What are Millennials really up to?
Why do our parents and grandparents think we're lazy, broke, and disloyal?
A friend of mine shared a video with me of trading and finance veteran Anton Kreil discussing modern finance. Here’s the video, it’s short and sweet:
He describes a few of the traps and failures of our modern institutions. Anton believes that, in order to really survive in the modern West, you have to build your own financial infrastructure. You have to adopt a different mindset than the traditional consumer mindset. You must own assets that are good for you and produce cash flow, rather than spending your entire life chasing liabilities directly into the clutches of debt. At one point he describes how absurd the credit system is: we get scored on our ability to take on debt, and the reward we get with a higher score is the ability to take on more debt. It really is stupid, especially when he puts it that way.
This video encouraged me to finally try to tackle a question that has been on my mind for a long while now: What are Millennials really up to?
Why do our elders look at us (and Gen Z’ers) and see a generation of lazy, entitled, disloyal, risk-taking ingrates? What is it about our generation that makes our elders so disdainful of us? Is it the job hopping? The lack of respect for institutions? The lack of loyalty to employers? Is it the fact that some of us have blue hair and watch too much anime? Is it the fact that we’re “always looking for the easy way out”?
Well, maybe it’s all of the above. And it’s my goal to dissect a little bit of this issue, at surface level, and come up with some insights. I could probably write a book on this topic, but since this is just a blog post I’ll keep my comments brief and general.
Let me first describe what I think the overall problem is, then I’ll dig into more detail. Our parents and grandparents grew up during a time when the institutions in their lives actually served their purpose. The institutions in their lives actually did something for them, and offered them a reasonably comfortable and sustainable way of life - and, in most cases, even some options and choices. We, the Millennials and Gen Z’ers, live in a time when our institutions mostly do not serve their purpose. Most of the institutions we count on to help us run our lives have descended into ideology, complacency, and outright abusive practices. For this reason, we have been forced to adopt a more independent and cynical mindset. We didn’t get this way by accident - we have been forced to become this way just to survive.
Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money, an outstanding work of financial nonfiction) wrote a great piece on the development of the economy since World War 2. I highly recommend reading this piece (or just reading The Psychology of Money, which includes this essay in its chapters):
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/how-this-all-happened/
He touches on not only the economic developments, but more importantly the development of people and their attitudes towards money, success, and social financial standards. After all, despite what cold-hard-facts finance and econ majors may say, psychology is an incredibly important part of economics. The economic system only works in the way its participants make it work. Human beings are not neatly-modelable, rational agents. We are creatures of comfort and bias and subjectivity. We only know what we’ve been conditioned to know. And what we’ve been taught and conditioned for changes from generation to generation.
Since World War 2, the economy has gone from wonderful and “everyone gets a piece of the pie” to fragile and “you have to either be remarkable or get incredibly lucky just to be upper middle class.” Things are Way, Way different than they were 70 years ago. And, despite what older folks may say, hard work does not always pay off. Our employers have made sure of that. Which is why we are a much more creative and independent generation of people.
So there are a number of ways in which the systems that run our lives are profoundly disappointing. There are a number of ways in which our modern economic and financial infrastructure is completely letting us down. I'll begin discussing these points now.
Insurance (as mentioned in Anton’s video above): insurance is essentially legal racketeering. It’s protection money. It’s a legal mob coming into our corner store every month and saying “you owe us money”, knowing full well that we’re never going to get anything back for our payments.
The deductibles on insurance policies are truly absurd sometimes, and insurance companies have massive teams of people whose job is to ensure that we never get any payouts. And when we do get payouts, they are generally completely inadequate. Honestly, if you have a car that is more than 10 years old, it doesn’t even make financial sense to have insurance. Because you’ll end up getting a $2,000 check for your loss. Never mind the fact that your car was in outstanding shape and has had all of the routine maintenance done like clockwork. Never mind that the car was a security blanket that you earned by taking good care of your vehicle - and whatever $4,000 piece of crap you can afford now offers you no such security.
