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"Boomers brag that standards set in 1960 unreachable by anyone today because Boomers ruined everything after they got theirs."
Which generation gets the blame for the utter failure to address climate change and the rise of global fascism? Oh and theres this stuff too: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/microplastics-human-testicles-study-sperm-counts
They get the blame because they caused this. If anyone also deserves blame, Millennials do as well. We're just Boomers II: Electric Boogalo, setting up entire ecosystems and telling everyone that everything is great now, not realizing or accepting responsibility for the adverse effects, just moving on the next grift.
Well, if the fucking silent generation would retire from congress already, god damn it
In 1960 the US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of a home averaged $11,000.00
Two kids could graduate high school and move into their own home the next day, and have the place paid off in less than a decade.
To put it In Perspective, in 1968. A person made about 6 grand a year houses were 12k. So twice the income. Now? Mean houses prices are around 400k. Income is around 66k.
There is no comparison. Today's kids are financially MUCH worse off than we genxers
Effectively, someone would have to be earning over a million dollars a year in literal wages (which virtually no one is) in order to have the equivalent buying power that someone earning a couple bucks an hour did in the 50s/60s. And that level of buying power was considered an appropriate wage for literal child workers…
And yet old folks complain “no one wants to work anymore”. Yeah, maybe thats because were grown adults with a tiny fraction of the buying power you had when you were 12 and bread cost a nickel
Old folks don't complain and say that.
Conservatives do
Back when I was a wee lad growing uo in the mean fields of rural new england, the conservatives in power were loud and powerful. And older. Boomers and the their parents.
But they were also richer, and like any other rich powerful elitists, they blamed the poor people for their greed and unwillingness to pay
So of course old people were demonized for saying it was the kids not wanting to work. Wasn't. It was the elite.
There's more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age),
Buts its not old people its the musk and trump and Zuckerberg, etc..
The older people I know who vote Democrat complain all the time about how expensive everything is these days and nobody can afford anything.
The bullshit "Nobody wants to work" narrative is absolutely pushed by conservatives.
Thank you friend. Your are seeing truth.
Its class warfare at its most insidious
There's more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age)
This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don't become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there's also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that's another topic).
I'm reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.
It's not just Gen Xers, speaking as a millennial, I bought a house with my wife in 2015 that was just over 2x our combined income at the time, which was not very high as we were both recently out of school, and we refinanced in '21 for a 2.7% interest rate. Out of control home prices nationwide coupled with high interest rates only hit after covid
I appreciate the insight as I'm a bit older and can't look at it from that vantage. , but I'd ask if it wasn't always going to go up again after the 08 bubble.
But I'm not economist. Just going off memory, so file this under "could be?"
I'm a millennial. Bought my house in a rural location for $70k at 3% interest in 2018
Due to the out of control housing market, it's now "worth" $150k
This market makes it impossible for younger generation to have a chance.
This article is not particularly well written, but the four milestones they mention are: 1) moving out of one's parents' home, 2) getting a job, 3) getting married and 4) having a child. The fifth one seems to be the completion of education.
Thank you! Headline said 5, took to the end of the post to only show 4 with no mention of the 5th one. I almost thought it was written by AI.
1 it was too expensive to move out and honestly without the added income I provided my parents would have lost their house on multiple occasions
2 I got one the fall after I graduated
3 this one took awhile
4 lol no. Never. Children are the worst. I should know, I used to be one.
Oh fuck off, I have very consciously decided NOT to have a child. In my own lifetime, I will see the agrinomic sector completely fail due to runaway climate change. I will see actual resource wars. Why the fuck would I have a kid
I've consciously decided to let my siblings have all the kids for me. It's going great! Lol
Why the fuck would I have a kid
To help pay for your retirement.
I know that was a rhetorical question, but regardless, here's the answer. Eventually people get old, and it's generally good if there are enough younger folks to pick up the slack when older folks really can't anymore.
Our society is essentially a house of cards. If there suddenly aren't enough supports remaining at the base, those higher levels might start to collapse, and that tends to take the rest of the structure down too.
Why are we calling these “milestones?” These are economic choices that were once expectations. Expectations that are no longer realistic, and can no longer be expected. These are NOT indicators of someone’s “success” at life.
No children here with how fucked up things are. Only downside is no clue who will take care of us when we get too old. Maybe Winchester or Smith and Wesson…
I don't need anyone to take care of me when I'm older. I decided that my retirement plan will be extreme sports. Base jumping? Wing suit? Steel toeing cops in the nuts? So many thrilling choices! Whatever happens, happens.
Gotta be thorough about it. Full body paralysis would be a suboptimal outcome.
Yes, money is important and salaries aren't enough.
Annoying that everything is written in clikcbait style these days. Why does it say "these 5" and then only list 4? was college the fifth, the one that's still happening? (thank god)
If you have to ask what the 5th one is, you cant afford it.
Instead of having kids I have decided to go on good vacations every year.
AND I don’t have a bunch of grey hair. It’s great!
