we’ve often had no choice but to go along with it.

So this is us.

We’re not optimistic. We’re not pessimistic. We’re both/and, a generation dealing with multiple levels of trauma. To say we feel abandoned by our institutions feels like a gross understatement.

We’re still being told to live according to rules made up by people like Warren Buffet, who made his fortune in an era that doesn’t exist anymore. Most of us barely have enough money to cover an emergency expense. The rest of it goes toward the cost of living. We’re paying off cars, maybe a house if we’re lucky. We have no money for the stock market. Only the most affluent of us are in a position to toy with cryptocurrency.

It makes us a little angry when we see more stories splashed across mainstream media outlets, wondering what’s wrong with us. There’s nothing wrong with us. We’re doing our jobs. We’re raising our families. We’re doing our best. We’re just done pretending everything is okay. We’re done taking selfies. We’re done with the whole gratitude and self-improvement act, even as we continue to do everything in our power for even the slightest chance at a modest improvement in our circumstances. We’re crawling through mud. We’re pissed off, and we’re finally showing it.

We’re sorry if that bothers anyone.