That is where the trouble lies. Insurance does not make our lives right. It does not give us back what we lost, or the value that we paid in. It’s nothing more than a lottery that you have to win in order to be made whole again. And most people do not win that lottery.
(Side note: why is insurance tied directly to our employers? Whose idea was that? I mean - there’s nothing about that that makes sense. We should have the ability to shop around and build our own financial infrastructure - especially since we are the generation that tends to not stick with employers very long.)
Pensions: we don’t get pensions anymore. Those days are over. Gone are the days when you could get a decent job, work with loyalty and gratitude, and get taken care of after 65.
Social Security: Unfortunately for us, Social Security is not only inadequate to take care of us, but it’s a Ponzi scheme that we are too late for. Most research suggests that Social Security will be bankrupt by the time Millennials go to collect it. There are too many Baby Boomers - they’re going to be the last ones to get anything out of the faucet before the well dries up.
You see what I’m getting at here? Things are different for Millennials and Gen Z. If we don’t build our own sustainable financial lives, we simply don’t get to retire. We just don’t get to. That is not only maddening, but also economically and politically pathetic. We are looking out over the horizon and seeing a barren wasteland, instead of the theme park that our grandparents saw for their own retirements. If we don’t take control of our financial lives, we get nothing. There was a day for our grandparents, and even our parents, when, as long as they were hard-working and reliable adults, both their employers and their government would take care of them after their working lives were over. We can’t really count on help from either one.
Education: I really hope I don’t even need to elaborate on this one. Modern higher education is indentured servitude. Our parents, the first generation to mass-adopt higher education, thought it was the best thing ever. They all graduated high school, shuffled off to college, and jumped into adulthood through the double doors of their chosen university. And it led them places. It offered them the reasonably sure hope of a bright future. And financial stability and job security. Going to college actually meant something for our parents.
And so they told us as we grew up, “You’ve got to go to college! It’s the only way you’ll get a good job!” And we believed them. Because why would we not? Their experience was all they had, and their stories are all we had. We had no reason not to believe them. So we did the same thing - we shuffled off to university and chose majors and took on an amazing amount of crippling debt. And when we graduated, we didn’t enter adulthood. Instead we entered slavery. Where we were buried up to our necks in interest-bearing loans that were orders of magnitude higher than what our parents ever had to pay, and all we could muster were minimum payments for years and years. Because most decent jobs these days want you to have 3 years of experience, a college education, and then they want to pay you 13 dollars an hour.
Our parents were able to work a part time job and put themselves through college. That’s not even remotely possible for people my age. We have no choice but to take on debt - debt for which the return on investment is unfortunately quite low. I dare say “unsustainably low”… so low that the investment in most cases is no longer worth making. Folks my age should have gone into the trades.
As with everything in human life, everything is cyclical - I imagine Gen Z will overcorrect and go into trades and entrepreneurship, and then the pendulum will swing back the other way and university degrees will become highly in-demand 20 years from now. C’est la vie.
The Welfare State: Boy, did Coronavirus exacerbate this one. To put it simply, people my age are incredibly, incredibly tired of having our tax money given to people who do not deserve it and don’t work for it. We are tired. We work hard for what little we do have, and we’re fed up with the welfare programs expanding instead of contracting. People my age are not short on compassion - no no. We are perfectly willing to help those who cannot help themselves. We tip well and we respect the downtrodden - we have no problem giving a handout to someone who’s having a rough go. But all this giving money away to people who aren’t even looking for a job - we’re just tired of it, man. It’s so insulting. It needs to stop. The Darwinist inside me says “if you aren’t going to go look for a job, you deserve to starve to death.” I know that’s harsh, but so is literally everything else. We aren’t getting a break from all of the realities of capitalism, and neither should those who don’t earn a paycheck.