Well, guess I'm never gonna be an adult seeing as I had a vasectomy nearly a decade ago now. I did finally buy a house in my early 40s (well, I'm paying for it for the next 19 more years, but still).
As far as having children goes, I think it's more than an economic effect. We also just have a change in personal goals, supported by a change in social expectation.
Choosing to start families at a later stage or just plain choosing not to at all, is sometimes a personal choice independently of economic pressures.
It should be noted that the article title is actually "Fewer young people are meeting these 5 milestones typically associated with adulthood", and even it's first sentence acknowledge these milestones as a mix of economic and family milestones - "Fewer young adults are achieving economic and family milestones typically associated with adulthood..."
Last I looked, we weren't running out of humans, so the drop-off in breeding is mostly a capitalist concern, or a bigoted concern that the wrong humans are breeding.
This is just a case where the metrics are utterly flawed.
At least a couple of those supposed "milestones" have nothing to do with a person's maturity, and I even know a few people who's immaturity helped them hit those milestones earlier than most.
They dont mention the 5th milestone but I imagine its buying a home.
It's finishing Elden Ring actually.
Completing education is the 5th. From the census study linked in the article
...reaching five milestones of adulthood: living away from their parents, completing their education, labor force participation, marrying, and living with a child.
They also mention it later in the article:
The completion of education, another marker of adulthood, has overshadowed other milestones over the years as an increasing number of young adults enroll in college, according to the paper.
I imagine it's buying a home, buying a car, having kids, getting a job (99% of people are actually getting this one, but it's among the milestones I consider)#
Yeah, well most young adults wouldn't make the mistake of cancelling the Late Show with Colbert Colbert.
I honestly couldn't imagine having a child or owning a home unless I had a job that paid at least 50k/year ($25/hr). -That's while living in this part of the country. If I were in a coastal state I wouldn't consider it for less than 75k/year. Unfortunately, that's not in the cards.
Getting married and having a child is not a milestone of adulthood. Being in a healthy relationship is though. You don't need to be married and have a child to be in a long term healthy relationship.
Kids and a wedding ring are quantitative things they can measure externally. I bet, back when this list was first pulled out of someone's ass, that was all they thought about whether a relationship was happy or not.
We know better, now.
My dad had those 4 things, too, and then one day his wife left him. If we measure 'success' against this criteria, he's failed. I can see how this mindset makes one reluctant to leave a marriage or not have kids, and I can see the pressure of competing with the "Joneses" can be a stressor.
I'm glad we know better. A divorce is not failure: it's harm reduction. No kids is not a failure: it's a decision about finances and goals.
I get that some people - false consensus or not - think that everyone generally wants kids etc, but grading people on how they measure up to the Cunninghams is simply unfair.
And we could do with a lower birthrate anyway, once we find how to do so without ruining our economy.
parents' home, getting a job, getting married and having a child.
Grouping those stats is pretty much clickbait as they're completely different. This is the data from the paper:
In 2005, living away from parents was the most commonly experienced milestone, with about 84% of 25-34 year olds living independently. By 2023, this percentage declined to 81%. Labor force participation became the most common marker of adulthood, with about 86% of young adults reporting being in the labor force in 2023. The share of young adults who completed their education by attaining a high school or college degree increased by 9 percentage points between 2005 to 2023, from 74% to 83%. Family formation milestones, on the other hand, were experienced less often. In 2005, about 62% of young adults had ever married, a share that declined by 18 percentage points to 44% by 2023. Similarly, the proportion of young adults who lived with a child in the household decreased by 16 percentage points from 55% to 39% over this 18-year period.
Which shows that: yeah, most young adults have a job and most young adults move out of their parents' home. It's really only the family formation milestones that are down. (Who can blame us though, in this economy)
What about let people live however they want? I live in a village near bigger city in Poland, and a lot of people just stay home with their parents, because they have big houses, and there's no need to pay for a flat as well.
Some people also don't want to marry and/or have kids, and that's fine as well.
Hm, so staying in all day and wanking isn't on the list?
Man, all these people in the thread commenting that having kids isn't a milestone of being an adult. It's like they can't fathom that it's a general milestone, just because they've noped out of it.
Like if you said one of the goals of a career is retirement, and then some trust fund fucktard showed up and said "No! Because I work but I could've retired decades ago!". Like stfu, it's still a general goal for most people -- just because you're too stupid to put it together that they're not talking about your specific niche situation, doesn't change the general validity of the message.
Personally I don't feel that goals and milestones are the same thing.
Agreed. Goal = something that I want to accomplish. Milestone = something that others (e.g. "society") measure as an accomplishment.
Becoming a parent may be a milestone, but it most definitely isn't one of my goals.
I wonder why? Is it the rise of fascism?
four milestones associated with adulthood: moving out of one's parents' home, getting a job, getting married and having a child.
My 20-something kids haven't reached any of those, unless by "job" you count 4 hour shifts 3-4 days a week at minimum wage...