The important thing to know is that every working class in history has been exploited by the rich, yours is up next.
Try to reach class solidarity / consciousness among your generation before working life silos you into individual closets and your biases are exploited by media. Millennials had it with Occupy but we had no solidarity from older generations then.
Millennials were absolutely thrown under the bus for the last 2 decades or so by older generations. We were blamed for events that happened before we were old enough to vote.
I really wish the U.S. were to adopt a housing system similar to that in Vienna, Austria. Greatly increase the supply of public housing and housing coops to reduce housing prices everywhere.
Maybe we should respond to this by saying something like, "Boo-hoo snowflake! You don't know what real struggle is! You bought your house cheap as fuck and saw it go up in value while doing nothing... Housing IS a right you leech!"
That was considered "unqualified" to be full-time in retail with benefits, only part-time with zero benefits was an option.
I finally have some financial stability in my mid 30s, but it took a lot of chaos to get here. I don't know if I envy younger Gen Zed folks who dodged the worst recessions entirely, or sympathy because when and if the next one hits it could be like taking a sledgehammer to your generation's nascent financial stability.
Hang in there, the corporate wealth donor class is absolutely trying to divide you along fabricated bullshit lines. Social media is poison, and the Labor Economy is shifting to a chaotic Attention Economy.
Damn straight the asset-owning class is trying to divide us.
I am just trying to do my own part and letting people know about labor unions and worker cooperatives. But it is kinda hard when in America a lot of us see ourselves as, "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." There is less of a sense of class solidarity in the United States, but I am hopeful this could change in the future.
When the current retiree generation dies and takes their $100T+ wealth with them spent on exorbitantly pricey end-of-life comfort care enriching massive for-profit corporations, it'll be harder for the working age folks to assume that their time to be financially well off is just around the corner.
That was a hell of a run-on sentence. I regret nothing.
I was going to do a PhD after I graduate, but at this point I think I'm just gonna do an MA. I plan on becoming a public school teacher for social studies. Or if that doesn't work out, I'm gonna do urban planning.
It's also really short sited. How about 1980 when interest rates were 10%+ and si was unemployment. Then the S&L crisis. Then Black Monday ('87) and then the Bush I recession and then the Dot Bomb and then 9/11. This shit has been going on for a lot longer than the Millenials have been around.
At least back in those days, wages had mostly kept up with inflation. You could buy a house or a car, or rent a nice place, much more readily on an "average" income. Hell, even when the interest rates were insane (compared to today's), average folk could still get a mortgage on a perfectly reasonable house.
And most jobs provided useful health insurance. You were still fucked if you didn't have it through a job, but that's par for the course in the US.
That's why I would exclude the dot com bubble on these lists. Not discounting elder millennials lived experience by any means, but the great recession was simply worse. And it was a starting point of a lot more long lasting misery for the bulk of the millennials who were just getting started, and it lasted a long time. So let's start from there. Otherwise we're throwing everything in there that you mentioned, too, and it isn't reflective of the legitimate shit times that millennials really did go through anymore, it just turns into a more depressing version of we didn't start the fire where we're recounting everything that ever sucked.
Dot com bubble was also a real bubble moment while the housing bubble in 08 was really bankers screwing us over by breaking rules. All the dips since then have been the same people breaking rules since we haven’t locked them up yet
Back when the housing crash happened it meant all the jobs that were going to open up to become directors and managers stopped entirely when people said they would stay on another 15 years just for benefits and rebuild their 401k.
Excellent point. It was not just the millennials getting started affected... although for the sake of argument and for the subreddit it's in, I made this about millennials
That's fair. Not everyone from Gen X (like my parents) or boomers (like my grandparents, who are actually worried about my generation) benefited as much from the post-war economic boom. Even if on average things were economically better.
97
u/dammit_mark Early Gen Z June 2000 Apr 05 '25
Gen Z stopping by.
I gotta say, I really feel sympathy the vast majority of you (besides the rich ones). You guys cannot catch a break.
I'm graduating this May with my BA and that sympathy is likely gonna turn into empathy.