Healthcare: This is a big one. Our healthcare system is so incredibly abusive, it’s hard to believe it even exists in the modern world - let alone the “wealthiest country on earth.” See, this is where I have trouble with all the America-gasms. People are so proud of what this country stands for. And sure, most of the time so am I. But when it really comes down to it, the question needs to be asked: if we’re the wealthiest country on earth, where’s the average person’s piece of that wealth? Where is the wealth? I mean, I certainly don’t have any of it. And statistically my guess is neither do you.
Our healthcare system, much like our education system, is a legalized and subsidized form of indentured servitude. Anton describes it well in his video above - it’s a left-tail industry. If you get hit by a car, or some other terribly unlucky thing happens to you, you’re basically just waxed. The insurance companies are very unlikely to make it right, and the healthcare you’re going to get is incredibly expensive no matter what. Because, over time, the constant ball-busting interplay between insurance companies, desperate hospitals, and GPOs, as well as the other moving parts of the healthcare industry, has just made things exponentially worse for the consumer - the patient. Us. These unfortunate kinds of events in our current healthcare regime can ruin your life - financially, not to mention the physical aspect of what you’re going through. Such a sentence should not need to be spoken in the “wealthiest country on earth.” We should have a healthcare system that takes care of us. There’s economically no reason for us not to. Our parents struggled with healthcare costs too, of course. But never in history has it been so expensive to be unlucky. We are getting it way worse than they ever did.
I’ve seen doctor bills from my parents’ generation where it costed someone $75 to have a baby. I’ve seen doctor bills from my own generation where it costed someone $21,000 to have a baby. How quaint. How utterly absurd.
Job Hopping: Another big issue that our elders have with us. “Why do these kids jump around from job to job, never showing a hint of loyalty or stick-to-it-iveness (fun fact: I really hate when people say “stick-to-it-iveness” because it sounds ridiculous)? Why do these kids work a job for 2 years, get bored, and leave? Don’t they understand that the only way to build a career is to show stickiness and loyalty? Don’t they want any promotions or raises?”
Well, sir or madam, those are good points. Or at least they were 40 years ago. However, no. We aren’t getting rewarded with promotions and raises. We aren’t getting rewarded with good careers. We aren’t getting noticed for our initiative or our creative ideas or our problem-solving abilities. And therefore, no - we aren’t sticking with employers who don’t give the first whiff of a shit about us.
Something interesting has happened over time - perhaps over the last 50 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps longer: the mutual respect between employer and employee has broken down. It has been ground down to virtually nothing. The job market is no longer a place of friendships and respect and mutual benefit - it’s a place of contracts and fear and skepticism from both parties. Getting a job or giving a job is no longer a pleasant thing in our generation. It’s an exercise in mutual distrust and self-protective measures from both employer and employee. Both sides are only sitting at the table because they need the other and they have no other way to survive.
For the employee, it’s no longer about working to make the company better - most of our ideas are rejected by the executives anyway, even when our ideas are objectively better than theirs. It’s no longer about going the extra mile, hoping that we’ll get recognized and get a raise. Because we tried. And now we know that we won’t. (If you’re not getting a raise that beats inflation, you’re getting a pay cut. And I don’t know many people who have gotten consistent raises that have beaten inflation. Which means that our jobs are paying less and less - things are still getting worse.) It’s no longer about sticking with a good employer for the long haul - because there aren’t many left who are worthy of that loyalty.
And for the employer, it’s no longer about validating or encouraging good work. It’s no longer about paying someone what they’re worth or holding on to your exceptional people. It’s about cost-cutting, hyper-productivity, and the bottom line. It’s not about making someone feel at home in your company - it’s about squeezing everything you possibly can out of them while making an exhaustive list of reasons why you “just can’t afford to give them a raise this year, sorry.”
This is not sustainable. It’s no wonder we aren’t sticking with companies very long - we get absolutely no benefit from doing so. So we keep shopping while we work. Keep looking for a job that will at least hire us in for a better price, so we can survive a while longer and maybe save a little more money. And then, we start our new job and keep shopping because we know the same thing is going to happen again. This is what Millennials are faced with - we’re not lazy, we’re not disloyal. We’re trying our asses off not to waste our time in mediocre, unrewarding circumstances. We’re not fickle, we’re desperately and creatively practical. For the Silent Generation, their biggest work concern was often whether or not their shirt was pressed. For Millennials, our biggest work concern is whether we’ll ever make enough money to afford a god damn house. How many more jobs will I need to hop into and out of before I find something that lets me break the $20 an hour barrier? How long until I find an employer who will pay me enough to have a decent life?
Even the Baby Boomers had enough opportunity to have a good life. A two-job couple could afford two cars, two kids, a mortgage and a dog. Most people my age are absolutely terrified to have children because we cannot even afford to have them. How horrible is that? It’s really, really horrible. It’s really sad. Most Millennials know how it feels to choose between having a decent car or a decent place to live. Because we often cannot afford both. Let alone have a child or a dog.
My parents owned a home at 23 years old, with college educations, a second kid on the way, two decent cars, retirement accounts, and an emergency fund. Most people my age have to choose approximately 2, maybe 3, of the above - hoping like hell that they’ll eventually have enough money for the others. Considering where and when we live, that’s a travesty.
Non-traditional jobs and risk-taking: And this is why my generation is so focused on leaving Corporate America behind, trying something new, and taking risks. Some people are trying to get jobs in cryptocurrency. Some people are trying to start business on the internet. Some folks are trying to do consulting work, or life coaching, or being Instagram influencers or YouTubers. Now, granted, a lot of people who want flashy internet jobs are fools and they really don’t have anything to offer to the world. But my point is, we’re tired of the status quo. My generation doesn’t care about the status quo - we just want a better financial structure for our lives. And if that means we have to leave the traditional job market behind and have no security for a while, so be it.
I left my job a year and a half ago to trade stocks. It has been unbelievably difficult. Being a trader is no joke - it showcases the worst of your personality. It is a ridiculously hard thing to learn how to do. But I have gotten lucky, with the support of my family and what few friends I have, and I’ve survived this long. This is my shot - my shot at escaping the god-forsaken landscape of Corporate America and a job that was never going to allow me to flourish. I am not going to stop working until this works. These are the kinds of risks Millennials are taking. I am Millennials.
In the early chapters of the Bible, Abraham had to wander out in the desert in order to find his new home. He had nothing - no meaningful skills, no sense of direction, no backup plan. All he had was the hope of a better future and the the idea that if he wandered far enough maybe he’d get lucky. And get lucky he did. That’s what my generation is doing - we’re wandering out into the desert because we cannot keep living this way. We can’t do it anymore. This doesn’t work anymore. Our institutions are completely failing us and we must find new ones. Ones that work. Ones that allow us to live. And procreate. And do better.
There are many other topics I’d love to have covered here. And each of these topics deserves our attention for a deep-dive and some serious questions and discussions. But I think this is about long enough for a blog post.
If we Millennials and Gen Z’ers don't build wealth for ourselves, we literally don't get to retire. We simply don't get to. Everything in Western life (especially American life) is designed to bleed us dry, offer us no help when we need it, and keep us trapped in the lower middle class. And never before has that been more apparent than with the blood-sucking joke of a financial environment that the Millennials have been born into.
It is incumbent upon us to do something our parents never had to do - and maybe one day they’ll understand that.
Our parents gave us the best they could - and for that, I adore and appreciate them. But they did not realize how much things have changed. Wages have gone up at a staggeringly inadequate rate to offset the rise of prices in everything else. The Millennials are not without loyalty, or respect, or work ethic - we are without good options. We are without institutions who actually serve our needs. We are good people. We respect what works for us. We are willing to grind our asses off when we actually believe we have a shot at a better future. Show us a better future, and we will bring it forth at a velocity you cannot believe.